At yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of State to be (or not) Rex Tillerson, Fla. Sen. Marco Rubio puffed out his young chest and demanded of Rex whether he considered Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” on the basis of recent bombing of civilians in Syria. Well, if you’re going to be secretary of state (or just the head of Exxon), calling the president of a large, strategically located, oil-producing country a war criminal is probably not a good idea, and so Tillerson quite reasonably demurred, despite the fact that there are more than a few unexplained corpses in Vladimir’s past. In fact, Tillerson could have responded—though quite reasonably he did not—that one Donald Trump had explicitly praised Putin for the Syria bombings (as means for fighting ISIS).
But, anyway, Marco’s question got me thinking: Who else could you call a war criminal? And that took me on a bit of a trip down memory lane. What follows is a bit “extended”, but, long story short, if Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, why aren’t Barack Obama, George Bush (père et fils), and Ronald Reagan?
March 28, 2010: So far this year, our current “Slaughter the Innocents” policy in the country [Afghanistan] we are fighting to prevent from having, someday, a government that might, someday, permit someone to attack us has netted 30 dead and 80 wounded, according to this article in the New York Times. This is just from the shooting of “suspicious” characters by American troops riding in convoys and operating check points. But as Gen. McChrystal remarks in wonder, “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” The good, or bad, news, depending on who’s doing the counting, is that the number of innocent deaths from airstrikes and Special Forces operations appears to be declining, according to the Times, though they don’t descend to such trivia as actual numbers. And the bad, or, again, good news is that, according to the Times, “… those numbers [30 dead, 80 wounded] do not include shooting deaths caused by convoys guarded by private security contractors. Some tallies have put the total number of escalation of force deaths far higher.”
Februrary 6, 2013: The attacks [on Americans in Beirut in 1982 following the entry of American troops as active participants on the side of Maronite Christian forces in Lebanon’s ongoing civil war] didn’t go entirely unavenged. On February 4, 1984, the battleship New Jersey fired about 300 16-inch shells at Muslim positions in Lebanon. The 1,000-pound shells probably killed hundreds of people, though exactly who isn’t clear, because the Navy didn’t know the precise characteristics of the propellant it was using, and the shells may have landed as much as five miles off-target.
March 27, 3013 It all goes back to Iraq Attack I. Nothing succeeds like success, of course, but still it remains astonishing in retrospect how effectively George H.W., James Baker and their gang erased all traces of their former policy, and obscured essential features of their current policy, when they went to war with Saddam Hussein. Two recent books on the Middle East, Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle and David Crist’s The Twilight War—which I previously discussed here, amply document the U.S.’s heavy involvement in the war between Iraq and Iran, which ran from September 1980 through August 1988 and which, of course, Hussein started in a pure act of aggression. Both Pollack and Crist argue that U.S. involvement quite probably saved Hussein from defeat, supplying him with invaluable information on Iranian troop movements. In addition, the U.S. navy actively and aggressively patrolled the Persian Gulf, to prevent Iran from halting shipments of Iraqi oil. While the U.S. was supporting Iraq, Hussein was using both nerve and mustard gas against Iranian troops, killing over 20,000 of them with these agents and leaving thousands more permanently injured. In March of 1988, Hussein launched a chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing at least 3,000 and injuring thousands more, most of them civilians. Overall, Hussein’s campaigns against the Kurds resulted in perhaps 200,000 deaths, most of them civilian, and most of them outright murders rather than “battlefield casualties.”
Despite this brutal record of both possession and use of chemical weapons and civilian slaughter, the U.S. remained on cordial terms with Saddam, even after the war with Iran was over. When Hussein was making noises about invading Kuwait (he claimed that after “defending” Arab nations against Persian aggression he deserved to be rewarded, and it appeared that Kuwait was dragging its heels), George H.W. Bush had his ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, speak with Hussein. In the interview, Glaspie listens to Hussein whine about how Kuwait isn’t being nice to him and that Iraq is running out of patience. Glaspie responds by assuring him that President Bush wants to “deepen and broaden” the United States’ relationship with Iraq, with the man whom he would be denouncing a few months later as “the worst since Hitler.”
July 16, 2015 In a story appearing in Politico, “Obama team split over next steps with Iran”, Michael Crowley writes that a “senior administration official” denied that there was any possibility of a presidential visit to Iran—“we continue to have very serious differences with Iran.” Crowley remarks that
“That sentiment will be appreciated by military officials who hold Iran responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq during the past decade, and who plan constantly for the possibility of future conflict with the highly anti-American Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
If military officials are looking for someone to blame, not for the hundreds of American deaths in Iraq over the past decade, but rather the thousands, they might start with former commander-in-chief George W. Bush, who chose to invade a country that had not harmed the U.S. in any way, nor had any intention of doing so. They might also recall that back in 1983 the U.S. shot down Iranian airliner flight 655, killing all 290 passengers on board, and subsequently lied its ass off about it, or that during the war between Iraq and Iran launched by Saddam Hussein, the U.S. provided Hussein with vital intelligence information that allowed him to foil Iranian counterattacks that might have won the war for Iran. And, yes, Saddam was using his “weapons of mass destruction” that we subsequently found so intolerable. Definitely, something for the brass hats to think about!
