Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:
"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."
It's that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a "clear breach of law," and dismissed the Bush administration's legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn't have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, "So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive."
2006-07-11
Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?
A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the 'supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.'
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Okay, well according to Ferencz's logic it would have been illegal and immoral to have taken out Hitler before he even invaded Poland, or Emperor Hirohito and Imperialist Japan before it attacked Pearl Harbor, right? Well I certainly don't think so. They were nations as sovereign (even more so actually) as Iraq was under Hussein. But had any of the eventual Allies acted in that fashion at the time then I'm sure there would have been many who have said the same thing then as you Ferencz are saying now.
In retrospect it's too bad isn't it that France and England long before September 1939 and the U.S. before December 1941 didn't start themselves a couple of illegal and immoral wars? Isn't it?
No, of course you don't think so.
"In retrospect it's too bad isn't it that France and England long before September 1939 and the U.S. before December 1941 didn't start themselves a couple of illegal and immoral wars? Isn't it?"
Your logic isn't logic at all. It's reactionary hocus-pocus to say that we can predict the future. To kill thousands of people because you believe their leader may be thinking about possibly attacking you is insanity.
It is just as unfortunate that this logic wasn't used by the Aztecs, Mayas, Mohawks, and Arawaks to kill the white men who invaded their shores. It should then be used by the Minutemen on the Mexican border to slaughter all of the people crossing LEGALLY into San Diego and El Paso.
You can't KNOW that someone is going to harm you.
Do you REALLY live your life in this kind of fear? Why do you even bother to go out of the house every day? With this kind of logic, you should be shooting every car that drives next to you on 696.
Why should the strongest nation in history be afraid of some piss-ant like Hussein?
The short answer: It isn't and never was. The pre-emptive strike was an excuse to bomb, invade, rape and pillage the Iraqi people. Hitler used the same argument to invade Poland in his quest to proliferate the master race.
This is the truth behind FDR's statement that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Starting a war for any reason other than self-defense is criminal. The US invasion of Iraq was never a war of self-defense and neither was Hitler's invasion of Poland or Israel's invasion of Gaza.
Nadir: What? Invading Hussein's Iraq due to the various facts and logic that I've articulated dozens of times here equates with executing random passers by? You're logic above certainly makes Lincoln a "criminal" as he invaded Mississippi for reasons other than "self defense." I do agree with the logic presented by your author, though I'm agreeable to violating it on behalf of opposite logic, just as Lincoln chose merely one logical paradigm to justify his invasion of Virginia over equally valid opposing paradigms. I for one am glad that he manipulated facts and logic (sexed them up, even!) in order to take civilization another giant step upward, however bloody it was (torture of confederate prisoners, violations of domistic liberties, lying about military intelligence, etc.).
Nadir: What history books have you been reading? Many American Indian groups did in fact pre-emptively attack arriving honkies, often accomplishing full-scale massacres. Had they achieved technology that at the time constituted superiority, they would have made your wishes come true, and repelleld the honkies. But had they possessed at this time such superior technology, it would have been they who would would have crossed the Atlantic and who would have hammered down on the honkies the then-dominant modis operandi of civilizations...
...modis operandi that these peoples smacked on each other over the millenia. They are, after all, humans, not "races" of Christs or Buddhas (I would say races of Mohammads, but of course he was himself a very successful pre-emptive massacerer).
Oh, wait, I know what history books you've been reading. The ones that omit these facts. Those are the books I used to read as well. They are racist. They hold one so-called race as especially wicked, a devil race, to which we can trace all of today's problems. They hold all the other "races" as inferrior to this master race, unable to achieve success and self-sufficiency, helpless in the face of unrelenting, diabolical subterfuge and infinitely complex conspiracies netted about them by that evil master "race."
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