Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?
A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the ‘supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.’
One of the truly amazing facets of the American national psychology is our seeminlgy collective inability to imagine that America and Americans could even remotely be held to be capable of mass murder, genocide, and the wholesale, indiscriminate violation of international law. Those egregious violations are somehow always something that SOMEONE ELSE is guilty of. Americans? Well, we’re good and decent people, and we simply don’t commit those sorts of heinous crimes.
Except that we do, we have, and we are. Though we might like to think of America and Americans as being incapable of comitting the sorts of crimes one thinks of when one considers Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum, we are no more or less capable than any other country. It’s just that we’re so blinded by our nationalism that we’ve simply refused to recognize that the war in Iraq is proof positive that we can be every bit as brutal, ruthless, and willfully ignorant of international law as anyone else. And Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader is leading the way as we seek to kill our way to peace.
From the massacre of more than 100,000 people in the Philippines to the first nuclear attack ever at Hiroshima to the unprovoked invasion of Baghdad, U.S.-sponsored violence doesn’t feel as wrong and worthy of prosecution in internationally sanctioned criminal courts as the gory, bload-soaked atrocities of Congo, Darfur, Rwanda, and most certainly not the Nazis — most certainly not. Howard Zinn recently described this as our “inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.”
Most Americans firmly believe there is nothing the United States or its political leadership could possibly do that could equate to the crimes of Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nazis are our “gold standard of evil,” as author John Dolan once put it.
But the truth is that we can, and we have — most recently and significantly in Iraq. Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.
Ferencz’s biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or “aggressive” war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a “prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.”
The bottom line is the United States invaded a sovereign country under false pretenses. Though the rationale was plumped up with fudged intelligence and post-9.11 paranoia and nationalist rhetoric, the pretext for the war was to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction…that in fact never existed. Then the rationale was changed to “fighting terrorists”- never mind the fact that there was no terrorist threat in Iraq until we invaded and created one out of whole cloth. Yes, more than 2,500 Americans have died in Iraq fighting a terrorist threat of our own creation.
Despite the lies and the incompetence, the fudged intelligence, the poor planning, and an overabundance of machismo and chutzpah, Republicans still view Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader as some sort of hero. Given the deception, propaganda, and manipulation it took to sell this immoral war to the American sheeple, perhaps bringing Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader up on war crimes charges might not be such a bad idea. Justice delayed may be justice denied, but it’s better than nothing at all.
Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:
“The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can’t use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, ‘Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they’ve found — then we’ll figure out what we’re going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq — which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter.”
It’s that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a “clear breach of law,” and dismissed the Bush administration’s legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn’t have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, “So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive.”
Not persuasive? In retrospect, they’re laughable. Lies, deception, and propaganda, all wrapped in a pretty package and propped up by more lies and fudged intellgence- all to get the war in Iraq Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader so desperately wanted.
If there’s ANY justice in this world (and I’m not holding my breath on this one), Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader will endure up like Rudolf Hess- a lonely, pathetic man with a prison all to himself. Of course, no reasonable person expects anything like this to ever happen…because Americans just don’t commit THOSE sorts of crimes. Do they??
WE DESERVE BETTER….
