I wouldn’t put Afghanistan and Iraq in 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.
Fun fact! In 2002 the US passed a law allowing themselves to invade the Hague in case any high-ranking US officials ended up on trial there.
Which I’m sure they passed in the year between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq just by coincidence, and they weren’t at all expecting any shady shit to go down at all.
The USA has NEVER supported the ICCJ and this was not a new policy the Bush 43 administration devised on their own.
But still, quite convenient timing to pass a “Guys we’re SUPER SERIOUS about not being on the hook for war crimes” bill.
Yeah but it’s like the PATRIOT Act (it’s an anagram Im just lazy). The PATRIOT Act had been kicking around DC for decades before we had an excuse to pass it. The ICCJ bill was no different.
How would that work? Wouldn’t that be an act of
warunprovoked aggression per the UN charter?No no, don’t you know that we don’t do “war” any more? We do “operations” now. War is totally different. Then we have to obey Geneva conventions and all sorts of other hairy stuff. Our politicians have decided as long as we don’t call it “war” then we’re fine.
Sure it would, but the US has veto power on the UN security council so they would not be passing any resolutions against the US if this happened.
I mean what are they gonna do, send them to the Hague?
Yeah, it would be.
It’s geopolitical dick wagging, not a law that was actually needed or does anything.
Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences
Lil Bush didn’t even really know…
He was just a puppet, and Cheney was part of his dad’s “old guard”. Lil Bush knew the game, so Cheney set it up so every intel agency reported to Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney decided if that info went anywhere else, including Lil Bush.
Cheney wanted the war, so he only passed on info that would cause the war, and it’s entirely likely he was the only member of the American government who could have seen 9/11 coming. The reason no one else could, was everything has to go thru Cheney, and he saw everything.
I’m not saying Lil Bush is innocent, I’m saying he was a useful idiot that knew he was just a puppet and went along with
But it pisses me off everyone acts like the puppet fall guy is who we should be upset with, not the people who were actually doing stuff and still work with the American Republican political party.
You need to look into the Project for a New American Century. It’s a PAC that most of GWB’s initial team was on and were asking fir war with Iraq in 1997. Wanna guess who in the GWB administration was not part of it?
Bush and his cabinet all knew
So, tl;dr: After being hammered by strikes they made an offer to hand him over to a 3rd party?
That’s correct. It wasn’t their first attempt, either. Instead Bush opted for the 20 years of occupation for whatever reason.
I’m not defending the occupation and whole “nation building” (which I doubt they though would take 20 years). Just pointing out that there was a difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, and that difference was reflected by the support (or lack of) from other countries.
Both countries also do not recognize the authority of International Court. High ranking officials definitely should have been hauled off to jail for authorizing, developing, and employing “enhanced interrogation” (aka torture) techniques
Officially that was the reason. The violation of the ceasefire. Iraq did not abide by the terms of the ceasefire.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t have invaded. I supported the invasion at the time because of the violations of the ceasefire. I didn’t completely buy the wmd argument.
Looking back, Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan.
Now, why wasn’t Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia.
Trump is being charged with crimes
Trump is being charged by the US and state governments with violation of US and state laws
That’s a far different scenario than an international court attempting to charge and arrest a US president (current or former
Bush lied to congress and the American people. I don’t believe there were no crimes committed by doing that.
But did Bush knowingly lie to a degree provable in court?
He would have had to have known it was a lie and for that to be proven in court. With trump, his crimes were so egregious there were devout party line adherents backing out and explicitly stating just how illegal what they were doing is. Trump had been told multiple times, in multiple ways that what he was doing was illegal and he went for it anyways.
Another point to add. It is not illegal for anyone to lie, so unless he was testifying under oath, Bush could lie as much as he wanted without legal repercussions.
It’s not illegal to lie to the American people. And it’s practically a requirement for office.
Trump didn’t even try and hide his crimes. He thinks being rich means he can do whatever he wants.
Well he’s been at it since the 80s and so far it’s been the only thing he’s ever been mostly right about for an extended period…
So it’s better when they try to hide it?
Trump is being charged with crimes
Not for dropping bombs or ordering drone strikes in a different country.
As criminals should.
One of the major prerequisites for people to get charged with war crimes, is to lose the war.
One of the major prerequisites
Not the only one though as Afghanistan was indeed lost.
But it took a long time. Long enough for people to forget.
It’s more that, win or lose, the United States never had its sovereignty threatened by Afghanistan. They could potentially have continued supporting terrorists and lobbing attacks against the US, but the US government wasn’t going to collapse because of it as long as they did literally anything.
Without that, it’s pretty unlikely to see a major US politician in front of the ICC no matter how much they deserve to be there.
Give Afghanistan a nuke and the US would never have even considered invading.
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.
Yeah but if Bush travelled to a country under the ICC jurisdiction he could still be tried. Of course the Hague invasion act (a big fuck you from USA to the ICC) may deter some countries from enforcing the ICC rules on American citizens.
ICC is for states that can’t prosecute within their country.
This is false.
I mean how bout a source buddy?
Heres what they say on their website. “As a court of last resort, it seeks to complement, not replace, national Courts.”
https://www.icc-cpi.int/about/the-court
Perhaps we interpret that differently, or I could have described it better.
You just come in here, take one sentence, call it false, and leave? Come on mannnnn.
I don’t need to refute your entire argument, this isn’t a Swedish university where peer criticism is required.
The ICJ says it’s a lot of things but it’s only been used as a colonial court against countries that aren’t aligned with western interests. I don’t defend the war criminals that have been prosecuted by the ICJ but how does the ICJ recognize the definition of a national court? For example, if an African country has an indigenous form and interpretation of justice to ensure societal cohesion, who are the western Europeans to say that their form of justice is incorrect and they need to be tried at the “international court”.
The court was only created to try Nazis because they didn’t think that country would treat their heros (at the time) fairly. It’s now used to try leaders the west doesn’t like. There’s lots of people in Iraq, Britain that want to see Tony Blair at the ICJ but the ICJ and the UK would use a rule such as the one you’ve mentioned to say it doesn’t apply, but won’t hesitate to take an Iraqi to the court.
You seem to think the laws you espouse as ideals are not inherently written to protect those already in exploitative power.
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.
Even if you remove the veto power, what exactly would you expect to happen?
Bush wasn’t going to be arrested and put under an international court for the same reason Putin isn’t going to be arrested for invading Ukraine. You can tell them “hand him over”, they say “make me”, and the only way to enforce the decision involves war, which no one wants to have.
The veto power is a problem, but it’s not the main problem here.
“The United Nations have made their decision, now let them enforce it” would be the response from the US government if you remove the veto power. Nothing would change. Everything the UN does is symbolic.
The UN is diplomatic platform, not a world government.
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.
So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.
What specific crimes?
I think his and his administration did a lot of awful shit, but they did it using politics, not by breaking the law. They painted their opponents as un-American. They whipped up fervor saying that “you’re with us or you’re with the terrists” and changed the “French Fries” in the congressional cafeteria to “Freedom Fries” after the French refused to jump on board with their war plans. They made sure the public was scared, because scared people are easier to manipulate. But, fundamentally his administration did it so that they could win votes in and for the house and senate. Fundamentally he still followed American law.
There are various things where the administration or the military might have violated international laws against war crimes or aggression. For example, the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Graib, the whole existence of and infinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, and possibly even the invasion of Iraq itself. But, international courts require a much higher burden of proof, especially to pin the crimes on the head of state. And, Bush had pet lawyers like John Yoo producing memos to declare it all legal.
Evil shit, especially evil done by the military in other countries is almost never going to result in criminal charges, let alone convictions. Trump is unusual in that the crimes were so incredibly blatant. The normal method for most shady heads of state is to at least go for plausibly legal. They have access to tons of lawyers willing to bend over backwards to declare what their bosses want to do as being legal.
People need to stop equating “evil shit” with “crimes”. Yes, Bush and his administration was responsible for a lot of evil shit. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, thousands of deaths of soldiers in the bullshit “Coalition of the Willing”. He was responsible for indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay and torture at Abu Graib. But, with all that blood on his hands, he may have done it all without breaking any laws. There’s a reason why the prisoners are being held in Guantanamo Bay and not on US soil. There’s a reason that the torture happened in an Iraqi prison. A big part of that is that many US laws don’t apply to those places, so while it’s awful, it may not be illegal.
Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to “finishing what daddy started.” In 2002-2003 the W’s cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.
It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that’s why he got all paranoid.
With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would’ve been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.
Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don’t know what the best “after” would’ve been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could’ve helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.
🤦🏻 yeah Iraq. Autocorrect probably. Daddy Bush probably also wanted to avoid a quagmire. Idk.
I agree we were justified invading Afghanistan and felt so at the time but it’s just not a great place to try and “conquer”. You might be right about the distraction of Iraq. However, Afghanistan strikes me as a country with the kind of deeply entrenched culture and politics so different from anything we are familiar with that I don’t know if we could ever actively transform it in meaningful ways.
Sometimes I wonder if the DRA would’ve succeeded if the CIA and MI6 hadn’t been backing the Mujahideen.
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.
It got more disgusting when the justification for war was simply “the world would be better off without Saddm Hussein!”
Do you know how many leaders I velieve the world would be better off without, starting with George W. bush?..
He should have been. Especially after the photos of Abu Ghraib came out. But it is the U.S. so he payed no penalties.
Those photos being released, along with the revelations about illegal surveillance and surveillance techniques revealed by Snowden really destroyed the myth of what we are as a country.
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.
The Taliban-led Afghanistan was closer allies with Al Qaeda than Iraq for sure, but invading Afghanistan was also a bit of a stretch. Sure, the Taliban was harboring and supporting terrorists, but so were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and probably at least a half dozen other countries.
Bush is a war criminal, and while they invented the entire connection to Iraq, his administration did “exaggerate” the justifications for invading Afghanistan as well.
Obama should be tried as well. He continued Bush’s politics and despite knowing that newly establish Iraqi government torture its prisoners he signed a document which allowed to hand over thousands of prisoners to them. It’s all well documented.
Turned out Saddam was a meanie after the USA helped make him. Had to slap that idea down lest any future installed dictators try any funny business.
There’s literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried. I’m sure they’d use that for a president… The US isn’t capable of war crimes. They said so.
There’s literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried
Can I have source?
EDIT: Don’t worry, found it
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
“The Act authorizes the President of the United States to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”. This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed “The Hague Invasion Act”, as the act allows the President to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of The Hague, where the ICC is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody.”
We’re literally locked and loaded to invade the international court if they ever try. They passed a fucking bill to say we can if the president just gives it a thumbs up.
deleted by creator
Can’t have the US be held responsible for its actions now, can we?
Even if we did send them to trial, how would it go?
Prosecution: “So you had suspicions of known terrorist group responsible for 9/11 as well as national nuclear weapons development in the region?”
Bush: “That’s right, my defence secretary and my appointee at the CIA brought relative documents, which we’ve submitted to the court, of the aluminum tubes assumed to be weapons technology at the time. The location of the Taliban had been tracked and went cold around there, but we did capture thousands of their fighters.”
Prosecution: “Some time after you installed a new CIA director.”
Bush: “Coincidently, yes, these sort of changes happen often.”
Prosecution: “Did you have any evidence of where they might have obtained the technology?”
Bush: “That’s right, we’ve had Russian informants about their spread of weapons throughout the middle east over the decades. Some of it is still classified but some of it has been submitted to the court.”
Prosecution: “And is it true your nation profited greatly off the Iraqi Oilfields which was Coincidently monopolized by Exxon Mobil under the leadership of Rex Tillerson who went on to become a Secretary in the Trump Administration?”
Bush: “Well this has nothing to do with the Trump administration, I myself don’t approve of them, and I also have no personal connections with Rex. But maybe that is true, I don’t know.”
Judge: breaks into a sweat realizing they’ll be here listening to the questioning people over this for another 2 decades and still not have a solid case
US consider the international criminal court as a terrorist organization
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
People wanted blood by any means necessarily post 9/11. There were many international calls for his arrest. It just never happened because people hated Afghanistan and Iraq more than the US.
World leaders wont arrest each other because they don’t want to set a precedent.
Isn’t that happening with Putin now?
In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn’t want to fuck with the money.
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
Because these are uncharted legal waters. There is no precedent for charging a former US president with a crime.
Yet.
You mean there wasn’t yet? I don’t know if that’s true, but I know there most definitely is precedent now.
