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by Glenn Greenwald
Published on Friday,
January 29, 2010 by Salon.com
British political
news has been consumed for the last several weeks by a formal inquiry
into the illegality [1] and deceit [2] behind Tony Blair's decision to
join the U.S. in invading Iraq. Today, Blair himself is publicly
testifying [3] before the investigative commission and is being grilled
about numerous false claims he made [2] in the run-up to the war, not
only about Iraqi weapons programs and their ties to Al Qaeda, but also
about secret commitments he made to join the U.S. at a time when he and
Bush were still pretending that they were undecided and awaiting the
outcome of the U.N. negotiations and the inspection process.
A major focus of the
investigation is the illegality of the war. Some of the most
embarrassing details that have emerged concerns the conclusions by
Blair's own legal advisers [4] that the invasion of Iraq would be
illegal without U.N. approval. The top British legal officer had
concluded [1] that the war would be illegal, only to change his mind
under substantial pressure shortly before the invasion. Several weeks
ago, a formal investigation in the Netherlands -- whose government had
supported the invasion -- produced the first official adjudication [5]
of the legality of the war, and found it illegal, with "no basis in
international law."
As Digby notes [6],
all of this stands in stark and shameful contrast to the U.S., which
pointedly refuses to "look back" or concern itself with whether it waged
an illegal (and horribly destructive) war. The British inquiry has been
widely criticized for being too passive and deferential and lacking any
credible threat of accountability (other than disclosure of facts).
Still, one could hardly imagine George Bush and Dick Cheney being hauled
before an investigative body and forced, under oath, to testify about
what they did as a means of examining the illegality of that war. Doing
that would fundamentally conflict with two leading principles in
American political life: (1) our highest political leaders must never be
accountable for actions they take while in power; and (2) whether
something they do is "illegal" -- especially the starting of wars -- is
utterly irrelevant. Instead of formally investigating whether they broke
the law, we treat them like elder statesmen who deserve a life of luxury
[7] and media reverence [8]. Tony Blair -- who had no discernible
expertise or experience in banking -- himself is showered with riches
[9] for a "part-time" job [10] by JP Morgan and by other institutions
[11] who benefited substantially from his acts in office.
All of this
underscores the fact that -- despite how much public debate it has
received -- we still childishly, and with moral blindness, refuse to
come to terms with the true scope of our wrongdoing when it comes to the
Iraq War. Several hundred thousand Iraqis -- at least -- were killed as
a result of this war, with another 4 million being turned into refugees.
As the Iraqi journalist and professor Ali Fadhil put it in 2008 [12], on
the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion: "basically, my assessment is
we have a whole nation called Iraq, now it's wiped out." Contrary to
conventional wisdom about the war, the alleged post-surge improvement in
Iraqi civil society has not remotely mitigated the destruction spawned
by the invasion. As The Economist detailed in September, 2009 [13], the
U.S.-supported Maliki government is relying increasingly on Saddam-era
tactics of torture, censorship, lawless sectarian militias, and brutal
punishment of dissent: "Human-rights violations are becoming more
common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if
their country may go back to being a police state."
The invasion of Iraq
was unquestionably one of the greatest crimes of the last several
decades. The fact that it was illegal -- a blatant violation of
international law -- makes it that much worse. Imagine what future
historians will say about it -- a nakedly aggressive war launched under
the falsest of pretenses, in brazen violation of every relevant precept
of law, which destroyed an entire country, killed huge numbers of
innocent people, and devastated the entire population. Have we even
remotely treated it as what it is? We're willing to concede it was a
"mistake" -- a good-natured and completely understandable lapse of
judgment -- but only the shrill and unhinged call it a crime. As always,
it's worth recalling that Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor at the
Nuremberg Trials, insisted in his Closing Argument [14] against the Nazi
war criminals that "the central crime in this pattern of crimes" was not
genocide or mass deportation or concentration camps; rather, "the
kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars."
History teaches that aggressive war is the greatest and most dangerous
of all crimes -- as it enables even worse acts of inhumanity -- and
illegal, aggressive war is precisely what we did in Iraq, to great
devastation.
I'm periodically
criticized for an "angry" tone in my writing, which I always find
mystifying. I genuinely don't understand why anger should be avoided or
even how it could be. What other reaction is possible when one looks
around and sees the government leaders who committed these grave crimes
completely unburdened by any accountability and treated as respectable
dignitaries, or watches the Tom Friedmans, Jeffrey Goldbergs, Fred
Hiatts and other unrepentant leading media propagandists who helped
enable it still feted as Serious and honest experts, or beholds the
current Cabinet and Senate filled with people who supported it, or
observes the Michael O'Hanlons and Les Gelbs and other Foreign Policy
Community luminaries who lent trans-partisan credence to it all continue
to traipse around still pompously advocating for more wars that never
touch their lives?
A few months ago, I
did an MSNBC segment with Dan Senor, who is currently a Fox News
contributor, author of a book hailing the greatness of Israeli
innovations, a recent addition to the Council on Foreign Relations, and
husband of CNN anchor Campbell Brown. But back in 2003 and 2004, he was
Chief Spokesman for the "Coalition Provisional Authority" in Iraq -- the
U.S. occupying force in that country. Sitting in the green room with him
before the segment, I was really disgusted by the paradox that one is
supposed to treat him as just some random political adversary deserving
of standard civility, respect and respectability -- in other words, a
Decent Person is supposed to forget that he was an official who enable
and lied about some of the most monstrous acts of the last many years.
And, of course, he was going on MSNBC that day to opine about our
current foreign policy options: direct involvement in this horrific
crime is no disqualifying factor; it's not even a black mark against
someone's credibility and reputation.
At least Robert
McNamara had the decency to write a deeply humble mea culpa and spend
the last couple of decades of his life living under a cloud of deep
shame and disgrace until he died. Do you think any of that will happen
to any of the people responsible -- in politics, the media and our
Foreign Policy think tanks -- for the unimaginable crimes of the last
decade, particularly what was done in Iraq: Shock and Awe and the
Fallujah massacres [15] and Blackwater slaughters and Abu Ghraibs and
all the rest?
Of course it won't.
They continue to thrive unabated even as Iraq tries to re-build itself
from the devastation they unleashed. As toothless as the British
investigation appears to be, at least there's some public reckoning,
compelled answers from their leaders, and an attempt to determine the
precise nature of their crimes. And the Dutch have formally declared the
war in which they were involved to be a crime. By contrast, we treat it
all as a pointless relic of the irrelevant and distant past, all because
the people who did it have banded together to insist that the worst
possible crime is not what they did, but instead, would be if the rest
of us examined what they did and insisted on meaningful accountability.
© 2010 Salon.com
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