George W. Bush’s gaffe shows war crimes are a parlour joke for the ruling class

George W Bush gives a speech.


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Nineteen years on, the Iraq War has become a parlour joke for rich Western audiences, a parlour joke cracked by no less than the architect of Iraq’s destruction, George W. Bush. That the ex-president was speaking at an event at a venue named after himself, the George W. Bush Presidential Centre, only adds to the crassness.

Bush was there to discuss future elections in the US. But he was criticising the Russian invasion of Ukraine when he said:

…the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.

When he laughed it off, audience members laughed with him. Bush blamed his age – he is 75 – for the error.

War crimes

Bush’s gaffe drew immediate criticism on social media, including from Mehdi Hasan:

Media Lens said Bush’s error showed up the mendacity and hypocrisy of Western media as a whole:

Bush also accused Putin of rigging elections. However, it was quickly pointed out that similar accusations have been made of Bush himself, regarding his 2000 election:

Another commenter had to explain to her father that Bush, who is famous for his blunders, somehow got into a top US university:

One journalist made it very clear that he felt there was little difference between what Bush did in Iraq and what Putin has done in Ukraine:

‘Twice as brutal’

Meanwhile, another said that in terms of sheer death toll in the first three months, Bush’s Iraq war was far more bloody than the Ukraine invasion:

And one Twitter user captured the essence of the problem when he said that war criminality is “ok when we do it”:

Accountability

Bush’s latest error comes at a key moment in terms of accountability. In recent days, the first trials of Russian troops for war crimes in Ukraine have gotten underway. The first accused soldier pleaded guilty in a Kyiv court on Wednesday.

Closer to home, an amnesty on crimes by British troops during the Troubles in Ireland has become law.

Republic of Ireland prime minister Michael Martin told the press on Tuesday 17th May:

Victims and survivors want no amnesty. They want full accountability. They want people brought before the courts if possible and they want people prosecuted. That’s the least they deserve.

If there was ever any doubt about a moral double standard over war crimes, it surely must now be dispelled. As it stands, British and American brutality can be legislated away or simply laughed off, whilst at the same time war crime trials in Ukraine are treated with grave seriousness.

The truth is, all war crime allegations must be given the same gravity, and the law should not respect wealth, fame, or power.

Featured image via Wikimedia Common/Chris Greenberg, cropped to 770 x 403.

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  • Show Comments

    1. Bush had strong influencers in his inner circle, notably insidious-control-man VP Dick Cheney. … I view such figureheads as U.S. presidents and Canadian prime ministers as being mostly symbolically ‘in charge’, beneath the most power-entrenched and saturated national/corporate interests and institutions. The elected heads ‘lead’ a virtual corpocracy, i.e. “a society dominated by politically and economically large corporations”.

      Powerful business interests can debilitate high-level elected officials through implicit or explicit threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and capital investment, thus economic stability, if corporate ‘requests’ aren’t accommodated. (Does Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s SNC-Lavalin affair/corruption come to mind?) It’s a political crippling that’s worsened by a blaring mainstream news-media that are permitted to be naturally critical of incumbent governments, especially in regards to job and capital transfers and economic weakening.

      Also, every nation and culture has its own propaganda and core beliefs, true and false; though some culture/nations — usually the biggest, most powerful — are much more corrupt and brutal than the smaller, weaker ones. And western mainstream news-media are a significant part of this moral problem. Yet, the editors/journalists likely sleep well at night, nonetheless. One can still hear or read praise, or conservatives’ scorn, heaped upon The New York Times for their supposed uncompromised integrity when it comes to humanitarianism and ethical journalism.

      Yet, did they not help create the Iraq War, through then-U.S.-VP Dick Cheney’s self-citing via The Times’ website? That would be the same Cheney who monetarily benefitted from the war via Iraqi oil fields — a war I consider to have been much more like a turkey shoot, considering the massive military might attacking the relatively weak country. I recall reading that The Times had essentially claimed honest-ignorance innocence on the grounds that it was its blogger’s overzealousness that was/is at fault. But is it really plausible that The Times did/does not insist upon securing the non-publishable yet accurate identity of its writers’ anonymous information sources — in this case, a devious Cheney — especially considering that Cheney himself would then use that anonymous source’s (i.e. his own) total BS about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify a declaration of war that inevitably resulted in genuine gratuitous mass suffering and slaughter, both abroad and domestically?

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