No Stupid Questions

I wouldn't put Afghanistan and Iraq on the same level.

Bin Laden (and Al-Qaeda) was in Afghanistan and they refused to hand him over. That invasion had the support of NATO and even Russia and China. Why? Because Al-Qaeda existing doesn't benefit anyone and they were behind the attacks.

Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences. Iraq used to have chemical weapons and even used them against civilians back in the 80s, started a war with Iran and invaded Kuwait, but those were not the reasons given for the invasion...

Now, why wasn't Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia. What are you going to do, invade the country to arrest the president?

Is it fair? No. But it's how the world works.

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.

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.

One of the major prerequisites for people to get charged with war crimes, is to lose the war.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He should have been. Especially after the photos of Abu Ghraib came out. But it is the U.S. so he payed no penalties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 these are uncharted legal waters. There is no precedent for charging a former US president with a crime.

Yet.

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.