Tim Kelly: The Criminal Iraq War

by Tim Kelly,  fff.org,  April 4, 2013

 

Much ink (or bandwidth) has been expended writing about the tenth anniversary of the U.S. government’s invasion of Iraq. That is justified, for the Iraq war was an act of naked aggression and a crime against humanity.

While apologists for the Bush administration have cited “bad intelligence” or even incompetence as an excuse for what the late Major General William Odom called “the greatest strategic disaster in American history,” such claims cannot withstand scrutiny.The evidence is overwhelming that George W. Bush and his henchmen cooked intelligence in building their case for the invasion and knowingly lied the country into an unnecessary war. The enormity of this crime is compounded by the fact that the war plunged Iraq, a nation already ravaged by a 12-year-long economic embargo, into a bloodbath that cost the lives of at least a hundred thousand civilians and displaced millions more.

Now, some claim that it is not fair to hold the Bush administration responsible for all the horrors that unfolded in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. But that really is no defense. As the Nuremburg tribunal declared, “To initiate a war of aggression ...  is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And by any reasonable standard, the invasion the U.S. government launched against Iraq on March 19, 2003, constituted a war of aggression. Iraq had never attacked the United States, nor did she pose a conceivable threat to the nation.

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