Preemptive War Criminals

In 1983, Rumsfeld, then chairman of G.D. Searle, a worldwide pharmaceutical firm, presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden cowboy spurs as a token of appreciation from Ronald Reagan.

__________________________________________________________________

Half the population of Iraq is under 15 years of age, including half of the five million Iraqis living in Baghdad. As part of the U.S. military’s “Rapid Dominance” posture, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld proposes a “Shock and Awe” military strategy meant to devastate Iraq’s capital city. Day One of the war calls for launching 500-800 Cruise missiles on Baghdad and other targets, unleashing munitions packing an explosive punch equivalent to a nuclear device. As a war planner boasted to CBS News, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.” On Day Two, the Pentagon proposes to do it again, launching another 500-800 high-explosive missiles.

Not since the blanket bombing of European cities in World War II has such premeditated devastation been planned for a civilian population. A team of international investigators recently completed the first pre-conflict field research, concluding that casualties among Iraqi children will likely be in the thousands, probably in the tens of thousands, “and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.”

Even without a second Gulf War, the impact on Iraqi children has been horrific. In the late 1980s, the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five was 50 per thousand. By 1999, the rate had reached 130 per thousand. In 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked her view of the embargo on Iraq in light of the fact that 500,000 children had died due to sanctions-related effects, largely dysentery and acute diarrhea. Child mortality soared after the U.S. bombed sewage and water purification facilities and then invoked the embargo to block replacement parts along with the chlorine and alum required for water purification. Albright’s on-the-air assessment: “We believe it is worth the price.” UNICEF confirms that an estimated 500,000 more children died in Iraq in the decade following the Gulf War than died in the previous decade.

Two UN chiefs of Iraqi sanctions have since resigned in protest over their impact: Peter van Walsun, chief of the UN Sanctions Committee, and Hans von Sponeck, chief UN coordinator. Noting that “chronic malnourishment cannot be repaired,” American Denis Halliday, former UN representative in Baghdad, charges “we are running a genocide program in Iraq” thus far killing almost three times more Iraqis than the number of Japanese killed in U.S. atomic blasts in WWII. This modern-day slaughter, ongoing and poised to increase in both scope and scale, calls for the issuance of criminal indictments under international law.

Reversal of Fortune

Before the Gulf War, Iraqi living standards were fast approaching that of southern Europe, featuring free education, ample electricity, modern farming, a large middle class and, according to the World Health Organization, access to health care for 93 percent of the population. A once proud and prospering nation fell apart as 525,000 Iraqis died in wars since 1980, including 375,000 in an 8-year Iraq-Iran conflict in which the U.S. sold arms and munitions to both sides.

In 1983, Rumsfeld, then chairman of G.D. Searle, a worldwide pharmaceutical firm, presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden cowboy spurs as a token of appreciation from Ronald Reagan. After the U.S. State Department issued an alert in 1984 claiming Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, Rumsfeld returned to Baghdad. Though he arrived the same day (March 5, 1984) that UN scientists confirmed their use against Iran, he lodged neither a formal nor an informal complaint. Nor did the Brits, the Israelis or any nation now supporting war in Iraq. According to an article published years later in Covert Action Quarterly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided crucial components for those weapons. Receipts can be found on the Internet from U.S. businesses that sold Iraq other key components, financed with generous loans backed by the U.S.

As a portion of their population, Iraqi casualties in that conflict were equivalent to 5.6 million deaths in the U.S. population, more than 100 times the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War. With their economy in tatters, many Iraqis fled the country. With the collapse of oil revenues, education collapsed with help from the U.S. and Britain who banned the import of printing equipment for schools as a dangerous “dual use” item disallowed under the sanctions. That same rationale was used to block textbooks, medicines, medical journals, medical supplies, vaccines, vitamins, eggs, incubators, dialysis machines, dental supplies, milk and yogurt production equipment, water tankers, disinfectants, pesticides, insecticides and, until recently, cancer medications, even those for children because they contain minute traces of radiation.

Compared to other economies in the region, Iraqi standards of living saw dramatic improvements during the pre-sanctions era, especially after the Ba’ath Party of Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Despite his loathsome treatment of political enemies and ethnic minorities, that diversion to domestic use of oil revenues previously paid to foreign investors enabled the typical Iraqi’s well-being to surge ahead of their neighbors in the region. The secular Iraq also embraced a culture of modernity that remains missing in its neighbors.

By some accounts, Iraq’s oil reserves are equal to those of Russia, the United States, China and Mexico combined. As vice chairman of the Party, Hussein oversaw nationalization, directing oil revenues to fund an infrastructure building binge that provided roads, schools and hospitals. According to the UN, Iraq created one of the best public health systems in the Middle East, a feat that earned Iraq – and Hussein -- an award from UNESCO.

Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein remains a disturbed and dangerous man, squandering revenues as he ordered the building of 78 presidential palaces. “Everything you have heard is true,” says Joe Wilson, U.S. ambassador to Iraq during the first Bush administration. “He killed some people and then sent bills to their families for the bullet used.” Saddam is bad, Wilson confirms, “but total war is not the best next step. There are other steps that can be taken.”

Genocide via Sanctions

Under the combined weight of bombing and sanctions, Iraqi civil society collapsed, including, most dramatically, its health care system. With the exception of its oil-extraction facilities, U.S. and British bombers destroyed Iraqi infrastructure, targeting not only water treatment and sewage plants but also power generators, telephone exchanges, food production plants, food storage facilities and other crucial components of civilian life. Crime soared as cultural, social and ethical values were steadily degraded in a nation where the first civilization emerged 6,000 years ago.

In this ancient cradle of humanity featuring (literally) hundreds of thousands of historic sites, child beggars now ply their trade alongside prostitutes as Iraqi society collapsed. By 1996, all sewage treatment plants had broken down in a country that now pours 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers. Corruption has become endemic. Iraqi living standards are now equivalent to Sudan as incomes fell to a tenth of what they were in 1980 and sanctions reduced the nation to something akin to a vast refugee camp.

Two-thirds of Iraqis, more than 16 million people, depend on a government-provided food ration that, by international standards, represents the minimum for human sustenance. Hospital wards are crammed with severely malnourished children. The proposed “Shock and Awe” destruction of Iraq’s transport system is certain to imperil food distribution, with fully foreseeable effects on civilians, particularly children. Unemployment exceeds 50 percent while those with jobs make between $4 and $8 per month, the latter the salary of a physician working in a primary health care center. The embargo succeeded largely in making civilians dependent on a despotic military government, ensuring that the worst effects of sanctions would fall on those whose voices count the least – women and children.

Since the UN’s oil-for-food program began in 1996, Iraq has spent roughly $23 billion on goods that actually arrived. That amount comes to about $170 per year per person, less than half the annual per capita income of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and less than half what the UN spends to feed the dogs it deploys in Iraqi de-mining operations. Much of the civilian population has been reduced to a marginal nutritional status.
In March 2002, over vigorous objection from the U.S., a UNICEF official was allowed to report on the inhumane conditions in Iraq since the imposition of sanctions. Fully 25 percent of children in south and central Iraq suffer from chronic malnutrition, which is typically irreversible, and nine percent from acute malnutrition. One in four Iraqi babies is born prematurely and underweight. Few survive. With only six week’s supply of food in the country, UN agencies estimate that an invasion could cause 100,000 immediate casualties and risk the deaths of nearly 1 million of Iraq’s 12 million children, with the rest of Iraqi youth put at grave risk of starvation, disease and severe psychological trauma.

The UN Genocide pact forbids the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. In January 1991, before the Gulf War, the Defense Intelligence Agency projected that sanctions would destroy Iraq’s ability to provide safe drinking water within six months, predicting “this could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease,” particularly “such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid.” All of this came to pass, the impact accelerated by U.S. bombing. The DIA list could have included water-borne diseases (up 1,000 percent since 1991), leprosy, cancers, heart defects and child starvation because, as war planners conceded, “food processing, electronic and particularly pharmaceutical plants require extremely pure water that is free from biological contaminants.” Typhoid cases alone have increased from 2,200 in 1990 to 27,000 in 1999, along with a steady rise in measles, diphtheria, gastroenteritis, meningitis, and respiratory illnesses, resulting in high rates of child mortality – as the Pentagon predicted in 1991. An estimated 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die each month due to the effects of sanctions.

Seasoned weapons experts now charge that sanctions of this sort are a modern-day implement of war, an inexpensive weapon of mass destruction. The embargo successfully thwarted Iraq from meeting even its most basic humanitarian needs while also systematically causing untold damage to civilians and to the infrastructure on which civilian life depends. These deadly effects were anticipated, announced and then implemented in conscious violation of Article 54 of the Geneva Convention which states simply: “It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population….”

Weapons of Delayed Destruction

In the Gulf War, an estimated 150,000 Iraqis were killed as the U.S. exploded munitions equivalent to seven Hiroshimas, unleashing more explosive force in six weeks than during the entirety of the Second World War. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers were buried alive by plows mounted on Abrams tanks belonging to the fabled First Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One. The lumbering tanks flanked First World War-style Iraqi trenches so that tons of sand from the plow-spoil covered an estimated 8,000 Iraqi troops, largely forced conscripts, many of then still dressed in civilian attire and armed with Second World War-era rifles. Behind the plows came Bradley Fighting Vehicles spraying machine-gun fire into those trapped or not fully plowed under. An estimated 70 miles of trenches were covered over in an exercise that U.S. troops practiced beforehand based on satellite photos of the battlefield. The carnage was then quickly smoothed away with finishing touches applied by the M9 ACE, massive armored combat earthmovers, leaving no sign of the total annihilation.
U.S. casualties in the Gulf War totaled 148 (1000:1 ratio), two-thirds from accidents and friendly fire. But that didn’t end the effects of the war on U.S. military personnel. Of the 696,778 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf War, more than 220,000 have applied for medical benefits. As of May 2002, 159,238 had been awarded service-connected disability due to a war-related ailment vaguely described as Gulf War Syndrome.

The logical counterpoint to the Bush-Blair Doctrine of preemptive war is preemptive war crimes and the need -- quickly and preemptively – to indict foreseeable war criminals in both the U.S. and the U.K. Under the Geneva Convention, weapons can only be used in the field of battle, defined as military targets of the enemy during war. Similarly, weapons can only be used for the duration of the conflict. International law also forbids weaponry that is either unduly inhumane or has an unduly negative effect on the natural environment. Yet American and British troops are poised to deploy in the Gulf once again armed with depleted uranium munitions which, on explosion, create a firestorm of fine radioactive ceramic particles that are easily inhaled and readily absorbed by plants and animals, guaranteed to become a toxic component in the region’s food chain.

By the Pentagon’s own studies prior to the Gulf War, exposure to this aerosol uranium under battlefield conditions can lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, neurocognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects. In 1990, Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority estimated that if 50 tons of depleted uranium (“DU”) munitions were left in the Gulf, that radioactive materiel would lead to 50,000 extra cancer deaths in the region over the following decade. Experts estimate that 300 to 900 tons of DU debris were left behind, its residue traveling wherever the wind blows. Children are 10 to 20 times more sensitive to the effects of radiation than adults.

In Basra, the southernmost point of entry for any U.S.-led invasion, pediatricians report an increase of six to 12 times in the incidence of childhood leukemia and cancer as radiation levels in flora and fauna reached 84 times the safe limit recommended by the World Health Organization. In practical effect, the first Gulf War was a nuclear war. Dr. Huda Ammash, a U.S.-educated environmental biologist at Baghdad University, calculates that the 10-year impact of this radiation is equivalent to 100 Chernobyls.

Iraqi doctors reported 11 birth defects per 100,000 in 1989. By 2001, the rate was 116 per 100,000, including a doubling of congenital malformations in newborns among exposed populations and a surge in late-term spontaneous abortions due to congenital effects, reportedly now two to three cases each day, up from one per month. Wives of Iraqi Gulf War veterans are three times more likely to suffer miscarriages than the average across Iraq. A photographic record from Basra General Hospital chronicles babies born without eyes, brains, limbs or genitalia, with internal organs on the outside, and with grotesquely deformed heads and bodies, including newborns featuring a single eye in the middle of the forehead.

Due to the risk, Iraqis of child-bearing age now often choose not to marry as everyone knows couples coping with grievously ill or massively disfigured children. Iraqi men in their mid-30s are now dying at record rates. “They are not ill,” reports Felicity Arbuthnot, “they just give up – especially young men between the ages of about 30 to 35. Their youth has been sacrificed to the embargo and they see middle age approaching with no hope, no dreams, no aspirations or ability to provide for those they love.” If cancer continues to spread at the present rate, an estimated 44 percent of the population of southern Iraq will develop cancer by the time today’s 15 year-olds reach 25.

Iraqis are not the only ones in harm’s way. Depleted uranium remains toxic for 4.5 billion years. One-third of U.S. tanks deployed in Desert Storm were armed with DU munitions, ensuring whole-body radioactive exposure by U.S. troops. Likewise for those handling aircraft and naval ordnance, including airmen, sailors, pilots and mechanics. Of the 29,000 British troops who served in that conflict, more than 8,000 are ill and over 400 have died. In 1999, a coroner in the north of England reported that he handled one suicide a week among Gulf War vets. Similar health effects are recorded among troops from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and among those exposed to DU munitions in Kosovo and Bosnia.

Foreseeable Criminality

Historically, war crimes have been committed against an enemy. In this case, the crimes include the premeditated slaughter of innocents, the premeditated destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the premeditated endangerment of coalition troops as, without informed consent, many military personnel were exposed to a toxic soup of unproven vaccines (for anthrax, nerve gas, etc.), and then ordered to deploy using munitions laced with a known trans-generational toxin, deadly not only to those exposed but also to their unborn offspring. A decade after the Gulf War, U.S. veterans still report traces of uranium in their urine and semen.

The Bush administration’s National Security Strategy envisions an America willing to demonstrate what the U.S. Space Command calls “full spectrum dominance” so that the White House can dictate to the world community militarily, politically and economically – with the help of its loyal lieutenants, Britain and Israel. Insisting on “global U.S. preeminence,” GOP strategists -- including Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney (Bush Senior’s Defense Secretary), and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz – served as founding members in 1997 of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank of conservative political operatives who proposed a war on Iraq more than a quarter-century ago. Consistent with a strategy first advocated in 1975 by Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, the seizure of Arab oil became the PNAC’s linchpin in a strategy of global hegemony both fueled and funded with Arab oil.

Arguing that what America needs is “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor,” these PNAC stalwarts were quick to describe 9/11 as “the opportunity of the ages.” Thus, on the morning of 9/12, Rumsfeld urged that the U.S. attack Iraq, even though 9/11 was directed by Muslim fundamentalists who despise Iraq’s secular regime. Osama bin Laden issued a decree calling for the death of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim. Hussein issued a similar decree calling for the death of Osama bin Laden, a Wahhabi Muslim allied with the Shiites who have long opposed Hussein’s secular reign. Hussein views bin Laden as a crazed zealot, as we do, and bin Laden sees Hussein as a thug, as we do. The only thing they share in common is a common enemy, us. Fully aware of the Gulf War coalition’s superior military might, Hussein kept in the rear his elite Republican Guard troops, composed largely of Sunni Muslims, while deploying Shiite conscripts along the front lines, confident that their certain slaughter would outrage Shiites everywhere.

Richard Perle, a founding member of PNAC and now chair of the powerful Defense Policy Board, calls for “total war.” “No stages,” he argues in an interview recently published in London’s New Statesman. “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq…this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war…our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” Rather than dismissing Perle as a madman, Rumsfeld regards him as a valued Pentagon strategist.

In its September 2000 report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, PNAC war planners argued that Pentagon spending must expand by $48 billion, precisely the dollar increase proposed in Bush’s 2003 budget, so that Washington can “fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars.” Their “Pax Americana” vision of global dominance advocates the preemptive use of both bunker-buster nukes and weapons in outer space as means to project military might globally. The report dismisses Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a minor distraction. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,” the report continues, “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Just since the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia has given the U.S. more than $43 billion to pay for weapons, military equipment and military construction projects, plus another $16 billion from Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Our purchases of Gulf oil funded their purchases of our military supplies, in effect, enabling the U.S. to preposition materiel in the Gulf, financing an armed regional sphere of influence, including the construction of two $1 billion Central Command headquarters located in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. On February 25th, Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki confirmed in Senate testimony that the military force for postwar Iraq could total “several hundred thousand” American soldiers, confirming why Rumsfeld says little about an exit strategy.

Iran shares a 730-mile border with Iraq that will need to be guarded by American troops. Its nuclear program is far larger, far more advanced and far closer to success than Iraq’s. Iraq’s long-oppressed majority Shiite population is certain to be outraged by a U.S. invasion, putting pressure on Iran’s fragile government and its fledgling attempt to escape its ugly fundamentalism. In comments appended to a March report by the Council on Foreign Relations, James F. Dobbins, special counsel to Afghanistan in the Bush administration, said that “even the lowest suggested requirement of 75,000 troops” would mean “that every infantryman in the U.S. Army spend 6 months in Iraq out of every 18 to 24.”

The PNAC Vision of the World

PNAC-inspired war planners predict their Iraq blitzkrieg will equal a nuclear explosion in its death and destruction. “The sheer size of this has never been … contemplated before,” one strategist concedes, though what’s envisioned is not without military precedent. In April 1937, Nazi war planners dropped 100,000 pounds of incendiary bombs on the peaceful Basque village of Guernica, destroying 70 percent of the town and killing 1,500 of its residents, a third of the population. As with Baghdad, the goal in Guernica was not just the assured slaughter of a far weaker foe – dominantly women and children -- the goal was to demonstrate overwhelming military dominance as a means for advancing a far more ambitious global strategy.

Leveling the ancient city of Baghdad will not uncover weapons of mass destruction even if they, in fact, exist. The bombing will, however, provide cover for war planners who can argue that those alleged weapons were destroyed in the bombing. From the PNAC’s perspective, a “bunker buster” nuclear device would prove triply useful: it obliterates the evidence, the radioactivity precludes access to verify what remains, and the blast demonstrates military dominance, per Guernica.

Roughly eight percent of the bombs dropped in the Gulf War were laser-guided “smart bombs,” a figure the Pentagon says will rise to 80 percent in their next incursion. The potential for surgically precise air strikes is a key reason Gulf War II is billed by the Pentagon as more humane than Gulf War I. Yet that oft-touted accuracy also confirms that war planners could easily target any suspicious facility to which UN inspectors are denied admission. Or armed UN troops could be deployed alongside UN arms inspectors to find, disarm and destroy forbidden weapons. But ridding the world of unsavory weapons was never the U.S. goal. That’s why we compromised the inspection process in the late-90s, replacing arms inspectors with intelligence operatives who assisted war planners in directing attacks against Hussein. Hussein has long understood that weapons of mass destruction are not the issue, certainly not for the advocates of Pax Americana. That well-known stance confirms that it was U.S. war-planners and not just a murderous Iraqi regime that kept the lethal sanctions in place.

On February 28th, faced with imminent release of a report by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix announcing “significant” progress in the inspections, the White House quickly raised the stakes, finally conceding that the only acceptable response is regime change. Though the UN resolution calls for lifting the embargo once Iraq complies with arms inspections, the announcement confirmed that U.S. support for UN inspections was largely a pretense. The U.S. goal was never the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. Nor is our goal solely about access to Iraqi oil. Nor is it about bringing democracy to “failed states” (a favorite PNAC term) in the long-fractured Middle East, an impossible result when pursued by armed Judeo-Christian troops deployed on Arab soil, particularly in a nation long divided by Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. The purpose is domination. The goal is empire. The strategy, in the words of Harlan Ullman, author of Shock and Awe, is to destroy the Iraqi people “physically, emotionally and psychologically.”

Destruction is not required if we only meant to purchase Iraqi oil. The Iraqis are happy to sell it to us if only we’d lift the embargo. Iraq’s oil reserves total as much as 432 billion barrels according to U.S. government estimates. At $30 per barrel, the potential long-term proceeds total $13 trillion in today’s petrodollars, plenty enough to restore Iraq’s prosperity. Far more likely, following our example elsewhere, we’ll dominate the political scene and instead “privatize” the oil with the help of Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the royalist Iraqi National Congress, a group of wealthy aristocrats-in-exile who fled when Iraq’s repressive monarchy was ousted in 1958. Recently identified as our handpicked political leader for a post-Hussein Iraq, Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 counts of bank fraud. Since leaving Iraq, he’s devoted the INC to the overthrow of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and the reversal of the Party’s nationalization of Iraqi oil, promising American and British oil companies that “they will have a big shot at Iraq oil” -- provided they can put him in power.

Strategically, this unleashing of Pentagon “Shock and Awe” ferocity is meant to send a clear signal that an American-led, British-backed, Israeli-encouraged Axis of Power means to convert the PNAC’s goal of righteous dominance into a military, political and economic reality. The fragile peace in this volatile region ensures subsequent – and immediate -- forays into Iran and Syria, followed by likely incursions into Libya and Lebanon. That strategic theme has long been advocated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who, on February 11th, was assured by the Hague’s highest court that he will be tried under Belgian law for war crimes committed in 1982, though not so long as he enjoys the immunity of his office.

Thugs, Criminals and Evil-doers

The prevention of this war and the cessation of sanctions-related war crimes requires that U.S. and British leaders be exposed to similar legal jeopardy by placing them under indictment for both past and proposed war crimes. In violation of the UN’s founding principle of non-aggression, coalition leaders are jeopardizing democracy’s capacity to hold out a moral standard to the world. Their first-strike strategy also ensures that the U.S. and the U.K. will forfeit their right to object should Pakistan or India attack one another, if North Korea should invade the South, or if China should invade Taiwan. China, Japan and Europe depend heavily on Persian Gulf oil. China may well oppose the PNAC’s insistence that the U.S. should control the world’s oil spigot.

France and Germany do not oppose the United States, they oppose the Bush regime, its agenda for the region and its imperial ambition. Their WWII experience predisposes them to worry about any regime that consolidates state and corporate power. And they oppose any regime willing to resort to force to take control of a region that holds two of the world’s every three barrels of oil. They oppose the imposition of a corporatist agenda worldwide, in the process flaunting UN principles and committing war crimes that are certain to further inflame Arab and Muslim resentment worldwide, unleashing more terror, ensuring more instability and preempting more resources.

With worldwide sympathy for 9/11 fading into present-day Real Politik, our friends abroad are fast becoming more afraid of us than for us. Former Gulf War generals Norman Schwarzkopf, Anthony Zinni and Wesley Clark leveled bristling broadsides at this push for U.S. dominance in the Middle East. Zinni’s dismissive appraisal of the GOP hawks: “I’m not sure which planet they live on, because it isn’t the one that I travel.” By imperiling U.S. troops with exposure to untested vaccines and uranium-laced weaponry, current war planners also undermine confidence in their commanders, imperiling the effectiveness of our armed forces in those situations where the U.S. is genuinely at risk. Under international law, both preemptive and “preventive” wars are outlawed as acts of aggression expressly forbidden under the UN charter to which the U.S. and Britain are founding signatories. To prevent this lawless military strike and discourage its re-occurrence, the leadership of law-abiding nations must mount a preemptive judicial strike against those Americans, Brits, Israelis and others who support this aggression. Absent that initiative, international law will fall into disrepute. Our true friends will intervene, pushing back against us by ensuring that both civilian leaders and Pentagon war planners are preemptively indicted as war criminals rather than emboldened and enabled by the lack of vigorous international resistance. Our refusal to support the International Criminal Court only confirms the intent of the Bush administration to operate outside the constraints of international norms in pursuit of the PNAC’s empire-building agenda.

From the perspective of those put most at risk – the women and children or Iraq -- that indictment should include charges covering not only Gulf War and embargo-related crimes but also those offenses these aggressors have signaled their intent to commit. While Saddam Hussein’s intent remains unclear, ours is crystal clear. That intention must itself be resisted. No apologies are needed as no legitimate U.S. leader would so imperil this nation’s hard-earned legitimacy in the court of world opinion. Since when does the world’s bastion of democracy resort to bellicose “might is right” and “with us or against us” rhetoric in its dealings with allies, jeopardizing decades of goodwill gained at the cost of untold toil and treasure? Our Pentagon chief’s macho posturing and our Boy President’s petty impatience confirm that the nation’s national security strategy is deeply and disturbingly unserious. Either that or the nation’s war planners mean to mount an attack based on an agenda that preempts national security.

We need help. With the corporatist takeover of mainstream media, American citizens simply don’t know any better. Texas-based Clear Channel controls programming on 1,225 radio stations, one-tenth of all radio broadcasting nationwide, ranking first in five of the top-ten media markets and second in four others, reaching 110 million listeners each week. Showcasing Hard Right talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, this media conglomerate distributes programming to more than 7,800 radio stations, reaching 54 percent of those nationwide between the ages of 18 and 49. Though Eisenhower warned against the perils of the ‘military-industrial complex’, that danger has since morphed into an even more perilous ‘military-media’ complex. As chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, is actively pursuing rule changes certain to ensure even greater media consolidation.

This war is being sold by the White House like so much breakfast cereal. The American public confronts a leadership of dubious legitimacy and doubtful competence who’ve announced their intent to use armed force in their pursuit of global corporatist goals. Treason may well be at work. As we’re between election cycles, the courts offer one of the few nonviolent means for opposing this lawless regime. What’s required is legitimate indictments issued by legitimate courts. As an American lawyer with experience abroad, I pray that our friends abroad quickly pursue war crime indictments of American political operatives who’ve assumed the reins of power in our country. The preservation of our democracy may well depend on that intervention.

President Bush implied just such a preemptive judicial strategy when, on February 25th, he warned Iraqi generals they should “clearly understand that if they take innocent life, if they destroy infrastructure, they will be held to account as war criminals.” He followed up on that strategy in mid-March by publishing a list of Iraqis who would be tried as war criminals. His words not only accurately reflect international law, they also confirm the grounds for his own indictment, and for the indictment of others in his cabinet who support this aggression. That well-settled legal point was clarified more than a half-century ago by Robert L. Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, speaking August 25, 1945:

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

__________________________________________________________________

Former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Mr. Gates is author of “The Ownership Solution and Democracy at Risk”
Tweet