Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses?
Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses?
I wouldn't put Afghanistan and Iraq on the same level.
Bin Laden (and Al-Qaeda) was in Afghanistan and they refused to hand him over. That invasion had the support of NATO and even Russia and China. Why? Because Al-Qaeda existing doesn't benefit anyone and they were behind the attacks.
Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences. Iraq used to have chemical weapons and even used them against civilians back in the 80s, started a war with Iran and invaded Kuwait, but those were not the reasons given for the invasion...
Now, why wasn't Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia. What are you going to do, invade the country to arrest the president?
Is it fair? No. But it's how the world works.
We barely got to the point of impeaching Nixon for his bullshit and Reagan got off scott free for Iran-Contra. So it shouldn't be too surprising that Bush didn't get keelhauled for his bullshit invasions especially since most of the morons in Washington were totally on board with it.
Some of us could see it coming from a mile away with Afghanistan. (Just had to look back to how it went for the USSR and like every other country that tried before us (see "Graveyard of Empires").
Iraq* looked an awful lot like bullshit driven by greed, oil, and "finishing what daddy started" at the time. Idk about the last one now but the first two? Definitely. But fucking Congress went along with all of it. Probably lobbied by billionaires.
So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.
People at the top in this country rarely do.
No stupid questions, but certainly stupid answers.
The USA is not a part of the international criminal court. So even if the ICC said the US committed war crimes, they have no way to enfore those laws in the USA.
ICC is for states that can't prosecute within their country. USA can do that. So it goes like this:
ICC: Hey, USA, you committed war crimes
USA: We dont recognize your court of law, and we did our own investigation where we found no wrongdoing.
ICC: We disagree
USA: Okay, that's nice. If you arrest Bush we will invade the Hague
Stalemate.
The UN Security Council, as outlined in Article 39 of the UN Charter, has the ability to rule on the legality of the war, but has yet not been asked by any UN member nation to do so. The United States and the United Kingdom have veto power in the Security Council, so action by the Security Council is highly improbable even if the issue were to be raised.
No one cares and even if they did it can be vetoed.
Countries shouldn't be able to veto things about themselves. That's stupid.
Afghanistan should be stricken from the title. There were no pretenses on that one. The US could never just let 9/11 go, and our allies and the rest of the world agreed. Just for the invasion in itself, Bush never would have been charged with any war crimes there. No, not even in a more just international criminal system than the one we have.
Iraq is a different story. The fabrications were obvious, our allies called them out, and then we did it anyway. Iraq had no connection to 9/11 and no WMD program in active development. That was obvious to everyone at the time who wasn't a senseless warmonger. Almost as bad, it took resources away from Afghanistan, which was the fight that really mattered. Stack on top of all that the fact that we could no longer realpolitik by playing the authoritarian governments of Iran and Iraq off of each other. Iran had no direct counterbalance on its border anymore, which freed resources for them to start a nuclear weapons program. They never could have done that if they had to keep up a conventional military to make sure Saddam Hussein didn't start another war with them.
The two should be considered separately. Bush ought to be tried as a war criminal for invading Iraq, and for what happened during the long occupation in both countries. But there's no good reason for trying him for invading Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was NOT under false pretenses. The entire world stood besides the US for that. It was Iraq that was false pretenses and much of the world did not support that, and as it went on the ones that did, quickly stopped supporting it.
The USA is one of those countries that the international community can't control with traditional means. It has been hard to get sanctions against Russia regarding the Ukrainian invasion; it would be impossible to try to do the same to the USA geopoliticaly.
Also, the false pretenses only involves Iraq. Afghanistan is a different idea behind what consists of aiding and abiding international war crimes.
Many factors play into this.
Lyndon Johnson came right out and told the American people that we needed to fight the Vietnam war to protect our rubber and tungsten interests there. Fighting a resource war is unfortunately not the crime it should be, and never has been.
If the WMD pretenses were false, Bush can and did blame the intelligence community that produced the information. No one there was prosecuted because it’s in their daily routine to say “we believe that inside Iraq / North Korea / etc that something bad XYZ is happening” and being wrong is not a crime.
Generally, no one believed that Saddam Hussein was good for Iraq, the Middle East, or the world. Iraqis were quite thankful for his removal. So even if the WMD thing was phony, there is a sense of “well, at least it all accomplished some good purpose.”
We can point to Bush as the sole responsible party but the reality is that Congress voted to authorize it and 40 nations participated. So responsibility is really pretty diffuse and Bush can say “everyone agreed it was the right thing to do.”
American politics are a shit show and any effort to hold a president accountable is seen as a ploy, and even if it isn’t, it becomes mired in the deep partisanship.
That was all too early for me to be following any political news.
In a way (just this one way) I'm glad he didn't.
At the time I was so in brainwashed conservative land. If I saw Bush get in trouble I would have stood by him simply because "Republicans good, Democrats bad". And it might have affected my waking up to the actuality, and maybe slowed it down to the point where I'd be defending Trump now. If the last guy got in trouble but was Republican and therefore innocent, it's just happening again, gosh dang those lefties.
That's literally the depth of thought in that camp. I've been there and seen it, I did it myself. They don't have any higher functioning logic to speak of. They really latch onto the victim mentality, even in their source of news. Since, at the time it got popular, Fox News was really the only right-leaning mainstream "news " network. I remember being told by my mom back then that it was the only one that wasn't "super liberal". And I took that at face value for years, not even questioning it. That's all it takes when you're that young. And then they'll defend it to their last breath when they only think like that because they were suggested to once, and they build their whole world on it.
Had to scrape myself out of that thinking. Took me forever. Turns out deprogramming yourself against the thinking taught to you by everyone you've ever known and with only tangential knowledge of others you know doing it is difficult. I knew one guy that broke his programming, but didn't really broadcast it, so I didn't really catch on to much of it. But later I had a roommate that would talk about it all the time, and could back it up. That really got me thinking, and ended up being like the starter pebble you nudge down the hill that becomes the huge snowball. But that's probably a story for a different kind of post. Probably a whole other community.
I didn't really have any exposure to anything outside that world until I was 25 or so, when I met the previously mentioned roommate. I still find pieces of that old thinking and influence in me all the time.
Thanks for coming to my accidental TED talk. Got a ramble going there.
Edit- fixed typos and added the part about FN.
because of precedent.
any single member of the government is afraid of setting a precedent that will come back to hurt them
they all do illegal shit, if one is punished then possibly they all will
US consider the international criminal court as a terrorist organization
Who do you expect would charge, arrest, and try him? Certainly not the United States. Congress passed a very broad authorization for the use of force after 9/11. Multiple US allies also sent personnel under the umbrella of a UN security assistance force, so it's unlikely the UN would try to do anything regardless of which countries have veto power
In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn't want to fuck with the money.
Maybe because everyone followed. Liberal, conservative, Canadian, American. Didn't matter to us then. We all knew it was going to lead to war, and when we were all pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan, we just accepted it and went for it. I still think it needed to be done, just not then and there. But to say the Taliban and Saddam didn't deserve to go down is also wrong.
In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.
In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.
Welcome to the rich and powerful, where everything is made up and laws dont matter.
Because the law is only applied to the poors
Who's going to charge him with a crime? Iraq and Afghanistan both have the most to gain, but good luck getting the U.S. to extradite a former president to sit trial for a foreign power. The U.S. sits on the United Nations security council, so the U.N. can't do anything. Realistically the only one who could charge him is the U.S. themself, but that would require a formal admission that the wars were unjust. Not to mention, we're already struggling to arrest a former president who attempted a coup, and potential charges against Bush would be much more difficult.
Ahh god dammit. Yep... Happened when I was a kid, still furious.
I don't know dude, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to die mad about it.
Regarding Iraq: Because he cynically played enforcer for a lot of very rich (AKA influential) people who were scared that the US petrodollar hegemony was about to be supplanted by the Euro once people did the maths on Hussein's recent successful pivot to Euro as reserve currency https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html - notice how the puppet government that was then installed made it one of their first tasks to switch the country's reserve back to USD. The ongoing currency war was and is the actual war behind the "war" (wars).
Regarding Afghanistan: Everyone knew there was just too much "fog of war" to build a slam-dunk case against him for it. At best it would have ended up being framed by media as hand-waving about "wrong country" or "not just that country". I remember scratching my head wildly though when he was spouting his "with us or against us" and "bomb them back to the stone age" rhetoric (and going unilateral - with the help of his Blair poodle - when the UN disagreed). He raced straight past "un-presidential" on his way to "extremely childish" when conflating "surgically remove some known terrorists from their hiding places" with "go all scorched earth on the entire country where they might have last been hiding". There might have been some chance of making a case for recklessness (similar to the distinction between "manslaughter" & "murder") - on the part of a jumped-up cowboy-wannabe playing "war president", all hubristically drunk on the power he effectively inherited from his dad. As mentioned in many of the other comments though the US would never "allow" the ICC to bring such a conviction (undermining what the ICC is for), and any legal attempt within the US would just trigger screams of "you're not a patriot" and "too soon" (still).
I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I'm not a legal scholar.
Afghanistan was a just action. Let's just get that settled.
Iraq was legal but the public was lied to about the justification.
War Crimes requires a nation to purposefully target and kill civilians. If such an illegal order occurs those responsible are charged. If a government does not charge those issuing illegal orders they can be charged with War Crimes.
Civilian deaths do occur in War, a nation must only target legal military targets. For example the World Trade Center was an illegal target on 9/11. The Pentagon was a legal target on 9/11. Attacking a Civilian office gave the United States legal rights to retaliation.
As for Bush, his actions didn't violate international law in Iraq. They were questionable and diplomacy would have been the better option, but still not illegal. All acts deemed War Crimes had those responsible charged and sent to prison. For example those responsible for the Abu Ghraib incident were charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The person to ordered the abuse and torture of prisoners was William Hayes II, General Council of the Department of Defense and authorized by Judge Brett Kavanagh, yes the same one that now serves on the Supreme Court.
Bonus, Ron DeSantis was responsible for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
If you want to charge people with War Crimes, start with the three who still are at-large from justice.
Oil.
Source?
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Probably he should be.
The US wields a huge amount of influence generally in the world, and specifically in the Hague. Behavior that would get other leaders called to task is generally ignored if it's done by the US.
It's not fair, but it is the way that the world works.
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Because we were useful to NATO and nobody cares when the global south complains about atrocities.
And remember that pretty much the entire planet expected Ukraine to be rolled in the first 24 hours and then for there to MAYBE be an Afghanistan (either flavor) style guerilla war. And then nobody would have cared enough to pressure russia on what they did.
Sort of like when russia invaded and stole the Crimea a decade or so ago. Or, the US and allies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or... you know, Russia in Afghanistan.
At the end of the day, the law only applies to those who can be held accountable. If the US said "no, we won't give you Bush" then it would just completely undermine The Hague and The UN as a whole.
It gave a pretense for any powerfull nation to do what they want. This was used by Putin to invade Ukraine. It is hard to be the nation who lead the world, as you lead by example
We can say the same thing about why Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden haven't been prosecuted either.
Seems like it's a lil hard to prosecute presidents who support the war machine.
The toppling of genocidal regime was an obviously good thing. Just ask the dissidents. Oh wait you only ask fanatic patriots for their moronic opinions because it's more sensationalist and promotes irrational but popular pacifist non-interventionist agenda that likes to turn the blind eye to all kinds of atrocities to this very day. The occupation was mishandled, no doubt about it, shoulda pulled out as soon as the dust had settled. When I was living in Russia I was only dreaming of international intervention to liberate the country of the regime. But then I left and Moscow can turn into a nuclear crater for all I care.