War crimes
April 10th, 2003
As expected, the overwhelming military might of the United States and its partners is prevailing over the troops of Saddam Hussein.
The British have taken the key city of Basra, and US forces appear to have taken the Iraqi capital. Iraqi military resistance has weakened considerably, and there is growing evidence of Iraqi citizens’ jubilation over the impending collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. No “quagmire” is in sight, and no Vietnam-like predicament is likely to confront US forces, despite the possibility that they will remain in Iraq for some time to come.
The United States is thus likely to “win” all of Iraq within a few weeks by achieving their basic aim of “regime change”: i.e., removing Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party from power and replacing him with someone of its own choice. Whether such a “victory” will mean a stable, peaceful and democratic Iraq is another matter, however.
In Afghanistan, the first target in the US’ “war on terror”, the exact opposite has occurred, 18 months after the US “victory”. The interim government of Hamid Karzai, which the US installed there, has so far been unable to extend its control beyond Kabul, and is besieged by problems ranging from its lack of means to revive the economy, and the tenacity of Taliban remnants, to the determination of local warlords not to yield an inch of their territories to the central government.
In Iraq the post-war problems will be equally immense. The Iraqi infrastructure—the bridges, the waterworks, the roads—as well as the economy, so efficiently obliterated by US super bombs, will have to be rebuilt. This task, gargantuan as it is, pales in comparison to that of restoring order not only by installing an interim authority in place, but even more fundamentally, by reconciling or at least keeping from each others’ throats the factions that the regime of Saddam Hussein managed to control through coercion. Iraqi society itself will be in shambles, and there will be a desperate need to rebuild the educational and health care systems, provide jobs, and prevent the escalation of criminal activity.
Perhaps in recognition of the complexity of the problems a post-Saddam Iraq will inherit, US President George W. Bush announced, long before he launched the attack on Iraq last March 20, that the US “is not in the business of nation-building”. As the events in Afghanistan before that and the events in Iraq since then have shown, the US is more accurately and more expertly in the business of nation-destroying.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, though apparently planned as early as 2000, has been totally focused on regime change rather than what comes after. The US in fact seems to have put together a plan on what to do with Iraq that’s at best haphazard, containing elements from the US experience in post-World War II Japan and Europe, and, significantly, without the critical involvement of the UN.
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair did say that the UN will have “a vital role” in post-war Iraq, but were both unable to provide details, prompting one Britich Broadcasting Corporation reporter to comment that during the Bush-Blair summit in Belfast, Ireland, there seemed to be “deliberate confusion”.
What Bush has made clear, however, is that the UN role will not include the administration of post-war Iraq, despite the pathetic plea of UN Secretary General Kofi Anan that the UN be allowed both a peacekeeping and administrative role “because of its long experience in these areas” and to “legitimize” the invasion.
Apparently the UN role will not include presiding over the war crimes trials that the United States wants in Iraq as part of that very process of legitimizing the invasion.
Consistent with its opposition to the UN International Criminal Court, last week the US dismissed suggestions that an international war crimes tribunal under UN auspices be created in post-war Iraq to try former Iraqi officials for war crimes. Instead the United States will either convene “new Iraqi courts”, or use US military and civil courts for that purpose.
On trial will be leading officials of the Saddam Hussein government, including Saddam himself, his sons Uday and Qusai, and 200 others the US says tortured, executed and raped Iraqi dissidents.
As in the plan to install a US administrator in Iraq, this part of the US post-war agenda takes a leaf from the US experience in World War II, when it used US jurists to try German war criminals in Nuremberg.
There was of course no United Nations at the time. The plan today to convene a similar court thus ignores the existence of the UN, which during the Nuremberg trials was still to be organized by the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France and the United Kingdom. It is at the same time likely to cast doubt on the impartiality of the tribunals.
By using its own military or civil courts, the US will assume the roles of both accuser and judge, the crimes of which it intends to accuse leading Iraqi officials being crimes allegedly committed against its forces.
Among those crimes are the alleged execution of at least one US prisoner, some of its soldiers’ firing on US forces while pretending to surrender, and showing video tapes over Iraqi TV of US prisoners of war.
The independence of such tribunals, specially military tribunals, will thus be questioned, since, despite all the rhetoric about the Iraqis deciding on their own, post-Saddam Iraq will be under US military control.
To the victors go the spoils, among them that of self-righteousness. US law does sanction trials by US courts for crimes against US soldiers in time of war, and it is a foregone conclusion that those courts will issue stiff prison and even death sentences to Iraqi “war criminals” for causing the deaths of several—make that dozens—of US soldiers, and “humiliating” US prisoners over television.
On the other hand the slaughter of thousands of non-combatants including women and children not only through such indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction like Cruise missiles and cluster bombs, but also through indiscriminate firing by US forces, will go unpunished.
No one will try US officials for the deaths of thousands dismembered by the efficiency of those and other US weapons, or for the deaths of the women and children shot by US forces on the streets and in their homes, among other reasons because the US has refused to ratify the UN convention on the International Criminal Court, apparently on the well-founded suspicion that it might end up the accused there.
The trials the US intends to conduct will thus demonstrate that it’s not so much the laws of civilized conduct—which the US invasion brazenly flouted—that will henceforth govern the relations between nations, but that old and tested principle, Might is Right.
In the process, the show case trials it is planning are unlikely to contribute anything positive to the social reconstruction of Iraq, and more likely indeed to contribute to the disintegration of civil life that even now is evident in the streets of Baghdad.
The slaughter of innocents through the weapons of mass destruction the US invasion of Iraq has demonstrated only the United States has is by itself a monstrous war crime. But even more monstrous is its aftermath—the destruction of an entire society, for the reconstruction of which the destroyer denies responsibility.
(abs-cbnNEWS.com, April 10, 2003)