There are two talking points that need to be defeated right now for the sake of sanity.
- Bush in his ABC interview says, "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,".
- Senator Dianne Feinstein is quoted in an article in NYT as saying "I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible," ,raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.
I will handle the Iraq war talking point first:
The Nuremberg trials conducted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) lists crimes against peace - and it lists aggressive war as the supreme international crime. There are specific criteria for deciding what is an aggressive war as define by the UN Charter. By those standards, the Iraq war is clearly a war of choice and aggression.
Now, going by the relaxed standards thrown about by American politicians, let us even say that nations are allowed to attack other nations based on "evidence" of bad behavior. Atleast that seems to be Bush's only defense of the Iraq war - that Iraq did not deserve its sovereignty because it was ruled by a dictator and that dictator was engaged in bad behavior.
Now, to come back five years later and say that even that evidence (of bad behavior) was not accurate - doesn't that sound a lot like a war criminal?
If the evidence was NOT incontrovertible, if the evidence was circumstantial, if the evidence was liable to be sketchy - then why did he commit his nation to an aggressive war?
This has nothing to do with weapons inspectors or anything - if the "evidence" you have is so sketchy that it could be overturned as soon as the invasion occured, then haven't you committed a crime by invading? Does Bush really believe that war is based on hunches and guesses?
I think Bush't stetement in that interview (if there is any justice in the world order) makes him liable for prosecution.
Secondly - I am tired of the Jack Bauer "dirty bomb" defense. It is so obviously phony.
The scenario is this - If you know that terrorists have planted a dirty bomb in a populous American city, and you have in your custody a terrorist who knows the location of that bomb, wouldn't you use torture on that terrorist? (Or "enhanced interrogation techniques" - whatever.)
This great "moral dilemma" has been repeated so many times that the Republican primary debate featured it and the presidential candidates went nuts trying to imagine what they would do to that terrorist.
The various conventions and treaties against torture such as Geneva Conventions are seen as some kind of limiting factor in this incredible scenario - they are impotent.
Well, then why wouldn't America actually take this up internationally? Isn't that the right thing to do? If you are limited by an international treaty and that treaty is now suddenly not able to do deal with this completely unheard of scenario of a bomb in a city - take it up in the United Nations and change the charter to allow exceptions.
Isn't that something the leader of the free world can do?
If instead you go ahead and violate Geneva Conventions, then what exactly was wrong with Saddam Hussein again?
Both these arguments (about the Iraq war and the dirty bomb scenario) are of course initiated by people who believe in American exceptionalism - a grand name for hypocrisy.