War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal:

[rainy]

In case you missed it: This was 2003:



War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal:

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.


This is the link
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5259.htm

[understandinglife]

1. fyi:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3931759

"... we sent our young people into harm's way without leveling with the American people." - Congresswoman Pelosi before Congress, 16 June 2005

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us - One question, my fellow Americans, "Why is Bush not already in jail?"

[cloudythescribbler]

3. relevant quote -- I only remember jist (plz find TS Eliot "Love Song ...

... of J. Alfred Prufrock" The quote, in its original Italian, from Dante, appears under the title, and usually has a footnote with translation in all but the snootiest editions.

"Sio credesse..."
From Dante's Inferno -- someone please supply both Italian and English:

roughly: If I believed that my word would be given to someone who might return to the land of the living, this flame would shake no more, but since I know that no one has ever returned from here, without fear of infamy I speak to you"

The relevance of this to the shamelessness of W Bush's imperialism is quite chilling ...

[leveymg]

2. The neocons can be arrestingly honest, at times.

One might say, Mr. Perle has been known to push the envelope a bit too far for his own good.:bounce:

[Jack Rabbit]

4. No Perles of wisdom found here

Thanks for digging this up. I had forgotten about it.

Perle's reasoning is warped. It's not that I think Saddam was just a poor, misunderstood dictator. He really was bloody murderer.

Nevertheless, Perle was admitting in November 2003 that Saddam was neither a threat nor in material of UN resolutions. If either of those had been the case, the war would not have been illegal.

How did he become the US priority? Why did Perle and other neocons morph Osama into Saddam and invade Iraq instead of pursuing a real national security objectives in Afghanistan?

Of course, the questions are rhetorical. Pay a visit to the PNAC website and find the answers. The neocons may be reluctant to call it colonialism, but that is what they are advocating.

These remarks from 2003 buttress the evidence recently uncovered in the Downing Street documents that the reasons given by the neocons and others in the Bush regime were phony and that they knew it or, at best, were entirely unconcerned about the veracity of their claims. They made their decision to go to war and then made up excuses for it.

Overthrowing a thug like Saddam was a laudable goal in itself, but the Bushies went about it in entirely the wrong way. Did they really think that cab drivers in Baghdad and longshoremen in Basra would be so happy be rid of Saddam that they would just let the neocons privatize their public industries and expropriate their mineral wealth? Under the leadership of a colonial-style foreign dictator, no less? Perhaps they should have asked cab drivers and longshoremen about it before invading. That would have given them a better feel for how Iraqis felt than asking people Chalabi. Of course, it shouldn't surprise anybody that the Bushies would be more comfortable with an embezzler than with people who really work for a living.

When it was all over, Saddam was gone, but Iraq worse off and the world more dangerous than before. We keep calling Bush an idiot, but that had to take genius.

As for Perle, well, he said it himself. The war that he helped plan was illegal. Will Mr. Perle be pleading guilty in The Hague?