And as for a list of other War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity committed by the Bush administration and by former US administrations in regards to Iraq see Barry Landos' book WEB OF DECEIT pub. 2007.
Landos begins his account about Iraq in the 1920s when Britain created the artificial country of Iraq with a puppet regime controlled by the British . Soon there were revolts, riots and a full scale uprising against the British. But the British were ruthless in their use of force against the so-called insurgents . They used the full weight of their air force against poorly armed rebels . Using the air force meant a loss of only a few British soldiers or pilots while towns and villages were utterly destroyed killing large numbers of civilians. But being British believing as a race they were superior to all other peoples especially Arabs they were therefore little interested in the deaths of Arab civilians or children . T.E. Laurence and others also wanted to use gas on the civilian populations to teach them a lesson that it was absolutely wrong to defy British rule.
Even though the situation seemed less and less worth the effort involved the British stubbornly continued with their failing and irrational policy. As Winston Churchill wrote at the time:
" There is something very sinister to my mind in this mesopotamian entanglement," Winston Churchill wrote his Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in August 1920. "Week after week and month after month for a long time we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic warfare marked from time to time certainly by minor disasters and cuttings off of troops and agents, and very possibly attended by some very grave occurrence."
Writing to Lloyd George, Churchill, frustrated after all the bloodshed in World War I, asked, "Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts?" But the British had created the problem, cobbling "Iraq" from three disparate Ottoman provinces. They chose sides, picking the Sunni minority to run the country. The Brits remained there 12 years, bleeding occasionally, until 1932. The bleeding continued after they left, as the Sunnis brutalized Iraq until 2003. The Bush Administration, defiantly ignorant of history, has created a situation far more dangerous than the one Churchill complained about. We are in free fall in Iraq, and there is no net.
From: Even Churchill Couldn't Figure Out Iraq
Sunday, Jul. 30, 2006 By JOE KLEIN at CNN & TIME
And further in 1922 Churchill wrote to Lloyd George:
"I am deeply concerned about Iraq. The task you have given me is becoming
really impossible. Our forces are reduced now to very slender proportions.
The Turkish menace has got worse; Feisal is playing the fool, if not the
knave; his incompetent Arab officials are disturbing some of the provinces
and failing to collect the revenue; we overpaid £200,000 on last year's account
which it is almost certain Iraq will not be able to pay this year, thus entailing
a Supplementary Estimate in regard to a matter never sanctioned by
Parliament; a further deficit, in spite of large economies, is nearly certain
this year on the civil expenses owing to the drop in the revenue. I have had to
maintain British troops at Mosul all through the year in consequence of the
Angora quarrel: this has upset the programme of reliefs and will certainly
lead to further expenditure beyond the provision I cannot at this moment
withdraw these troops without practically inviting the Turks to come in. The
small column which is operating in the Rania district inside our border
against the Turkish raiders and Kurdish sympathisers is a source of constant
anxiety to me."
From:Winston S. Churchill to David Lloyd George
(Churchill papers: 17/27)1 September 1922
So we jump ahead to the 1970s and 1980s when Saddam Hussein has become the head of state of Iraq and an ally and good friend of the American and British administrations whom they support utterly and completely.For various reasons they see Saddam as lynch-pin for stability and peace in the Middle East. So one of their first task for their puppet Saddam is for him to engage in what turns out to be a long and bloody war against Iran. They supported Saddam for years and knew of the crimes he committed and either remained silent or downplayed the accusations since he was their ally. Britain and the United States also gave Saddam the WMDs which he could use on Iranians and on his own people with the cooperation and help of Britain and the United States. Though sometimes they played a complicated duplicitous game surreptitiously supporting Iran at times against Iraq and then switching sides again and again.
It is highly unlikely that Saddam would have gone to war against Iran if he had not been coaxed, encouraged and coerced by the United States administration. They kept lending him money or giving him a bigger line of credit to ensure that he was able to buy the best in military equipment and to build an air defense system and manufacturing plants for creating chemical and biological weapons .They were also allowing Saddam to begin a nuclear weapons program .
All of this later the US and Brits would claim Saddam did without their knowledge or permission which was just another lie on their part. They then accused Saddam of illegally building these weapon systems and that they were shocked and outraged and believed Saddam had to be stopped before he endangered other Middle East countries especially Israel.
The book takes one through the various crimes from torture and murder to full scale slaughter of Kurds and Shiites when they rebelled against Saddam in 1991 believing that the Americans and British would give them aid but of course did not. American troops stood by watching whole villages being slaughtered with bombs ,machine guns ,and gas. Some American officials voiced the belief that it would be better for everyone if Saddam wiped out all the Kurds & most of the Shiites while he was at it. So they concluded in the end it was a good thing. Though George W. Bush would use these human rights violations & massacres and the use of Chemicals and gas against civilian populations as a rationale for invading Iraq. Even though his dear old dad stood by and did nothing while these crimes were committed. If President Bush senior had given orders to American troops still in Iraq to shoot down Helicopters being used by Saddam to kill insurgents the insurgency might have succeeded. If the Americans had also turned over the large caches of weapons they had seized to the insurgents they would have had at least a fighting chance against Saddam. Instead President Bush senior encouraged Shiites and Kurds to revolt against Saddam and when they did he allowed American and coalition troops to stand idly by as the insurgents were slaughtered. Is it any wonder why many Iraqis do not trust the Americans or the British .
Barry Lando 's book is an important book in detailing the crimes of Saddam and the role played by the American administrations of Ronald Regan , Bush senior, Bill Clinton and Bush Jr. They in the end were or are as guilty as Saddam. Unfortunately all of these war criminals including George Bush , Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher,Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright , Donald Rumsfeld , Condoleeza Rice, etc. will never face criminal trials as they should.
The victors as they say write the history and therefore decide what constitutes a crime and who in their view are criminals. Being Americans and British they believe as do their people that they are above any form of international law or any appeals to justice, fairness and humane treatment of human beings . Only those of their elite groups it seems are to be treated humanely and fairly and everybody else is on their own.
For instance we cannot expect Hillary Clinton to do much about the Bush administration's crimes or those of the past administrations because this might lead to charges being laid against President Bill Clinton who kept the draconian inhumane sanctions in place against Iraq which led to the deaths of some 500,000 to 1,000,000 (one million ) Iraqi civilians. These sanctions were condemned by various international groups and have been called Crimes against Humanity. Though Clinton and other Americans and Brits don't see it that way since Iraqis it seems are mere pawns in America's Game of Global Empire. Whatever will help America's agenda of world Domination is by definition justifiable and therefore cannot be characterized as immoral, unethical, or illegal.
President Clinton also on several occasions attacked Iraq though these attacks were unnecessary though they did help to give Clinton a boost in the popular polls making him look like a real Macho kind of guy. Americans seem to like their leaders to choose force over diplomacy. As we see this is one of the issues Barack Obama keeps getting attacked for since he claims he would try to use diplomacy before going to war with some country . Whereas Hillary is much more Macho and strident and is already planing on going to war with Iran or maybe some less well defended country.
Of course Americans might get all upset over a President conducting an extramarital affair but torturing or killing thousands of innocent people is a small matter in the scheme of things according to America's sense of values.
When Saddam killed innocent civilians it was wrong when America does it it is collateral damage or necessary .
It is important to remember that it was America that supplied Saddam with WMD's in order to fight an unprovoked war against Iran. Saddam was obliged to fight this proxy war against Iran to reduce Iran as a threat to the region or to the United States. And when Saddam used his conventional weapons and WMDs including chemical and biological weapons to terrorize and Kill his own citizens it was ignored or played down by American and British administration. Or they would claim these actions were an internal affair and none of their business even though he was accused of Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes. They were of course in a difficult position since if Saddam was found guilty of War Crimes they too would be implicated since they helped to arm Saddam and had full knowledge of how he was using these illegal weapons.
So America and Britain spent a great deal of money and time covering up Saddam's Crimes against Humanity. They for instance claimed ( lied )that it was Iran that had used poisoned gas during the war rather than Iraq . They of course knew that such an accusation was not true.
Once America and Britain decided Saddam was a liability they used those very acts against his people as part of the rationale to invade his country in 1991 . After this brief war the United States and Britain insisted on using the United Nations to impose the most draconian inhumane sanctions ever placed on a nation for some 12 years to punish not just Saddam but the people of Iraq for not rising up and ousting Saddam. After the slaughter of some four hundred thousand Iraqis during the 1991 uprising the Iraqi people no longer had the means or the leaders to stage another uprising. The sanctions have been declared a case of Genocide which led to the deaths of over one million people . Over half of those who died as a result of the sanctions were children. But President Bush senior and President Clinton claimed the sanctions were justified and were unrepentant when it came to the deaths of so many Iraqi children.
Somehow or other Bush Senior , President Clinton & George W. Bush convinced the media and the American people that starving Iraqi children to death or allowing them to die because of lack of medicine or doctors was OK since all Iraqis were to blame for Saddam continuing in power In Iraq.This is referred to as collective guilt .
One shouldn't be surprised by this logic as the Israelis have used it again and again in their fight against Lebanon and Palestine and all Arabs who are second class Israeli citizens.And the Americans have carried out the same sorts of policies in other conflicts most notoriously Vietnam.
Hitler used a massive bombing campaign against British Civilians claiming that all British citizens were the enemy. In response the allies fire-bombed German cities such as Dresden which had little or no military value and was filled with German refugees . But this war crime is not one we are supposed to mention. Or rather when our side mass murders innocent civilians we are justified when the other side our enemy of the moment do the same thing they are characterized as evil monsters and criminals.
So over the past couple of decades American administrations have concluded that all Iraqis, all Arabs and all Muslims are the enemy and therefore legitimate targets.
And as things worsen in the Middle East more and more of the peoples of the region have come to mistrust if not outright hate Americans and Britons & other Western Nations for the suffering they have unnecessarily caused as part of some Imperialist game. The problem in part is that we in the west are dependent upon access to inexpensive and dependable supply of oil and so we are willing it appears to ignore the sovereignty of other nations , to replace regimes we don't like or support ruthless regimes whom we like without consulting the citizens of a particular nation.
In the end the corporations want their slice of the pie as it were that is cheap oil they can sell at a what they consider to be a fair profit. The problem with the oil companies is that they do not want to have to pay a fair price to the oil producing countries and they further want to charge as much as they can to the consumers in the west.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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