I wouldn't put Afghanistan and Iraq on the same level.
Bin Laden (and Al-Qaeda) was in Afghanistan and they refused to hand him over. That invasion had the support of NATO and even Russia and China. Why? Because Al-Qaeda existing doesn't benefit anyone and they were behind the attacks.
Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences. Iraq used to have chemical weapons and even used them against civilians back in the 80s, started a war with Iran and invaded Kuwait, but those were not the reasons given for the invasion...
Now, why wasn't Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia. What are you going to do, invade the country to arrest the president?
Which I'm sure they passed in the year between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq just by coincidence, and they weren't expecting any shady shit to go down at all.
How would that work? Wouldn't that be an act of war unprovoked aggression per the UN charter?
Well, you know, the US always considered the international treaties to be more akin to suggestions.
I mean what are they gonna do, send them to the Hague?
Yeah, it would be.
It’s geopolitical dick wagging, not a law that was actually needed or does anything.
This is why I maintain that Trump will never go to prison.. The u.s government itself would never allow it. They'll likely help him stay out on appeals till he dies, that's gonna be the worst punishment he'll get. I think the government would have him killed and made it to look like an accident before they ever allow him to set foot in prison.
The US government will allow Trump to go to an American jail. This is like ruling over like. The US government would never allow Trump to go a foreign jail, no matter how much he deserved it.
I think there are enough people in power who will use the "one of our presidents in jail will hurt our country" excuse, or they'll fear reprisal from the maga cult, that they'll let him walk. I hope I'm wrong, but the u.s pulls this shit all the time.
Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences
Lil Bush didn't even really know...
He was just a puppet, and Cheney was part of his dad's "old guard". Lil Bush knew the game, so Cheney set it up so every intel agency reported to Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney decided if that info went anywhere else, including Lil Bush.
Cheney wanted the war, so he only passed on info that would cause the war, and it's entirely likely he was the only member of the American government who could have seen 9/11 coming. The reason no one else could, was everything has to go thru Cheney, and he saw everything.
I'm not saying Lil Bush is innocent, I'm saying he was a useful idiot that knew he was just a puppet and went along with
But it pisses me off everyone acts like the puppet fall guy is who we should be upset with, not the people who were actually doing stuff and still work with the American Republican political party.
Bush and his cabinet all knew
Even Powell? Always assumed he resigned once he realized he’d been used to sell that false evidence for Iraq.
Officially that was the reason. The violation of the ceasefire. Iraq did not abide by the terms of the ceasefire.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t have invaded. I supported the invasion at the time because of the violations of the ceasefire. I didn’t completely buy the wmd argument.
Looking back, Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan.
So, tl;dr: After being hammered by strikes they made an offer to hand him over to a 3rd party?
That's correct. It wasn't their first attempt, either. Instead Bush opted for the 20 years of occupation for whatever reason.
I'm not defending the occupation and whole "nation building" (which I doubt they though would take 20 years). Just pointing out that there was a difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, and that difference was reflected by the support (or lack of) from other countries.
The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks.
It's insane to suggest the US would ever agree to that.
I believe it would have been the correct move, but the US as a nation would straight up never agree to that. The citizenry would have lost their fucking minds.
Both countries also do not recognize the authority of International Court. High ranking officials definitely should have been hauled off to jail for authorizing, developing, and employing "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) techniques
Now, why wasn’t Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia.
Trump is being charged with crimes
Trump is being charged by the US and state governments with violation of US and state laws
That's a far different scenario than an international court attempting to charge and arrest a US president (current or former
Bush lied to congress and the American people. I don't believe there were no crimes committed by doing that.
But did Bush knowingly lie to a degree provable in court?
He would have had to have known it was a lie and for that to be proven in court. With trump, his crimes were so egregious there were devout party line adherents backing out and explicitly stating just how illegal what they were doing is. Trump had been told multiple times, in multiple ways that what he was doing was illegal and he went for it anyways.
Another point to add. It is not illegal for anyone to lie, so unless he was testifying under oath, Bush could lie as much as he wanted without legal repercussions.
Not quite. The constitution has a cutout for official duties of the office. The president must faithfully carry out the duties of the office. So knowingly lying can fail that test.
If you want someone to blame for the US invasion of Iraq, blame Italy, their Intelligence apparatus, and Nicolò Pollari in particular. He submitted the “Iraq is buying Yellowcake” to the CIA twice, who figured out it was a forgery before setting a private meeting with the vice president who did not know the CIA had already ruled it out.
The Constitution lists one crime: treason. He didn't do that. Not faithfully carrying out the duties of the office is absolutely grounds for impeachment, but it's not a crime.
That’s not true. Even the specific rules laid out in the constitution have limits. You have the right to freedom of speech, and yet it is silent about the type of speech protected. We did not write down that the president is allowed to lie about winning the election in the constitution, but we did write down the president must carry out the duties of the office faithfully, and we gave Congress the power to create laws, which all citizens are bound. The president is a citizen, not a king, and I have to say this again as it was very important to the authors of the constitution: The president is not a king. He doesn’t have the divine right. Trump’s just another citizen who was temporarily given the power of the executive. You could charge him with a crime and put his ass in prison while he was a president without impeaching him. Executive privilege is court tested, but it only applies to confidentiality, and going in front of the public and lying is, by definition, not confidential.
and we gave Congress the power to create laws, which all citizens are bound.
Exactly. Congress has to make things a crime. The fact that the Constitution says that the president has to faithfully carry out their duties doesn't make not doing that a crime.
If you're saying that Congress did pass such a law, can you tell me which one?
I think you folks are talking past each other. The constitution requires faithful fulfillment of the duties of office, so because of that requirement, presidents swear oaths of duty. Lying under oath is a crime (not delineated in the constitution) and a violation of the faithful fulfillment of duties, which means that he is violating the terms of presidency set out in the constitution (also not a crime, but impeachable).
But you'd have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he intended not to uphold the oath of office when he made it.
It's not illegal to not do that. The legal framework to deal with that is impeachment and trial by Congress.
Not quite. Trump is currently being charged in federal court for his part in lying to overturn the election. They used “knowingly false” 32 times in the indictment for a reason. His defense is not that the president is allowed to lie, but rather that he truthfully believed he was telling the truth, so I’m not sure where you assertion is coming from: It is illegal to lie in furtherance of breaking the law, even for the POTUS.
Trump is not being put on trial for lying per se. The lying however is part of the furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, which is illegal. So with regards to Bush, he can't be charged with lying to the American people. It can however be used as evidence against him if it was part of furthering a criminal conspiracy.
To the best of my knowledge, we have never put a president on trial for the faithfulness clause (and no, impeachment is not an actual criminal/constitutional trial, no matter how much we treat it as such)
We barely got to the point of impeaching Nixon for his bullshit and Reagan got off scott free for Iran-Contra. So it shouldn't be too surprising that Bush didn't get keelhauled for his bullshit invasions especially since most of the morons in Washington were totally on board with it.
Some of us could see it coming from a mile away with Afghanistan. (Just had to look back to how it went for the USSR and like every other country that tried before us (see "Graveyard of Empires").
Iraq* looked an awful lot like bullshit driven by greed, oil, and "finishing what daddy started" at the time. Idk about the last one now but the first two? Definitely. But fucking Congress went along with all of it. Probably lobbied by billionaires.
So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.
People at the top in this country rarely do.
Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to "finishing what daddy started." In 2002-2003 the W's cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.
It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that's why he got all paranoid.
With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would've been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.
Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don't know what the best "after" would've been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could've helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.
🤦🏻 yeah Iraq. Autocorrect probably. Daddy Bush probably also wanted to avoid a quagmire. Idk.
I agree we were justified invading Afghanistan and felt so at the time but it's just not a great place to try and "conquer". You might be right about the distraction of Iraq. However, Afghanistan strikes me as a country with the kind of deeply entrenched culture and politics so different from anything we are familiar with that I don't know if we could ever actively transform it in meaningful ways.
The US had no support to set foot in Iraq. The UN mandate was to remove Iraq from Kuwait, no more, no less. If the auS set foot on Iraqi soil, it would be going alone, and in violation of the UN.
Two words:
Dick Cheney
You really think dubya cared about attacking Iraq.
He was told.
Pre9-11 my dad liked messing with his coworkers saying W was making a hell of a democrat when they complained about what he was doing.
After he suddenly got in line like his daddy. Always figured it's when he started listening to Cheney
So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.
What specific crimes?
I think his and his administration did a lot of awful shit, but they did it using politics, not by breaking the law. They painted their opponents as un-American. They whipped up fervor saying that "you're with us or you're with the terrists" and changed the "French Fries" in the congressional cafeteria to "Freedom Fries" after the French refused to jump on board with their war plans. They made sure the public was scared, because scared people are easier to manipulate. But, fundamentally his administration did it so that they could win votes in and for the house and senate. Fundamentally he still followed American law.
There are various things where the administration or the military might have violated international laws against war crimes or aggression. For example, the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Graib, the whole existence of and infinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, and possibly even the invasion of Iraq itself. But, international courts require a much higher burden of proof, especially to pin the crimes on the head of state. And, Bush had pet lawyers like John Yoo producing memos to declare it all legal.
Evil shit, especially evil done by the military in other countries is almost never going to result in criminal charges, let alone convictions. Trump is unusual in that the crimes were so incredibly blatant. The normal method for most shady heads of state is to at least go for plausibly legal. They have access to tons of lawyers willing to bend over backwards to declare what their bosses want to do as being legal.
People need to stop equating "evil shit" with "crimes". Yes, Bush and his administration was responsible for a lot of evil shit. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, thousands of deaths of soldiers in the bullshit "Coalition of the Willing". He was responsible for indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay and torture at Abu Graib. But, with all that blood on his hands, he may have done it all without breaking any laws. There's a reason why the prisoners are being held in Guantanamo Bay and not on US soil. There's a reason that the torture happened in an Iraqi prison. A big part of that is that many US laws don't apply to those places, so while it's awful, it may not be illegal.
No stupid questions, but certainly stupid answers.
The USA is not a part of the international criminal court. So even if the ICC said the US committed war crimes, they have no way to enfore those laws in the USA.
ICC is for states that can't prosecute within their country. USA can do that. So it goes like this:
ICC: Hey, USA, you committed war crimes
USA: We dont recognize your court of law, and we did our own investigation where we found no wrongdoing.
ICC: We disagree
USA: Okay, that's nice. If you arrest Bush we will invade the Hague
Stalemate.
Yeah but if Bush travelled to a country under the ICC jurisdiction he could still be tried. Of course the Hague invasion act (a big fuck you from USA to the ICC) may deter some countries from enforcing the ICC rules on American citizens.
ICC is for states that can’t prosecute within their country.
This is false.
I mean how bout a source buddy?
Heres what they say on their website. "As a court of last resort, it seeks to complement, not replace, national Courts."
Perhaps we interpret that differently, or I could have described it better.
You just come in here, take one sentence, call it false, and leave? Come on mannnnn.
I don't need to refute your entire argument, this isn't a Swedish university where peer criticism is required.
The ICJ says it's a lot of things but it's only been used as a colonial court against countries that aren't aligned with western interests. I don't defend the war criminals that have been prosecuted by the ICJ but how does the ICJ recognize the definition of a national court? For example, if an African country has an indigenous form and interpretation of justice to ensure societal cohesion, who are the western Europeans to say that their form of justice is incorrect and they need to be tried at the "international court".
The court was only created to try Nazis because they didn't think that country would treat their heros (at the time) fairly. It's now used to try leaders the west doesn't like. There's lots of people in Iraq, Britain that want to see Tony Blair at the ICJ but the ICJ and the UK would use a rule such as the one you've mentioned to say it doesn't apply, but won't hesitate to take an Iraqi to the court.
You seem to think the laws you espouse as ideals are not inherently written to protect those already in exploitative power.
Literally none of this has any relevance to the above statement that you deemed 'false' and is little more than a political rant.
You can be dismissive of the reality of people outside of your bubble, however this is the pragmatic reality in the world. I do enjoy people taking the time to write comments that show their worldview is being shattered.
Source?
One of the major prerequisites for people to get charged with war crimes, is to lose the war.
One of the major prerequisites
Not the only one though as Afghanistan was indeed lost.
The UN Security Council, as outlined in Article 39 of the UN Charter, has the ability to rule on the legality of the war, but has yet not been asked by any UN member nation to do so. The United States and the United Kingdom have veto power in the Security Council, so action by the Security Council is highly improbable even if the issue were to be raised.
No one cares and even if they did it can be vetoed.
Countries shouldn't be able to veto things about themselves. That's stupid.
Even if you remove the veto power, what exactly would you expect to happen?
Bush wasn't going to be arrested and put under an international court for the same reason Putin isn't going to be arrested for invading Ukraine. You can tell them "hand him over", they say "make me", and the only way to enforce the decision involves war, which no one wants to have.
The veto power is a problem, but it's not the main problem here.
The main problem is thinking the UN is supposed to be like this higher authority. That isn't and never was the intention, because it's impossible for it to be.
Yep. The UN isn’t the world government. It’s a place for the super powers to air their grievances for the rest of the world to see.
That's stupid
Duh, but that's the point of the council, to ensure they can't do anything.
Afghanistan should be stricken from the title. There were no pretenses on that one. The US could never just let 9/11 go, and our allies and the rest of the world agreed. Just for the invasion in itself, Bush never would have been charged with any war crimes there. No, not even in a more just international criminal system than the one we have.
Iraq is a different story. The fabrications were obvious, our allies called them out, and then we did it anyway. Iraq had no connection to 9/11 and no WMD program in active development. That was obvious to everyone at the time who wasn't a senseless warmonger. Almost as bad, it took resources away from Afghanistan, which was the fight that really mattered. Stack on top of all that the fact that we could no longer realpolitik by playing the authoritarian governments of Iran and Iraq off of each other. Iran had no direct counterbalance on its border anymore, which freed resources for them to start a nuclear weapons program. They never could have done that if they had to keep up a conventional military to make sure Saddam Hussein didn't start another war with them.
The two should be considered separately. Bush ought to be tried as a war criminal for invading Iraq, and for what happened during the long occupation in both countries. But there's no good reason for trying him for invading Afghanistan.
The Taliban-led Afghanistan was closer allies with Al Qaeda than Iraq for sure, but invading Afghanistan was also a bit of a stretch. Sure, the Taliban was harboring and supporting terrorists, but so were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and probably at least a half dozen other countries.
Bush is a war criminal, and while they invented the entire connection to Iraq, his administration did "exaggerate" the justifications for invading Afghanistan as well.
It was clear the leadership of Al Queda planned 9/11 from Afghanistan and were under the protection of the Taliban
Was it clear? Or was that the official story?
Look, I have no love for the Taliban, and I agree that they were supporting Al Qaeda. But there was far more evidence pointing to the Saudi royal family. Afghanistan was a convenient scape goat to distract the American people.
Saddam was a bad guy, and the world is better off without him, but he didn't attack us at all. Bush lying doesn't make Saddam or the Taliban innocent. They are all bad in their own ways.
It was clear, it was the official story, it was admitted by the Taliban and it was proven by history. There's really no reason to doubt or spread any doubt on the subject
Obama should be tried as well. He continued Bush's politics and despite knowing that newly establish Iraqi government torture its prisoners he signed a document which allowed to hand over thousands of prisoners to them. It's all well documented.
And that fucker got peace nobel price. What a joke..
Turned out Saddam was a meanie after the USA helped make him. Had to slap that idea down lest any future installed dictators try any funny business.
Afghanistan was NOT under false pretenses. The entire world stood besides the US for that. It was Iraq that was false pretenses and much of the world did not support that, and as it went on the ones that did, quickly stopped supporting it.
The USA is one of those countries that the international community can't control with traditional means. It has been hard to get sanctions against Russia regarding the Ukrainian invasion; it would be impossible to try to do the same to the USA geopoliticaly.
Also, the false pretenses only involves Iraq. Afghanistan is a different idea behind what consists of aiding and abiding international war crimes.
There's literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried. I'm sure they'd use that for a president.... The US isn't capable of war crimes. They said so.
There’s literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried
"The Act authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the President to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of The Hague, where the ICC is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody."
We're literally locked and loaded to invade the international court if they ever try. They passed a fucking bill to say we can if the president just gives it a thumbs up.
So that's why Putin has to watch his step, but 'murican presidents can commit all sorts of war crimes and still say they stand for "democracy and freedom"
Can't have the US be held responsible for its actions now, can we?
Even if we did send them to trial, how would it go?
Prosecution: "So you had suspicions of known terrorist group responsible for 9/11 as well as national nuclear weapons development in the region?"
Bush: "That's right, my defence secretary and my appointee at the CIA brought relative documents, which we've submitted to the court, of the aluminum tubes assumed to be weapons technology at the time. The location of the Taliban had been tracked and went cold around there, but we did capture thousands of their fighters."
Prosecution: "Some time after you installed a new CIA director."
Bush: "Coincidently, yes, these sort of changes happen often."
Prosecution: "Did you have any evidence of where they might have obtained the technology?"
Bush: "That's right, we've had Russian informants about their spread of weapons throughout the middle east over the decades. Some of it is still classified but some of it has been submitted to the court."
Prosecution: "And is it true your nation profited greatly off the Iraqi Oilfields which was Coincidently monopolized by Exxon Mobil under the leadership of Rex Tillerson who went on to become a Secretary in the Trump Administration?"
Bush: "Well this has nothing to do with the Trump administration, I myself don't approve of them, and I also have no personal connections with Rex. But maybe that is true, I don't know."
Judge: breaks into a sweat realizing they'll be here listening to the questioning people over this for another 2 decades and still not have a solid case
You're missing
And is it true your nation profited greatly off the Iraqi Oilfields
He should have been. Especially after the photos of Abu Ghraib came out. But it is the U.S. so he payed no penalties.
Those photos being released, along with the revelations about illegal surveillance and surveillance techniques revealed by Snowden really destroyed the myth of what we are as a country.
Many factors play into this.
Lyndon Johnson came right out and told the American people that we needed to fight the Vietnam war to protect our rubber and tungsten interests there. Fighting a resource war is unfortunately not the crime it should be, and never has been.
If the WMD pretenses were false, Bush can and did blame the intelligence community that produced the information. No one there was prosecuted because it’s in their daily routine to say “we believe that inside Iraq / North Korea / etc that something bad XYZ is happening” and being wrong is not a crime.
Generally, no one believed that Saddam Hussein was good for Iraq, the Middle East, or the world. Iraqis were quite thankful for his removal. So even if the WMD thing was phony, there is a sense of “well, at least it all accomplished some good purpose.”
We can point to Bush as the sole responsible party but the reality is that Congress voted to authorize it and 40 nations participated. So responsibility is really pretty diffuse and Bush can say “everyone agreed it was the right thing to do.”
American politics are a shit show and any effort to hold a president accountable is seen as a ploy, and even if it isn’t, it becomes mired in the deep partisanship.
That was all too early for me to be following any political news.
In a way (just this one way) I'm glad he didn't.
At the time I was so in brainwashed conservative land. If I saw Bush get in trouble I would have stood by him simply because "Republicans good, Democrats bad". And it might have affected my waking up to the actuality, and maybe slowed it down to the point where I'd be defending Trump now. If the last guy got in trouble but was Republican and therefore innocent, it's just happening again, gosh dang those lefties.
That's literally the depth of thought in that camp. I've been there and seen it, I did it myself. They don't have any higher functioning logic to speak of. They really latch onto the victim mentality, even in their source of news. Since, at the time it got popular, Fox News was really the only right-leaning mainstream "news " network. I remember being told by my mom back then that it was the only one that wasn't "super liberal". And I took that at face value for years, not even questioning it. That's all it takes when you're that young. And then they'll defend it to their last breath when they only think like that because they were suggested to once, and they build their whole world on it.
Had to scrape myself out of that thinking. Took me forever. Turns out deprogramming yourself against the thinking taught to you by everyone you've ever known and with only tangential knowledge of others you know doing it is difficult. I knew one guy that broke his programming, but didn't really broadcast it, so I didn't really catch on to much of it. But later I had a roommate that would talk about it all the time, and could back it up. That really got me thinking, and ended up being like the starter pebble you nudge down the hill that becomes the huge snowball. But that's probably a story for a different kind of post. Probably a whole other community.
I didn't really have any exposure to anything outside that world until I was 25 or so, when I met the previously mentioned roommate. I still find pieces of that old thinking and influence in me all the time.
Thanks for coming to my accidental TED talk. Got a ramble going there.
Edit- fixed typos and added the part about FN.
Same
because of precedent.
any single member of the government is afraid of setting a precedent that will come back to hurt them
they all do illegal shit, if one is punished then possibly they all will
Maybe because everyone followed. Liberal, conservative, Canadian, American. Didn't matter to us then. We all knew it was going to lead to war, and when we were all pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan, we just accepted it and went for it. I still think it needed to be done, just not then and there. But to say the Taliban and Saddam didn't deserve to go down is also wrong.
Not true by a long shot. In 2003, a majority of Americans wanted the US to stay out of Iraq if the UN security council did not approve the invasion. A majority of Democrats in congress voted against the authorization of use of force. (and many who voted for it said they were against the invasion).
US consider the international criminal court as a terrorist organization
Well, because the U.S. is a police state, with a military stranglehold on the planet, and the invasions were predicated on an event with uh, let's say, suspicious circumstances, that was engraved into the national psyche as the worst crime of a generation.
You REALLY need to learn what a police state is if you think America is one. Police states are authoritarian which America is not at this moment.
His comment reeks of InfoWars
Bush buys shit coin though. He can't be wrong.
Who do you expect would charge, arrest, and try him? Certainly not the United States. Congress passed a very broad authorization for the use of force after 9/11. Multiple US allies also sent personnel under the umbrella of a UN security assistance force, so it's unlikely the UN would try to do anything regardless of which countries have veto power
In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn't want to fuck with the money.
What specific laws do you think he broke?
You can't charge someone with "crimes", you need specific laws and how he broke them.
Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war signed by congress and without congressional or U.N. approval. Plus, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and several of their legal advisors were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts for endorsing torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of P.O.W.s but the ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.
Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war
Getting UN approval is a "nice to have", but it doesn't guarantee anything. A war of aggression would probably be something that could be prosecuted in the ICC as a crime of aggression, but to prove it's a crime of aggression you need to prove that there was no "just cause for self-defense". The whole basis of the US justification for attacking Iraq was that Iraq was involved in terrorism against the USA. So, to prove that it wasn't a war of self-defense, you'd not only have to prove that Iraq had no connection with any kind of terrorism against the USA and had no intention of it in the future, but that the US leadership knew that that was the case and invaded under false pretenses.
At this point we know that Iraq didn't have WMD, but can you really prove that the US leadership wasn't so deluded that they thought that Iraq genuinely didn't have WMD? The whole aftermath of the invasion involved a lot of embarrassing searching for WMDs that the US was sure were there. The US was constantly announcing that they were closing in on the WMDs, but every site they searched turned out to be nothing. If they'd known there really weren't any, they probably would have just gone ahead and planted some evidence. Instead, they kept looking and looking and claiming they were sure it was there somewhere.
Besides, the US has a veto on the UN security council, so they couldn't recommend prosecution or anything because the US would just veto the resolution.
were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts
Which foreign courts? Which war crimes in particular?
ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.
"cause Murica" is your reading of it. They had the option to charge Bush, but they didn't. One reason for that might have been that they knew they'd never be able to get their hands on the US officials they could have charged, and that the US might react really badly to the charges. But, another reason might be that they knew they'd never be able to get a conviction, because the bar to convicting officials is very high at the ICC.
"Evil shit" isn't the same as "crimes". The Bush admin did plenty of evil shit, but it's very hard to prove they broke any specific laws. Instead, because they managed to scare the shit out of the US, congress and the senate kept giving them as much authorization to do whatever they wanted. As for international laws, those are very rarely used, especially against superpowers, and the bar to proving anything is very high.
The wikipedia page you posted essentially just says "Iraqi Freedom was justified because of all of these things that we say are occurring" when it was proven that there were no WMDs, no nuclearization, etc. They violated the terms of a ceasefire? So that required 13 years of war? It was about Saddam and Bush Sr. That and creating a US military base in the middle east so that there would be a base of operations outside of Saudi or Iranian influence.
So, you missed this bit? It's right at the top of the page:
is a joint resolution passed by the United States Congress in October 2002 as Public Law No. 107-243, authorizing the use of the United States Armed Forces against Saddam Hussein's Iraq government in what would be known as Operation Iraqi Freedom.
can you really prove that the US leadership wasn't so deluded that they thought that Iraq genuinely didn't have WMD?
I can't be fucked to look up something that hasn't been relevant for over ten years, but the answer to this question is definitely yes. Do some research and it shouldn't be hard to find.
K
signed by congress and without congressional or UN approval
So congress signed off on the plan without approving it somehow?
Edit: Nevermind, there was a lack of comma, and my brain separated one statement into two. Sorry for the fuss.
Preemptive strike WHITOUT formal declaration of war signed by congress and WITHOUT congressional or U.N. approval.
Isn't he directly saying congress DIDN'T sign off on it?
I think you are right. I get it now. Whoops. I guess the lack of a comma confused my dumbass.
Starting a war is illegal under international law. People have hanged for it.
Sometimes, sometimes it isn't. Specifically what would you have charged him with, and what evidence would have convicted him?
Crimes against the peace. The evidence is he started a war in Iraq. It's not complicated.
Yes, it is. Merely starting a war isn't justification for prosecution in the ICC. That's not how the laws work.
There is no such thing as international law despite what you've heard
There's laws written, courts. They've arrested people, tried them, and punished the convicted. You can call it whatever dumb word you want to call it.
In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.
In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.
Because these are uncharted legal waters. There is no precedent for charging a former US president with a crime.
Yet.
You mean there wasn't yet? I don't know if that's true, but I know there most definitely is precedent now.
People wanted blood by any means necessarily post 9/11. There were many international calls for his arrest. It just never happened because people hated Afghanistan and Iraq more than the US.
World leaders wont arrest each other because they don't want to set a precedent.
Isn't that happening with Putin now?
Kinda. There's a really good chance he only invaded Ukraine because a Yes Man told him it would only take a few days and the west wouldn't get involved. >
Oh I'm fairly certain that's what happened.
This is the entire point of declaring (even informally) a reasonable Cassus Belli
Russia does not have a reasonable reason to go to war with Ukraine that is not "we want that land"
I don't think there's any good reason for two countries to go to war. It's weird you would say wanting land is a justification.
Russia's stated reason was and is for a security buffer against NATO. It's not justified but I don't understand why you're pretending it's not the reason.
NATO wasn't in Ukraine, Ukraine had pledged not to join NATO as part of their disarmament, and the attack on Ukraine encouraged more countries to join NATO.
If "a buffer against NATO" was the actual goal, that existed in post-Maidan Ukraine already, and the invasion directly counteracts that goal.
Also their stated reason was denazification of Ukraine, which is pretty much just rejected by the international community as an unreasonable CB.
There were several goals stated. It's clear to anyone with a modicum of intelligence
that denazification was meant for domestic politics.
The Minsk accords were never implemented and Merkel bragged about it being a small tactic to arm the Ukrainians.
I suppose we'll see who ends up writing the history books to see which of us is right.
The US and EU will write the history books, regardless of who wins the war.
Effectively, those two are the world, despite being a minority population. That's just the way the geopolitical cookie crumbles.
No one called for arrests of the US over Afghanistan, get your history straight. Iraq is where it went off the rails.
Who's going to charge him with a crime? Iraq and Afghanistan both have the most to gain, but good luck getting the U.S. to extradite a former president to sit trial for a foreign power. The U.S. sits on the United Nations security council, so the U.N. can't do anything. Realistically the only one who could charge him is the U.S. themself, but that would require a formal admission that the wars were unjust. Not to mention, we're already struggling to arrest a former president who attempted a coup, and potential charges against Bush would be much more difficult.
Because the law is only applied to the poors
Ahh god dammit. Yep... Happened when I was a kid, still furious.
I don't know dude, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to die mad about it.
Welcome to the rich and powerful, where everything is made up and laws dont matter.
Afghanistan was a just action. Let's just get that settled.
Iraq was legal but the public was lied to about the justification.
War Crimes requires a nation to purposefully target and kill civilians. If such an illegal order occurs those responsible are charged. If a government does not charge those issuing illegal orders they can be charged with War Crimes.
Civilian deaths do occur in War, a nation must only target legal military targets. For example the World Trade Center was an illegal target on 9/11. The Pentagon was a legal target on 9/11. Attacking a Civilian office gave the United States legal rights to retaliation.
As for Bush, his actions didn't violate international law in Iraq. They were questionable and diplomacy would have been the better option, but still not illegal. All acts deemed War Crimes had those responsible charged and sent to prison. For example those responsible for the Abu Ghraib incident were charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The person to ordered the abuse and torture of prisoners was William Hayes II, General Council of the Department of Defense and authorized by Judge Brett Kavanagh, yes the same one that now serves on the Supreme Court.
Bonus, Ron DeSantis was responsible for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
If you want to charge people with War Crimes, start with the three who still are at-large from justice.
"Afghanistan was a just action". Was it really? Is it justice to invade a country and kill civilians for an act of terrorism, even a massive one? Should the Latin american countries where the CIA operated, installed dictatorships and helped to kill thousands, bomb the USA? Wasn't it foreign terrorism? Should Vietnam invade the USA for its use of Agent orange and napalm? Would it be just?
Do you think the US invaded Afghanistan with the goal to kill civilians?
That's the neat part: nobody is a civilian when you define everyone as an unlawful combatant.
But otherwise, every war ever fought has killed civilians; so starting a war is automatically about killing civilians at some point. Stating that it's not the main goal is hypocritical
Do you think the US should have just left Bin Laden to 'do his thing'? Do you think religious terrorist can be stopped without using violence?
Well they did let him do his thing (unknowingly). They even trained him...
But after that, I think they shouldn't have invaded a country for him. Otherwise where do you stop? Do the US bomb Texas every time there is a Christian bomber?
Do you believe Texas is going to refuse to extradite a christian terrorist that's attacked New York?
Regarding Iraq: Because he cynically played enforcer for a lot of very rich (AKA influential) people who were scared that the US petrodollar hegemony was about to be supplanted by the Euro once people did the maths on Hussein's recent successful pivot to Euro as reserve currency https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html - notice how the puppet government that was then installed made it one of their first tasks to switch the country's reserve back to USD. The ongoing currency war was and is the actual war behind the "war" (wars).
Regarding Afghanistan: Everyone knew there was just too much "fog of war" to build a slam-dunk case against him for it. At best it would have ended up being framed by media as hand-waving about "wrong country" or "not just that country". I remember scratching my head wildly though when he was spouting his "with us or against us" and "bomb them back to the stone age" rhetoric (and going unilateral - with the help of his Blair poodle - when the UN disagreed). He raced straight past "un-presidential" on his way to "extremely childish" when conflating "surgically remove some known terrorists from their hiding places" with "go all scorched earth on the entire country where they might have last been hiding". There might have been some chance of making a case for recklessness (similar to the distinction between "manslaughter" & "murder") - on the part of a jumped-up cowboy-wannabe playing "war president", all hubristically drunk on the power he effectively inherited from his dad. As mentioned in many of the other comments though the US would never "allow" the ICC to bring such a conviction (undermining what the ICC is for), and any legal attempt within the US would just trigger screams of "you're not a patriot" and "too soon" (still).
Maybe you can help me because I’m 20 or 30 paragraphs in to that essay and it hasn’t explained anything to me: it just repeats the same points over and over that “the REAL reason for the war was oil transactions currency and LOOK Saddam actually made money by switching and this is all UNREPORTED by US media!” (Repeat, ad nauseum).
What is an oil transaction currency?
How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?
It makes me highly suspicious that this author doesn’t take time early on to explain these basics, and instead spends a bunch of time at the top congratulating himself on all the nice emails he’s gotten.
I sympathise with your "TL;DR" feeling (why oh why do academics - including the extremely knowledgable ones - so often make their otherwise-valid points soooo long-winded and self-referential? ...which is why I love the project started by Alan Alda - https://www.aldacenter.org/ by the way). In the author's partial defence though the initial "note to readers" text is follow-up to responses and updates, before the guts of the essay which follows (I think he could have more clearly formatted those parts differently in coloured boxes or such, so people could easily/quickly see where the "the original content" starts),
Firstly I say persevere with the essay if you can bear it (even if you need to skim initial verbiage) - there are a lot of profound insights, especially considering it was written 20 years ago as events were happening, and it ultimately answers your questions comprehensively. However for some quicker on-ramps about its primary tenet I was able to find from a quick DDG-search of "petrodollar currency war" that the rest of the reporting world is slowly catching-up (in many cases only now, 20 years later). Some top-links I found from that search (which I mainly just skimmed the beginnings of for context, so don't necessarily endorse entirely) are:
The Wikipedia link about Petrodollar-recycling seems to have a nicely concise summary to answer your question:
How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?
...and my very quickly typed (therefore far from accurate but hopefully high-level enough) answer would be something like this:
Following 1971 when the US forced termination of the Bretton Woods system (abandoned "gold-backed currency" for "fiat currency backed by smoke and mirrors"), by 1974 they became dangerously vulnerable due to over-spending on war (and some other endeavours) but found a quick-fix through petrodollar recycling ("buy loads of oil and the oil-producing country in-turn invests their profits heavily back into the US"). That was initially setup with Saudi Arabia but ended up being with all of OPEC, and because oil became the yardstick for international trade eventually the situation became such that the currency the world trades oil in became the de-facto "world trade" currency, and therefore the "international reserve currency". This creates a scenario in which "the US going under would take much of the world under with it" (generalising and summarising very crudely). That of course incentivised much of the world to protect the USD (and therefore protect the US from itself) in myriad ways and seemingly incentivised the consequent US administrations to hubristically spend wild/reckless amounts (especially on war) feeling like they are immune to "Consequences [tm]". The mantra was always "If you switch your reserve funds away from USD you will tank your country", but over time the expanding Euro-spending block of countries were becoming as big (eventually bigger) oil-buyers than the US, and Iraq switching their reserve to Euro turned out not only to be non-problematic but even "very successful". The US knew this would cause a chain-reaction of countries wanting to try the same switch to Euros (or at least be less phobic of considering it) so they needed it stomped out, while also finding other soundbite-friendly "reasons" for the stomping - screaming "look over here, look over here" so the mass-media would not notice the "petrodollar hegemony preservation" reason. WMDs was their gambit and it largely "worked" due to most people only listening to hot-button soundbites and retrofitting manufactured narratives to justify exceptionalism-fueled superficial knee-jerk responses. I think vanishingly few people would disagree with the fact that Hussein was a terrible, unforgivably criminal dictator, but not enough people asked "why are they suddenly only doing something about him now?".
"why are they suddenly only doing something about him now?".
Because for a time he was our guy in the region.
And then he wasn’t - when he stomped Kuwait. Are these people forgetting Desert Storm in 1991?
But mainly: let’s say that switching to the Euro was a great idea and more countries were likely to do it. How does going to war with Iraq stop anyone else from doing it? Are we really supposed to believe it was a threatening show of force to cow the entire world into throwing away profits and using our currency? This doesn’t make sense.
Like many many arguments, the author can’t be content with “here’s another factor in the mix of what happened” and just haaaas to say “everything else is lies - here’s the one and only explanation.”
Are we really supposed to believe it was a threatening show of force to cow the entire world into throwing away profits and using our currency?
I don't think it was as much about "making an example of them" as it was about getting them back to accepting USD (and "recycling" those back into the US economy) ASAP. Installed Iraq administrations switched straight back to USD since the invasion.
I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I'm not a legal scholar.
Afghanistan was legit, how are people sold that it wasn't so close to 9/11?
The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudis lead by a US-trained individual that was later found and executed in Pakistan, where the group was founded. The only way Afghanistan was close to any of this was geographically.
You (intentionally?) leave out the important detail that the main orchestrator of the attack bin Laden / al-Qaeda were based in Afghanistan and Taliban refused to extradite him/them.
They offered to extradite him if America could prove that he was responsible. This seems reasonable until you realize that the only way to do this would be to offer the Taliban, who never were allies, a list of most of the US' intelligence assets, so what would happen is they would either give OBL up or not but then would execute everyone supplying info.
It was easier and more expedient for GWB to go to war
Weren't they protecting bin Laden?
Yes, Pakistan was, in a way, helping bin Laden to hide and evade the USA military. The fact that the USA never "tough talked" to Pakistan, even when the intelligence agencies left no doubt about that, is proof that Afghanistan was anything -but- legit.
The Taliban hid him for a bit after 9/11/01
I'm talking about Afghanistan in 2001.
Yes, they were hiding bin Laden and that was the causa belli. The USA gave an ultimatum to the Taliban, which they denied, and the invasion happened shortly after.
After the battle of Tora Bora, a lot of al-Qaeda members managed to flee into Pakistan and further east, so you could say that the reason for the invasion into Afghanistan ended there.
Yeah it's kinda hard to isolate sunni terrorism to a single location. America and Saudi Arabia funded a whole bunch of extremist madrasa in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a bid to oust the Soviet occupation.
This militant force was primarily led by Arab fighters who operated largely in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the hijackers were mostly Arab, but a lot of their organizational infrastructure operated out of central Asia.
It's where the majority of Al Qaeda was
Probably he should be.
The US wields a huge amount of influence generally in the world, and specifically in the Hague. Behavior that would get other leaders called to task is generally ignored if it's done by the US.
It's not fair, but it is the way that the world works.
It gave a pretense for any powerfull nation to do what they want. This was used by Putin to invade Ukraine.
It is hard to be the nation who lead the world, as you lead by example
Every politician has committed serious crimes
I knew Suzy committed serious crimes by running for Student Council!
Suzy killed Epstein
We can say the same thing about why Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden haven't been prosecuted either.
Seems like it's a lil hard to prosecute presidents who support the war machine.
The toppling of genocidal regime was an obviously good thing. Just ask the dissidents. Oh wait you only ask fanatic patriots for their moronic opinions because it's more sensationalist and promotes irrational but popular pacifist non-interventionist agenda that likes to turn the blind eye to all kinds of atrocities to this very day. The occupation was mishandled, no doubt about it, shoulda pulled out as soon as the dust had settled. When I was living in Russia I was only dreaming of international intervention to liberate the country of the regime. But then I left and Moscow can turn into a nuclear crater for all I care.
I wouldn't put Afghanistan and Iraq on the same level.
Bin Laden (and Al-Qaeda) was in Afghanistan and they refused to hand him over. That invasion had the support of NATO and even Russia and China. Why? Because Al-Qaeda existing doesn't benefit anyone and they were behind the attacks.
Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences. Iraq used to have chemical weapons and even used them against civilians back in the 80s, started a war with Iran and invaded Kuwait, but those were not the reasons given for the invasion...
Now, why wasn't Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia. What are you going to do, invade the country to arrest the president?
Is it fair? No. But it's how the world works.
Fun fact! In 2002 the US passed a law allowing themselves to invade the Hague in case any high-ranking US officials ended up on trial there.
Which I'm sure they passed in the year between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq just by coincidence, and they weren't expecting any shady shit to go down at all.
How would that work? Wouldn't that be an act of
warunprovoked aggression per the UN charter?Well, you know, the US always considered the international treaties to be more akin to suggestions.
I mean what are they gonna do, send them to the Hague?
Yeah, it would be.
It’s geopolitical dick wagging, not a law that was actually needed or does anything.
This is why I maintain that Trump will never go to prison.. The u.s government itself would never allow it. They'll likely help him stay out on appeals till he dies, that's gonna be the worst punishment he'll get. I think the government would have him killed and made it to look like an accident before they ever allow him to set foot in prison.
The US government will allow Trump to go to an American jail. This is like ruling over like. The US government would never allow Trump to go a foreign jail, no matter how much he deserved it.
I think there are enough people in power who will use the "one of our presidents in jail will hurt our country" excuse, or they'll fear reprisal from the maga cult, that they'll let him walk. I hope I'm wrong, but the u.s pulls this shit all the time.
Lil Bush didn't even really know...
He was just a puppet, and Cheney was part of his dad's "old guard". Lil Bush knew the game, so Cheney set it up so every intel agency reported to Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney decided if that info went anywhere else, including Lil Bush.
Cheney wanted the war, so he only passed on info that would cause the war, and it's entirely likely he was the only member of the American government who could have seen 9/11 coming. The reason no one else could, was everything has to go thru Cheney, and he saw everything.
I'm not saying Lil Bush is innocent, I'm saying he was a useful idiot that knew he was just a puppet and went along with
But it pisses me off everyone acts like the puppet fall guy is who we should be upset with, not the people who were actually doing stuff and still work with the American Republican political party.
Bush and his cabinet all knew
Even Powell? Always assumed he resigned once he realized he’d been used to sell that false evidence for Iraq.
I believe he admitted it was lies
Officially that was the reason. The violation of the ceasefire. Iraq did not abide by the terms of the ceasefire.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t have invaded. I supported the invasion at the time because of the violations of the ceasefire. I didn’t completely buy the wmd argument.
Looking back, Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&page=1
So, tl;dr: After being hammered by strikes they made an offer to hand him over to a 3rd party?
That's correct. It wasn't their first attempt, either. Instead Bush opted for the 20 years of occupation for whatever reason.
I'm not defending the occupation and whole "nation building" (which I doubt they though would take 20 years). Just pointing out that there was a difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, and that difference was reflected by the support (or lack of) from other countries.
It's insane to suggest the US would ever agree to that.
I believe it would have been the correct move, but the US as a nation would straight up never agree to that. The citizenry would have lost their fucking minds.
Both countries also do not recognize the authority of International Court. High ranking officials definitely should have been hauled off to jail for authorizing, developing, and employing "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) techniques
Trump is being charged with crimes
Trump is being charged by the US and state governments with violation of US and state laws
That's a far different scenario than an international court attempting to charge and arrest a US president (current or former
Bush lied to congress and the American people. I don't believe there were no crimes committed by doing that.
But did Bush knowingly lie to a degree provable in court?
He would have had to have known it was a lie and for that to be proven in court. With trump, his crimes were so egregious there were devout party line adherents backing out and explicitly stating just how illegal what they were doing is. Trump had been told multiple times, in multiple ways that what he was doing was illegal and he went for it anyways.
Another point to add. It is not illegal for anyone to lie, so unless he was testifying under oath, Bush could lie as much as he wanted without legal repercussions.
Not quite. The constitution has a cutout for official duties of the office. The president must faithfully carry out the duties of the office. So knowingly lying can fail that test.
If you want someone to blame for the US invasion of Iraq, blame Italy, their Intelligence apparatus, and Nicolò Pollari in particular. He submitted the “Iraq is buying Yellowcake” to the CIA twice, who figured out it was a forgery before setting a private meeting with the vice president who did not know the CIA had already ruled it out.
The Constitution lists one crime: treason. He didn't do that. Not faithfully carrying out the duties of the office is absolutely grounds for impeachment, but it's not a crime.
That’s not true. Even the specific rules laid out in the constitution have limits. You have the right to freedom of speech, and yet it is silent about the type of speech protected. We did not write down that the president is allowed to lie about winning the election in the constitution, but we did write down the president must carry out the duties of the office faithfully, and we gave Congress the power to create laws, which all citizens are bound. The president is a citizen, not a king, and I have to say this again as it was very important to the authors of the constitution: The president is not a king. He doesn’t have the divine right. Trump’s just another citizen who was temporarily given the power of the executive. You could charge him with a crime and put his ass in prison while he was a president without impeaching him. Executive privilege is court tested, but it only applies to confidentiality, and going in front of the public and lying is, by definition, not confidential.
Source? This says it also mentions piracy and counterfeiting, but it's just listing it as one of the enumerated powers.
Exactly. Congress has to make things a crime. The fact that the Constitution says that the president has to faithfully carry out their duties doesn't make not doing that a crime.
If you're saying that Congress did pass such a law, can you tell me which one?
I think you folks are talking past each other. The constitution requires faithful fulfillment of the duties of office, so because of that requirement, presidents swear oaths of duty. Lying under oath is a crime (not delineated in the constitution) and a violation of the faithful fulfillment of duties, which means that he is violating the terms of presidency set out in the constitution (also not a crime, but impeachable).
But you'd have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he intended not to uphold the oath of office when he made it.
It's not illegal to not do that. The legal framework to deal with that is impeachment and trial by Congress.
Not quite. Trump is currently being charged in federal court for his part in lying to overturn the election. They used “knowingly false” 32 times in the indictment for a reason. His defense is not that the president is allowed to lie, but rather that he truthfully believed he was telling the truth, so I’m not sure where you assertion is coming from: It is illegal to lie in furtherance of breaking the law, even for the POTUS.
Trump is not being put on trial for lying per se. The lying however is part of the furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, which is illegal. So with regards to Bush, he can't be charged with lying to the American people. It can however be used as evidence against him if it was part of furthering a criminal conspiracy.
To the best of my knowledge, we have never put a president on trial for the faithfulness clause (and no, impeachment is not an actual criminal/constitutional trial, no matter how much we treat it as such)
It's not illegal to lie to the American people. And it's practically a requirement for office.
Trump didn't even try and hide his crimes. He thinks being rich means he can do whatever he wants.
Well he's been at it since the 80s and so far it's been the only thing he's ever been mostly right about for an extended period..
So it's better when they try to hide it?
Not for dropping bombs or ordering drone strikes in a different country.
As criminals should.
We barely got to the point of impeaching Nixon for his bullshit and Reagan got off scott free for Iran-Contra. So it shouldn't be too surprising that Bush didn't get keelhauled for his bullshit invasions especially since most of the morons in Washington were totally on board with it.
Some of us could see it coming from a mile away with Afghanistan. (Just had to look back to how it went for the USSR and like every other country that tried before us (see "Graveyard of Empires").
Iraq* looked an awful lot like bullshit driven by greed, oil, and "finishing what daddy started" at the time. Idk about the last one now but the first two? Definitely. But fucking Congress went along with all of it. Probably lobbied by billionaires.
So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.
People at the top in this country rarely do.
Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to "finishing what daddy started." In 2002-2003 the W's cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.
It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that's why he got all paranoid.
With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would've been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.
Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don't know what the best "after" would've been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could've helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.
🤦🏻 yeah Iraq. Autocorrect probably. Daddy Bush probably also wanted to avoid a quagmire. Idk.
I agree we were justified invading Afghanistan and felt so at the time but it's just not a great place to try and "conquer". You might be right about the distraction of Iraq. However, Afghanistan strikes me as a country with the kind of deeply entrenched culture and politics so different from anything we are familiar with that I don't know if we could ever actively transform it in meaningful ways.
The US had no support to set foot in Iraq. The UN mandate was to remove Iraq from Kuwait, no more, no less. If the auS set foot on Iraqi soil, it would be going alone, and in violation of the UN.
Two words:
Dick Cheney
You really think dubya cared about attacking Iraq. He was told.
Pre9-11 my dad liked messing with his coworkers saying W was making a hell of a democrat when they complained about what he was doing.
After he suddenly got in line like his daddy. Always figured it's when he started listening to Cheney
What specific crimes?
I think his and his administration did a lot of awful shit, but they did it using politics, not by breaking the law. They painted their opponents as un-American. They whipped up fervor saying that "you're with us or you're with the terrists" and changed the "French Fries" in the congressional cafeteria to "Freedom Fries" after the French refused to jump on board with their war plans. They made sure the public was scared, because scared people are easier to manipulate. But, fundamentally his administration did it so that they could win votes in and for the house and senate. Fundamentally he still followed American law.
There are various things where the administration or the military might have violated international laws against war crimes or aggression. For example, the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Graib, the whole existence of and infinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, and possibly even the invasion of Iraq itself. But, international courts require a much higher burden of proof, especially to pin the crimes on the head of state. And, Bush had pet lawyers like John Yoo producing memos to declare it all legal.
Evil shit, especially evil done by the military in other countries is almost never going to result in criminal charges, let alone convictions. Trump is unusual in that the crimes were so incredibly blatant. The normal method for most shady heads of state is to at least go for plausibly legal. They have access to tons of lawyers willing to bend over backwards to declare what their bosses want to do as being legal.
People need to stop equating "evil shit" with "crimes". Yes, Bush and his administration was responsible for a lot of evil shit. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, thousands of deaths of soldiers in the bullshit "Coalition of the Willing". He was responsible for indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay and torture at Abu Graib. But, with all that blood on his hands, he may have done it all without breaking any laws. There's a reason why the prisoners are being held in Guantanamo Bay and not on US soil. There's a reason that the torture happened in an Iraqi prison. A big part of that is that many US laws don't apply to those places, so while it's awful, it may not be illegal.
No stupid questions, but certainly stupid answers.
The USA is not a part of the international criminal court. So even if the ICC said the US committed war crimes, they have no way to enfore those laws in the USA.
ICC is for states that can't prosecute within their country. USA can do that. So it goes like this:
ICC: Hey, USA, you committed war crimes
USA: We dont recognize your court of law, and we did our own investigation where we found no wrongdoing.
ICC: We disagree
USA: Okay, that's nice. If you arrest Bush we will invade the Hague
Stalemate.
Yeah but if Bush travelled to a country under the ICC jurisdiction he could still be tried. Of course the Hague invasion act (a big fuck you from USA to the ICC) may deter some countries from enforcing the ICC rules on American citizens.
This is false.
I mean how bout a source buddy?
Heres what they say on their website. "As a court of last resort, it seeks to complement, not replace, national Courts."
https://www.icc-cpi.int/about/the-court
Perhaps we interpret that differently, or I could have described it better.
You just come in here, take one sentence, call it false, and leave? Come on mannnnn.
I don't need to refute your entire argument, this isn't a Swedish university where peer criticism is required.
The ICJ says it's a lot of things but it's only been used as a colonial court against countries that aren't aligned with western interests. I don't defend the war criminals that have been prosecuted by the ICJ but how does the ICJ recognize the definition of a national court? For example, if an African country has an indigenous form and interpretation of justice to ensure societal cohesion, who are the western Europeans to say that their form of justice is incorrect and they need to be tried at the "international court".
The court was only created to try Nazis because they didn't think that country would treat their heros (at the time) fairly. It's now used to try leaders the west doesn't like. There's lots of people in Iraq, Britain that want to see Tony Blair at the ICJ but the ICJ and the UK would use a rule such as the one you've mentioned to say it doesn't apply, but won't hesitate to take an Iraqi to the court.
You seem to think the laws you espouse as ideals are not inherently written to protect those already in exploitative power.
Literally none of this has any relevance to the above statement that you deemed 'false' and is little more than a political rant.
You can be dismissive of the reality of people outside of your bubble, however this is the pragmatic reality in the world. I do enjoy people taking the time to write comments that show their worldview is being shattered.
Source?
One of the major prerequisites for people to get charged with war crimes, is to lose the war.
Not the only one though as Afghanistan was indeed lost.
No one cares and even if they did it can be vetoed.
Countries shouldn't be able to veto things about themselves. That's stupid.
Even if you remove the veto power, what exactly would you expect to happen?
Bush wasn't going to be arrested and put under an international court for the same reason Putin isn't going to be arrested for invading Ukraine. You can tell them "hand him over", they say "make me", and the only way to enforce the decision involves war, which no one wants to have.
The veto power is a problem, but it's not the main problem here.
The main problem is thinking the UN is supposed to be like this higher authority. That isn't and never was the intention, because it's impossible for it to be.
Yep. The UN isn’t the world government. It’s a place for the super powers to air their grievances for the rest of the world to see.
Duh, but that's the point of the council, to ensure they can't do anything.
Afghanistan should be stricken from the title. There were no pretenses on that one. The US could never just let 9/11 go, and our allies and the rest of the world agreed. Just for the invasion in itself, Bush never would have been charged with any war crimes there. No, not even in a more just international criminal system than the one we have.
Iraq is a different story. The fabrications were obvious, our allies called them out, and then we did it anyway. Iraq had no connection to 9/11 and no WMD program in active development. That was obvious to everyone at the time who wasn't a senseless warmonger. Almost as bad, it took resources away from Afghanistan, which was the fight that really mattered. Stack on top of all that the fact that we could no longer realpolitik by playing the authoritarian governments of Iran and Iraq off of each other. Iran had no direct counterbalance on its border anymore, which freed resources for them to start a nuclear weapons program. They never could have done that if they had to keep up a conventional military to make sure Saddam Hussein didn't start another war with them.
The two should be considered separately. Bush ought to be tried as a war criminal for invading Iraq, and for what happened during the long occupation in both countries. But there's no good reason for trying him for invading Afghanistan.
The Taliban-led Afghanistan was closer allies with Al Qaeda than Iraq for sure, but invading Afghanistan was also a bit of a stretch. Sure, the Taliban was harboring and supporting terrorists, but so were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and probably at least a half dozen other countries.
Bush is a war criminal, and while they invented the entire connection to Iraq, his administration did "exaggerate" the justifications for invading Afghanistan as well.
It was clear the leadership of Al Queda planned 9/11 from Afghanistan and were under the protection of the Taliban
Was it clear? Or was that the official story?
Look, I have no love for the Taliban, and I agree that they were supporting Al Qaeda. But there was far more evidence pointing to the Saudi royal family. Afghanistan was a convenient scape goat to distract the American people.
Saddam was a bad guy, and the world is better off without him, but he didn't attack us at all. Bush lying doesn't make Saddam or the Taliban innocent. They are all bad in their own ways.
It was clear, it was the official story, it was admitted by the Taliban and it was proven by history. There's really no reason to doubt or spread any doubt on the subject
Obama should be tried as well. He continued Bush's politics and despite knowing that newly establish Iraqi government torture its prisoners he signed a document which allowed to hand over thousands of prisoners to them. It's all well documented.
And that fucker got peace nobel price. What a joke..
Turned out Saddam was a meanie after the USA helped make him. Had to slap that idea down lest any future installed dictators try any funny business.
Afghanistan was NOT under false pretenses. The entire world stood besides the US for that. It was Iraq that was false pretenses and much of the world did not support that, and as it went on the ones that did, quickly stopped supporting it.
The USA is one of those countries that the international community can't control with traditional means. It has been hard to get sanctions against Russia regarding the Ukrainian invasion; it would be impossible to try to do the same to the USA geopoliticaly.
Also, the false pretenses only involves Iraq. Afghanistan is a different idea behind what consists of aiding and abiding international war crimes.
There's literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried. I'm sure they'd use that for a president.... The US isn't capable of war crimes. They said so.
Can I have source?
EDIT: Don't worry, found it
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act#:~:text=This%20authorization%20led%20to%20the,or%20rescue%20them%20from%20custody.
"The Act authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the President to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of The Hague, where the ICC is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody."
We're literally locked and loaded to invade the international court if they ever try. They passed a fucking bill to say we can if the president just gives it a thumbs up.
So that's why Putin has to watch his step, but 'murican presidents can commit all sorts of war crimes and still say they stand for "democracy and freedom"
Can't have the US be held responsible for its actions now, can we?
Even if we did send them to trial, how would it go?
Prosecution: "So you had suspicions of known terrorist group responsible for 9/11 as well as national nuclear weapons development in the region?"
Bush: "That's right, my defence secretary and my appointee at the CIA brought relative documents, which we've submitted to the court, of the aluminum tubes assumed to be weapons technology at the time. The location of the Taliban had been tracked and went cold around there, but we did capture thousands of their fighters."
Prosecution: "Some time after you installed a new CIA director."
Bush: "Coincidently, yes, these sort of changes happen often."
Prosecution: "Did you have any evidence of where they might have obtained the technology?"
Bush: "That's right, we've had Russian informants about their spread of weapons throughout the middle east over the decades. Some of it is still classified but some of it has been submitted to the court."
Prosecution: "And is it true your nation profited greatly off the Iraqi Oilfields which was Coincidently monopolized by Exxon Mobil under the leadership of Rex Tillerson who went on to become a Secretary in the Trump Administration?"
Bush: "Well this has nothing to do with the Trump administration, I myself don't approve of them, and I also have no personal connections with Rex. But maybe that is true, I don't know."
Judge: breaks into a sweat realizing they'll be here listening to the questioning people over this for another 2 decades and still not have a solid case
You're missing
"No, that is not accurate."
He should have been. Especially after the photos of Abu Ghraib came out. But it is the U.S. so he payed no penalties.
Those photos being released, along with the revelations about illegal surveillance and surveillance techniques revealed by Snowden really destroyed the myth of what we are as a country.
Many factors play into this.
Lyndon Johnson came right out and told the American people that we needed to fight the Vietnam war to protect our rubber and tungsten interests there. Fighting a resource war is unfortunately not the crime it should be, and never has been.
If the WMD pretenses were false, Bush can and did blame the intelligence community that produced the information. No one there was prosecuted because it’s in their daily routine to say “we believe that inside Iraq / North Korea / etc that something bad XYZ is happening” and being wrong is not a crime.
Generally, no one believed that Saddam Hussein was good for Iraq, the Middle East, or the world. Iraqis were quite thankful for his removal. So even if the WMD thing was phony, there is a sense of “well, at least it all accomplished some good purpose.”
We can point to Bush as the sole responsible party but the reality is that Congress voted to authorize it and 40 nations participated. So responsibility is really pretty diffuse and Bush can say “everyone agreed it was the right thing to do.”
American politics are a shit show and any effort to hold a president accountable is seen as a ploy, and even if it isn’t, it becomes mired in the deep partisanship.
That was all too early for me to be following any political news.
In a way (just this one way) I'm glad he didn't.
At the time I was so in brainwashed conservative land. If I saw Bush get in trouble I would have stood by him simply because "Republicans good, Democrats bad". And it might have affected my waking up to the actuality, and maybe slowed it down to the point where I'd be defending Trump now. If the last guy got in trouble but was Republican and therefore innocent, it's just happening again, gosh dang those lefties.
That's literally the depth of thought in that camp. I've been there and seen it, I did it myself. They don't have any higher functioning logic to speak of. They really latch onto the victim mentality, even in their source of news. Since, at the time it got popular, Fox News was really the only right-leaning mainstream "news " network. I remember being told by my mom back then that it was the only one that wasn't "super liberal". And I took that at face value for years, not even questioning it. That's all it takes when you're that young. And then they'll defend it to their last breath when they only think like that because they were suggested to once, and they build their whole world on it.
Had to scrape myself out of that thinking. Took me forever. Turns out deprogramming yourself against the thinking taught to you by everyone you've ever known and with only tangential knowledge of others you know doing it is difficult. I knew one guy that broke his programming, but didn't really broadcast it, so I didn't really catch on to much of it. But later I had a roommate that would talk about it all the time, and could back it up. That really got me thinking, and ended up being like the starter pebble you nudge down the hill that becomes the huge snowball. But that's probably a story for a different kind of post. Probably a whole other community.
I didn't really have any exposure to anything outside that world until I was 25 or so, when I met the previously mentioned roommate. I still find pieces of that old thinking and influence in me all the time.
Thanks for coming to my accidental TED talk. Got a ramble going there.
Edit- fixed typos and added the part about FN.
Same
because of precedent.
any single member of the government is afraid of setting a precedent that will come back to hurt them
they all do illegal shit, if one is punished then possibly they all will
Maybe because everyone followed. Liberal, conservative, Canadian, American. Didn't matter to us then. We all knew it was going to lead to war, and when we were all pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan, we just accepted it and went for it. I still think it needed to be done, just not then and there. But to say the Taliban and Saddam didn't deserve to go down is also wrong.
Not true by a long shot. In 2003, a majority of Americans wanted the US to stay out of Iraq if the UN security council did not approve the invasion. A majority of Democrats in congress voted against the authorization of use of force. (and many who voted for it said they were against the invasion).
US consider the international criminal court as a terrorist organization
Well, because the U.S. is a police state, with a military stranglehold on the planet, and the invasions were predicated on an event with uh, let's say, suspicious circumstances, that was engraved into the national psyche as the worst crime of a generation.
You REALLY need to learn what a police state is if you think America is one. Police states are authoritarian which America is not at this moment.
His comment reeks of InfoWars
Bush buys shit coin though. He can't be wrong.
Who do you expect would charge, arrest, and try him? Certainly not the United States. Congress passed a very broad authorization for the use of force after 9/11. Multiple US allies also sent personnel under the umbrella of a UN security assistance force, so it's unlikely the UN would try to do anything regardless of which countries have veto power
In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn't want to fuck with the money.
What specific laws do you think he broke?
You can't charge someone with "crimes", you need specific laws and how he broke them.
Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war signed by congress and without congressional or U.N. approval. Plus, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and several of their legal advisors were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts for endorsing torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of P.O.W.s but the ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002
Getting UN approval is a "nice to have", but it doesn't guarantee anything. A war of aggression would probably be something that could be prosecuted in the ICC as a crime of aggression, but to prove it's a crime of aggression you need to prove that there was no "just cause for self-defense". The whole basis of the US justification for attacking Iraq was that Iraq was involved in terrorism against the USA. So, to prove that it wasn't a war of self-defense, you'd not only have to prove that Iraq had no connection with any kind of terrorism against the USA and had no intention of it in the future, but that the US leadership knew that that was the case and invaded under false pretenses.
At this point we know that Iraq didn't have WMD, but can you really prove that the US leadership wasn't so deluded that they thought that Iraq genuinely didn't have WMD? The whole aftermath of the invasion involved a lot of embarrassing searching for WMDs that the US was sure were there. The US was constantly announcing that they were closing in on the WMDs, but every site they searched turned out to be nothing. If they'd known there really weren't any, they probably would have just gone ahead and planted some evidence. Instead, they kept looking and looking and claiming they were sure it was there somewhere.
Besides, the US has a veto on the UN security council, so they couldn't recommend prosecution or anything because the US would just veto the resolution.
Which foreign courts? Which war crimes in particular?
"cause Murica" is your reading of it. They had the option to charge Bush, but they didn't. One reason for that might have been that they knew they'd never be able to get their hands on the US officials they could have charged, and that the US might react really badly to the charges. But, another reason might be that they knew they'd never be able to get a conviction, because the bar to convicting officials is very high at the ICC.
"Evil shit" isn't the same as "crimes". The Bush admin did plenty of evil shit, but it's very hard to prove they broke any specific laws. Instead, because they managed to scare the shit out of the US, congress and the senate kept giving them as much authorization to do whatever they wanted. As for international laws, those are very rarely used, especially against superpowers, and the bar to proving anything is very high.
The wikipedia page you posted essentially just says "Iraqi Freedom was justified because of all of these things that we say are occurring" when it was proven that there were no WMDs, no nuclearization, etc. They violated the terms of a ceasefire? So that required 13 years of war? It was about Saddam and Bush Sr. That and creating a US military base in the middle east so that there would be a base of operations outside of Saudi or Iranian influence.
So, you missed this bit? It's right at the top of the page:
I can't be fucked to look up something that hasn't been relevant for over ten years, but the answer to this question is definitely yes. Do some research and it shouldn't be hard to find.
K
So congress signed off on the plan without approving it somehow?
Edit: Nevermind, there was a lack of comma, and my brain separated one statement into two. Sorry for the fuss.
Isn't he directly saying congress DIDN'T sign off on it?
I think you are right. I get it now. Whoops. I guess the lack of a comma confused my dumbass.
Starting a war is illegal under international law. People have hanged for it.
Sometimes, sometimes it isn't. Specifically what would you have charged him with, and what evidence would have convicted him?
Crimes against the peace. The evidence is he started a war in Iraq. It's not complicated.
Yes, it is. Merely starting a war isn't justification for prosecution in the ICC. That's not how the laws work.
There is no such thing as international law despite what you've heard
There's laws written, courts. They've arrested people, tried them, and punished the convicted. You can call it whatever dumb word you want to call it.
In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.
In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.
Because these are uncharted legal waters. There is no precedent for charging a former US president with a crime.
Yet.
You mean there wasn't yet? I don't know if that's true, but I know there most definitely is precedent now.
People wanted blood by any means necessarily post 9/11. There were many international calls for his arrest. It just never happened because people hated Afghanistan and Iraq more than the US.
World leaders wont arrest each other because they don't want to set a precedent.
Isn't that happening with Putin now?
Kinda. There's a really good chance he only invaded Ukraine because a Yes Man told him it would only take a few days and the west wouldn't get involved. >
Oh I'm fairly certain that's what happened.
This is the entire point of declaring (even informally) a reasonable Cassus Belli
Russia does not have a reasonable reason to go to war with Ukraine that is not "we want that land"
I don't think there's any good reason for two countries to go to war. It's weird you would say wanting land is a justification. Russia's stated reason was and is for a security buffer against NATO. It's not justified but I don't understand why you're pretending it's not the reason.
NATO wasn't in Ukraine, Ukraine had pledged not to join NATO as part of their disarmament, and the attack on Ukraine encouraged more countries to join NATO.
If "a buffer against NATO" was the actual goal, that existed in post-Maidan Ukraine already, and the invasion directly counteracts that goal.
Also their stated reason was denazification of Ukraine, which is pretty much just rejected by the international community as an unreasonable CB.
There were several goals stated. It's clear to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that denazification was meant for domestic politics. The Minsk accords were never implemented and Merkel bragged about it being a small tactic to arm the Ukrainians. I suppose we'll see who ends up writing the history books to see which of us is right.
The US and EU will write the history books, regardless of who wins the war.
Effectively, those two are the world, despite being a minority population. That's just the way the geopolitical cookie crumbles.
No one called for arrests of the US over Afghanistan, get your history straight. Iraq is where it went off the rails.
Who's going to charge him with a crime? Iraq and Afghanistan both have the most to gain, but good luck getting the U.S. to extradite a former president to sit trial for a foreign power. The U.S. sits on the United Nations security council, so the U.N. can't do anything. Realistically the only one who could charge him is the U.S. themself, but that would require a formal admission that the wars were unjust. Not to mention, we're already struggling to arrest a former president who attempted a coup, and potential charges against Bush would be much more difficult.
Because the law is only applied to the poors
Ahh god dammit. Yep... Happened when I was a kid, still furious.
I don't know dude, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to die mad about it.
Welcome to the rich and powerful, where everything is made up and laws dont matter.
Afghanistan was a just action. Let's just get that settled.
Iraq was legal but the public was lied to about the justification.
War Crimes requires a nation to purposefully target and kill civilians. If such an illegal order occurs those responsible are charged. If a government does not charge those issuing illegal orders they can be charged with War Crimes.
Civilian deaths do occur in War, a nation must only target legal military targets. For example the World Trade Center was an illegal target on 9/11. The Pentagon was a legal target on 9/11. Attacking a Civilian office gave the United States legal rights to retaliation.
As for Bush, his actions didn't violate international law in Iraq. They were questionable and diplomacy would have been the better option, but still not illegal. All acts deemed War Crimes had those responsible charged and sent to prison. For example those responsible for the Abu Ghraib incident were charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The person to ordered the abuse and torture of prisoners was William Hayes II, General Council of the Department of Defense and authorized by Judge Brett Kavanagh, yes the same one that now serves on the Supreme Court.
Bonus, Ron DeSantis was responsible for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
If you want to charge people with War Crimes, start with the three who still are at-large from justice.
"Afghanistan was a just action". Was it really? Is it justice to invade a country and kill civilians for an act of terrorism, even a massive one? Should the Latin american countries where the CIA operated, installed dictatorships and helped to kill thousands, bomb the USA? Wasn't it foreign terrorism? Should Vietnam invade the USA for its use of Agent orange and napalm? Would it be just?
Do you think the US invaded Afghanistan with the goal to kill civilians?
That's the neat part: nobody is a civilian when you define everyone as an unlawful combatant.
But otherwise, every war ever fought has killed civilians; so starting a war is automatically about killing civilians at some point. Stating that it's not the main goal is hypocritical
Do you think the US should have just left Bin Laden to 'do his thing'? Do you think religious terrorist can be stopped without using violence?
Well they did let him do his thing (unknowingly). They even trained him... But after that, I think they shouldn't have invaded a country for him. Otherwise where do you stop? Do the US bomb Texas every time there is a Christian bomber?
Do you believe Texas is going to refuse to extradite a christian terrorist that's attacked New York?
Regarding Iraq: Because he cynically played enforcer for a lot of very rich (AKA influential) people who were scared that the US petrodollar hegemony was about to be supplanted by the Euro once people did the maths on Hussein's recent successful pivot to Euro as reserve currency https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html - notice how the puppet government that was then installed made it one of their first tasks to switch the country's reserve back to USD. The ongoing currency war was and is the actual war behind the "war" (wars).
Regarding Afghanistan: Everyone knew there was just too much "fog of war" to build a slam-dunk case against him for it. At best it would have ended up being framed by media as hand-waving about "wrong country" or "not just that country". I remember scratching my head wildly though when he was spouting his "with us or against us" and "bomb them back to the stone age" rhetoric (and going unilateral - with the help of his Blair poodle - when the UN disagreed). He raced straight past "un-presidential" on his way to "extremely childish" when conflating "surgically remove some known terrorists from their hiding places" with "go all scorched earth on the entire country where they might have last been hiding". There might have been some chance of making a case for recklessness (similar to the distinction between "manslaughter" & "murder") - on the part of a jumped-up cowboy-wannabe playing "war president", all hubristically drunk on the power he effectively inherited from his dad. As mentioned in many of the other comments though the US would never "allow" the ICC to bring such a conviction (undermining what the ICC is for), and any legal attempt within the US would just trigger screams of "you're not a patriot" and "too soon" (still).
Maybe you can help me because I’m 20 or 30 paragraphs in to that essay and it hasn’t explained anything to me: it just repeats the same points over and over that “the REAL reason for the war was oil transactions currency and LOOK Saddam actually made money by switching and this is all UNREPORTED by US media!” (Repeat, ad nauseum).
What is an oil transaction currency?
How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?
It makes me highly suspicious that this author doesn’t take time early on to explain these basics, and instead spends a bunch of time at the top congratulating himself on all the nice emails he’s gotten.
I sympathise with your "TL;DR" feeling (why oh why do academics - including the extremely knowledgable ones - so often make their otherwise-valid points soooo long-winded and self-referential? ...which is why I love the project started by Alan Alda - https://www.aldacenter.org/ by the way). In the author's partial defence though the initial "note to readers" text is follow-up to responses and updates, before the guts of the essay which follows (I think he could have more clearly formatted those parts differently in coloured boxes or such, so people could easily/quickly see where the "the original content" starts),
Firstly I say persevere with the essay if you can bear it (even if you need to skim initial verbiage) - there are a lot of profound insights, especially considering it was written 20 years ago as events were happening, and it ultimately answers your questions comprehensively. However for some quicker on-ramps about its primary tenet I was able to find from a quick DDG-search of "petrodollar currency war" that the rest of the reporting world is slowly catching-up (in many cases only now, 20 years later). Some top-links I found from that search (which I mainly just skimmed the beginnings of for context, so don't necessarily endorse entirely) are:
The Wikipedia link about Petrodollar-recycling seems to have a nicely concise summary to answer your question:
...and my very quickly typed (therefore far from accurate but hopefully high-level enough) answer would be something like this:
Following 1971 when the US forced termination of the Bretton Woods system (abandoned "gold-backed currency" for "fiat currency backed by smoke and mirrors"), by 1974 they became dangerously vulnerable due to over-spending on war (and some other endeavours) but found a quick-fix through petrodollar recycling ("buy loads of oil and the oil-producing country in-turn invests their profits heavily back into the US"). That was initially setup with Saudi Arabia but ended up being with all of OPEC, and because oil became the yardstick for international trade eventually the situation became such that the currency the world trades oil in became the de-facto "world trade" currency, and therefore the "international reserve currency". This creates a scenario in which "the US going under would take much of the world under with it" (generalising and summarising very crudely). That of course incentivised much of the world to protect the USD (and therefore protect the US from itself) in myriad ways and seemingly incentivised the consequent US administrations to hubristically spend wild/reckless amounts (especially on war) feeling like they are immune to "Consequences [tm]". The mantra was always "If you switch your reserve funds away from USD you will tank your country", but over time the expanding Euro-spending block of countries were becoming as big (eventually bigger) oil-buyers than the US, and Iraq switching their reserve to Euro turned out not only to be non-problematic but even "very successful". The US knew this would cause a chain-reaction of countries wanting to try the same switch to Euros (or at least be less phobic of considering it) so they needed it stomped out, while also finding other soundbite-friendly "reasons" for the stomping - screaming "look over here, look over here" so the mass-media would not notice the "petrodollar hegemony preservation" reason. WMDs was their gambit and it largely "worked" due to most people only listening to hot-button soundbites and retrofitting manufactured narratives to justify exceptionalism-fueled superficial knee-jerk responses. I think vanishingly few people would disagree with the fact that Hussein was a terrible, unforgivably criminal dictator, but not enough people asked "why are they suddenly only doing something about him now?".
Because for a time he was our guy in the region.
And then he wasn’t - when he stomped Kuwait. Are these people forgetting Desert Storm in 1991?
But mainly: let’s say that switching to the Euro was a great idea and more countries were likely to do it. How does going to war with Iraq stop anyone else from doing it? Are we really supposed to believe it was a threatening show of force to cow the entire world into throwing away profits and using our currency? This doesn’t make sense.
Like many many arguments, the author can’t be content with “here’s another factor in the mix of what happened” and just haaaas to say “everything else is lies - here’s the one and only explanation.”
I don't think it was as much about "making an example of them" as it was about getting them back to accepting USD (and "recycling" those back into the US economy) ASAP. Installed Iraq administrations switched straight back to USD since the invasion.
I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I'm not a legal scholar.
Afghanistan was legit, how are people sold that it wasn't so close to 9/11?
The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudis lead by a US-trained individual that was later found and executed in Pakistan, where the group was founded. The only way Afghanistan was close to any of this was geographically.
You (intentionally?) leave out the important detail that the main orchestrator of the attack bin Laden / al-Qaeda were based in Afghanistan and Taliban refused to extradite him/them.
They offered to extradite him if America could prove that he was responsible. This seems reasonable until you realize that the only way to do this would be to offer the Taliban, who never were allies, a list of most of the US' intelligence assets, so what would happen is they would either give OBL up or not but then would execute everyone supplying info.
It was easier and more expedient for GWB to go to war
Weren't they protecting bin Laden?
Yes, Pakistan was, in a way, helping bin Laden to hide and evade the USA military. The fact that the USA never "tough talked" to Pakistan, even when the intelligence agencies left no doubt about that, is proof that Afghanistan was anything -but- legit.
The Taliban hid him for a bit after 9/11/01
I'm talking about Afghanistan in 2001.
Yes, they were hiding bin Laden and that was the causa belli. The USA gave an ultimatum to the Taliban, which they denied, and the invasion happened shortly after.
After the battle of Tora Bora, a lot of al-Qaeda members managed to flee into Pakistan and further east, so you could say that the reason for the invasion into Afghanistan ended there.
Yeah it's kinda hard to isolate sunni terrorism to a single location. America and Saudi Arabia funded a whole bunch of extremist madrasa in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a bid to oust the Soviet occupation.
This militant force was primarily led by Arab fighters who operated largely in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the hijackers were mostly Arab, but a lot of their organizational infrastructure operated out of central Asia.
It's where the majority of Al Qaeda was
Probably he should be.
The US wields a huge amount of influence generally in the world, and specifically in the Hague. Behavior that would get other leaders called to task is generally ignored if it's done by the US.
It's not fair, but it is the way that the world works.
It gave a pretense for any powerfull nation to do what they want. This was used by Putin to invade Ukraine. It is hard to be the nation who lead the world, as you lead by example
Every politician has committed serious crimes
I knew Suzy committed serious crimes by running for Student Council!
Suzy killed Epstein
We can say the same thing about why Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden haven't been prosecuted either.
Seems like it's a lil hard to prosecute presidents who support the war machine.
The toppling of genocidal regime was an obviously good thing. Just ask the dissidents. Oh wait you only ask fanatic patriots for their moronic opinions because it's more sensationalist and promotes irrational but popular pacifist non-interventionist agenda that likes to turn the blind eye to all kinds of atrocities to this very day. The occupation was mishandled, no doubt about it, shoulda pulled out as soon as the dust had settled. When I was living in Russia I was only dreaming of international intervention to liberate the country of the regime. But then I left and Moscow can turn into a nuclear crater for all I care.