This is a common and disastrous theme in contemporary society. As long as we are willing to perceive, or deem ourselves responsible for, only one small part of our world, the suffering of the world as a whole can be overlooked, or declared beyond our job spec: ‘I’m an oil executive, it’s not my job to protect the climate.’ ‘I’m an arms manufacturer, it’s not my job to prevent people killing each other.’ ‘I’m a science writer, it’s not my job to comment on my government’s war crimes.’
Tony Blair is a supporter of extremism around the world, whether it be the dictators in Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan, the despots ruling the oil states Kuwait and Bahrain, or Israel’s apartheid regime that occupies Palestinian land in contravention of international law and countless UN resolutions. When prime minister, not content with waging illegal wars, he was up to his neck in CIA torture and kidnapping ‘every step of the way’.
In truth, if colonial conquest and force majeure are legitimate grounds of sovereignty, and if extermination of a population can wipe out the legal right to self-determination, then in international law Britain has the right to Diego Garcia and to give it as tribute to their US overlords. But if international law has any relationship of any kind to principles of justice, then Britain should not be permitted to reap the dubious benefit of genocide.
“War is essentially an evil thing . . . to initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
On the off-chance you have not been paying attention for the last couple of weeks, the US State Department, led by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, embarked on and succeeded in an overthrow of the legitimately elected government in Ukraine.
The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be “countered” indefinitely. Neither can “our” support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist “liberators” of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news. There will be a reckoning – not just for the Blairs, Straws and Campbells, but for those paid to keep the record straight.
“[Blair] was sitting at the head of a table upstairs with about eight other people eating dinner. I think he was out with his family and a few friends,” Garcia said. “I went over to him, put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Mr. Blair, this is a citizen’s arrest for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq. I am inviting you to accompany me to a police station to answer the charge.’”
Furious Afghan president says US drones have struck a home in Helmand, killing a small child and wounding two women.
President Hamid Karzai has condemned the drone strike as yet another example of US disregard for civilian life. The strike comes in the midst of a standoff between the Afghan government and the US over a security deal.
these are accusations from the man both covering up the genesis of massacres of genocidal magnitude – and who enjoined in the near destruction of Libya, the resultant lynching of the country’s leader, the murder of his sons and small grand children and uncounted others in another decimation of a country who had threatened no other.
There is no more serious decision that a government can take than a declaration of war, and there is no more serious test of a democracy than the ability to hold its leaders to account over why and how such decisions are taken, especially when a war is declared on false pretences and results in a tragic and bloody disaster of the magnitude of the Iraq War.
This tool has turned into a “machine unto itself,” claims Vali Nasr, who served in the State Department during Obama’s first term and is now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It becomes a rote habit,” he says, “operated by a bureaucracy that is always looking to close that last loophole. Pressure becomes the end, not the means.”
All citizens of the World Community have both the right and the duty under public international law to sit in judgment over a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental norms of international criminal law committed by any member state of that same World Community.
