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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?No no, don’t you know that we don’t do “war” any more? We do “operations” now. War is totally different. Then we have to obey Geneva conventions and all sorts of other hairy stuff. Our politicians have decided as long as we don’t call it “war” then we’re fine.
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Yeah, it would be.
It’s geopolitical dick wagging, not a law that was actually needed or does anything.
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.
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That’s correct. It wasn’t their first attempt, either. Instead Bush opted for the 20 years of occupation for whatever reason.
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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
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.
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.
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?
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As criminals should.
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.
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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.
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
Welcome to the rich and powerful, where everything is made up and laws dont matter.
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.
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?
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.
Because the law is only applied to the poors
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.
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).
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.
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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.
