DO IRAQI LIVES MATTER? Are Those Voting For Biden Voting For The “Supreme International Crime”?

Bush-Biden Attack On Baghdad Iraq, 2003: Shock and Awe!

Charles Manson was an American criminal and cult leader. In mid-1967, he formed what became known as the “Manson Family”. His followers committed nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. The Los Angeles County district attorney believed that Manson intended to start a “race war“. In 1971, Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people. The prosecution conceded that Manson never literally ordered the murders, but they contended that his ideology constituted an OVERT ACT OF CONSPIRACY. Manson was sentenced to the death penalty for this conspiracy. So Manson’s influence killed nine, and he was condemned to capital punishment. If he had conspired to kill three millions, would he have been nominated to the presidency?

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the vote for a war of aggression against Iraq was cast, Biden was at the forefront of the effort to attack Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Biden had set-up a commission to invent reasons for invading Iraq.{“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“7cbd14bd-7bb3-494b-bbe7-69802f809141″],”srcRootClientId”:””} 

The US government called this sort of massacre, “Shock And Awe”. Plutocratic media has been removing pictures of the bombing of Baghdad by the US in 2003 recently. There is probably no desire to remember this tragedy where Biden was arguably the second most important perpetrator, in the drive towards war, only behind President W Bush himself… Of course Biden later tried to forget the whole thing, and the plutocratic media has helped him that way.

Please consider carefully what this establishment of a commission to invade Iraq means. Biden’s drive to war was not a silly off the cuff remark, or an out of context edited statement, or a silly tweet storm, or a joke. Justifying the invasion of Iraq by carefully invented, vicious lies was Biden’s purposeful main policy and activity for  at least ten months… The invasion of Iraq killed at least two million Iraqis. Upper estimates are up to 3.5 millions.  The war is in a quiet phase now, but it is still going on, and could flare up any time.

Around 10,000 US citizens died (nearly half of them soldiers; the US military used a lot of civilian contractors). And all this mayhem for what exactly? 

At first sight, the attack on Iraq was just to satisfy the inner urges of the three most crucial US leaders at that time (President W. Bush and his two “Democratic” accomplices, Biden and Pelosi.) I call this criminal. War criminal. As we will see, there is a much broader and deeper motivation. That motivation became clearer in the fullness of time. Actually the deep motivation for the Iraq invasion animated the most major US policy in the two decades following the US invasion and mayhem in Iraq. The mayhem and wholesale destruction was no happenstance, as it was made to appear. In truth, it was too well organized, not to have been a plan.

The day the war commenced, Biden told CNN: “There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the president the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm. And there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down.” Who are these “us” Biden is talking about? The “us” from the US Deep State…

Stephen Johnson, a US citizen, and a friend, intervened, to re-establish what passes in the USA for sanity, the madness of the crowd. He wrote: “Calling Biden a war criminal is plainly nuts, so you’re losing credibility with me.”

Well, I am driven by facts, not by whether people have faith in me, as if I were Jesus Christ, who needed the comfort of the crowd to feel good about himself. I have written extensively about the US aggression against Iraq for more than a decade. The Guardian gave a nice synopsis of my position in:

“Joe Biden championed the Iraq war. Will that come back to haunt him now?” By Mark Weisbrot”

“The Iraq war has been a prominent, even decisive issue, in recent US presidential elections. That will make Biden’s history a liability. Mon 17 Feb 2020

BIDEN DID VASTLY MORE THAN JUST VOTE FOR THE WAR. Yet his role in bringing about that war remains mostly unknown or misunderstood by the public.

When the war was debated and then authorized by the US Congress in 2002, Democrats controlled the Senate and Biden was chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations. Biden himself had enormous influence as chair and argued strongly in favor of the 2002 resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

“I do not believe this is a rush to war,” Biden said a few days before the vote. “I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur …”

BUT HE HAD A POWER MUCH GREATER THAN HIS OWN WORDS. He was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position. They argued in favor of “regime change as the stated US policy” and warned of “a nuclear-armed Saddam sometime in this decade”. That Iraqis would “welcome the United States as liberators” And that Iraq “permits known al-Qaida members to live and move freely about in Iraq” and that “they are being supported”.

The lies about al-Qaida were perhaps the most transparently obvious of the falsehoods created to justify the Iraq war. As anyone familiar with the subject matter could testify, Saddam Hussein ran a secular government and had a hatred, which was mutual, for religious extremists like al-Qaida. But Biden did not choose from among the many expert witnesses who would have explained that to the Senate, and to the media.

Biden’s selling points as a candidate often lead with his reputation for foreign policy experience and knowledge. But Iraq in 2002 was devastated by economic sanctions, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was known by even the most pro-war experts to have no missiles that could come close to the United States. The idea that this country on the other side of the world posed a security threat to America was more than far-fetched. The idea that the US could simply invade, topple the government, and take over the country without provoking enormous violence was also implausible. It’s not clear how anyone with foreign policy experience and expertise could have believed these ideas.

The Guardian adds: “Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and still a Senator in 2020, was on the Senate intelligence committee at the time. Durbin was astounded by the difference between what he was hearing there and what was being fed to the public. “The American people were deceived into this war,” he said…

The resolution granting President Bush the authority to start the invasion of Iraq, which Biden pushed through the Senate, was a major part of that deception. So, too, was the restricted testimony that Biden allowed. The resolution itself contained deceptive language about a number of pretexts for the war, including al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not have.”

• Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is the director of Worth the Price? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War (2020)

Weisbrot finishes his article this way, re-hashing essays of mine written since 2003… But the truth is worth re-hashing, always, when it is most significant:

“The Iraq war has generally been seen as one of the worst US foreign policy blunders in decades. It fueled the spread of terrorism and destabilized the Middle East and parts of north Africa. “Isil is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaida in Iraq, that grew out of our invasion,” noted President Obama.

More than 4,500 US soldiers, and nearly as many US military contractors, lost their lives; tens of thousands were wounded, with hundreds of thousands more suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Estimates of Iraqi deaths run as high as 1 million.

At the very least, Biden should explain why he played such a major role in winning the authorization from Congress for President Bush to wage this disastrous war.”

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Was Biden’s Attack On Iraq Criminal?

When considering if a criminal act happened during a violent action, one has to look at the motivation of the suspect. That’s called Mens Rea in Roman, and contemporary law. It is the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing that constitutes part of a crime, as opposed to the action or conduct of the accused. In the case of the legal person known as the USA, there was a blatant criminal motivation: fracking. Revealingly, the Obama-Biden administration made that motivation blatant.

The US attack on Iraq occurred without a clear UN mandate… because of the frantic efforts of the French Republic… which has the longest historical view: France was a driver of history against extravagant savagery, for 15 centuries.

Biden’s criminal act is not that of a simple vote and arguments in favor of invading Iraq, as Senator Hillary Clinton did. No, Biden invented the entire big lie which Bush used, and made the US media run with it. 

What are those who claim they intend to vote for Biden, and are exposed to the preceding say? It’s hard for Trump haters to accuse Trump this time (Trump opposed the Iraq invasion, so did I. I got insulted, lost all my friends, got banned from the New York Times… This is when my attitude to Trump started to change, because, to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003 from inside the USA, one needed to have more than guts, but also lots of brains and self-confidence)

They can’t accuse Trump, but they can blame the victim. Stephen Jones: “For the record, it was Saddam Hussein that first claimed he had WMDs. Unfortunately, few in the Cheney-Bush administration wanted peace over profits.”

Unwittingly, Mr. Jones proved my point. Which profits? Invading a country to exploit its resources is a very well defined war crime. Even for the brutal US Deep State, such a gross violation would have been too much, so it was never the real plan. So, if there couldn’t be any profit made in Iraq itself, the profits could only be made in the USA itself where Cheney, ex-CEO of oil fracking giant Halliburton was massively invested.

For the record too: Saddam lied for internal reasons, but he knew that the Americans knew he had NO Weapons of Mass Destruction whatsoever… And that was confirmed by the UN inspectors going all around Iraq and finding none. So the Bush administration claimed that the weapons, and the laboratories, were on trucks and were moving around. No doubt Biden and Pelosi smiled and clang champagne glasses together about that grotesque fairy tale lie, fostered by their errant boy, General Powell at the UN.

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Nuremberg Jurisprudence: WAR OF AGGRESSION IS THE SUPREME INTERNATIONAL CRIME:

In the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. TO INITIATE A WAR OF AGGRESSION, THEREFORE, IS NOT ONLY AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME; IT IS THE SUPREME INTERNATIONAL CRIME differing only from other war crimes in that it CONTAINS WITHIN ITSELF THE ACCUMULATED EVIL OF THE WHOLE.“[1][2] .

The United States of America is then asked to vote for an accomplice and perpetrator of the “Supreme International Crime”. 

***

Manson’s ideology led to the murder of nine people, from a criminal conspiracy. He was sentenced to death, but he didn’t plan or order the murders. 

How many people died in Iraq because of the US attack? Deliberately, the US military refused to count the bodies. Says even the plutocratic Washington Post, a Trump hating newspaper owned by global monopolist plutocrat Bezos: 

“15 years after the Iraq War began, the death toll is still murky”

By Philip Bump, March 20, 2018:

Tens of thousands of people died fighting in the Iraq War, which began 15 years ago Tuesday. Nearly 5,000 of them were U.S. service members. Tens of thousands were insurgents battling the transitional Iraqi government put in place after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

But that figure obscures the actual number of deaths attributable to the conflict. During the war and during the Islamic State militant group’s occupation of as much as a third of the country in recent years, the number of deaths runs into the hundreds of thousands, including civilians killed as a result of violence and, more broadly, those who died because of the collapse of infrastructure and services in Iraq resulting from the ongoing conflict

The Washington Post, and top US universities are owned, directly or not, figuratively, or literally, by US plutocracy. US plutocracy wanted to attack Iraq, to become wealthier and more powerful, so it had interest to underestimate the number of people killed by the US attack. Iraq Body Count, for example, counts only the death appearing in English speaking papers (that’s around 300,000). Studies in The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, also infeodate to US and global plutocracy recognized around 700,000 killed by 2006 from the invasion. A general overview by (plutocratic) MIT explains why the numbers published are just a fraction of the real number of deaths (they stop there, lest they displease their wealthy sponsors). Even (plutocratic) Brown University agrees that when the large city of Mosul was retaken, dozens of thousands died. But they have not been counted, observes Brown: most civilian victims were pulverized or returned to the atmosphere after combustion, and their ashes dispersed. 

An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul alone, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble.  A recent project to remove rubble and recover bodies in just one neighborhood found 3,353 more bodies, of whom only 20% were identified as ISIS fighters and 80% as civilians. Another 11,000 people in Mosul are still reported missing by their families.

All in all, the Iraq invasion led by Bush, Biden, and authorized by their accomplice Pelosi, killed at least 2.5 million people. Because Pelosi, as Ranking Member of the US Congress Intelligence Committee knew explicitly that the pretext for invading Iraq was a complete lie. Pelosi admitted her her lie on CNN in 2019.

Pelosi said Bush had a right to invade Iraq “because they won the election”. Pelosi justification? She said:”…I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. It just wasn’t there…. So, I knew it was a – a misrepresentation to the public…in my view, not a ground for impeachment. That was – they won the election. They made a representation. And to this day, people think – people think that that it was the right thing to do.”

Biden, though, maneuvered to invade Iraq before the election. Why did Biden want so much to invade Iraq? Official history doesn’t know. W Bush pretended he hated Saddam because Saddam had tried to kill his dad. But Biden never presented a motivation for his hatred. OK, OK, some will claim I do not know that Biden hated Iraq. They would say Biden just helped to kill ten percent of a country, because he could.

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US FRACKING WAS THE MOTIVATION TO INVADE IRAQ:

When wars happen, it is often not clear why, in the heat of the moment. However, in the fullness of times, the real culprits are easier to reveal. However, sometimes, they stay hidden, because the mood in power is adverse to the truth. This needs a full essay: for example why Rome annihilated Carthage is still a hot potato: the plutocracy presently in power would prefer you not to know why, so it promotes in its plutocratic universities historians uninterested by a real explanation.

So why did the US invade Iraq? At the time US leaders claim that Iraqi oil would pay for the invasion (can’t do this, it’s a war crime!) That still did not explain how the US was supposed to profit from the invasion. 

{“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“a58ed73d-b0c8-45c4-9cbc-a26c5a2d70c1″],”srcRootClientId”:””}The truth is simple: Iraq, with the second oil reserves in the world, saw its oil production killed. In consequence, the price of oil shot up to heights never seen before (above $140 a barril). Capital investment in US FRACKING was profitable at or above $60 a barril. Wall Street was all for it. 

Shortly after the paroxysm of the Iraq war, the ingenue, Barack Obama arrived on the scene, talked of saving the climate, big time, and then proceeded to push US FRACKING as much as possible. Obama called fracking the “bridge fuel” to the “clean-energy future” (even the Washington Post in 2014 found this bridge fuel to the future “not so simple”). Soon the US was the greatest oil producer the world had ever seen, and soon the US was the world’s greatest gas producer the world had ever seen. Biden could only smile that the plot had worked as intended, and Trump haters could only conclude that Trump destroyed the climate.

*** 

Hatred in the service of greed is a common motivation:.

So what about these “Black Lives Matter” signs on the lawns? Do Iraq Lives Matter, too? So why are they not on the lawns, too? Two and a half million killed, does that speak loud enough? It does not? Never had math, never had history? Don’t know about Iraq? Why is that not SYSTEMIC RACISM AGAINST IRAQIS?

Patrice Ayme

Biden’s work. US Bombing Kirkuk, Iraq 2003

Tags: Biden, Iraq, War Crime, War Of Aggression