Send Our
War Criminals to the Hague Court
By Eric
Margolis
July 11,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- 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.
Eric S.
Margolis is an award-winning, internationally
syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in
the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune
the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf
Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan,
Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other
news sites in Asia.
http://ericmargolis.com/
Copyright
Eric S. Margolis 2016 |