U.S. should have its own Chilcot Report
I have argued many times that the Iraq invasion
was a crime of the highest proportion. Bush’s
poodle, a.k.a. former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, allowed his country to
be pulled into a conflict that claimed hundreds of British lives, thousands of
American lives, and probably a million Iraqi lives (but who is counting!),
while plunging the entire region into a maelstrom of terroristic chaos,
including the birth of extremist groups like the Daesh.
Last Thursday the Chilcot
report on the UK’s involvement in Iraq delivered
a scathing critique of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war on the basis of
bogus intelligence and a catastrophic lack of planning for the aftermath of the
invasion. (The
excerpts of the Chilcot report can be read by clicking here.) The salient points of
the report are:
11. The government had no post-invasion
strategy.
14. The government did not try hard enough
to keep a tally of Iraqi civilian casualties.
The Chilcot report obviously
incriminates Blair. But how about George W. Bush, the man who must be held
accountable for starting the war in Iraq?
A
scathing new biography of Bush was published last week
by renowned historian Jean Edward Smith in which he devotes a substantial
portion of his book to the lead-up and aftermath of the Iraq war.
He concludes: “Whether George W Bush was the worst president in American
history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is
easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”
Beyond Bush, the political
elite in the US has faced almost no punishment for supporting the invasion
of Iraq. Dick
Cheney and company are also living comfortably in retirement, and both
political parties have nominated people (Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump) who
supported the invasion in 2003.
The current global disorder from Bangladesh to
the USA stem largely from our inability to punish such white-collar mega war
criminals who get away as the untouchable mafias from the wars that they bring
about. It is a shame to our generation that we have failed to book these SOBs
(son of Bush and Blair) who have caused so much pain, suffering and sadness in
our time. Such impunity has created a sense of utter frustration and
un-quenched anger among some concerned citizens of our globe who feel that in
the absence of a trial at The Hague, they must do something, for instance, take
the law in their own hands. In this age of the Internet, when children are
growing up spending more time behind the computer than playing games in the
fields, some youngsters are fuming in anger and do feel that their parents’
generation has failed them miserably and that they ought to do something to
right the wrong. They are rebelling, and taking law in their own hands, and
are, regrettably, thus, creating a world of fitnah
and fasad that we have never seen
before in which victims simply don't know why they are getting killed. It is a
sad saga of our time in which every day is worse than the one before! It is like
living under mindless anarchy from Baghdad to Brussels, from Dhaka to Dallas, and
from Jerusalem to Juba!
I believe that the only way we can stop this
mess is by ensuring that the mega war criminals like Bush, Blair, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell are all tried for their respective roles in Iraq War
invasion, and that those responsible are punished appropriately so that no
future Bush or Blair can emerge in our world. Once such mega criminals are
tried, then we can go with trying our smaller criminals like Bashar al-Assad
and General Sisi and others. So long the world community fails to bring in
justice in our world against such mega criminals, I am afraid, we shall only
see worse. Period!
The US truly needs its own Chilcot report. But
with the Amen Corner controlling the Capitol Hill will it ever do the
needful for such a report to emerge? I doubt it.
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