The 20th anniversary of the Iraq War — arguably one of the largest military quagmires in American history, second only perhaps to Vietnam — came and went.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the entire cast of the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century, the intellectual justification for American imperialism and nation-building abroad, remain blissfully free from incarceration.
The PNAC agenda — to establish Pax Americana across the globe, resulted in thousands of American deaths, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, and a failed state that facilitated the rise of ISIS. It did not strengthen or enrich any Americans or American enterprises, save for weapons contractors like Halliburton (not coincidentally Dick Cheney’s former employer).
The decades of civil war unleashed on Iraq after Hussein was deposed turned entire cities into rubble, and for what benefit?
Yet, two decades later, George W. Bush and Co. remain curiously well-received in corporate media, never pressed to account for their destruction.
Dick Cheney’s daughter, in fact, maintains her perch atop the GOP despite her flagrant unpopularity with the base. Prior to her defeat in the 2022 midterms, she suffered from a 72% disapproval rating in her own deeply Republican Wyoming district. No normal American likes her outside of the #Resistance DC liberal class. Yet, fueled by donor class support, she apparently suffers from the delusion that she will become president in 2024.
One man, former UN weapons inspector Han Blix, has not forgotten Liz Cheney’s father’s crimes in the Middle East.
Via Yahoo! News:
The former weapons inspector who was tasked with investigating Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs for the United Nations has spoken out Hans Blix said that, “in principle”, Blair and Bush should have faced consequences for their invasion – which is now widely regarded as illegal under international law…
He said there should be a penalty for breaking the “principle rule” of the United Nations charter – not to “use force against the territorial integrity and independence of other states”.
Blix pointed to the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
Blix deserves credit not just for his insistence on justice in the present tense, but because he was on top of the Bush administration’s lies from the very start, in the runup to the invasion, and exposed them publicly.
While I believe that Bush and his collaborators should be prosecuted domestically and not internationally in the illegitimate International Criminal Court (ICC) as a matter of principle related to national sovereignty, the prosecutorial logic remains.
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