For 20 Years, Team Bush Has Escaped Prosecution for War Crimes in Iraq

At the moment, Iraqis mark the twentieth anniversary of the horrific U.S.-U.Ok. bombing of Baghdad, dubbed “Shock and Awe.” In speedy succession, “coalition forces” dropped 3,000 bombs, together with many who weighed 2,000 kilos, on Baghdad in what The New York Occasions referred to as “virtually biblical energy.”

Though they launched an unlawful struggle of aggression and dedicated struggle crimes in Iraq, 20 years later the leaders of the U.S. and the U.Ok. have by no means confronted legal accountability. Against this, the Worldwide Legal Courtroom (ICC) has already charged Russian President Vladimir Putin with struggle crimes only one 12 months after his illegal invasion of Ukraine. He’s the primary non-African chief to be charged by the ICC, which incessantly succumbs to strain from america.

In what got here to be referred to as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 173,000 troops from america and the UK invaded Iraq. Through the eight-year war, about 300,000 Iraqis and 4,600 Individuals have been killed. America spent $815 billion on the struggle, not counting oblique prices. It plunged the nation right into a civil struggle and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees stay displaced. 20 years later, not one of many individuals accountable has been dropped at justice.

Invading Iraq Was an Act of Aggression

Sources inside his administration have confirmed that George W. Bush was planning to invade Iraq and execute regime change lengthy earlier than the September 11, 2001, terrorist assaults. The U.S.-led invasion violated the United Nations Constitution, which authorizes nations to make use of navy pressure towards different nations solely in self-defense or with approval by the UN Safety Council.

The assault on Iraq didn’t fulfill both of those circumstances and was subsequently an act of aggression. After the Holocaust, the Worldwide Army Tribunal at Nuremberg wrote, “To provoke a struggle of aggression, subsequently, will not be solely a world crime; it’s the supreme worldwide crime differing solely from different struggle crimes in that it incorporates inside itself the collected evil of the entire.”

Like different U.S. navy interventions, the rationale for this unlawful aggression was primarily based on a lie. A lot as President Lyndon B. Johnson used the fabricated Tonkin Gulf incident as a pretext to escalate the Vietnam Struggle, Bush relied on legendary weapons of mass destruction and a nonexistent hyperlink between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 assaults to justify his struggle on Iraq.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Protection Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Nationwide Safety Advisor Condoleezza Rice falsely warned that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and Rice invoked the picture of a “mushroom cloud” to justify the approaching invasion of Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell shamefully offered false details about Iraq having WMD to the UN Safety Council in February 2003.

In 2002, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter confirmed that Iraq had destroyed 90-95 % of its WMD and there was no proof that it had retained the opposite 5-10 %, which didn’t essentially represent a menace or perhaps a weapons program.

Certainly, no WMD have been ever discovered by the UN weapons inspectors earlier than or after Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, the Bush administration fabricated a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda however the intelligence on the contrary.

The Downing Road Minutes, a transcript of one in all Prime Minister Tony Blair’s briefings with British intelligence that The Occasions of London printed in 2005, demonstrated that the Bush administration had determined by July 2002 to invade Iraq and perform regime change. The “intelligence and details have been being mounted across the coverage,” the minutes revealed.

Even a 2005 congressional report ready on the route of former Rep. John Conyers, Jr. concluded that regardless of intelligence data on the contrary, members of the Bush administration made false statements earlier than the invasion about Iraq having WMD, and linkages between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Though Crew Bush urged the UN Safety Council to cross a decision authorizing its assault on Iraq, the Council refused. Bush and his allies as an alternative cobbled collectively prior Council resolutions, none of which — individually or collectively — approved the invasion of Iraq.

Bush justified the assault together with his doctrine of “preemptive struggle.” However the UN Constitution solely permits a rustic to make use of navy pressure in response to an armed assault by one other nation or with permission of the Safety Council. Operation Iraqi Freedom violated the UN Constitution and constituted an unlawful struggle of aggression.

Struggle Crimes Dedicated by the Bush Administration

U.S. forces dedicated many different struggle crimes in Iraq, together with extrajudicial killings, torture and the focusing on of civilians, that are prohibited by the Geneva Conventions; the Conference Towards Torture and Different Merciless, Inhuman or Degrading Remedy or Punishment; and the Worldwide Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Torture and abuse performed at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq included the stacking of bare prisoners on each other; photographing prisoners who had been forcibly organized in sexually express positions; maintaining prisoners bare for days; forcing male prisoners to put on girls’s underwear; utilizing snarling canine; punching, slapping and kicking prisoners; and sodomizing a prisoner with a chemical mild and broomstick.

Civilians have been focused as U.S. troops operated underneath guidelines of engagement that directed them to shoot all the things that moved. In these “free-fire zones” the U.S. additionally bombed civilian areas and used cluster bombs, depleted uranium and white phosphorus, leading to huge civilian casualties.

Essentially the most infamous free-fire zone was in Fallujah. In April 2004, U.S. forces attacked the village and killed 736 people, not less than 60 % of whom have been girls and youngsters. In one other assault the next November, U.S. troops killed between 581 and 670 civilians in Fallujah.

One other notorious instance of extrajudicial killing was the Haditha Bloodbath in November 2005, when U.S. Marines killed 24 unarmed civilians “execution-style” in a 3-to-4-hour rampage. The U.S. lined up the bloodbath till Time journal ran a narrative about it in March 2006.

Documented extrajudicial killings additionally came about within the Iraqi cities of Al-Qa’im, Taal Al Jal, Mukaradeeb, Mahmudiya, Al-Hamdaniyah, Samarra, Salahuddin and Ishaqi.

These struggle crimes aren’t solely abhorrent, however punishable underneath the U.S. Struggle Crimes Act and the U.S. Torture Statute. But, though it has been 20 years because the invasion of Iraq, no U.S. leaders have been dropped at justice. The Obama administration’s Division of Justice actively determined to not prosecute anybody for the torture and abuse dedicated through the Bush regime. But it solely took one 12 months for the ICC to cost Putin with struggle crimes in Ukraine.

Final Could, George W. Bush unintentionally admitted that his resolution to invade Iraq was unjustified. Whereas addressing a crowd on the Bush Presidential Heart in Dallas, Bush decried “the choice of 1 man to launch an entirely unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I imply, Ukraine.” He then added underneath his breath, “Iraq too.”

Talking in regards to the struggle in Ukraine, President Joe Biden just lately declared the obvious absurdity of “The concept that over 100,000 forces would invade one other nation — since World Struggle II, nothing like that has occurred.” Biden apparently forgot about “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”