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.
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 expecting any shady shit to go down at all.
But still, quite convenient timing to pass a “Guys we’re SUPER SERIOUS about not being on the hook for war crimes” bill.
How would that work? Wouldn’t that be an act of war unprovoked aggression per the UN charter?
This is why I maintain that Trump will never go to prison… The u.s government itself would never allow it. They’ll likely help him stay out on appeals till he dies, that’s gonna be the worst punishment he’ll get. I think the government would have him killed and made it to look like an accident before they ever allow him to set foot in prison.
The US government will allow Trump to go to an American jail. This is like ruling over like. The US government would never allow Trump to go a foreign jail, no matter how much he deserved it.
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.
Even Powell? Always assumed he resigned once he realized he’d been used to sell that false evidence for Iraq.
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.
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.
The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks.
It’s insane to suggest the US would ever agree to that.
I believe it would have been the correct move, but the US as a nation would straight up never agree to that. The citizenry would have lost their fucking minds.
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.
Trump didn’t even try and hide his crimes. He thinks being rich means he can do whatever he wants.
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.
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.
Two words:
Dick Cheney
You really think dubya cared about attacking Iraq. He was told.
🤦🏻 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.
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.
Sometimes I wonder if the DRA would’ve succeeded if the CIA and MI6 hadn’t been backing the Mujahideen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 main problem is thinking the UN is supposed to be like this higher authority. That isn’t and never was the intention, because it’s impossible for it to be.
