SEND OUR WAR CRIMINALS TO THE HAGUE COURT by Eric Margolis

[DA60]

'SEND OUR WAR CRIMINALS TO THE HAGUE COURT
by Eric Margolis

9 July 2016
This week’s Chilcot report on Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq was as polite and guarded as a proper English tea party. No direct accusations, no talk of war crimes by then Prime Minister Tony Blair or his guiding light, President George W. Bush. But still pretty damning.
Such government reports and commissions, as was wittily noted in the delightful program ‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ are designed to obscure rather than reveal the truth and bury awkward facts in mountains of paper.
And beneath mountains of lies. The biggest lie on both sides of the Atlantic was that the invasion and destruction of Iraq was the result of ‘faulty intelligence.’ The Bush and Blair camps and the US and British media keep pushing this absurd line.
This writer, who had covered Iraq since 1976, was one of the first to assert that Baghdad had no so-called weapons of mass destruction, and no means of delivering them even if it did. For this I was dropped and black-listed by the leading US TV cable news network and leading US newspapers.
I had no love for the brutal Saddam Hussein, whose secret police threatened to hang me as a spy. But I could not abide the intense war propaganda coming from Washington and London, served up by the servile, mendacious US and British media.
The planned invasion of Iraq was not about nuclear weapons or democracy, as Bush claimed. Two powerful factions in Washington were beating the war drums: ardently pro-Israel neoconservatives who yearned to see an enemy of Israel destroyed, and a cabal of conservative oil men and imperialists around Vice President Dick Cheney who sought to grab Iraq’s huge oil reserves at a time they believed oil was running out. They engineered the Iraq War, as blatant and illegal an aggression as Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.
Britain’s smarmy Tony Blair tagged along with the war boosters in hopes that the UK could pick up the crumbs from the invasion and reassert its former economic and political power in the Arab world. Blair had long been a favorite of British neoconservatives. The silver-tongued Blair became point man for the war in preference to the tongue-twisted, stumbling George Bush. But the real warlord was VP Dick Cheney.
There was no ‘flawed intelligence.’ There were intelligence agencies bullied into reporting a fake narrative to suit their political masters. And a lot of fake reports concocted by our Mideast allies like Israel and Kuwait.
After the even mild Chilcot report, Blair’s reputation is in tatters, as it should be. How such an intelligent, worldly man could have allowed himself to be led around by the doltish, swaggering Bush is hard to fathom. Europe’s leaders and Canada refused to join the Anglo-American aggression. France, which warned Bush of the disaster he would inflict, was slandered and smeared by US Republicans as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’
In the event, the real monkeys were the Bush and Blair governments. Saddam Hussain, a former US ally, was deposed and lynched. Iraq, the most advanced Arab nation, was almost totally destroyed. Up to one million Iraqis may have been killed, though the Chilcot report claimed only a risible 150,000. As Saddam had predicted, the Bush-Blair invasion opened the gates of hell, and out came al-Qaida and then ISIS.
The US and British media, supposedly the bulwark of democracy, rolled over and became an organ of government war propaganda. Blair had the august BBC purged for failing to fully support his drive for war. BBC has never recovered.
Interestingly, this week’s news of the Chilcot investigation was buried deep inside the New York Times on Thursday. The Times was a key partisan of the war. So too the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the big TV networks.
Without their shameful connivance, the Iraq War might not have happened.
Bush and Blair have the deaths of nearly 4,500 US soldiers on their heads, the devastation of Iraq, our $1 trillion war, the ever-expanding mess in the Mideast, and the violence what we wrongly blame on ‘terrorism’ and so-called ‘radical Islam.’
The men and women responsible for this biggest disaster in our era should be brought to account. As long as Bush and Blair swan around and collect speaking fees, we have no right to lecture other nations, including Russia and China, on how to run a democracy or rule of law. Bush and Blair should be facing trial for war crime at the Hague Court.'

SEND OUR WAR CRIMINALS TO THE HAGUE COURT « Eric Margolis


Thoughts?

 

[Tigerace117]

'SEND OUR WAR CRIMINALS TO THE HAGUE COURT
by Eric Margolis

9 July 2016
This week’s Chilcot report on Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq was as polite and guarded as a proper English tea party. No direct accusations, no talk of war crimes by then Prime Minister Tony Blair or his guiding light, President George W. Bush. But still pretty damning.
Such government reports and commissions, as was wittily noted in the delightful program ‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ are designed to obscure rather than reveal the truth and bury awkward facts in mountains of paper.
And beneath mountains of lies. The biggest lie on both sides of the Atlantic was that the invasion and destruction of Iraq was the result of ‘faulty intelligence.’ The Bush and Blair camps and the US and British media keep pushing this absurd line.
This writer, who had covered Iraq since 1976, was one of the first to assert that Baghdad had no so-called weapons of mass destruction, and no means of delivering them even if it did. For this I was dropped and black-listed by the leading US TV cable news network and leading US newspapers.
I had no love for the brutal Saddam Hussein, whose secret police threatened to hang me as a spy. But I could not abide the intense war propaganda coming from Washington and London, served up by the servile, mendacious US and British media.
The planned invasion of Iraq was not about nuclear weapons or democracy, as Bush claimed. Two powerful factions in Washington were beating the war drums: ardently pro-Israel neoconservatives who yearned to see an enemy of Israel destroyed, and a cabal of conservative oil men and imperialists around Vice President Dick Cheney who sought to grab Iraq’s huge oil reserves at a time they believed oil was running out. They engineered the Iraq War, as blatant and illegal an aggression as Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.
Britain’s smarmy Tony Blair tagged along with the war boosters in hopes that the UK could pick up the crumbs from the invasion and reassert its former economic and political power in the Arab world. Blair had long been a favorite of British neoconservatives. The silver-tongued Blair became point man for the war in preference to the tongue-twisted, stumbling George Bush. But the real warlord was VP Dick Cheney.
There was no ‘flawed intelligence.’ There were intelligence agencies bullied into reporting a fake narrative to suit their political masters. And a lot of fake reports concocted by our Mideast allies like Israel and Kuwait.
After the even mild Chilcot report, Blair’s reputation is in tatters, as it should be. How such an intelligent, worldly man could have allowed himself to be led around by the doltish, swaggering Bush is hard to fathom. Europe’s leaders and Canada refused to join the Anglo-American aggression. France, which warned Bush of the disaster he would inflict, was slandered and smeared by US Republicans as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’
In the event, the real monkeys were the Bush and Blair governments. Saddam Hussain, a former US ally, was deposed and lynched. Iraq, the most advanced Arab nation, was almost totally destroyed. Up to one million Iraqis may have been killed, though the Chilcot report claimed only a risible 150,000. As Saddam had predicted, the Bush-Blair invasion opened the gates of hell, and out came al-Qaida and then ISIS.
The US and British media, supposedly the bulwark of democracy, rolled over and became an organ of government war propaganda. Blair had the august BBC purged for failing to fully support his drive for war. BBC has never recovered.
Interestingly, this week’s news of the Chilcot investigation was buried deep inside the New York Times on Thursday. The Times was a key partisan of the war. So too the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the big TV networks.
Without their shameful connivance, the Iraq War might not have happened.
Bush and Blair have the deaths of nearly 4,500 US soldiers on their heads, the devastation of Iraq, our $1 trillion war, the ever-expanding mess in the Mideast, and the violence what we wrongly blame on ‘terrorism’ and so-called ‘radical Islam.’
The men and women responsible for this biggest disaster in our era should be brought to account. As long as Bush and Blair swan around and collect speaking fees, we have no right to lecture other nations, including Russia and China, on how to run a democracy or rule of law. Bush and Blair should be facing trial for war crime at the Hague Court.'

SEND OUR WAR CRIMINALS TO THE HAGUE COURT « Eric Margolis


Thoughts?

The fact that they compared the Iraq War to Hitler's invasion of Poland is beyond ridiculous.

The fact that they say "the violence we wrongly blame on radical Islam and terrorism" is also beyond ridiculous.

 

[Apocalypse]

The fact that they compared the Iraq War to Hitler's invasion of Poland is beyond ridiculous.

The fact that they say "the violence we wrongly blame on radical Islam and terrorism" is also beyond ridiculous.

/thread

 

[Lafayette]

Thoughts?

Yes, about this quote from the article:

In the event, the real monkeys were the Bush and Blair governments. Saddam Hussain, a former US ally, was deposed and lynched.

I don't condone the Bush invasion of Iraq, based upon his reasoning that he wanted to recuperate a pair of six-guns returned to him that his father had gifted to Saddam. Which he did, btw. (Texan Oil-people are like that. They think they run the world.)

But this article is replete with tendentious remarks of the kind. Not that they aren't truths, just that they are irrelevant to the main point. Which is what?

That we never should have invaded Iraq, and perhaps today ISIS - whilst Saddam Hussien kept a lid on Iraq - would have remained just a dream. Of who?

The origins of ISIS are found in Camp Bucca that was a prison of the US Army containing war-prisoners. It was amongst this group, including the personage now called "al Baghdadi" (a student of Islamic history), that ISIS was germinated.

See that WashPo story here, "How the Islamic State evolved in an American prison".

Excerpt:

From the ashes of what former inmates called an “al-Qaeda school” rose the Islamic State. Indeed, when those inhabitants freed in 2009 returned to Baghdad, The Post reported, they spoke of two things: their conversion to radicalism — and revenge.

They were all Sunnis, and Baghdad was being run by Shi'ite politicians. Note that the Sunnis (minority in Iraq) and the Shi'ite (majority) have hated one another since an 8th century schism of the Muslim religion. The Sunni revolutionaries needed money, and Assad (President of Syria next door) was having difficulty protecting the East-Syrian oil-fields just across the border from Iraq.

Which the Sunnis took, and from which they sold oil to an oil-hungry Turkey - which, in this manner, sparked the rise of ISIS. (Thank you President Erdogan of Turkey!) Thus funding ISIS to the tune of a megabuck a day in terms of oil revenues.

The rest is a disgusting history of the lack of real involvement in Syria from the US and the EU, neither of which wanted to enter what is essentially an inter-Muslim Religious War in the Middle-east. Some will say that this was clever thinking on behalf of the US/EU-axis, just letting air-bombings do the dirty-work.

Leaving Putin free to help Assad (a Shi'ite) fight off Syrian Sunni-dissidents and thus assure Russia's only seaport in the Mediterranean located in Assad's home-town of Latakia-on-the-seaside.

That military option has since been revised to allow allow Yanks-of-all-kinds (who climax shooting machine-guns) help the Kurds fight ISIS forces. (Hey, mommy, look at me shooting a Kalashnikov!!!)

Others, given the ISIS murders in France and Germany - that are becoming common - one might tend to think otherwise. That entering a land-war in Syria to destroy ISIS maybe is necessary?

Vote Trump and watch exactly that happen! More Yank body-bags being flown home to grieving families ...