Is Putin A War-Criminal For Invading Ukraine?

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Written by Eric Zuesse

I almost always agree with the courageous whistleblowing former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, but not including this from him on April 25th:

“I condemn the invasion of Ukraine and I have no hesitation in calling Putin a war criminal. However for precisely the same reasons so are Bush and Blair [for their invasion of Iraq]. It astonishes me how very few people in the media are prepared, in the current emergency, to acknowledge this.”

Here’s why I don’t “acknowledge this”:

When Bush/Blair invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003, it was entirely on the basis of lies by themselves and their respective Administrations, and by their mainstream ‘news’-media, which stenographically conveyed those politicians’ lies to the public despite knowing, even at the time, that at least some of those lies WERE lies and yet they failed to point this crucial fact out to their audiences at the time or even afterward. (Instead, the falsehoods had been mere ‘intelligence failures’ — which was/is another lie, retrospectively piled on top of the main one.)

For example:

U.S. President George W. Bush seems to have been informed, in advance, about a New York Times article (which was the lead-story in the newspaper on Sunday, 8 September 2002), titled “U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS”, in which the sources were anonymous “Administration officials.” The story concerned “aluminum tubes” that were “intended as casing for rotors in centrifuges, which are one means of producing highly enriched uranium …  to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.”

So, on Saturday, September 7th, of 2002, U.S. President Bush said, while standing beside British Prime Minister Tony Blair,

We just heard the Prime Minister talk about the new report. I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied — finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need [in order for Congress to authorize an invasion of Iraq].

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Absolutely right.

Then, as soon as the weekend was over, on Monday 9 September 2002, was issued by the IAEA the following:

Related Coverage: Director General’s statement on Iraq to the IAEA Board of Governors on 9 September 2002 [this being a republication of their notice three days earlier, on 6 Sep.].

Vienna, 06 September, 2002 – With reference to an article published today in the New York Times [which, as usual, stenographically reported the Administration’s false allegations, which the IAEA was trying to correct in a way that would minimally offend the NYT and the U.S. President], the International Atomic Energy Agency would like to state that it has no new information on Iraq’s nuclear programme since December 1998 when its inspectors left Iraq [and verified that no WMD remained there at that time]. Only through a resumption of inspections in accordance with Security Council Resolution 687 and other relevant resolutions can the Agency draw any conclusion with regard to Iraq’s compliance with its obligations under the above resolutions relating to its nuclear activities.

Contact: Mark Gwozdecky, Tel: (+43 1) 2600-21270, e-mail: M.Gwozdecky@iaea.org.

It even linked to the following statement from the IAEA Director General amplifying it:

Since December 1998 when our inspectors left Iraq, we have no additional information that can be directly linked without inspection to Iraq’s nuclear activities. I should emphasize that it is only through resumption of inspections that the Agency can draw any conclusion or provide any assurance regarding Iraq’s compliance with its obligations under these resolutions.

So, this was proof of the falsehood of Bush’s and Blair’s reference, on September 7th, to the IAEA, in which Bush-Blair were saying that, upon the authority of the IAEA itself, there was “the new report … a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.”

Because of the news-media’s ignoring the IAEA’s denial of the President’s statement, the author of the IAEA’s denial, Mark Gwozdecky, spoke again nearly three weeks later, by phone, with the only journalist who was interested, Joseph Curl of the Washington Times, who headlined on 27 September 2002, “Agency Disavows Report on Iraq Arms” — perhaps that should instead have been “President Lied About ‘Saddam’s WMD'” — and Curl quoted Gwozdecky: “There’s never been a report like that [which Bush alleged] issued from this agency. … When we left in December ’98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.” Other news-media failed to pick up Curl’s article. And, even in that article, there was no clear statement that the President had, in fact, lied — cooked up an IAEA ‘report’ that never actually existed. Actually, the IAEA hadn’t even so much as been mentioned in that New York Times article.

Bush had simply lied, and Blair seconded it, and the ‘news’-media stenographically accepted it, and broadcasted their lies to the public, and continued to do so, despite the IAEA’s having denied, as early as September 6th, that they had issued any such “new report” at all. (The IAEA had, apparently, somehow known in advance that someone would soon be saying that the IAEA had issued a report alleging that Iraq was resuming its nuclear program.) Virtually all of the alleged news-media (and not only the NYT) entirely ignored the IAEA’s denial (though it was not merely one bullet, but rapidly fired on four separate occasions, into the wilderness of America’s ‘news’-media) that it had issued any such “report.” All of them were actually only propaganda-media: they hid the fact that George W. Bush was simply lying. Both the U.S. Government and its ‘news’-media were frauds.

The day after that 7 September 2002 unquestioned lie by Bush, saying Iraq was only six months from having a nuclear weapon, and citing the IAEA as his source for that, the New York Times ran their article. It included such hair-raisers as “‘The jewel in the crown is nuclear,’ a senior administration official said. ‘The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical or biological weapons. Nuclear weapons are his hole card.'” The fake ‘news’ — stenography from the lying Government and its chosen lying sources (in this case anonymous Administration-officials) — came in an incessant stream, from the U.S. Government and its ‘news’ media (such as happened also later, regarding Honduras 2009, Libya 2011, Yemen 2011-, Syria 2011-, Ukraine 2014, and Yemen 2015-). Do the American people never learn — ever — that their Presidents and ‘news’-media) now lie routinely?

Also on Sunday, September 8th, of 2002, the Bush Administration’s big guns were firing off against Iraq from the Sunday ‘news’ shows; and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice delivered her famous “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” statement, which was clearly building upon the lying Bush allegation of the day before, that the International Atomic Energy Agency had just come up with this ominous “Atomic” “new report.”

Then, President Bush himself, on 12 September 2002, addressed the U.N. General Assembly, seeking authorization to invade:

We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced — the just demands of peace and security will be met — or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

Events can turn in one of two ways: If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission. The regime will have new power to bully and dominate and conquer its neighbors, condemning the Middle East to more years of bloodshed and fear. The regime will remain unstable — the region will remain unstable, with little hope of freedom, and isolated from the progress of our times. With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.

Bush (and Blair) failed to win any authorization to invade, but did it anyway. They should be hung for it. They were atop a bi-national and entirely bipartisan (in each of the two countries) public-deception operation, like had occurred in Germany during Hitler’s time. (Hitler was a boon for his nation’s armaments-makers then, just as America’s Presidents now are for America’s armaments-firms.)

And both of America’s political Parties are controlled by their billionaires, who fund the political careers of the politicians whom those mega-donors want to become s’elected’ by the public to win public offices. For example, whereas George W. Bush lied America into invading and destroying Iraq, Barack Obama and Joe Biden lied America into believing that their coup overthrowing and replacing Ukraine’s democratically elected Government in February 2014 was instead a ‘democratic revolution’ there. It’s so bad that even the progressive Democratic Party site, David Sirota’s “The Daily Poster,” has NEVER exposed anything about that Obama coup and about those Obama-Clinton-Biden lies about Ukraine, and about the U.S. Government’s planned conquest of both Russia and China — the things that might actually produce WW III (in other words: are even more important than what they do report about). In fact, Sirota had the nerve, on 15 February 2022, to post to Vimeo an anti-Republican-Party propaganda video, “The Pundits Who Lied America Into A War”, against the Republican Party’s liars who deceived the American people into invading and destroying Iraq in 2003 — though almost all leading Democrats, including Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, had voted in the U.S. Senate for (not against) that lie-based invasion, and though all Democratic-Party ‘news’-media (and not ONLY the Republican-Party ones) unquestioningly transmitted the Bush-Administration’s lies to the American people, against Iraq, in order to fool Americans into supporting the then-upcoming U.S. invasion. That Sirota video entirely ignores the Democratic-Party “Pundits” — such as the Party’s think tank, the Brookings Institution, whose Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, propagandized on TV and elsewhere to invade Iraq (such as in Pollack’s Council on Foreign Relations article, “Invasion the Only Realistic Option to Head Off the Threat from Iraq, Argues Kenneth Pollack in The Threatening Storm” did). Whereas Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats, it’s the billionaires of BOTH Parties who actually fund all of these lies and liars — and who continue to fund those liars’ careers, and to present them on their ‘news’-media as ‘experts’, to fool the public to okay the trillions of dollars that the U.S. Government pays to those billionaires’ corporations such as Lockheed Martin, to profit from those wars. It’s hypocrisy on top of lying, so as to convey an impression that neoconservatism — U.S. imperialism — is a ‘Republican’ (or else a ‘Democratic’) evil, when it’s ACTUALLY an evil by the billionaires who fund BOTH Parties AND who fund the ‘news’-media, both liberal and conservative, and who profit from those invasions. It’s not just the lies of America’s Presidents; it is the lies that are funded by America’s billionaires, who placed such people as that into Congress and the White House. This regime is an aristocracy, and imperialism is second nature to aristocrats. But an aristocracy is a dictatorship by the very rich — NOT any sort of democracy. This is the type of dictatorship that America now has — NOT a Republican dictatorship, or a Democratic dictatorship, but a dictatorship by the aristocracy, of BOTH Parties. They have made a mockery of their ‘democracy’. Practically everything they do is fake, except the vast harms that they produce.

BY CONTRAST:

Putin, regarding Ukraine, was responding (stupidly, in my opinion, but that’s another matter) to the U.S. regime’s very real “provocations” (as he typically understates such things) against Russia’s most vital national-security interests. Russia has (and for years has publicly stated) a vital national-security interest in preventing nuclear weapons against Russia being installed on or near Russia’s border. It’s true in 2022, just as America had a vital national-security interest in preventing nuclear weapons against America being placed 100 miles from America’s border during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It wasn’t a made-up, lying, pretext for an invasion, like America’s “Saddam’s WMD” lies were in 2002 and 2003. That makes all the difference.

Russia is America’s victim in this. And America chose and trained and is arming Ukraine to serve as the first battleground of its World War III to conquer Russia. Biden and his team should be tried as international war-criminals, but Putin and his team aren’t anywhere even nearly as bad as all U.S. Presidents during this Century are and have been. Putin made a strategic error by invading Ukraine prematurely, as he did. But that does’t automatically make him a “war criminal.” He is trying to defend Russia’s most crucial national-security interests. That’s no lie — and that makes all the difference.

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