Iraq War: An Affront to Nuremberg

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


Iraq War: An Affront to Nuremberg
March 19, 2013

The tenth anniversary of the Iraq War has understandably focused on the thousands upon thousands of people killed and the chaos unleashed. But the war also dealt a harsh blow to the legal principles that U.S. leaders helped enshrine after World War II, as Marjorie Cohn noted in this excerpt from “Cowboy Republic.”

By Marjorie Cohn


According to sources inside the administration, George W. Bush was planning to invade Iraq and remove its government well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Such an invasion violates the UN Charter, which the United States signed in 1945 after the bloodiest conflict in history.

The Charter permits countries to use military force against another country only in self-defense or with Security Council permission. But the evidence indicates that the U.S.-led invasion satisfied neither condition and is therefore a war of aggression, which constitutes a Crime Against Peace - exactly the kind of war the Charter was meant to prevent.

Although Bush marketed the war in Iraq as necessary to protect us from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), his decisions had less to do with self-defense than with dominating the oil-rich Middle East. Some evidence for this conclusion can be found in a September 2000 report prepared by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

The report, commissioned by Dick Cheney, outlines a plan “to maintain American military preeminence that is consistent with the requirements of a strategy of American global leadership.” It notes that while “the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/19/iraq-war-an-affront-to-nuremberg/

[idwiyo]

1. K&R

[blkmusclmachine]

2. .

.

[Mnemosyne]

3. Exactly. nt

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[bemildred]

5. And an affront to the "values" our politicians keep babbling about but not voting for.

Self-serving cowards.