Could Seeking Win-win Solutions Have Prevented US and UK Leaders of Being Guilty of the War Crime of Making a War of Aggression?

The author of the article that follows, John Pilger, investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, makes the case that the US and UK have committed the highest of war crimes, the act of causing a war of aggression to achieve geopolitical aims rather than acting in defense. (Germany did this with the Blitzkrieg of Poland, Czechoslovakia etc, at the start of WW2.)

As Pilger indicates, under International Law, both the US and UK could be charged and potentially convicted of this. It won't happen, but technically, it's possible.

The US used to support the International Crimes Court (ICC) under Clinton, but Bush has rejected the authority of this body and has waged a "campaign of impunity" to make one-to-one deals with nations to keep our soldiers and CIA agents from being tried in this court. ("If you don't make a deal, we'll stop doing business with your country...") This is part of our recent leaders' pattern of acting to keep the US above any international law.

America should stand for Something Better than ignoring international democracy, starting wars, and torturing prisoners.

A RAF officer will soon be on trial in the UK because he refuses to go back to Iraq because he has determined that the war is illegal under international law. His trial could bring out much evidence of how the war was forced upon the world by leaders who wanted war to achieve specific geo-political ends. (See list below.) If this war wasn't really an act of defense, then it becomes a war crime under international law.

So why have US and UK leaders gone to such extremes in regard to Iraq? Why have they risked being labeled in History as war-makers? Why have they been obsessed with taking Iraq?

Here's my best list (so far) of why this war has happened:

Taking control of Iraq:

• protects 25% of the world's oil supplies from falling into the control of Russia or China, or an Islamic power, and keeps it under US control. Even if we can't actually get much right now because of instability, no one else can either
• the occupation prevents Iraq from trading oil in Euros which Saddam was threatening to do, which would have threatened the US dollar value and the US economy, (Iran is now setting up an oil exchange to do this, and now we see them in US crosshairs...)
• Iraq provides a place to base US troops permanently to keep expanding military control of the region, (note current events with Syria...)
• the US presence protects Israel by eliminating a major financial supporter of the Palestinians, Saddam, and
• provides a means for the US to act against the US and Israel's other regional enemies, such as Iran, and now most imminently, Syria.

This is mostly about maintaining the US's position as sole world superpower. Check the official US National Security Strategy to see it in black and white.

From this position of unmatched military strength, US leaders feel they they can best protect US interests. The problem is, this US approach costs many thousands of people their lives, and costs many billions of people the chance to live freely and in safety without interference from the US or its allies. War is not the way to "spread Democracy." It is the problem.

With these strong geo-political needs pushing them, the US and UK made the war on Iraq happen, not by faking or falsifying, but by filtering facts that they had complete control over (and we citizens had few other sources with which to cross check these top-secret "facts") to make us all think Saddam was a threat (WMD, mushroom clouds etc...)

Intelligence findings which supported the argument that Saddam was a threat were emphasized, that which said he was no threat were suppressed. In this way our leaders misled us and the world.

Emerging documentation, like the "Downing Street Memo" now underscore this, and the recent "CIA Leak Case" is related to this push for war through the manipulation of intelligence findings. (Joseph Wilson was one of only a handful of people in the world capable of countering US leaders' arguments for war with facts. That's why they went after him through his wife, CIA Agent Valerie Plame.)

Think about it for a moment.

If we can believe and accept that our leaders could do "dirty tricks" against Joseph Wilson, and that it is just normal "playing hardball" in Washington, then it's not beyond possibility that they "played hardball" with us too and misled us.

We need to stop being either so naive, or so in denial about our leaders.

With such a long list of reasons to invade Iraq, it's easy to understand why US leaders were so hell bent on taking Iraq, no matter the cost in dollars or human lives. If they don't use military force, then the worldwide status quo that they control will be threatened. Yet the current international status quo is unjust and oppressive to billions of humans.

We need a positive direction for the US and the World, not endless war.

If our nation had a different approach to international relations over the years, we wouldn't be in this situation. Our leaders see challenges in "win-lose" terms which leads to conflict. Instead, if our leaders sought "win-win" solutions to problems, we'd have better relations in the world and we'd have found ways to get beyond our thirst for oil, obsession with military power, etc...

Our leaders are responding "normally" from an American perspective. We grow up thinking that violence can solve problems. Sit and watch cartoons on TV, most movies, and most video games, and you'll see conflicts "solved" through violence. The truth is, none of these conflicts are solved. They are just changed. The conflict is supressed for a time untill it appears again in a different form. This is no real solution. We see our leaders responding this same way, but on a much larger and more deadly scale.

We need to teach and learn new ways of responding to conflict, so future leaders can do better than our current ones do. We must recognize the trap of violence. We must recognize the self-made trap that the "War on Terror" is. We must decide to do Something Better for ourselves and our children.

Universal

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John Pilger's site: http://www.johnpilger.com

The Epic Crime That Dares Not Speak Its Name
by John Pilger
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct05/Pilger1027.htm

Thursday, October 27, 2005 -- A Royal Air Force officer is about to be tried before a military court for refusing to return to Iraq because the war is illegal.

Malcolm Kendall-Smith is the first British officer to face criminal charges for challenging the legality of the invasion and occupation. He is not a conscientious objector; he has completed two tours in Iraq. When he came home the last time, he studied the reasons given for attacking Iraq and concluded he was breaking the law.

Kendall-Smith's position is supported by international lawyers all over the world, not least by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who said in September last year: The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN Charter.

The question of legality deeply concerns the British military brass, which sought Tony Blair's assurance on the eve of the invasion, got it and, as they now know, were lied to. They are right to worry; Britain is a signatory to the treaty that set up the International Criminal Court, which draws its codes from the Geneva Conventions and the 1945 Nuremberg Charter. The latter is clear: To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, counts one and two, Conspiracy to wage aggressive war and waging aggressive war,refer to the common plan or conspiracy. These are defined in the indictment as the planning, preparation, initiation and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements and assurances. A wealth of evidence is now available that George Bush, Blair and their advisers did just that. The leaked minutes from the infamous Downing Street meeting in July 2002 alone reveal that Blair and his war cabinet knew that it was illegal. The attack that followed, mounted against a defenseless country offering no threat to the US or Britain, has a precedent in Hitler's invasion of Sudetenland; the lies told to justify both are eerily similar.

The similarity is also striking in the illegal bombing campaign that preceded both. Unknown to most people in Britain and America, British and US planes conducted a ferocious bombing campaign against Iraq in the ten months prior to the invasion, hoping this would provoke Saddam Hussein into supplying an excuse for an invasion. It failed and killed an unknown number of civilians.

At Nuremberg, counts three and four referred to War crimes and crimes against humanity. Here again, there is overwhelming evidence that Blair and Bush committed violations of the laws or customs of warincluding murder ... of civilian populations of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war.

Two recent examples: the US onslaught near Ramadi this month in which 39 men, women and children -- all civilians -- were killed, and a report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur in Iraq who described the Anglo-American practice of denying food and water to Iraqi civilians in order to force them to leave their towns and villages as a "flagrant violation" of the Geneva Conventions.

In September, Human Rights Watch released an epic study that documents the systematic nature of torture by the Americans, and how casual it is ... even enjoyable. This is a sergeant from the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division: On their day off, people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC [prisoners'] tent. In a way, it was sport ... One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal [baseball] bat. He was the fucking cook!

The report describes how the people of Fallujah, the scene of numerous American atrocities, regard the 82nd Airborne as the Murdering Maniacs. Reading it, you realize that the occupying force in Iraq is, as the head of Reuters said recently, out of control. It is destroying lives in industrial quantities when compared with the violence of the resistance.

Who will be punished for this? According to Sir Michael Jay, the permanent under-secretary of state who gave evidence before the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee on 24 June 2003, Iraq was on the agenda of each cabinet meeting in the nine months or so until the conflict broke out in April. How is it possible that in 20 or more cabinet meetings, ministers did not learn about Blair's conspiracy with Bush? Or, if they did, how is it possible they were so comprehensively deceived?

Charles Clarke's position is important because, as the current British Home Secretary (interior minister), he has proposed a series of totalitarian measures that emasculate habeas corpus, which is the barrier between a democracy and a police state. Clarke's proposals pointedly ignore state terrorism and state crime and, by clear implication, say they require no accountability. Great crimes, such as invasion and its horrors, can proceed with impunity.

This is lawlessness on a vast scale. Are the people of Britain going to allow this, and those responsible, to escape justice? Flight Lieutenant Kendall-Smith speaks for the rule of law and humanity and deserves our support.