The similarities between Iran in 2026 and Iraq in 2003 are obvious, and have been commented on before, most thoroughly by Frederick Deknatel in New Lines magazine. Like Trump, George W. Bush promised a quick, easy victory, only to plunge the U.S. into a conflict much more protracted and bloody than the one he’d advertised. Like Trump, he slaughtered untold numbers of civilians.
In both cases, this was a unilateral assault on a sovereign nation in the Middle East which had not attacked the United States, making it a clear-cut war of aggression. Aggression is the “supreme crime” in international law, and one of the primary crimes Nazi officers were hanged for at Nuremberg. The point of those trials, as chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said at the time, was to establish for the world that actions like invading Poland would never be acceptable: “civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
And yet, more than 20 years after the fact, Bush and his associates have never faced any serious penalties for their invasion of Iraq, or for the litany of human rights abuses they committed in the process. Bush himself continues to be treated as a respectable figure in mainstream American politics, often compared favorably to the more vulgar and erratic Trump.
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And so, just a few decades later, Trump has walked through the door that Bush left wide-open, secure in the expectation that he, too, is unlikely to ever face real consequences.
It didn’t have to be that way. Over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, plenty of people made noble efforts to bring Bush to account for his crimes, and if they had been listened to and empowered, the world might be a very different place today.
This article is written from what would perhaps feel a bit too US centric of a perspective for this community normally but the analysis I think is globally relevant because of how large the consequences were. It is a relevant read for anybody unfortunately.
In particular I condemn Obama for normalizing the use of drones to do violence without proactively establishing the accountability previous established forms of military violence were somewhat mitigated by.
He could have made the criteria for drone strikes far more rigid, defined and public and he chose to be a coward and be seduced by illusion of power it created.
There is an argument to be made that at a certain point maybe firing a missile from a drone is the best solution vs. sending in troops or shelling a place with artillery, but that must be the end product of a long line of human, vetted intelligence not the product of some operator sitting in Nevada inside a shipping crate spotting a boy in Afghanistan running at night with a shovel and bag and realizing that this person qualifies as a military target according to the incredibly loose set of encompassing critera set by Obama and those before him.
It was obvious then how wrong those drone strikes were in countries I maybe have never even heard of for utterly obscure “national security” reasons the same way it is obvious now the US missile strikes on random fisherman in the Caribbean are heinously wrong.
Oh, I’m sure there’s reams of well-formatted government reports formally justifying everything in terms of national security. I imagine half of involves things like, “well this regime or group threatens this industry which is vital for national security because its products are used in military applications A, B, C, and D…” or “this group has a beef with allied government A, which provides vital resources B, C, and D, for vital military applications E, F, and G…”
In some ways that’s the most insulting part of all of this. Nominally we’re a nation still ruled by laws, but they’ve found legal tricks to get around so many constraints on executive power.
In any sane universe, if we’re going to be executing people for reasons of national security or justice, shouldn’t that be a thing for a jury to decide? We normally let juries decide such individualized punishments. Why shouldn’t drone strikes in foreign lands work the same way? Select 12 random people in the US, ideally people of the ethnic background of the country you’re committing the strike in. If you can convince by unanimous vote 12 of those people that a lethal strike is necessary, fine. Then at least it has some semblance of a justice system.