Break out the handcuffs

Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and one
of the most outspoken and influential hawks leading the rush to war,
has conceded that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law:

In a startling break with the official White House and
Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in
this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal
either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq -
also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of
self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises
the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law
... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this
would have been morally unacceptable.

Once again, the neoconservatives have demostrated their utter contempt
for anything resembling multilateral cooperation or international law.
You might be wondering when we'll get to see Perle, Bush and the rest
of them marched into the Hague for their war crimes trials, but it
turns out they saw this coming miles away. They pulled out of the
International Criminal Court back in May 2002, thereby ensuring that
they could never be held responsible for breaking UN laws:

A simple three-sentence letter to U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan formally ended U.S. participation in an agreement to create
the world's first permanent tribunal to prosecute war crimes, genocide,
and other crimes against humanity. In the letter, Undersecretary of
State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton,
asserted that Washington "does not intend to become a party to the
(Rome Statute of the ICC)" and that it "has no legal obligations
arising from its signature (to the treaty) on December 31, 2000." The
ICC treaty � which was signed by President Bill Clinton � has been
signed by almost 140 countries and ratified by 66 and takes formal
effect July 1. Right-wing hawks in the Bush administration have been
gunning for the ICC even before the inauguration. The author of the
U.N. letter, John Bolton, was perhaps the most outspoken foe of the
Rome Statute in Washington even before his appointment to the State
Department. As vice president of the neo-conservative American
Enterprise Institute and a trusted adviser of Sen. Jesse Helms, Bolton
argued that the Court compromises U.S. constitutional guarantees, U.S.
sovereignty, and could be used to pursue politically-motivated
prosecutions of U.S. troops stationed overseas.

And there you have it. No one will be penalized, reprimanded, fired,
tried, jailed, or held accountable in any way, and that's exactly how
they planned it all along.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 20, 2003 at 10:38 AM | Permalink