by laws it enforces
By GUEST COMMENTARY BY JOHN MARCIANO (John Marciano lives in Santa Monica.)
Powerful arguments have been made for George W. Bush’s impeachment. But they do not go far enough. Bush and his major advisers must not only be impeached, but also prosecuted for planning and conducting a war of aggression — in violation of the U.S. Constitution, U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg Principles established after World War II.
This is not a partisan Bush attack. Bill Clinton deserved impeachment and prosecution for going to war in clear violation of the Constitution and international law — in Haiti, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. Since World War II, our lawless presidents have also included Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam; Reagan in Central America and Grenada; Bush I in Iraq and Panama; and even Jimmy Carter, the “patron saint” of human rights, in Indonesia, Iran and Nicaragua.
Presidential disregard for the Constitution and international law surged with Truman’s presidency after WW II. In 1950, he ordered U.S. forces to Korea without a congressional declaration of war and “violated the … UN Charter … by taking a unilateral military action even before the Security Council had called on members for their assistance.”
Not one president since FDR has asked for a declaration of war even though the U.S. has been in dozens of armed conflicts since 1945. Congress has “tagged along, offering blank-check authorizations or after-the-fact approvals of unilateral executive-branch war making.” (Peter Irons, “War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution”).
International legal scholars Richard Falk and Howard Friel write that Bush and his advisers created a climate of fear in order to gain support for the Iraq war, aided by major media outlets such as “The New York Times” (“The Record of the Paper”): “Iraq already possesses biological and chemical weapons...” (Aug. 11, 2002); “No one who knows his history (Hussein) can doubt that he is secretly trying to develop weapons of mass destruction” (Jan. 26, 2003).
These and similar statements were all proven to be lies. Iraq could not attack the U.S. with WMD because it had none. It had no missiles that could deliver them and it was not developing its nuclear weapons program.
This was known in 1995 when the CIA informed President Clinton that Iraq had destroyed its WMD in the early 1990s. Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law who had been in charge of Iraq’s WMD programs for 10 years, “told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors … that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them” (“Newsweek,” March 7, 2003).
According to Falk and Friel, Clinton withheld this CIA information and continued to support economic sanctions against Iraq “for its alleged failure to comply with UN disarmament resolutions.” The genocidal human cost of these sanctions for Iraqis has been documented in a number of reports: In 2000, a UN official estimated that about 500,000 children “under the age of 5 have died in Iraq since the imposition of UN sanctions 10 years ago” (“Reuters,” July 21, 2000); perhaps 400,000 of these died during Clinton’s eight-year presidency. There was no outcry in Congress or attacks on Clinton for supporting these sanctions — as opposed to the histrionics over his personal misbehavior in office and lying about sex.
Bush’s presidential wars do not place him above the law: a fundamental Nuremberg principle states that commit-ting “an act which constitutes a crime under international law … as head of state or responsible government official does not relieve (one) from responsibility...” Falk and Friel conclude that the Bush administration committed “the supreme international crime.” Its planned invasion of Iraq was “a conspiracy to commit aggression” and its actual invasion “committed the crime of aggression.”
At Nuremberg after WWII, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who signed the Tribunal agreement for the U.S., stated that the Allies should make “clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but … started it.” He condemned aggressive war as “the greatest menace of our times.”
By ordering the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush has continued a long and sordid pattern of presidential criminality, violating the Constitution, UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles. Those who support him, therefore, essentially defend the opportunistic principle that the U.S. actions are above the law: Our violence is a good thing as long as it works and U.S. presidents have the God-given right to kill and maim whomever they please.
Readers wishing to defend Bush, Clinton, and other presidents who engage in aggression around the world should spare us their hypocritical moral lessons and condemnation of others’ violence. There will be many 911s until the U.S. upholds the international covenants and principles of law and order that it demands of others.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 17, 2006. Read the original PDF.