There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy

[cal04]

The Iraq catastrophe isn't down to mistakes or lack of planning, but a refusal to accept that people will resist foreign occupation
Seumas Milne,The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/20/iraq

The problem in Iraq, we're now told, was a lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of planning, or mistakes in implementation. If only, say the neocons, we had put our man Ahmad Chalabi in charge from the start, the Iraqis wouldn't have felt so humiliated. If only we hadn't dissolved the army, the pragmatists insist, the insurgency would never have taken off. If only the Brits had been running the show, mutter the old Whitehall hands, all would have been different. The problem, it turns out, was not the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab oil state on a tide of official deceit, but the way it was carried out.

Meanwhile, we're being subjected to a renewed barrage of spin about the success of the US surge in turning the country round, quelling the violence and opening the way to a sunlit future. In an echo of his notorious "mission accomplished" speech of May 2003, George Bush yesterday proclaimed the Iraq war a "major strategic victory" in the "war on terror".

All this is self-delusion on a heroic scale. The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, "a day which will live in infamy". Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead, as Jon Snow's compelling TV documentary Hidden Iraq underlined this week, they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperisation, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.

(snip)
Given that the invasion of Iraq was regarded as illegal by the majority of the UN security council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion, it must by the same token be seen as a war crime: what the Nuremberg tribunal deemed the "supreme international crime" of aggression. If it weren't for the fact that there is not the remotest prospect of any mechanism to apply international law to powerful states, Bush and Blair would be in the dock at the Hague. As it is, the only Briton to be found guilty of a war crime in Iraq has been corporal Donald Payne, convicted of inhumane treatment of detainees in Basra - while the man who sent him there is preposterously touted as a future president of the European Union.

[Demeter]

1. Consider How Much Punishment It Took To Humble The Germans Into Remorse

Multiply it by ten, and you know how much the US is going to suffer.

[ellaydubya]

2. Thank you very much for this posting,

I could not agree more. Right on!!!!!

[wtmusic]

3. There we have it: "Nuremburg" and "war crime" in reference to Iraq

in a major British daily.

It can happen.