Time to Stop Bush-Cheney's War Crimes in the Middle East
"Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant, and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth. The problem is that his name is George W. Bush, and he is our president."
Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of
Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School, September 22, 2002
"When people speak to you
about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience,
I have come to hate war. War settles nothing."
Dwight
D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th president of the United States
"Force always attracts men of low morality."
Albert
Einstein (1879 – 1955)
When senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE)
muses aloud about how the U.S. Constitution could take
care of a would-be dictator president, who is dismissive of both the American
people and the U.S. Congress, you know that things are getting pretty bad for
George W. Bush. Underneath the thick layers of propaganda and lies, the
president is stark naked. And the picture isn't pretty: incompetence,
insecurity, inflexibility, arrogance, manipulation, lies, a gangster-like,
sociopath and sadistic mentality, ...etc.
Bush's lack
of empathy
was appallingly
illustrated when, in 1999, as the sitting governor
of Texas, he publicly mocked convicted grandmother
Mrs. Karla Faye Tucker's begging for mercy, whimpering in derision: "Please," referring to her demand, "don't
kill me."—He had her executed.
On May 21, 2000, New York Times' columnist
Nicholas D. Kristof warned the American people about GWB's lack of empathy, his insensitivity and his penchant for cruelty when he reported that,
as a youngster, growing up in Midland, Texas, Bush Jr. was known to enjoy
putting firecrackers into frogs' mouths, throwing them in the air, and then
watching them blow up. Nobody paid any attention to Bush's troubling trait of
character. Nevertheless, it is well known by psychiatrists that cruelty to
animals among youngsters is a common precursor to later criminal violence as
adults.—No one should be surprised that under the Bush-Cheney regime, the
U.S. occupation forces in Iraq are killing Iraqi civilians
indiscriminately and that this
administration crafted an official policy of running secret prisons and of
resorting to illegal torture.
To compound matters, as
an incompetent and a failure, after winning a very contested election with the
help of his father's rich friends, Bush made sure to surround himself with
like-minded persons. He made a power-sharing agreement with co-oil-man Dick
Cheney, most likely under the inducement of rich campaign money contributors:
He would play the role of president while the vice-president would run the
government and name the all important deputy secretaries. For secretaries, Bush
chose people who would not overshadow or contradict him: Donald Rumsfeld as
Defense secretary, John Ashcroft, and later, Alberto Gonzales, his small town
personal lawyer from Texas, as Attorney General, and yes-woman Condoleezza Rice
as Security Advisor, later to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State, etc.
A competent person squeezed into Bush's inner circle by accident. This was Paul H. O'Neill, the former CEO of Alcoa and former president of International Paper
Company. But he resigned two years later, disgusted at the improvisation he was
witnessing, especially as the invasion of Iraq was being planned under a cloud
of lies, dishonesty and misinformation.
As it turned out, the military invasion of Iraq was an apparent case of
"redirected aggression", a phenomenon typically observed in the
animal kingdom. Unable to retaliate effectively against the shadowy Osama bin
Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
they saw an opportunity in Iraq, a country which they had their eyes on for a
long time. The country was run by a ruthless dictator, was sitting on the
second largest oil pool in the world, and was seen by Israel as financing
terrorists in Palestine.
Moreover, the neocon hierarchy at the Pentagon had plans for a war without end in the Middle East, and they were ready
and available. Indeed, General Wesley Clark, the
former Commander of NATO, has confirmed that as early as 2001, the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Pentagon had war plans "to take
out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." What we have been witnessing since 2003
was the implementation of this long term plan.
After
more than four years, one would think that George W. Bush's misguided personal
war of aggression against the sovereign country of Iraq has lasted long enough
and has killed enough people. To begin with, this is a war that was sold to the
American people on the basis of lies, disinformation and misrepresentation. Democracies
should never go to war on the basis of lies and misrepresentation because this
means they occupy the low moral ground. Not that totalitarian regimes should
launch wars of aggression on such
dishonest bases, but for a democracy to do so is a fundamental contradiction in
terms and is a sign of moral decay. Secondly, this is a war that has resulted
in fanning the flame of terrorism not only in Iraq, but all over the world.
This is a failed policy and a failed war. The British are beginning to
understand that and have begun to withdraw from Iraq. The
only ones who do not understand that seem to be the Bush-Cheney regime and its
neocon sycophants within and outside the administration.
So far, the Iraq war has been a total human disaster.
Some 3,245 American soldiers have perished
(losses equivalent to ten fully loaded 747 plane crashes); an estimated 655,000
Iraqis have lost their lives, and millions of people have been impoverished and
rendered miserable. But against all advice, the war goes on and Bush is
pressing the escalation button. There seems to be something in George W. Bush's personality that
prevents him from showing empathy toward other human beings. He seems oblivious
to deaths and sufferings of other people, not the least are the hundreds of
thousands of American and Iraqi families who lost love ones in this insane and
illegal war.
In fact, the entire military adventure that the
Bush-Cheney regime initiated in the Middle East has all the odor of a criminal enterprise.
This may explain why the Bush-Cheney duo fought so much to prevent the creation
of the new International Criminal Court.
Indeed, for this war to have taken place, a lot of principles had to be
violated and a lot of laws had to be broken. Bush's proclivity for
thinking that he can violate international law with impunity is well known. In
his 2004 State of the Union address, for example, he publicly showed his contempt for international law when he said:
"America will never seek a permission slip [from any world body] to
defend the security of our country".
What laws were
broken? —First of all, the Iraq war was never approved by the United
Nations. This led then UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan, in September 2004, to declare: "The
US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN
charter." Case closed as far as the United Nations
is concerned. But there is more.
Secondly, and
perhaps even more importantly, the Iraq war is a war that violated the Nuremberg Charter.
Indeed, the Nuremberg Charter (Article 6) which is both U.S. law and
international law, makes it a crime for anybody to engage in the "planning,
preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation
of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a
common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
...Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the
formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the
foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in
execution of such plan." —Article 7 of the Nuremberg Charter even specifies
that "The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or
responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as
freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
If a Nuremberg Court were
established to judge those who planned and initiated the Iraq War of March 20,
2003, they would be reminded that “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.” Moreover,
"Individuals have international duties which transcend the
national obligations of obedience…therefore [individual
citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against
peace and humanity from occurring."
The Iraq War that
George W. Bush initiated on his own on the basis of fabricated lies will be judged by
history as one of the most blatant abuses of power ever by any American
administration. It is a war based on false pretenses and on false perceptions
of the Muslim Middle East. For example, it is not true that
Middle Eastern Muslims hate the West "because they hate our way of life, our freedom, and our democracy."
Polls indicate that such ideas are simply based on ignorant prejudices. But
when Bush II sent American troops storming into
private homes in Baghdad and Haditha, and elsewhere in Iraq, shooting
first and asking questions later, in a juvenile Texan way, it is no surprise
that the entire Muslim world started hating him. That is the way most people
view lawless thugs.
If ever there were a president-by-accident, it is the
present occupant of the White House. An electoral accident resulted in placing
into office a candidate who had not received the democratic approval of the
people. And the American people could not have been more out of luck, because
it could not have fallen upon a more mediocre politician than George W. Bush.
—Unfortunately, it is highly likely that the
worst is still to come, with more blunders ahead, if those who have the power to act in the U.S. Congress
continue to put their heads deep in the sand..
__________________________________________________
Rodrigue
Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
Visit
his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's
Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check
Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The Code for Global Ethics"
at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com
_______________________________________________
Posted,
April 2, 2007, at 5:30 am
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Posted,
April 2, 2007, at 5:30 am
© 2007 by Big Picture World Syndicate,
Inc.