IRAQ
THE UN CHARTER (1945)
Article 2, 4 Military action against another country is a crime
Article 51 Self-defense is only lawful against an launched attack
Article 39 It takes a UN mandate to go to war on a threat assessment
The UN denied the Bush administration a mandate to war against Iraq. This makes it a war of aggression, the supreme war crime.
IRAQ WAR PLANNED APRIL 2001
British MP Michal Meacher writes in the 2003 Guardian article This War on Terrorism is Bogus that the Iraq war was documented planned by April 2001, and for the purpose of getting the oil:
“The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, Oct. 6 2002)".
'SAVED' IRAQ FROM OWN MASSACRES
The members of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations are the same as the ones of George W's that went to save the Iraqi people from the very same massacres less than two decades later, according to PBS FRONTLINE - Paths to Power.
| Reagan / Bush Sr. administration (1981-1989) |
| Bush Sr. administration (1989 - 93) |
| Rumsfeld | “December 1983: As Reagan's personal Middle East representative, he meets with Saddam Hussein. He hopes Iraq will counter the rise of Iran (…). Iraq has used chemical weapons, but Rumsfeld says the U.S. will look the other way”. |
| Powell | 1983: Top assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Reagan's national security adviser. 1989: Chair of the Joint Chiefs. |
| Rice | 1986: Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 1989: "Directs Bush's policies on Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council. (…) she will also advise Bush during the Gulf War”. |
| Armitage | 1983: Assistant secretary of defense 2001: Working under Powell |
| Cheney | 1989: Secretary of defense. |
BUSH FACILITATED MASSACRES
Human Rights Watch : "When the Iraqi government was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops in the 1980s, the Reagan administration was giving it intelligence information. After the Anfal genocide against Iraqi Kurds in 1988, the Reagan and first Bush administrations gave Baghdad billions of dollars in commodity credits and import loan guarantees.
The Iraqi government's ruthless suppression of the 1991 uprising was facilitated by the first Bush administration's agreement to Iraq's use of helicopters - permission made all the more callous because then-President Bush had encouraged the uprising in the first place. In each of these cases, Washington deemed it more important to defeat Iran or avoid Iranian influence in a potentially destabilized Iraq than to discourage or prevent large-scale slaughter. We condemn such calculations. However, we would not deny relief to, say, the potential victims of genocide simply because the proposed intervener had dirty hands in the past".
See also the 'WAR CHILDREN WITHOUT AID' section.
