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.
You know, I remember when I first started learning about Athens, Athenian Democracy, you’re kinda taught that it was a flawed form of government, because they so often turned on their leaders. That prosecuting leaders for the crimes they committed while in office was insane. That is absolutely the narrative in a lot of textbooks. I think about that a lot these days, as it becomes more and more apparent that that was probably one of the best aspects of the athenian democracy.
You mean Nixon, Johnson, like Kissinger got to die in bed for buttholes’s sakes.
The moment Obama gave his “I’m looking forward not backward” excuse for not bringing justice to the open corruption and rampant criminality of the bush years was the final death knell for the rule of law.
Since then the rich have understood that there are no consequences, and the masks have come off. I’ve heard that Putin cites Iraq as the inspiration for Ukraine - that it was when he realized the great powers could just lie and get away with wars of aggresion and doesn’t matter that no one believes the lie.
We’ve been at war with the middle east for three generations.
coincidentally, we’ve been screwing over American workers for about as long… we’ve been too poor to help them, I’m told.
My disgust in our political parties grows every year. I may even hate Democrats more, as they seem smart enough to know better.
I think it makes sense to feel as angry at the “good cop” as the “bad cop”, they must work in unison together to be effective.
Neither cop in this metaphor is a perfectly monolithic entity though which is why you still probably want to vote for the “good cop” in the hopes that some goodness escapes the event horizon of fatal neoliberalism.
We are forced to ask however if the DNC actually desires to win except under extraordinarily alienating circumstances for the average person living in the US which makes this a different question at this point.
It is no longer “are they in the way?”, it is “are they actively against us or just so incompetent and stubborn enough to functionally behave as though they are?”.
The sobering thing is, normally it doesn’t really matter either way in practice, but when a country is on the verge of shattering into a million pieces as the US is it really does matter.
I mean, why would the DNC want to win? Like any big organization, the point of the organization eventually becomes the continuance and growth of the organization itself. And in this organization, that means money. And it’s simply a lot easier to raise money when you’re out of power than when you are in power. When you’re in power, you have to start showing tangible results for what your donors and voters are demanding. When you’re out of power, all you have to do is shout from the mountaintops about all the evil the other party is doing. Do that and the money rolls in. Actually governing is hard. Often satisfying one constituent mean angering another. The Democratic Party is a big tent, we don’t agree with each other on everything. And it’s really easy to anger one donor while trying to please another donor. But simply highlighting the misdeeds of Republicans? That ultimately doesn’t help or hurt anyone. But it sure does bring in the dollars.
If you are a leader at the DNC, and your goal is to advance your own power and influence, unless you have aspirations for office yourself…Why exactly do you want Democrats to win? I would think you would want your side to win frequently enough to still have credibility as a competitive party, but otherwise seek to be out of office as often as possible.
You are at war with Iran because a fat orange paedo wants to distract everyone from the Epstein files.
Also, Obama in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, Donald Trump in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and Joe Biden in Syria and Iraq. Obama ran out of bombs in Syria ffs… I didn’t know this, but NATO ran out of bombs in Libya too…
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.
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
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.
or, not to mention the staggeringly obvious, that you failed to punish trump for his first term
There were problems before, but the biggest turning point in my mind was the quick passing of the Patriot Act. Something that was said so large they couldn’t possibly go through it in the urgent time of need we were in. But if it was that big, when was it put together?
There’s all sorts of legislation like this, waiting in the wings. Corey Doctorow has actually talked about it as a useful tactic for consumer rights reform. The old saying is “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Whatever your cause, have draft legislation ready to go that supports your cause. Even better, brainstorm possible crises that your cause might appear a solution to. In a crisis, people are panicking. Politicians are looking a way to DO SOMETHING. Often simply doing a thing is more important than what thing you actually choose to do. For example. Let’s say you want to advance right-to-repair laws. Have that draft legislation ready to go, already drafted by lawyers in whatever jurisdiction you’re working in. Then wait for a crisis caused by vendor lock-in. Maybe a city water supply shuts down for obscure DRMd hardware reasons. Maybe John Deere goes bankrupt, and nearly every tractor in America gets bricked because of DRM issues. There are many possible scenarios where vendor lock-in via DRM could cause a real national or statewide emergency. So have your consumer rights legislation ready to go. When an appropriate crisis happens, the politicians will be looking to DO SOMETHING. And you’ll be there, bill in hand, ready to hand them the solution to their imminent problem. That would be a way to use a crisis for good.
I have no doubt that the Patriot Act was written long before 9/11. But I wouldn’t read anything conspiratorial into it. It was written by Republicans, who want to advance executive authority for their own reasons. (Mostly that they can push things via presidential power alone that they could never get passed through Congress.) Or if you want to start enforcing morality laws, a government with advanced surveillance powers sure is useful. Anyway, Republicans wanted the powers in the Patriot Act for their own reasons. They wrote it, put it in a drawer, and waited. And then they just waited til the next big terrorist attack or national security crisis. We’re a nation continually engaged in wars around the world. We’re going to get some blowback once in awhile. It’s an entirely predictable consequence of our foreign policy choices. So all they had to do was write it and wait. There’s no need to imagine 9/11 as anything other than the work of Bin Ladin and company. (Not sure if you meant to imply this conspiracy angle, sorry if not.)
No conspiracy, just looking for a spot to shoehorn in what they want, and they got a perfect moment when anyone arguing it would be shouted down as anti-patriotic. The name was well chosen.
It so much isn’t a tied together conspiracy like some claim, I had heard when Bin Laden found out the results of his plan, even he was surprised how impactful it was. He was looking to cause a disaster that would scare Americans, but he didn’t know it would work so well.
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How about the whole entire south of the US after the civil war.
Civil war reconstruction failed, the south is deeply broken.
It all comes down to money in politics. The Heritage Foundation was a large part of the Iraq war, and had ten interns in charge of Iraqs economy:
Great perspective thank you
Not just Bush. And also, does anyone think that Trump or his administration would have cared?
If you think this article is arguing this is about “just Bush”, please read the article.
Because you never punished trump for anything ever
We did punish him by not electing the biggest fan of its architect, Kamala Cheney.
