Let’s start at the top–Bush first, Cheney second…Clinton about 329th, **John Mace **15,697,056th, me 41,056,838th, etc.
If a Nation is not acting in self-defense or does not have specific UN authorization, then that Nation is starting an illegal war. It doesn’t matter what the individual Nations thinks or votes on. To get around that glaring fact, the US contends they were fulfilling the UN resolution from the first Gulf War which Iraq was now (in 2002) in violation of (among other just as tenuous arguments).
That’s weak of course, but shows you the lengths the US will go to be in “compliance” with the UN. I also doubt that argument would stop anyone from prosecuting the US if anyone wanted to. Nations (not individuals) are tried in the International Court of Justice, an arm of the UN. I do not believe they have been asked or have stated whether the Second Gulf War was an illegal war. People have, but not the UN/ICJ as a body.
What’s with you and Hillary Clinton, John?
You just keep bringing her up specifically.
I’m going to pretend, just for the sake of argument only, that you aren’t just doing your usual ‘my side, my side’ handwaving and point out that the USA considered South Vietnam a real country.
They did not attack South Vietnam, they went to war to ‘defend’ them. Although the whole thing was a war crime in any meaningful sense, the USA did not ‘launch a war of aggression’. It was meeting its SEATO obligations and so was covered as ‘an exercise of collective self-defense’.
And as you well know, armed intervention to prevent genocide is not considered a Crime Against Peace. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention permits intervention to prevent genocide.
International Law is not a gotcha invented to nail your team. It’s just your team in the USA and ‘my team’ in the UK who are the ones who did the** particular example being discussed in this thread**. I don’t care whose fracking ‘team’ was involved and the thread in not about Vietnam, Bosnia or the War of Jenkins Ear or whatever.
Iraq is the clearest, most blatant example of a war of aggression as technically defined in my life time. It was so blatant it could not be driven through the gaping loopholes that allow all kinds of unjust wars.
But if I could bring back LBJ, Nixon and Macnamara and dig Kissinger out of whatever rock he’s under I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff they should be charged with other than Crimes Against Peace (although that would cover Cambodia for N & K I think).
And just to head off your next game - yea - I think Obama’s use of drones is a crime and he should be tried for it at some point.
Bush jr. isn’t the top. It’s the Cheny-Rumsfeld-Bush sr-et altra cabal that was in power since Reagan. Bush Jr was just their front-man for the period 2002-2008.
That was UN authorised NATO enforced. Again, as you well know.
Who was the front man in 2001? Lost my scorecard.
I was never in support of the Iraq war. Not before and not after. My side is the side with facts, though, and I don’t just mindlessly support anyone on “my side” who is posting factually incorrect information.
The idea that there was “genocide” going on in either case is not a factual statement. And just who, if not the UN Security Council, can legally make that judgement, if we’re talking about international law? The UN Charter is quite clear about the use of force, and it is not permitted without UNSC authorization except when a nation is under imminent threat of attack.
Of course I know that. So what? The US was not obligated to continue doing it indefinitely, as I said.
At any rate, to prevent further hijacking of this thread, unless Ms. Maddow has proposed that Bush et al be tried for crimes against peace, it’s probably better to either let that discussion die, or open a separate thread to discuss it. Tagos, feel free to do the latter if you like. I won’t.
How the world cringed: Colin Powell’s UN Speech on Iraq:
I watched that live. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears, it was that bad. Lost a lot of respect for him that day, I did.
Question:
What was the expected endstate for the WMD claims? Did they have an excuse for their failure prepared at any point? Or did they just expect everyone would shrug and move along and ask no questions?
(As they have never faced the consequences of their decision, it appears their hubris was justified.)
They’re claiming basically that they were right, but their intelligence was bad.
I don’t understand.
If they knew the information was false to begin with then they would have to know the deceit would eventually be unsupportable. That means they would have planned the “morally right, information wrong” non-argument from the beginning and just hoped it played well with the masses.
Unless there’s some part of this I’m still missing.
I think the most parsimonious answer is that they really thought they’d find “something”. They thought that Blix was incompetent, and they were sure SH was playing a cat and mouse game, moving stuff around or hiding it in presidential palaces or whatever.
But the whole WMDs things was red herring all along. Who the hell doesn’t have “WMDs” of some sort? That’s a term so vague that it can easily be made to fit almost any circumstance. And they could always fall back on the fact that not only was SH supposed to destroy all his WMDs, but he was supposed to account for their destruction, too. And he hadn’t. It might not even have been possible to do so, but that didn’t matter. They wanted to invade Iraq, and one excuse was as good as another. I think they picked WMDs because they thought that was the best bet.
Sure, there is a laundry list of reasons in the AUMF that are not WMD-related, but the Bush administration made it the sine qua non of the Iraq war. The smoking gun that could manifest itself as a mushroom cloud.
Didn’t Cheney make a comment along the lines of:“We ( at the top) are creating history at the moment and all the rest of you can do, for the years to come, is study what we did.”
it’s from an “unnamed aide to George W. Bush”.
You left out the part of the quote where the unnamed source asks if the color blue for the reporter is the same blue as for White House officials, and then gets the munchies and wanders off.
Wow that is right up there with Xerxes lashing and branding the Ocean for defying his will
Capt
@der trihs quote
She was correct.
The authorization bill did not simply say, “Let’s invade Iraq!” On the contrary, it authorized Bush to use military force only after he certified in writing that nothing short of war could keep America safe from Iraq.
At the time of the vote, there had been no outside inspectors in Iraq for four years, and it was the responsible thing to do for Congress to assume the worst. The only information they had about Iraq was the estimates and guesses of our intelligence community, so they had no choice but to trust them. Although the NIE showed that there was more uncertainty about WMDs than Bush and Cheney portrayed, people responsible for the security of the US had to err on the side of caution.
And the bill worked perfectly. It forced Saddam to allow the UN inspectors back in, and even to allow them complete access to previously forbidden areas, like the Presidential compounds.
It only took a few weeks of inspections to prove that our intelligence was wrong, and that Chalabi’s defectors were liars. It only took a few months to prove that there were no large active WMD programs or stockpiles at all. And according to Blix, it would only have taken a few more months to have completely accounted for the WMDs that we knew Saddam had in the 1980s.
So by early March 2003, the Democrats could take great satisfaction in the October 2002 vote. It had accomplished its goals, resulting in a sure knowledge, for the first time in decades, that Iraq was no threat to the US.
And then Bush ignored all the work of the UN inspectors, declared in writing that nothing short of war could protect the US against Saddam’s pickup truck army, and invaded anyway.
Hillary was absolutely correct. The problem was not in the vote, but in the way Bush abused the authority it gave him.