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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
US consider the international criminal court as a terrorist organization
Well, because the U.S. is a police state, with a military stranglehold on the planet, and the invasions were predicated on an event with uh, let's say, suspicious circumstances, that was engraved into the national psyche as the worst crime of a generation.
You REALLY need to learn what a police state is if you think America is one. Police states are authoritarian which America is not at this moment.
In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn't want to fuck with the money.
What specific laws do you think he broke?
You can't charge someone with "crimes", you need specific laws and how he broke them.
Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war signed by congress and without congressional or U.N. approval. Plus, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and several of their legal advisors were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts for endorsing torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of P.O.W.s but the ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.
Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war
U.N. approval
Getting UN approval is a "nice to have", but it doesn't guarantee anything. A war of aggression would probably be something that could be prosecuted in the ICC as a crime of aggression, but to prove it's a crime of aggression you need to prove that there was no "just cause for self-defense". The whole basis of the US justification for attacking Iraq was that Iraq was involved in terrorism against the USA. So, to prove that it wasn't a war of self-defense, you'd not only have to prove that Iraq had no connection with any kind of terrorism against the USA and had no intention of it in the future, but that the US leadership knew that that was the case and invaded under false pretenses.
At this point we know that Iraq didn't have WMD, but can you really prove that the US leadership wasn't so deluded that they thought that Iraq genuinely didn't have WMD? The whole aftermath of the invasion involved a lot of embarrassing searching for WMDs that the US was sure were there. The US was constantly announcing that they were closing in on the WMDs, but every site they searched turned out to be nothing. If they'd known there really weren't any, they probably would have just gone ahead and planted some evidence. Instead, they kept looking and looking and claiming they were sure it was there somewhere.
Besides, the US has a veto on the UN security council, so they couldn't recommend prosecution or anything because the US would just veto the resolution.
were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts
Which foreign courts? Which war crimes in particular?
ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.
"cause Murica" is your reading of it. They had the option to charge Bush, but they didn't. One reason for that might have been that they knew they'd never be able to get their hands on the US officials they could have charged, and that the US might react really badly to the charges. But, another reason might be that they knew they'd never be able to get a conviction, because the bar to convicting officials is very high at the ICC.
"Evil shit" isn't the same as "crimes". The Bush admin did plenty of evil shit, but it's very hard to prove they broke any specific laws. Instead, because they managed to scare the shit out of the US, congress and the senate kept giving them as much authorization to do whatever they wanted. As for international laws, those are very rarely used, especially against superpowers, and the bar to proving anything is very high.
The wikipedia page you posted essentially just says "Iraqi Freedom was justified because of all of these things that we say are occurring" when it was proven that there were no WMDs, no nuclearization, etc. They violated the terms of a ceasefire? So that required 13 years of war? It was about Saddam and Bush Sr. That and creating a US military base in the middle east so that there would be a base of operations outside of Saudi or Iranian influence.
Starting a war is illegal under international law. People have hanged for it.
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.
No one called for arrests of the US over Afghanistan, get your history straight. Iraq is where it went off the rails.
Because these are uncharted legal waters. There is no precedent for charging a former US president with a crime.
Yet.
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.
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.