Commentary
Butchers of Bushland: Is the price worth it?
By Luciana Bohne
Online Journal Associate Editor


Oct 16, 2006, 12:24

There is no longer any doubt that Bush's policy in Iraq is facilitating genocide. The recent Lancet study makes that very clear.

Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq was a premeditated and documentable conspiracy to subvert the peace -- a crime for which the Nazi elites were hanged. The war crimes Nuremberg Tribunal, Protocol, and Principles would have no qualms calling the invasion of Iraq "the supreme crime," a crime from which all other war crimes have derived, including genocide.

The war against Iraq was, as far as international law is concerned, the mother of all crimes. It violated the Constitution two, three times over, starting with violating the UN Charter, which is the "supreme law of [our] land," according to the Constitution, and encompasses the principles of the Nuremberg Judgment. The occupation violated the Geneva Conventions against mistreatment of prisoners. It violated the Geneva and Hague Conventions on the occupier's obligations 1) by failing to provide Iraqis with security and basic services, while at the same time disbanding the Iraqi army, 2) by failing to safeguard the sites of their national patrimony (National Library, museums, etc), 3) by attempting to sell off Iraqi assets, banks, services to foreign bidders 4) by altering Iraq's tax laws without representation (Bremer's "Orders"). Now comes evidence of national dying on a genocidal scale from the Lancet study.

We live in a grotesque rogue state. Its disregard for law and human life endangers the planet, yet the larger the crime grows the less we are able to fathom it. A terrible numbness envelops us. We are becoming one of "them" -- the freaks at the helm. Or, are we hoping that "elections" will deliver us from evil? We have to realize, sooner rather than later, that the only thing that stands between the horror and their victims is our willingness to oppose it. This empire thing will not stop by electing the Democrats: they

have never opposed this war. They will send more troops; they will expend more funds; they will tell more lies.

Unless they start to fear us.

We say we "support the troops." Do we know what that means?

It means supporting the death and injury not only of nearly 3,000 US troops and 20,000 casualties but also the death of over 650,000 Iraqis, the detention, torture, and disappearance of an unknown number of others, and the projected partition of the country.

It means supporting genocide by denying it. Five hundred Iraqis per day have been dying since 19 March 2003, when Bush decided to despoil, rape, plunder, poison, bomb, torture and steal Iraq from Iraqis because they were oppressed by Saddam Hussein.

It means supporting George Bush, the humanoid predator in the White House, who sneered at the Lancet's study, referring to the results as "whatever they guessed at" -- and that was just before he added as an afterthought that the "innocent" death of Iraqis concerned him greatly.

It means supporting the US bullets that directly killed about 150,000 Iraqi men, women, and children, or 31 percent of the Lancet's total estimated deaths. The Lancet study, based on cluster sampling, used the standard methodology employed to estimate mortality in cases of conflict and disasters.

Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom has liberated Iraq of 2.5 percent of its population in three years. Is the world better off without Saddam? I wouldn't ask an Iraqi that question!

France has just passed a bill in the lower chamber, proposing to make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide of 1.5 million people by the Turkish government in WWW I. The war in Iraq is half way to that number, and the warmongers are saying they won't pull out until 2010 or 2011 (though I wouldn't hold my breath; the US has 60 nuclear warheads in bases in South Korea, half a century after that war, and a similar number on Italian bases; it never "leaves"). If one adds 1.5 million Iraqis killed by the US sanction regime (1990-2003) and now over half a million killed as a result of the US occupation regime we're way over the number of people who died in the Armenian holocaust -- and the fat lady has not sung yet!

It means supporting more than 50 percent unemployment and 100 percent anarchy in crucial parts of Iraq.

It means war crimes such as the destruction of cities such as Falluja, Ramadi, Tel-afar and others.

It means one Iraqi child in four suffering from malnutrition.

It means a cost of $500 billion for the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq thus far while US citizens have scant defenses against natural disasters and catastrophic illness.

It means no end in sight.

It is time we ask the butchers in the White House a question the poet W.H. Auden asked in verse about another war: "To save your world you asked this man to die:/Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?" (Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier)