Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules

Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules | World news | guardian.co.uk

Of course it was illegal. There are only two conditions under which war may be launched according to the United Nations Charter, which most countries have signed. One is self-defense. Iraq did not attack the US in 2003. The other is if the UN Security Council authorizes a war, as with the Gulf War where collective security was invoked to push back the aggression on Kuwait. The UNSC could also authorize intervention to stop genocide, e.g.

Craig Murray, then a UK ambassador to a Muslim-majority country who was copied with diplomatic positions from London, confirms that the initial position of the Blair government was that previous UNSC resolutions did not provide an automatic trigger for war. The British inquiry into the Iraq War, which sheds loads of illumination on the Bushies' lies and crimes, is being studiously ignored by US mass media.

There was no UNSC authorization, and no issue of self-defense. The most egregious violation of the post- World War II international order by a major Power we have yet seen. I said all this in my first blog posting here at Informed Comment in April of 2002.

You kind of hope it means Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hadley and the Neocons can never safely vacation in Europe again.



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7 Comments:

At 5:42 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

You kind of hope it means Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hadley and the Neocons can never safely vacation in Europe again

well, we hope they do go to Europe - specifically to The Hague to be put on trial for their murderous War Crimes.

 
At 5:44 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I said all this in my first blog posting here at Informed Comment in April of 2002.

holy wah !! we have been reading you for over seven ( 7 ) years !!!

and it has been time very well spent.

we will never be able to thank you enough, Professor Cole, for your courage and your ability to explain it all to us.

may the stupid war criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan end soon.

 
At 9:18 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Will this imperil Richard Perle's holidays at his house in the south of France?

 
At 4:46 AM, Blogger karlof1 said...

Dr Francis Boyle of the University of Illiois has filed a complaint with the ICC regarding the crimes of BushCo and the ongoing crimes of ObamaInc.

Nice observation of the Propaganda System at work. It's too bad it took an illegal war to get you to start blogging. But I'm glad you did.

 
At 9:32 AM, Blogger Naim said...

"You kind of hope it means Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hadley and the Neocons can never safely vacation in Europe again.".

Well, I hope Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hadley and the Neocons are prosecuted and put behind bars. Let's not, again, limit the possible outcome by having too low an expectation to start with.

 
At 9:44 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Imagine the carnage, devastation and loss of lives caused by this illegal war in Iraq being caused by leaders of non-western countries, then you can be sure that their leaders would be before the International Court.

See the hypocrisy? Do you understand why they hate us?

 
At 4:52 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I seriously doubt that anything serious will come of it; the corruption runs way too deep.

Holland's intelligence services are mafia controlled; they are cooperating in the attack on Venezuela on the part of the financial/military fascist elite that has taken over our world. Nothing has any real meaning, no institution is exempt from the underlying corruption. These bastards financed our modern world since its inception, they own every freaking thing and want it all.

I remember Holland, around 2002-2003 said something about prosecuting some American functionary under the universal jurisdiction aspect of certain crimes against humanity; ha, they changed that law quick as well as in belgium, I think.

The Spanish also have good number of criminal fascists in their midst (Aznar, now of the "Carlyle Group") and their universal jurisdiction only seems to apply to South American torturers/dictators/puppets of CIA (and whoever is behind the CIA) and never any real bite when it comes to US Gov. war criminals like Cheney and Bush et al.

I mean Cheney had these people tortured so they could provide the support for their allegations of WMD in Iraq and Iraq-al Qaeda; it just doesn't get more evil than that.

 

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