March 28, 2006
Bush's Insane and Criminal War against
Iraq
by Rodrigue Tremblay
“To initiate a war
of aggression…is not only an international crime,
it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Nuremberg Tribunal
George W. Bush was
planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' in that
country, even before he took power in January 2001. It was Bush's plan for the
U.S. to take military control of the Middle East Gulf region, whether or not
Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq. In fact, presidential candidate Bush Jr.
saw the political benefits of attacking Iraq as early as 1999, as has been
confirmed by Bush's biographer, Mickey Herskowitz.
Just before the Nov. 2000 presidential elections, and much
before the terrorist attacks of September 2001, a Bush inner cabinet composed
of Dick Cheney (now Vice- President), Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense),
Paul Wolfowitz (later Rumsfeld's deputy and now President of the World Bank),
GWB's younger brother Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's
chief of staff) drafted a policy document, dated September 2000, and entitled "Rebuilding
America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century."
—The neo-conservative blueprint called for establishing a "permanent (American) role in Gulf
regional security". It
said: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf
transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." During that time, Gov. Bush was
campaigning in October 2000, declaring himself to be unambiguously against "extending our troops
all around the world in nation-building missions". (October 3, 2000). —It is thus amply
clear that the Bush administration had a plan to invade Iraq, that this plan
was hidden from the American people, and then that they seized the opportunity
provided by the 9/11 events to implement it.
Since internal government polls showed that the American
public would only support a war against Iraq if there was a danger that Saddam
Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, the Bush-Cheney administration invented
the Iraqi nuclear threat from scratch. —The American corporate media
(ACM) did the rest. They acted as an echo chamber for the White House lies,
repeating ad nauseam
the big lie that a war was necessary to destroy Iraq's stockpile of
"weapons of mass destruction."
The invasion and occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces on March
20, 2003, was in flagrant breach of international law and America's own binding
treaty commitments in the UN Charter to abandon the unilateral
use of force as an instrument of international policy. —Article 2(4) of
the UN Charter is crystal clear: "All Members shall refrain in their
international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial
integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner
inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations." To pretend to ignore the law is
the summum of hypocrisy. The
fact remains that the war against Iraq is the first illegal war of the 21st
Century. Moreover, it is an immoral war according to any coherent moral code.
No democracy can win an immoral war. And the Iraq war is both illegal and
immoral.
Bush based his unilateral military aggression on the false
and discredited theory of "preemptive war", the so-called
imperial
“Bush
Doctrine” that allows the U.S. to attack a foreign country on the basis
of suspicion alone. He forgot to say that any such 'preemptive' military attack
on another country, which is unsanctioned by the United Nations, is in direct
contravention of international law and the UN Charter. The U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan made that very clear in September 2004, in regard to Iraq,
when he said: "The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that
contravened the UN charter." The fact that Bush has reaffirmed his illegal strategy of preventive war
only makes him more dangerous and less accountable, and makes the world a less
secure place.
Now that Iraq is a mess, that thousands and thousands of
people have been killed, that the Iraqi infrastructures have been destroyed and
that the fire of civil war has been lit between the Shiites, the Sunnis and the
Kurds, it will take very competent people to avoid a larger catastrophe. Bush
even acknowledges now that he may not clean up the mess he made in Iraq, but
will leave that to the next president,
scheduled to take over on January 20, 2009. —Bush is also shedding crocodile tears over the mess in Iraq and he even goes so far as to
say that he never wanted to go to war against Iraq, even though there are tons
of evidence to the contrary: "I didn't want war [in Iraq] ...No President
wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not
true."
..."When he
[Saddam Hussein] chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose,
then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. (George W. Bush, March 21, 2005.)
Somebody should remind Bush Jr. that the 145 U.N. inspectors
were in Iraq in December 2002 and in January 2003, but had to leave the country
precipitiously when the American president announced he was going to bomb
Baghdad. Also, he should be reminded that the government of Saddam Hussein was
in compliance with U.N. demands when it supplied, on December 7, 2002, a 12,200-page declaration
about its
weapons programs. In this report, Iraq demonstrated convincingly that there
were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when inspectors left at the end of
1998, and that none had been designed, procured, produced or stored in the
period since then.
We now know this was the truth.
Iraq had dismantled its nuclear program and destroyed its
chemical and biological weapons stockpiles by 1992. Unfortunately, the Bush
administration removed more than 8,000 pages from the December 2002 Iraqi report
before publishing it. These erased pages listed in detail how the United States
supplied Iraq with biological and chemical weapons, during the 1980's, and the
direct involvement of twenty-four U.S-based corporations and key American
political figures in the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. And, even more
damning for the Bush administration, in his final report of October 2004,
Charles Duelfer, head of the post-invasion U.S. team of weapons hunters,
concluded also that Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had, indeed, dismantled Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction .
So far, the Bush administration has offered no apology for twisting reality to
fit its warmongering plans.
Nowadays, President Bush Jr. is shamelessly lying about his
lies. As the saying goes, 'Lie once —Lie a thousand times'. We now know, beyond any shadow of
a doubt, that he knew he was lying about the motives to launch a war and that
he was looking for ways to provoke a war with Iraq. A recently divulged British
confidential memorandum, which has been thoroughly analyzed by the New York Times,
explains, in
detail, how the Bush administration engineered this war and lied its ways into
it.
This historical truth is unassailable. —The stark fact
is that, for his Middle Eastern policy, Bush Jr. has enthusiastically and irresponsibly
adopted the chaos theory of the neoconservatives advising him. For example, he
told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote the book "Bush at War": "Look, our strategy is to create chaos, to create a
vacuum."
In the summer and fall of 2002, Bush Jr. was watching the
polls, and when he saw that the official propaganda against Iraq was working,
linking Iraq with 9/11, with the active complicity of the American corporate
media (ACM), and that it would be politically advantageous to him and the
Republicans to have a war against the diabolized Saddam Hussein, he went to war
on his own volition, even though he had failed to obtain the necessary legal
cover from the United Nations and his own intelligence reports made it amptly
clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Bush
administration was bent on going to war against Iraq no matter what, and it
"fixed the intelligence and facts" around the already decided policy.
See the Downing Street Memo. The extent to which the Bush
administration resorted to lies and trickeries to launch a war of choice
against Iraq will fascinate future historians. It will be the sad joke of the
21st Century.
For those, like the highly respected journalist Helen Thomas,
who still try to
get at the truth of why Bush illegally, and with no provocation, invaded Iraq,
Bush Jr. has a ready answer, and it is the one he gave Bob Woodward: "I’m
the commander—see, I don’t need to explain—I do not need to
explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the
president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I
don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
He 'don't' need to explain!
If he were in a democracy following the rules of the British
parliamentary system, he would have to answer such fundamental questions in the
daily 'Question Period' of the House of Commons. In the U.S., he can stonewall
and only a few professional journalists dare to make him accountable, ...and
this happens only once in a few years.
In all my years spent at observing politicians all around
the world, I have never seen such delusion and such lack of candor in a single
person, as is witnessed in George W. Bush.
Maybe Congress should dust off its copies of the Nuremberg
Charter and of the U. N. Charter, and begin applying the U.S. Constitution each
member was sworn to uphold. A simple majority of the US House of
Representatives can vote to impeach George W. Bush.
In launching a war of aggression against Iraq and in
inventing lies to justify his actions, George W. Bush has committed an
international war crime of the highest order.
As military historian Martin van Creveld has aply put it: "For misleading
the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus
in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be
impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with
the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to
mull over their sins." –
Posted by Rodrigue Tremblay,
March 28, 2006, at 9:30 am
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