The Vocabulary of War Criminals

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/05/31/the-vocabulary-of-war-criminals.html

In the land of American exceptionalism, bipartisan political leaders make “mistakes” in foreign policy; they do not commit war crimes. The invasion of Iraq offers a much needed case study; and the brother of the president who launched the invasion sets the stage.

Let’s “imagine what the world would look like today” if George W. Bush had not been president of the United States. There would probably be far more than a million Iraqi mothers and fathers and their children alive today—rather than many “piled into mass graves.” There would not be 1 to 2 million Iraqi widows, nor 5 million orphans. Nor the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and diminishing of the Iraqi people’s quality of life. Nor the terrible sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. Nor the birth of the Islamic State, or Isis, which, today, is seeking to match America’s brutality with its own revengeful pursuit of territory.

If George W. Bush had not become president, some 4,500 American military persons would still be alive, with hundreds of thousands more whole, rather than wounded– many struggling to find adequate treatment in a broken VA health care system. Without Bush in power, there might have been a bipartisan political commitment to invest our country’s resources and know-how in everyone’s pursuit of happiness here– rather than sacrificing lives and resources in the death-dealing criminal pursuit of Iraq’s huge oil reserves. There would be love and laughter filling far more American homes today, rather than death and grieving and injury and festering neglect. Without Bush ruling, the American people might have enjoyed real personal and national security—including far more whole persons, rather than wounded warriors.