Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses?
We barely got to the point of impeaching Nixon for his bullshit and Reagan got off scott free for Iran-Contra. So it shouldn't be too surprising that Bush didn't get keelhauled for his bullshit invasions especially since most of the morons in Washington were totally on board with it.
Some of us could see it coming from a mile away with Afghanistan. (Just had to look back to how it went for the USSR and like every other country that tried before us (see "Graveyard of Empires").
Iraq* looked an awful lot like bullshit driven by greed, oil, and "finishing what daddy started" at the time. Idk about the last one now but the first two? Definitely. But fucking Congress went along with all of it. Probably lobbied by billionaires.
So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.
People at the top in this country rarely do.
Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to "finishing what daddy started." In 2002-2003 the W's cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.
It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that's why he got all paranoid.
With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would've been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.
Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don't know what the best "after" would've been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could've helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.
Two words:
Dick Cheney
You really think dubya cared about attacking Iraq. He was told.
🤦🏻 yeah Iraq. Autocorrect probably. Daddy Bush probably also wanted to avoid a quagmire. Idk.
I agree we were justified invading Afghanistan and felt so at the time but it's just not a great place to try and "conquer". You might be right about the distraction of Iraq. However, Afghanistan strikes me as a country with the kind of deeply entrenched culture and politics so different from anything we are familiar with that I don't know if we could ever actively transform it in meaningful ways.
So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.
What specific crimes?
I think his and his administration did a lot of awful shit, but they did it using politics, not by breaking the law. They painted their opponents as un-American. They whipped up fervor saying that "you're with us or you're with the terrists" and changed the "French Fries" in the congressional cafeteria to "Freedom Fries" after the French refused to jump on board with their war plans. They made sure the public was scared, because scared people are easier to manipulate. But, fundamentally his administration did it so that they could win votes in and for the house and senate. Fundamentally he still followed American law.
There are various things where the administration or the military might have violated international laws against war crimes or aggression. For example, the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Graib, the whole existence of and infinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, and possibly even the invasion of Iraq itself. But, international courts require a much higher burden of proof, especially to pin the crimes on the head of state. And, Bush had pet lawyers like John Yoo producing memos to declare it all legal.
Evil shit, especially evil done by the military in other countries is almost never going to result in criminal charges, let alone convictions. Trump is unusual in that the crimes were so incredibly blatant. The normal method for most shady heads of state is to at least go for plausibly legal. They have access to tons of lawyers willing to bend over backwards to declare what their bosses want to do as being legal.
People need to stop equating "evil shit" with "crimes". Yes, Bush and his administration was responsible for a lot of evil shit. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, thousands of deaths of soldiers in the bullshit "Coalition of the Willing". He was responsible for indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay and torture at Abu Graib. But, with all that blood on his hands, he may have done it all without breaking any laws. There's a reason why the prisoners are being held in Guantanamo Bay and not on US soil. There's a reason that the torture happened in an Iraqi prison. A big part of that is that many US laws don't apply to those places, so while it's awful, it may not be illegal.
Sometimes I wonder if the DRA would've succeeded if the CIA and MI6 hadn't been backing the Mujahideen.
No stupid questions, but certainly stupid answers.
The USA is not a part of the international criminal court. So even if the ICC said the US committed war crimes, they have no way to enfore those laws in the USA.
ICC is for states that can't prosecute within their country. USA can do that. So it goes like this:
ICC: Hey, USA, you committed war crimes
USA: We dont recognize your court of law, and we did our own investigation where we found no wrongdoing.
ICC: We disagree
USA: Okay, that's nice. If you arrest Bush we will invade the Hague
Stalemate.
Yeah but if Bush travelled to a country under the ICC jurisdiction he could still be tried. Of course the Hague invasion act (a big fuck you from USA to the ICC) may deter some countries from enforcing the ICC rules on American citizens.
ICC is for states that can’t prosecute within their country.
This is false.
I mean how bout a source buddy?
Heres what they say on their website. "As a court of last resort, it seeks to complement, not replace, national Courts."
https://www.icc-cpi.int/about/the-court
Perhaps we interpret that differently, or I could have described it better.
You just come in here, take one sentence, call it false, and leave? Come on mannnnn.
The UN Security Council, as outlined in Article 39 of the UN Charter, has the ability to rule on the legality of the war, but has yet not been asked by any UN member nation to do so. The United States and the United Kingdom have veto power in the Security Council, so action by the Security Council is highly improbable even if the issue were to be raised.
No one cares and even if they did it can be vetoed.
Countries shouldn't be able to veto things about themselves. That's stupid.
Afghanistan should be stricken from the title. There were no pretenses on that one. The US could never just let 9/11 go, and our allies and the rest of the world agreed. Just for the invasion in itself, Bush never would have been charged with any war crimes there. No, not even in a more just international criminal system than the one we have.
Iraq is a different story. The fabrications were obvious, our allies called them out, and then we did it anyway. Iraq had no connection to 9/11 and no WMD program in active development. That was obvious to everyone at the time who wasn't a senseless warmonger. Almost as bad, it took resources away from Afghanistan, which was the fight that really mattered. Stack on top of all that the fact that we could no longer realpolitik by playing the authoritarian governments of Iran and Iraq off of each other. Iran had no direct counterbalance on its border anymore, which freed resources for them to start a nuclear weapons program. They never could have done that if they had to keep up a conventional military to make sure Saddam Hussein didn't start another war with them.
The two should be considered separately. Bush ought to be tried as a war criminal for invading Iraq, and for what happened during the long occupation in both countries. But there's no good reason for trying him for invading Afghanistan.
The Taliban-led Afghanistan was closer allies with Al Qaeda than Iraq for sure, but invading Afghanistan was also a bit of a stretch. Sure, the Taliban was harboring and supporting terrorists, but so were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and probably at least a half dozen other countries.
Bush is a war criminal, and while they invented the entire connection to Iraq, his administration did "exaggerate" the justifications for invading Afghanistan as well.
Turned out Saddam was a meanie after the USA helped make him. Had to slap that idea down lest any future installed dictators try any funny business.
Obama should be tried as well. He continued Bush's politics and despite knowing that newly establish Iraqi government torture its prisoners he signed a document which allowed to hand over thousands of prisoners to them. It's all well documented.
And that fucker got peace nobel price. What a joke..
Afghanistan was NOT under false pretenses. The entire world stood besides the US for that. It was Iraq that was false pretenses and much of the world did not support that, and as it went on the ones that did, quickly stopped supporting it.
There's literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried. I'm sure they'd use that for a president.... The US isn't capable of war crimes. They said so.
There’s literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried
Can I have source?
EDIT: Don't worry, found it
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
"The Act authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the President to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of The Hague, where the ICC is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody."
We're literally locked and loaded to invade the international court if they ever try. They passed a fucking bill to say we can if the president just gives it a thumbs up.
Can't have the US be held responsible for its actions now, can we?
Even if we did send them to trial, how would it go?
Prosecution: "So you had suspicions of known terrorist group responsible for 9/11 as well as national nuclear weapons development in the region?"
Bush: "That's right, my defence secretary and my appointee at the CIA brought relative documents, which we've submitted to the court, of the aluminum tubes assumed to be weapons technology at the time. The location of the Taliban had been tracked and went cold around there, but we did capture thousands of their fighters."
Prosecution: "Some time after you installed a new CIA director."
Bush: "Coincidently, yes, these sort of changes happen often."
Prosecution: "Did you have any evidence of where they might have obtained the technology?"
Bush: "That's right, we've had Russian informants about their spread of weapons throughout the middle east over the decades. Some of it is still classified but some of it has been submitted to the court."
Prosecution: "And is it true your nation profited greatly off the Iraqi Oilfields which was Coincidently monopolized by Exxon Mobil under the leadership of Rex Tillerson who went on to become a Secretary in the Trump Administration?"
Bush: "Well this has nothing to do with the Trump administration, I myself don't approve of them, and I also have no personal connections with Rex. But maybe that is true, I don't know."
Judge: breaks into a sweat realizing they'll be here listening to the questioning people over this for another 2 decades and still not have a solid case
The USA is one of those countries that the international community can't control with traditional means. It has been hard to get sanctions against Russia regarding the Ukrainian invasion; it would be impossible to try to do the same to the USA geopoliticaly.
Also, the false pretenses only involves Iraq. Afghanistan is a different idea behind what consists of aiding and abiding international war crimes.
He should have been. Especially after the photos of Abu Ghraib came out. But it is the U.S. so he payed no penalties.
Those photos being released, along with the revelations about illegal surveillance and surveillance techniques revealed by Snowden really destroyed the myth of what we are as a country.
Many factors play into this.
Lyndon Johnson came right out and told the American people that we needed to fight the Vietnam war to protect our rubber and tungsten interests there. Fighting a resource war is unfortunately not the crime it should be, and never has been.
If the WMD pretenses were false, Bush can and did blame the intelligence community that produced the information. No one there was prosecuted because it’s in their daily routine to say “we believe that inside Iraq / North Korea / etc that something bad XYZ is happening” and being wrong is not a crime.
Generally, no one believed that Saddam Hussein was good for Iraq, the Middle East, or the world. Iraqis were quite thankful for his removal. So even if the WMD thing was phony, there is a sense of “well, at least it all accomplished some good purpose.”
We can point to Bush as the sole responsible party but the reality is that Congress voted to authorize it and 40 nations participated. So responsibility is really pretty diffuse and Bush can say “everyone agreed it was the right thing to do.”
American politics are a shit show and any effort to hold a president accountable is seen as a ploy, and even if it isn’t, it becomes mired in the deep partisanship.
That was all too early for me to be following any political news.
In a way (just this one way) I'm glad he didn't.
At the time I was so in brainwashed conservative land. If I saw Bush get in trouble I would have stood by him simply because "Republicans good, Democrats bad". And it might have affected my waking up to the actuality, and maybe slowed it down to the point where I'd be defending Trump now. If the last guy got in trouble but was Republican and therefore innocent, it's just happening again, gosh dang those lefties.
That's literally the depth of thought in that camp. I've been there and seen it, I did it myself. They don't have any higher functioning logic to speak of. They really latch onto the victim mentality, even in their source of news. Since, at the time it got popular, Fox News was really the only right-leaning mainstream "news " network. I remember being told by my mom back then that it was the only one that wasn't "super liberal". And I took that at face value for years, not even questioning it. That's all it takes when you're that young. And then they'll defend it to their last breath when they only think like that because they were suggested to once, and they build their whole world on it.
Had to scrape myself out of that thinking. Took me forever. Turns out deprogramming yourself against the thinking taught to you by everyone you've ever known and with only tangential knowledge of others you know doing it is difficult. I knew one guy that broke his programming, but didn't really broadcast it, so I didn't really catch on to much of it. But later I had a roommate that would talk about it all the time, and could back it up. That really got me thinking, and ended up being like the starter pebble you nudge down the hill that becomes the huge snowball. But that's probably a story for a different kind of post. Probably a whole other community.
I didn't really have any exposure to anything outside that world until I was 25 or so, when I met the previously mentioned roommate. I still find pieces of that old thinking and influence in me all the time.
Thanks for coming to my accidental TED talk. Got a ramble going there.
Edit- fixed typos and added the part about FN.
Same
because of precedent.
any single member of the government is afraid of setting a precedent that will come back to hurt them
they all do illegal shit, if one is punished then possibly they all will
US consider the international criminal court as a terrorist organization
Maybe because everyone followed. Liberal, conservative, Canadian, American. Didn't matter to us then. We all knew it was going to lead to war, and when we were all pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan, we just accepted it and went for it. I still think it needed to be done, just not then and there. But to say the Taliban and Saddam didn't deserve to go down is also wrong.
Not true by a long shot. In 2003, a majority of Americans wanted the US to stay out of Iraq if the UN security council did not approve the invasion. A majority of Democrats in congress voted against the authorization of use of force. (and many who voted for it said they were against the invasion).
Who do you expect would charge, arrest, and try him? Certainly not the United States. Congress passed a very broad authorization for the use of force after 9/11. Multiple US allies also sent personnel under the umbrella of a UN security assistance force, so it's unlikely the UN would try to do anything regardless of which countries have veto power
Well, because the U.S. is a police state, with a military stranglehold on the planet, and the invasions were predicated on an event with uh, let's say, suspicious circumstances, that was engraved into the national psyche as the worst crime of a generation.
You REALLY need to learn what a police state is if you think America is one. Police states are authoritarian which America is not at this moment.
His comment reeks of InfoWars
Bush buys shit coin though. He can't be wrong.
In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn't want to fuck with the money.
What specific laws do you think he broke?
You can't charge someone with "crimes", you need specific laws and how he broke them.
Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war signed by congress and without congressional or U.N. approval. Plus, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and several of their legal advisors were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts for endorsing torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of P.O.W.s but the ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.
Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war
U.N. approval
Getting UN approval is a "nice to have", but it doesn't guarantee anything. A war of aggression would probably be something that could be prosecuted in the ICC as a crime of aggression, but to prove it's a crime of aggression you need to prove that there was no "just cause for self-defense". The whole basis of the US justification for attacking Iraq was that Iraq was involved in terrorism against the USA. So, to prove that it wasn't a war of self-defense, you'd not only have to prove that Iraq had no connection with any kind of terrorism against the USA and had no intention of it in the future, but that the US leadership knew that that was the case and invaded under false pretenses.
At this point we know that Iraq didn't have WMD, but can you really prove that the US leadership wasn't so deluded that they thought that Iraq genuinely didn't have WMD? The whole aftermath of the invasion involved a lot of embarrassing searching for WMDs that the US was sure were there. The US was constantly announcing that they were closing in on the WMDs, but every site they searched turned out to be nothing. If they'd known there really weren't any, they probably would have just gone ahead and planted some evidence. Instead, they kept looking and looking and claiming they were sure it was there somewhere.
Besides, the US has a veto on the UN security council, so they couldn't recommend prosecution or anything because the US would just veto the resolution.
were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts
Which foreign courts? Which war crimes in particular?
ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.
"cause Murica" is your reading of it. They had the option to charge Bush, but they didn't. One reason for that might have been that they knew they'd never be able to get their hands on the US officials they could have charged, and that the US might react really badly to the charges. But, another reason might be that they knew they'd never be able to get a conviction, because the bar to convicting officials is very high at the ICC.
"Evil shit" isn't the same as "crimes". The Bush admin did plenty of evil shit, but it's very hard to prove they broke any specific laws. Instead, because they managed to scare the shit out of the US, congress and the senate kept giving them as much authorization to do whatever they wanted. As for international laws, those are very rarely used, especially against superpowers, and the bar to proving anything is very high.
signed by congress and without congressional or UN approval
So congress signed off on the plan without approving it somehow?
Edit: Nevermind, there was a lack of comma, and my brain separated one statement into two. Sorry for the fuss.
Because these are uncharted legal waters. There is no precedent for charging a former US president with a crime.
Yet.
You mean there wasn't yet? I don't know if that's true, but I know there most definitely is precedent now.
Welcome to the rich and powerful, where everything is made up and laws dont matter.
In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.
In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.
People wanted blood by any means necessarily post 9/11. There were many international calls for his arrest. It just never happened because people hated Afghanistan and Iraq more than the US.
Because the law is only applied to the poors
Who's going to charge him with a crime? Iraq and Afghanistan both have the most to gain, but good luck getting the U.S. to extradite a former president to sit trial for a foreign power. The U.S. sits on the United Nations security council, so the U.N. can't do anything. Realistically the only one who could charge him is the U.S. themself, but that would require a formal admission that the wars were unjust. Not to mention, we're already struggling to arrest a former president who attempted a coup, and potential charges against Bush would be much more difficult.
Ahh god dammit. Yep... Happened when I was a kid, still furious.
I don't know dude, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to die mad about it.
Regarding Iraq: Because he cynically played enforcer for a lot of very rich (AKA influential) people who were scared that the US petrodollar hegemony was about to be supplanted by the Euro once people did the maths on Hussein's recent successful pivot to Euro as reserve currency https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html - notice how the puppet government that was then installed made it one of their first tasks to switch the country's reserve back to USD. The ongoing currency war was and is the actual war behind the "war" (wars).
Regarding Afghanistan: Everyone knew there was just too much "fog of war" to build a slam-dunk case against him for it. At best it would have ended up being framed by media as hand-waving about "wrong country" or "not just that country". I remember scratching my head wildly though when he was spouting his "with us or against us" and "bomb them back to the stone age" rhetoric (and going unilateral - with the help of his Blair poodle - when the UN disagreed). He raced straight past "un-presidential" on his way to "extremely childish" when conflating "surgically remove some known terrorists from their hiding places" with "go all scorched earth on the entire country where they might have last been hiding". There might have been some chance of making a case for recklessness (similar to the distinction between "manslaughter" & "murder") - on the part of a jumped-up cowboy-wannabe playing "war president", all hubristically drunk on the power he effectively inherited from his dad. As mentioned in many of the other comments though the US would never "allow" the ICC to bring such a conviction (undermining what the ICC is for), and any legal attempt within the US would just trigger screams of "you're not a patriot" and "too soon" (still).
Maybe you can help me because I’m 20 or 30 paragraphs in to that essay and it hasn’t explained anything to me: it just repeats the same points over and over that “the REAL reason for the war was oil transactions currency and LOOK Saddam actually made money by switching and this is all UNREPORTED by US media!” (Repeat, ad nauseum).
What is an oil transaction currency?
How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?
It makes me highly suspicious that this author doesn’t take time early on to explain these basics, and instead spends a bunch of time at the top congratulating himself on all the nice emails he’s gotten.
I sympathise with your "TL;DR" feeling (why oh why do academics - including the extremely knowledgable ones - so often make their otherwise-valid points soooo long-winded and self-referential? ...which is why I love the project started by Alan Alda - https://www.aldacenter.org/ by the way). In the author's partial defence though the initial "note to readers" text is follow-up to responses and updates, before the guts of the essay which follows (I think he could have more clearly formatted those parts differently in coloured boxes or such, so people could easily/quickly see where the "the original content" starts),
Firstly I say persevere with the essay if you can bear it (even if you need to skim initial verbiage) - there are a lot of profound insights, especially considering it was written 20 years ago as events were happening, and it ultimately answers your questions comprehensively. However for some quicker on-ramps about its primary tenet I was able to find from a quick DDG-search of "petrodollar currency war" that the rest of the reporting world is slowly catching-up (in many cases only now, 20 years later). Some top-links I found from that search (which I mainly just skimmed the beginnings of for context, so don't necessarily endorse entirely) are:
The Wikipedia link about Petrodollar-recycling seems to have a nicely concise summary to answer your question:
How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?
...and my very quickly typed (therefore far from accurate but hopefully high-level enough) answer would be something like this:
Following 1971 when the US forced termination of the Bretton Woods system (abandoned "gold-backed currency" for "fiat currency backed by smoke and mirrors"), by 1974 they became dangerously vulnerable due to over-spending on war (and some other endeavours) but found a quick-fix through petrodollar recycling ("buy loads of oil and the oil-producing country in-turn invests their profits heavily back into the US"). That was initially setup with Saudi Arabia but ended up being with all of OPEC, and because oil became the yardstick for international trade eventually the situation became such that the currency the world trades oil in became the de-facto "world trade" currency, and therefore the "international reserve currency". This creates a scenario in which "the US going under would take much of the world under with it" (generalising and summarising very crudely). That of course incentivised much of the world to protect the USD (and therefore protect the US from itself) in myriad ways and seemingly incentivised the consequent US administrations to hubristically spend wild/reckless amounts (especially on war) feeling like they are immune to "Consequences [tm]". The mantra was always "If you switch your reserve funds away from USD you will tank your country", but over time the expanding Euro-spending block of countries were becoming as big (eventually bigger) oil-buyers than the US, and Iraq switching their reserve to Euro turned out not only to be non-problematic but even "very successful". The US knew this would cause a chain-reaction of countries wanting to try the same switch to Euros (or at least be less phobic of considering it) so they needed it stomped out, while also finding other soundbite-friendly "reasons" for the stomping - screaming "look over here, look over here" so the mass-media would not notice the "petrodollar hegemony preservation" reason. WMDs was their gambit and it largely "worked" due to most people only listening to hot-button soundbites and retrofitting manufactured narratives to justify exceptionalism-fueled superficial knee-jerk responses. I think vanishingly few people would disagree with the fact that Hussein was a terrible, unforgivably criminal dictator, but not enough people asked "why are they suddenly only doing something about him now?".
I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I'm not a legal scholar.
Afghanistan was a just action. Let's just get that settled.
Iraq was legal but the public was lied to about the justification.
War Crimes requires a nation to purposefully target and kill civilians. If such an illegal order occurs those responsible are charged. If a government does not charge those issuing illegal orders they can be charged with War Crimes.
Civilian deaths do occur in War, a nation must only target legal military targets. For example the World Trade Center was an illegal target on 9/11. The Pentagon was a legal target on 9/11. Attacking a Civilian office gave the United States legal rights to retaliation.
As for Bush, his actions didn't violate international law in Iraq. They were questionable and diplomacy would have been the better option, but still not illegal. All acts deemed War Crimes had those responsible charged and sent to prison. For example those responsible for the Abu Ghraib incident were charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The person to ordered the abuse and torture of prisoners was William Hayes II, General Council of the Department of Defense and authorized by Judge Brett Kavanagh, yes the same one that now serves on the Supreme Court.
Bonus, Ron DeSantis was responsible for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
If you want to charge people with War Crimes, start with the three who still are at-large from justice.
"Afghanistan was a just action". Was it really? Is it justice to invade a country and kill civilians for an act of terrorism, even a massive one? Should the Latin american countries where the CIA operated, installed dictatorships and helped to kill thousands, bomb the USA? Wasn't it foreign terrorism? Should Vietnam invade the USA for its use of Agent orange and napalm? Would it be just?
I think OP means in 2001, not in the 80s
He's the guy who gets invited for dinner and stays for 4 months so this is normal to him.
Afghanistan was legit, how are people sold that it wasn't so close to 9/11?
The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudis lead by a US-trained individual that was later found and executed in Pakistan, where the group was founded. The only way Afghanistan was close to any of this was geographically.
You (intentionally?) leave out the important detail that the main orchestrator of the attack bin Laden / al-Qaeda were based in Afghanistan and Taliban refused to extradite him/them.
Weren't they protecting bin Laden?
Yeah it's kinda hard to isolate sunni terrorism to a single location. America and Saudi Arabia funded a whole bunch of extremist madrasa in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a bid to oust the Soviet occupation.
This militant force was primarily led by Arab fighters who operated largely in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the hijackers were mostly Arab, but a lot of their organizational infrastructure operated out of central Asia.
It's where the majority of Al Qaeda was
Probably he should be.
The US wields a huge amount of influence generally in the world, and specifically in the Hague. Behavior that would get other leaders called to task is generally ignored if it's done by the US.
It's not fair, but it is the way that the world works.
We can say the same thing about why Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden haven't been prosecuted either.
Seems like it's a lil hard to prosecute presidents who support the war machine.
Every politician has committed serious crimes
I knew Suzy committed serious crimes by running for Student Council!
Suzy killed Epstein
The toppling of genocidal regime was an obviously good thing. Just ask the dissidents. Oh wait you only ask fanatic patriots for their moronic opinions because it's more sensationalist and promotes irrational but popular pacifist non-interventionist agenda that likes to turn the blind eye to all kinds of atrocities to this very day. The occupation was mishandled, no doubt about it, shoulda pulled out as soon as the dust had settled. When I was living in Russia I was only dreaming of international intervention to liberate the country of the regime. But then I left and Moscow can turn into a nuclear crater for all I care.
Fun fact! In 2002 the US passed a law allowing themselves to invade the Hague in case any high-ranking US officials ended up on trial there.
Which I'm sure they passed in the year between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq just by coincidence, and they weren't expecting any shady shit to go down at all.
How would that work? Wouldn't that be an act of
warunprovoked aggression per the UN charter?This is why I maintain that Trump will never go to prison.. The u.s government itself would never allow it. They'll likely help him stay out on appeals till he dies, that's gonna be the worst punishment he'll get. I think the government would have him killed and made it to look like an accident before they ever allow him to set foot in prison.
Lil Bush didn't even really know...
He was just a puppet, and Cheney was part of his dad's "old guard". Lil Bush knew the game, so Cheney set it up so every intel agency reported to Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney decided if that info went anywhere else, including Lil Bush.
Cheney wanted the war, so he only passed on info that would cause the war, and it's entirely likely he was the only member of the American government who could have seen 9/11 coming. The reason no one else could, was everything has to go thru Cheney, and he saw everything.
I'm not saying Lil Bush is innocent, I'm saying he was a useful idiot that knew he was just a puppet and went along with
But it pisses me off everyone acts like the puppet fall guy is who we should be upset with, not the people who were actually doing stuff and still work with the American Republican political party.
Bush and his cabinet all knew
https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&page=1
It's insane to suggest the US would ever agree to that.
I believe it would have been the correct move, but the US as a nation would straight up never agree to that. The citizenry would have lost their fucking minds.
Officially that was the reason. The violation of the ceasefire. Iraq did not abide by the terms of the ceasefire.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t have invaded. I supported the invasion at the time because of the violations of the ceasefire. I didn’t completely buy the wmd argument.
Looking back, Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan.
Both countries also do not recognize the authority of International Court. High ranking officials definitely should have been hauled off to jail for authorizing, developing, and employing "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) techniques
Trump is being charged with crimes
Trump is being charged by the US and state governments with violation of US and state laws
That's a far different scenario than an international court attempting to charge and arrest a US president (current or former
Trump didn't even try and hide his crimes. He thinks being rich means he can do whatever he wants.
As criminals should.