The latest evidence of their war crimes was
revealed in secret British minutes of an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 31,
2003, when Bush, Blair and their top aides chillingly discussed their
determination to invade Iraq, though still hoping to provoke the Iraqis
into some violent act that would serve as political cover.
Bush, who has publicly told Americans that it was Saddam
Hussein who chose war by refusing to disarm, was, in reality, set on invading
Iraq regardless of Husseins cooperation with United Nations weapons inspectors,
according to the five-page memo described in detail by the New York Times.
[March 27, 2006]
At the same Oval Office meeting, Bush cavalierly dismissed
concerns that the U.S. conquest might not go as smoothly as he expected.
The President predicted that it was unlikely there would
be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups,
according to the British minutes written by David Manning, then Blairs chief
foreign policy adviser.
But Bushs judgment would prove tragically wrong, as more
than 2,300 U.S. troops have died along with tens of thousands of Iraqis
possibly more than 100,000 in three years of invasion, occupation and now
sectarian violence.
Conniving Bush
The memo also reveals Bush as conniving to deceive the
American people and the world community. At the meeting, Bush floated ideas for
how to rally U.N. support for the invasion by engineering a provocation that
would portray Hussein as the aggressor.
Bush suggested painting a U.S. plane up in U.N. colors and
flying it over Iraq with the goal of drawing Iraqi fire, the minutes said.
The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance
aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours, the memo said
about Bushs scheme. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.
Regardless of whether any casus belli could be
provoked, Bush already had penciled in March 10, 2003, as the start of the
U.S. bombing of Iraq, according to the memo. Our diplomatic strategy had to be
arranged around the military planning, Manning wrote.
At the Oval Office meeting, Bush also discussed possibly
assassinating Hussein, according to the memo. (Bush, it should be noted, assured
the American people that he would restore honor and decency to the Oval Office
where Bill Clinton had sexual dalliances with Monica Lewinsky.)
According to the British memo, Bush and Blair acknowledged
that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, nor were they likely
to be found in the coming weeks, but that wouldnt get in the way of the
U.S.-led invasion.
Blair, however, stressed the need for a second resolution
from the U.N. Security Council that would authorize the use of force. Bush
agreed to try but felt he had the authority to attack Iraq whether the U.N.
approved or not.
The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts to get
another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten, the memo said about
Bushs plans. But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action
would follow anyway."
Averted Eyes
Parts of the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting memo were disclosed
earlier this year by British attorney Philippe Sands, author of the book,
Lawless World. But Sandss disclosure received scant attention in the United
States, where the major news media also has downplayed other revelations of
Bushs duplicity about the Iraq War.
In 2005, the U.S. press mostly averted its eyes when a
British newspaper disclosed the so-called Downing Street Memo, which recounted
the chief of British intelligence telling Blair in July 2002 that Bush was set
on invading Iraq and that intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy.
The major U.S. media also has failed to challenge Bush
when he has claimed falsely that Hussein brought the war on himself by barring
U.N. inspectors from his country.
We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he
wouldnt let them in, Bush said when he began revising the pre-war history in
July 2003, four months after invading Iraq. And, therefore, after a reasonable
request, we decided to remove him from power.
Bush has repeated that lie in varying forms dozens
of times since, including at a televised news conference on March 21,
2006. [See Consortiumnews.coms Those Lies, Again.]
Nuremberg Precedent
Beyond more proof that Bush has lied consistently about
Iraq, the Jan. 31, 2003, memo represents striking evidence that Bush, Blair and
their top assistants violated the Nuremberg Principles and the U.N. Charter by
launching an aggressive war against Iraq.
While many Americans think of the Nuremberg trials after
World War II as just holding Nazi leaders accountable for genocide, a major
charge against Adolf Hitlers henchmen was the crime of aggressive war. Later,
that principle was embodied in the United Nations Charter, forbidding armed
aggression by one state against another.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who represented
the United States at the Nuremberg Tribunal, made clear that the intent was to
establish a precedent against aggressive war.
Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may
have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an
illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions,
Jackson said, adding that the same rules would apply to the victors in World War
II.
Let me make clear that while this law is first applied
against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful
purpose, it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which
sit here now in judgment, Jackson said.
We are able to do away
with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the
rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law.
This trial represents mankinds desperate effort to
apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state
to attack the foundations of the worlds peace and to commit aggression against
the rights of their neighbors.
The British memos, combined with public statements by Bush
and his senior aides, represent a prima-facie case that Bush, Blair and
others violated the Nuremberg Principles and the U.N. Charter, to which the
United States was a founding signatory.
While Bush has insisted that his invasion of Iraq was
preemptive defined as an act of self-defense to thwart an impending attack
his argument is not only laughable in the case of Iraq, but has been
contradicted by his own advisers, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Rice's Cultural Engineering
In a March 26 interview on NBCs Meet the Press, Rice
offered a different rationale for invading Iraq. She agreed that Hussein was not
implicated in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks nor did she assert that he was
conspiring with al-Qaeda on another assault.
Instead, Rice justified invading Iraq and ousting Hussein
because he was part of the old Middle East, which she said had engendered
hatreds that led indirectly to 9/11.
If you really believe that the only thing that happened
on 9/11 was people flew airplanes into buildings, I think you have a very narrow
view of what we faced on 9/11, Rice said. We faced the outcome of an ideology
of hatred throughout the Middle East that had to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein
was a part of that old Middle East. The new Iraq will be a part of the new
Middle East, and we will all be safer.
Rices argument that Bush has the right to invade any
country that he feels is part of a culture that might show hostility toward the
United States represents the most expansive justification to date for
launching the Iraq War.
It goes well beyond waging preemptive or even
predictive war. Rice is asserting a U.S. right to inflict death and
destruction on Muslim countries as part of a social-engineering experiment to
eradicate their perceived cultural and political tendencies toward hatred.
Despite the extraordinary implications of Rices
declaration, her comment passed almost unnoticed by the U.S. news media, which
gave much more attention to her demurring on the possibility of becoming the
next National Football League commissioner.
Yet Rices new war rationale, combined with the British
memo on Bushs determination to invade Iraq regardless of the facts, should be
more than enough evidence to put Bush, Rice, Blair and other U.S. and British
officials before a war crimes tribunal.
But that would only happen if Justice Jackson were right
about the universal application of the principle against aggressive wars
and if all nations and leaders actually lived by the same rules.