The One With Aldacron

There’s a good opinion piece on in the Toronto Star about the US media and how it has treated the war in Iraq. Many American media outlets and Democrats have criticized Bush for his inept handling of the war. The author, Linda McQuaig, asserts that the Bush administration’s ineptitude is not what they should be focusing on:

But incompetence is a side issue. The real problem is, and always has
been, that it is illegal — not to mention immoral — for a country to
invade another country, in other words, to wage a war of aggression.

She has a point. She strengthens her argument with a quote from the Nuremberg Tribunal:

As the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded after World War II: “War is
essentially an evil thing … To initiate a war of aggression,
therefore, 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.”

I have often called Bush a war criminal on this blog. I wonder, though, once he is finally out of office, will he be held accountable? Will justice be served?

There is no doubt that the US initiated this war. No matter how often Bush asserts that Iraq is a central front in the war on terror, we must never lose sight of the fact that this was not true until after we invaded. There was no provocation. Some people claim that attacks on our planes while enforcing the no-fly zone were provocative, but that was not cited as a reason by the Bush administration for war — besides, we always retaliated for such attacks by taking out radar and missile sites. We weren’t liberating another nation, as in the Gulf War of the senior Bush. We invaded Iraq against the will of the United Nations, when we should have been working within the established framework. It was a unilateral decision that some of our allies jumped on board with, while others made the (correct) moral decision to abstain and protest (such as France).

Bush has claimed on more than one occasion that we are there to liberate the Iraqi people. He did make a speech once, before the invasion, that included that idea. But that was not the primary reason to invade. They put a great deal of emphasis on WMDs. Besides, is it now acceptable to go off and invade any country whose ideals we disagree with in the name of Liberty? Everyone talks about North Korea, but the Chinese government is generally considered to be oppressive and has a horrid human rights record. Why not invade so that the Chinese people can be liberated? Oh, they also have WMDs. They could, potentially, trade them to terrorists for use against the US.

No matter how you look at it, every excuse Bush has used to justify the invasion of Iraq could also be used to justify an invasion of several other countries around the world. There are a great many dictators who could be toppled, millions of people who could be liberated, and several countries with stockpiles of WMDs that could end up in the wrong hands. That means each of those excuses, as it applies to Iraq, is null and void. Of course, there is still the claim of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but that has been shown to be fictional. Whatever the real reason to invade Iraq, it is not one that has been publicly acknowledged by the Bush administration.

Ms. McQuaig makes the case, as do so many others, that the primary motive for the war was oil. That could very well be true. If it is true, that alone makes the Bush administration the most criminal regime in US history. If it’s not true, then one can only imagine what twisted reasoning sent our soldiers off to die. The truth likely will not come out while Bush sits in the White House. I do hope that there are aggressive investigations into the administration once the Democrats take control of Congress. And I hope they continue once Bush is out of office. He and all responsible parties must be held accountable for what they have done.

What makes it difficult to indict Bush for an illegal invasion, though, is that many members of Congress, from both sides of the aisle, voted for the war. They did so on the pretense that there was a clear and present danger of WMDs finding their way from Iraq into the hands of al Qaeda, but they did vote to invade another country. If they accuse Bush of illegally invading a sovereign nation, they must accuse themselves as
well. That’s highly unlikely. The international community could set up a War Tribunal, as it has done before, and demand that Bush and key members of his administration be turned over for trial. Also unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility.

If any proceedings do go forward against Bush in the aftermath of his presidency, it will likely be focused on the idea that he intentionally misled the Congress and the American people into supporting this war. He might be accused of manipulating the media to generate fear among the people, a terroristic tactic. He could be held up for scrutiny on a lot of issues, but, although I agree with Ms. McQuaig’s assertion that the war is illegal, the legality of the Iraq invasion will not be one of them.

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