20 February 2016
“The evil that men do lives after them,” wrote Shakespeare. A prime example, former US President George W. Bush who appeared last week campaigning in South Carolina for his amiable younger brother, Jeb.
George W. continues to haunt the Republican Party and damage its electoral chances. At home, Bush has been staying out of public gaze; abroad, he is widely hated and limits overseas travel due to fear of war crimes arrest for his 2003 invasions of Iraq.
Republican spin doctors and the rightwing US media has been trying to soft soap Bush and his mentor, Dick Cheney, for years and slowly expunge their disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that opened a Pandora’s Box of horrors across the Muslim world. Democrats who cheered the war have equally sought to dodge responsibility. However, Hillary Clinton can’t seem to escape her tawdry war record.
The US, claim the Bush/Cheney amen chorus, was “misled” into invading Iraq by “faulty intelligence,” misled by the hope to promote democracy among the benighted Muslims; on a noble quest to remove a frightful dictator Saddam; and, of course, the famous missing “weapons of mass destruction.”
As candidate Donald Trump said last week, these were all bare-faced lies. These spurious allegations had one purpose: to mislead Americans into believing that Bush’s aggression in Iraq was a crusade for justice rather than a crude attempt to turn Iraq, with the world’s second biggest oil reserves, into an American vassal petrostate.
Unfortunately, mainstream America has not yet understood the enormity of the crimes that were committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. These include some one million civilians, cities destroyed, death squads, drone wars, kidnapping, torture and turning the US into a Stasi-like police state. And destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment plants by US air attacks, spreading disease and pestilence across the nation.
Washington claimed these crimes against humanity were justified by the 9/11 attacks, though the real culprits came from Saudi Arabia, not remote Afghanistan or Iraq. Osama bin Laden was rubbed out so he could never voice the truth in a fair court.
Almost as bad was the continuing evil from Bush/Cheney’s so-called “war on terror.” Concocted and run by neocons, the faux war served to expand US control of the Muslim world (which I term ‘the American Raj’ in my book), and destroy enemies of Israel. This ‘war’ continues today, 13 years later, with military budgets doubled in size, a 100% increase in spending on all sorts of spies, mercenaries and private armies, militarized police forces, and endless funds to fuel America’s Mideast, African and Asian imperial wars.
There should be special taxes to pay for these conflicts, but all are dumped onto the national debt, driving America ever deeper into hock. CIA, founded to provide analysis, assassinates alleged enemies across the world. The US government now shamelessly spies on all of us, exceeding even the intrusions of the old KGB and Stasi. Thank you, George W. Bush for supposedly defending America.
Bush ruined America’s name across the globe, making us look no better, maybe even worse, than the Soviet Union. Today’s witch hunt in the US against Muslims began during the Bush years. The Bush administration made many Americans feel that Uncle Sam was their enemy, not their friend. Of course, to many of American hard right and neocons – Bush was a saint. He remains so today in the Bible Belt and West. South Carolina, with its evangelicals and retired military communities, venerates Bush. A survey taken just before the invasion of Iraq showed that over 70% of evangelical Christians ardently backed the impending war.
Bush/Cheney aggressions led directly to the spread of the al-Qaida movement whose goal was to drive western influence from the Muslim world. The more lethal ISIS was born in US prison camps in Iraq. Somalia’s Shebab arose after the US and Ethiopia overthrew Somalia’s legitimate government. Now, the US in fast blundering into a major new Mideast War in Iraq and Syria that could provoke a nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow.
Unfortunately, too few Americans understand these legacies of Bush, Cheney, Hillary Clinton and the neocons. Who even remembers former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright actually saying that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraq children (UN figures) caused by US sanctions were “worth the price.”
George Bush is no cowboy saint. He, Cheney and their henchmen should all face justice for the invasions of Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2016
This post is in: USA
No sense holding my breath waiting for a well deserved Nuremberg trial for that line-up of American war criminals, as long as their imperium is intact. Hopefully it is not going to result into a nuclear exchange to bring about some justice, because then we all lose.
Since Jeb is out somebody get GW and Cheney to follow Trump around endorsing him…… Maybe they can take him down too
Justice for Cheney/Bush would be nice but unfortunately the international police apparatus are focused elsewhere on bringing to ‘justice’ men like Snowden and Assange.
There is evidence that Bush himself planned and executed the destruction of the World Trade Center to justify an invasion of Iraq. His brother had control of the towers in the weeks preceding their destruction and shut down the Center’s security system for one complete weekend. That provided enough time to smuggle powerful thermo explosives on to all the floors. No airplane, however big could bring down the towers by themselves, especially when they crashed on so high a floor. They were constructed too strongly for that to happen. The worst that should have happened was that the airplanes would have sunk a few floors before the sheer weight of the buildings prevented further sinkings. In fact the buildings were so strong, no sinking occurred at all. Look closely at what would follow. The towers did not fly apart but were demolished inwardly like a professional demolition. As the towers collapsed, note the small puffs of smoke that are emitted from each floor as these destructive thermo devices explode, correctly timed like any professional demolition. Bush, his brother and his gang of criminals should be tried in the United States for murder of all the innocent people in the World Trade Center as well as for his international crimes.
A very good article. But how do we inform the people of the US? The media appears to be a tool of Washington. Are the people so into their own affairs, that anything outside their immediate area does not concern them? can them be so blind to the lies of their own government.
Mr. Margolis as always it is a wonderful article. I have a question.
Americans are the most educated people around the world. Information is easily available to them. Their votes bring real change in political arena. Honest political commentators and pundits are available. The list can go on. Yet the “extreme” group of people involved in the politics keep winning.
Why is this happening?