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.
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.
That’s stupid
Duh, but that’s the point of the council, to ensure they can’t do anything.
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.
So that’s why Putin has to watch his step, but 'murican presidents can commit all sorts of war crimes and still say they stand for “democracy and freedom”
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.
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).
In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn’t want to fuck with the money.
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
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.
can you really prove that the US leadership wasn’t so deluded that they thought that Iraq genuinely didn’t have WMD?
I can’t be fucked to look up something that hasn’t been relevant for over ten years, but the answer to this question is definitely yes. Do some research and it shouldn’t be hard to find.
K
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.
Starting a war is illegal under international law. People have hanged for it.
Sometimes, sometimes it isn’t. Specifically what would you have charged him with, and what evidence would have convicted him?
Crimes against the peace. The evidence is he started a war in Iraq. It’s not complicated.
Yes, it is. Merely starting a war isn’t justification for prosecution in the ICC. That’s not how the laws work.
There is no such thing as international law despite what you’ve heard
There’s laws written, courts. They’ve arrested people, tried them, and punished the convicted. You can call it whatever dumb word you want to call it.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
