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Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses?

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨TehBamski@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

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  • dsmk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wouldn’t put Afghanistan and Iraq in the same level.

    • Bin Laden (and Al-Qaeda) was in Afghanistan and they refused to hand him over. That invasion had the support of NATO and even Russia and China. Why? Because Al-Qaeda existing doesn’t benefit anyone and they were behind the attacks.

    • Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences. Iraq used to have chemical weapons and even used against civilians back in the 80s, started a war with Iran and invaded Kuwait, but that’s not why the invasion happened.

    Now, why wasn’t Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia. What are you going to do, invade the country to arrest the president?

    Is it fair? No. But it’s how the world works.

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    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences

      Lil Bush didn’t even really know…

      He was just a puppet, and Cheney was part of his dad’s “old guard”. Lil Bush knew the game, so Cheney set it up so every intel agency reported to Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney decided if that info went anywhere else, including Lil Bush.

      Cheney wanted the war, so he only passed on info that would cause the war, and it’s entirely likely he was the only member of the American government who could have seen 9/11 coming. The reason no one else could, was everything has to go thru Cheney, and he saw everything.

      I’m not saying Lil Bush is innocent, I’m saying he was a useful idiot that knew he was just a puppet and went along with

      But it pisses me off everyone acts like the puppet fall guy is who we should be upset with, not the people who were actually doing stuff and still work with the American Republican political party.

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      • relative_iterator@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Bush and his cabinet all knew

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      • gowan@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        You need to look into the Project for a New American Century. It’s a PAC that most of GWB’s initial team was on and were asking fir war with Iraq in 1997. Wanna guess who in the GWB administration was not part of it?

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    • wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Officially that was the reason. The violation of the ceasefire. Iraq did not abide by the terms of the ceasefire.

      In hindsight, we shouldn’t have invaded. I supported the invasion at the time because of the violations of the ceasefire. I didn’t completely buy the wmd argument.

      Looking back, Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan.

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    • Gigan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Now, why wasn’t Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia.

      Trump is being charged with crimes

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      • JBar2@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Trump is being charged by the US and state governments with violation of US and state laws

        That’s a far different scenario than an international court attempting to charge and arrest a US president (current or former

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      • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Trump didn’t even try and hide his crimes. He thinks being rich means he can do whatever he wants.

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      • dsmk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Trump is being charged with crimes

        Not for dropping bombs or ordering drone strikes in a different country.

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      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        As criminals should.

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    • grte@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&p…

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      • dsmk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        So, tl;dr: After being hammered by strikes they made an offer to hand him over to a 3rd party?

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      • SCB@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks.

        It’s insane to suggest the US would ever agree to that.

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    • malloc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Both countries also do not recognize the authority of International Court. High ranking officials definitely should have been hauled off to jail for authorizing, developing, and employing “enhanced interrogation” (aka torture) techniques

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  • agent_flounder@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    We barely got to the point of impeaching Nixon for his bullshit and Reagan got off scott free for Iran-Contra. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Bush didn’t get keelhauled for his bullshit invasions especially since most of the morons in Washington were totally on board with it.

    Some of us could see it coming from a mile away with Afghanistan. (Just had to look back to how it went for the USSR and like every other country that tried before us (see “Graveyard of Empires”).

    Iran looked an awful lot like bullshit driven by greed, oil, and “finishing what daddy started” at the time. Idk about the last one now but the first two? Definitely. But fucking Congress went along with all of it. Probably lobbied by billionaires.

    So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.

    People at the top in this country rarely do.

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    • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to “finishing what daddy started.” In 2002-2003 the W’s cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.

      It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that’s why he got all paranoid.

      With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would’ve been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.

      Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don’t know what the best “after” would’ve been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could’ve helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.

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      • Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Two words:

        Dick Cheney

        You really think dubya cared about attacking Iraq. He was told.

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      • agent_flounder@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        🤦🏻 yeah Iraq. Autocorrect probably. Daddy Bush probably also wanted to avoid a quagmire. Idk.

        I agree we were justified invading Afghanistan and felt so at the time but it’s just not a great place to try and “conquer”. You might be right about the distraction of Iraq. However, Afghanistan strikes me as a country with the kind of deeply entrenched culture and politics so different from anything we are familiar with that I don’t know if we could ever actively transform it in meaningful ways.

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    • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      So no way was he going to pay for his crimes.

      What specific crimes?

      I think his and his administration did a lot of awful shit, but they did it using politics, not by breaking the law. They painted their opponents as un-American. They whipped up fervor saying that “you’re with us or you’re with the terrists” and changed the “French Fries” in the congressional cafeteria to “Freedom Fries” after the French refused to jump on board with their war plans. They made sure the public was scared, because scared people are easier to manipulate. But, fundamentally his administration did it so that they could win votes in and for the house and senate. Fundamentally he still followed American law.

      There are various things where the administration or the military might have violated international laws against war crimes or aggression. For example, the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Graib, the whole existence of and infinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, and possibly even the invasion of Iraq itself. But, international courts require a much higher burden of proof, especially to pin the crimes on the head of state. And, Bush had pet lawyers like John Yoo producing memos to declare it all legal.

      Evil shit, especially evil done by the military in other countries is almost never going to result in criminal charges, let alone convictions. Trump is unusual in that the crimes were so incredibly blatant. The normal method for most shady heads of state is to at least go for plausibly legal. They have access to tons of lawyers willing to bend over backwards to declare what their bosses want to do as being legal.

      People need to stop equating “evil shit” with “crimes”. Yes, Bush and his administration was responsible for a lot of evil shit. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, thousands of deaths of soldiers in the bullshit “Coalition of the Willing”. He was responsible for indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay and torture at Abu Graib. But, with all that blood on his hands, he may have done it all without breaking any laws. There’s a reason why the prisoners are being held in Guantanamo Bay and not on US soil. There’s a reason that the torture happened in an Iraqi prison. A big part of that is that many US laws don’t apply to those places, so while it’s awful, it may not be illegal.

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  • jet@hackertalks.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    One of the major prerequisites for people to get charged with war crimes, is to lose the war.

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    • theKalash@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      One of the major prerequisites

      Not the only one though as Afghanistan was indeed lost.

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      • LordCirais@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        But it took a long time. Long enough for people to forget.

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  • Pottsunami@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    No stupid questions, but certainly stupid answers.

    The USA is not a part of the international criminal court. So even if the ICC said the US committed war crimes, they have no way to enfore those laws in the USA.

    ICC is for states that can’t prosecute within their country. USA can do that. So it goes like this:

    ICC: Hey, USA, you committed war crimes USA: We dont recognize your court of law, and we did our own investigation where we found no wrongdoing. ICC: We disagree USA: Okay, that’s nice. We disagree with you.

    Stalemate.

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    • jormaig@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah but if Bush travelled to a country under the ICC jurisdiction he could still be tried. Of course the Hague invasion act (a big fuck you from USA to the ICC) may deter some countries from enforcing the ICC rules on American citizens.

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  • Lmaydev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The UN Security Council, as outlined in Article 39 of the UN Charter, has the ability to rule on the legality of the war, but has yet not been asked by any UN member nation to do so. The United States and the United Kingdom have veto power in the Security Council, so action by the Security Council is highly improbable even if the issue were to be raised.

    No one cares and even if they did it can be vetoed.

    Countries shouldn’t be able to veto things about themselves. That’s stupid.

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    • dsmk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Even if you remove the veto power, what exactly would you expect to happen?

      Bush wasn’t going to be arrested and put under an international court for the same reason Putin isn’t going to be arrested for invading Ukraine. You can tell them “hand him over”, they say “make me”, and the only way to enforce the decision involves war, which no one wants to have.

      The veto power is a problem, but it wouldn’t help much here.

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      • deweydecibel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The main problem is thinking the UN is supposed to be like this higher authority. That isn’t and never was the intention, because it’s impossible for it to be.

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    • WtfEvenIsExistence@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “The United Nations have made their decision, now let them enforce it” would be the response from the US government if you remove the veto power. Nothing would change. Everything the UN does is symbolic.

      The UN is diplomatic platform, not a world government.

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    • Crashumbc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s stupid

      Duh, but that’s the point of the council, to ensure they can’t do anything.

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  • frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Afghanistan should be stricken from the title. There were clear and obvious reasons there. The US could never just let 9/11 go, and our allies and the rest of the world agreed. Just for the invasion in itself, Bush never would have been charged with any war crimes there. No, not even in a more just international criminal system than the one we have. It’s how things were handled after that.

    Iraq is a different story. The fabrications were obvious, our allies called them out, and then we did it anyway. They had no connection to 9/11 and no WMD program in active development. That was obvious to everyone at the time who wasn’t a senseless warmonger. Almost as bad, it took resources away from Afghanistan, which was the fight that really mattered. Stack on top of all that the fact that we could no longer realpolitik by playing the authoritarian governments of Iran and Iraq off of each other. Iran had no direct counterbalance on its border anymore, which freed resources for them to start a nuclear weapons program. They never could have done that if they had to keep up a conventional military to make sure Saddam Hussein didn’t start another war with them.

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    • nostradiel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Obama should be tried as well. He continued Bush’s politics and despite knowing that newly establish Iraq government torture it’s prisoners he signed a document which allowed to hand over thousands of prisoners to them. It’s all well documented.

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      • nostradiel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        And that fucker got peace nobel price. What a joke…

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    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The Taliban-led Afghanistan was closer allies with Al Qaeda than Iraq for sure, but invading Afghanistan was also a bit of a stretch. Sure, the Taliban was harboring and supporting terrorists, but so were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and probably at least a half dozen other countries.

      Bush is a war criminal, and while they invented the entire connection to Iraq, his administration did “exaggerate” the justifications for invading Afghanistan as well.

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      • nonailsleft@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It was clear the leadership of Al Queda planned 9/11 from Afghanistan and were under the protection of the Taliban

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    • nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Turned out Saddam was a meanie after the USA helped make him. Had to slap that idea down lest any future installed dictators try any funny business.

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  • bemenaker@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Afghanistan was NOT under false pretenses. The entire world stood besides the US for that. It was Iraq that was false pretenses and much of the world did not support that, and as it went on the ones that did, quickly stopped supporting it.

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  • Astroturfed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There’s literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried. I’m sure they’d use that for a president… The US isn’t capable of war crimes. They said so.

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    • quitenormal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There’s literally a standing US order to invade the Hague if a US military member is tried

      Can I have source?

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      • Astroturfed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        …wikipedia.org/…/American_Service-Members'_Protec….

        “The Act authorizes the President of the United States to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”. This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed “The Hague Invasion Act”, as the act allows the President to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of The Hague, where the ICC is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody.”

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    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Can’t have the US be held responsible for its actions now, can we?

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      • doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Even if we did send them to trial, how would it go?

        Prosecution: “So you had suspicions of known terrorist group responsible for 9/11 as well as national nuclear weapons development in the region?”

        Defense: “That’s right, my defence secretary and my appointee at the CIA brought relative documents, which we’ve submitted to the court, of the aluminum tubes assumed to be weapons technology at the time. The location of the Taliban had been tracked and went cold around there, but we did capture thousands of their fighters.”

        Prosecution: “Some time after you installed a new CIA director.”

        Defense: “Coincidently, yes, these sort of changes happen often.”

        Prosecution: “Did you have any evidence of where they might have obtained the technology?”

        Defense: “That’s right, we’ve had Russian informants about their spread of weapons throughout the middle east over the decades. Some of it is still classified but some of it has been submitted to the court.”

        Prosecution: “And is it true your nation profited greatly off the Iraqi Oilfields which was Coincidently monopolized by Exxon Mobil under the leadership of Rex Tillerson who went on to become a Secretary in the Trump Administration?”

        Defense: “Well this has nothing to do with the Trump administration, I myself don’t approve of them, and I also have no personal connections with Rex. But maybe that is true, I don’t know.”

        Judge: breaks into a sweat realizing they’ll be here listening to the questioning people over this for another 2 decades and still not have a solid case

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  • HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The USA is one of those countries that the international community can’t control with traditional means. It has been hard to get sanctions against Russia regarding the Ukrainian invasion; it would be impossible to try to do the same to the USA geopoliticaly.

    Also, the false pretenses only involves Iraq. Afghanistan is a different idea behind what consists of aiding and abiding international war crimes.

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  • scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Many factors play into this.

    Lyndon Johnson came right out and told the American people that we needed to fight the Vietnam war to protect our rubber and tungsten interest there. Fighting a resource war is unfortunately not the crime it should be, and never has been.

    If the WMD pretenses were galas, Bush can and did blame the intelligence community that produced the information. No one there was prosecuted because it’s in their daily routine to say “we believe that inside Iraq / North Korea / etc that something bad XYZ is happening” and being wrong is not a crime.

    Generally, no one believed that Saddam Hussein was good for Iraq, the Middle East, or the world. Iraqis were quite thankful for his removal. So even if the WMD thing was phony, there is a sense of “well, at least it all accomplished some good purpose.”

    We can point to Bush as the sole responsible party but the reality is that Congress voted to authorize it and 40 nations participated. So responsibility is really pretty diffuse and Bush can say “everyone agreed it was the right thing to do.”

    American politics are a shit show and any effort to hold a president accountable is seen as a ploy, and even if it isn’t, it becomes mired in the deep partisanship.

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    • IHaveTwoCows@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It got more disgusting when the justification for war was simply “the world would be better off without Saddm Hussein!”

      Do you know how many leaders I velieve the world would be better off without, starting with George W. bush?..

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  • hoodlem@hoodlem.me ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    He should have been. Especially after the photos of Abu Ghraib came out. But it is the U.S. so he payed no penalties.

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  • dx1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well, because the U.S. is a police state, with a military stranglehold on the planet, and the invasions were predicated on an event with uh, let’s say, suspicious circumstances, that was engraved into the national psyche as the worst crime of a generation.

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    • GreatGrapeApe@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You REALLY need to learn what a police state is if you think America is one. Police states are authoritarian which America is not at this moment.

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      • BloodyFable@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        His comment reeks of InfoWars

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    • Astroturfed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Bush buys shit coin though. He can’t be wrong.

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What specific laws do you think he broke?

    You can’t charge someone with “crimes”, you need specific laws and how he broke them.

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    • Baphomet_The_Blasphemer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war signed by congress and without congressional or U.N. approval. Plus, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and several of their legal advisors were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts for endorsing torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of P.O.W.s but the ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even thought they had ample evidence cause Murica.

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      • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Preemptive strike without formal declaration of war

        en.wikipedia.org/…/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit…

        U.N. approval

        Getting UN approval is a “nice to have”, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. A war of aggression would probably be something that could be prosecuted in the ICC as a crime of aggression, but to prove it’s a crime of aggression you need to prove that there was no “just cause for self-defense”. The whole basis of the US justification for attacking Iraq was that Iraq was involved in terrorism against the USA. So, to prove that it wasn’t a war of self-defense, you’d not only have to prove that Iraq had no connection with any kind of terrorism against the USA and had no intention of it in the future, but that the US leadership knew that that was the case and invaded under false pretenses.

        At this point we know that Iraq didn’t have WMD, but can you really prove that the US leadership wasn’t so deluded that they thought that Iraq genuinely didn’t have WMD? The whole aftermath of the invasion involved a lot of embarrassing searching for WMDs that the US was sure were there. The US was constantly announcing that they were closing in on the WMDs, but every site they searched turned out to be nothing. If they’d known there really weren’t any, they probably would have just gone ahead and planted some evidence. Instead, they kept looking and looking and claiming they were sure it was there somewhere.

        Besides, the US has a veto on the UN security council, so they couldn’t recommend prosecution or anything because the US would just veto the resolution.

        were charged and found guilty of war crimes in foreign courts

        Which foreign courts? Which war crimes in particular?

        ICC (international criminal court) decided not to pursue the matter even though they had ample evidence cause Murica.

        “cause Murica” is your reading of it. They had the option to charge Bush, but they didn’t. One reason for that might have been that they knew they’d never be able to get their hands on the US officials they could have charged, and that the US might react really badly to the charges. But, another reason might be that they knew they’d never be able to get a conviction, because the bar to convicting officials is very high at the ICC.

        “Evil shit” isn’t the same as “crimes”. The Bush admin did plenty of evil shit, but it’s very hard to prove they broke any specific laws. Instead, because they managed to scare the shit out of the US, congress and the senate kept giving them as much authorization to do whatever they wanted. As for international laws, those are very rarely used, especially against superpowers, and the bar to proving anything is very high.

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      • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        signed by congress and without congressional or UN approval

        So congress signed off on the plan without approving it somehow?

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    • dudinax@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Starting a war is illegal under international law. People have hanged for it.

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      • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Sometimes, sometimes it isn’t. Specifically what would you have charged him with, and what evidence would have convicted him?

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      • RandomlyAssigned@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        There is no such thing as international law despite what you’ve heard

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  • deft@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    because of precedent.

    any single member of the government is afraid of setting a precedent that will come back to hurt them

    they all do illegal shit, if one is punished then possibly they all will

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  • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That was all too early for me to be following any political news.

    In a way (just this one way) I’m glad he didn’t.

    At the time I was so in brainwashed conservative land. If I saw Bush get in trouble I would have stood by him simply because “Republicans good, Democrats bad”. And it might have affected my waking up to the actuality, and maybe slowed it down to the point where I’d be defending Trump now. If the last guy got in trouble but was Republican and therefore innocent, it’s just happening again, gosh dang those lefties.

    That’s literally the depth of thought in that camp. I’ve been there and seen it. They don’t have any higher functioning logic to speak of.

    Has to scrape myself out of that thinking. Took me forever. Turns out deprogramming yourself against the thinking taught you you by everyone you’ve ever known and with only tangential knowledge of others you know doing it is difficult.

    I didn’t really have any exposure to anything outside that world until I was 25 or so. I still find pieces of that thinking and influence in me all the time.

    Thanks for coming to my accidental TED talk. Got a ramble going there.

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    • shasta@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Same

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  • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Maybe because everyone followed. Liberal, conservative, Canadian, American. Didn’t matter to us then. We all knew it was going to lead to war, and when we were all pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan, we just accepted it and went for it. I still think it needed to be done, just not then and there. But to say the Taliban and Saddam didn’t deserve to go down is also wrong.

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    • dudinax@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Not true by a long shot. In 2003, a majority of Americans wanted the US to stay out of Iraq if the UN security council did not approve the invasion. A majority of Democrats in congress voted against the authorization of use of force. (and many who voted for it said they were against the invasion).

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  • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    US consider the international criminal court as a terrorist organization

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  • kamenoko@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    In short? Facism and Saudi Arabia. America wanted to punish someone, but didn’t want to fuck with the money.

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  • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Who do you expect would charge, arrest, and try him? Certainly not the United States. Congress passed a very broad authorization for the use of force after 9/11. Multiple US allies also sent personnel under the umbrella of a UN security assistance force, so it’s unlikely the UN would try to do anything regardless of which countries have veto power

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  • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    People wanted blood by any means necessarily post 9/11. There were many international calls for his arrest. It just never happened because people hated Afghanistan and Iraq more than the US.

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    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      World leaders wont arrest each other because they don’t want to set a precedent.

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    • bemenaker@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      No one called for arrests of the US over Afghanistan, get your history straight. Iraq is where it went off the rails.

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  • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Afghanistan was a just action. Let’s just get that settled.

    Iraq was legal but the public was lied to about the justification.

    War Crimes requires a nation to purposefully target and kill civilians. If such an illegal order occurs those responsible are charged. If a government does not charge those issuing illegal orders they can be charged with War Crimes.

    Civilian deaths do occur in War, a nation must only target legal military targets. For example the World Trade Center was an illegal target on 9/11. The Pentagon was a legal target on 9/11. Attacking a Civilian office gave the United States legal rights to retaliation.

    As for Bush, his actions didn’t violate international law in Iraq. They were questionable and diplomacy would have been the better option, but still not illegal. All acts deemed War Crimes had those responsible charged and sent to prison. For example those responsible for the Abu Ghraib incident were charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The person to ordered the abuse and torture of prisoners was William Hayes II, General Council of the Department of Defense and authorized by Judge Brett Kavanagh, yes the same one that now serves on the Supreme Court.

    Bonus, Ron DeSantis was responsible for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.

    If you want to charge people with War Crimes, start with the three who still are at-large from justice.

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    • drolex@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “Afghanistan was a just action”. Was it really? Is it justice to invade a country and kill civilians for an act of terrorism, even a massive one? Should the Latin american countries where the CIA operated, installed dictatorships and helped to kill thousands, bomb the USA? Wasn’t it foreign terrorism? Should Vietnam invade the USA for its use of Agent orange and napalm? Would it be just?

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      • nonailsleft@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Do you think the US invaded Afghanistan with the goal to kill civilians?

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  • iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    [deleted]
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    • DonnieDarkmode@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I think OP means in 2001, not in the 80s

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      • Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        He’s the guy who gets invited for dinner and stays for 4 months so this is normal to him.

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  • regdog@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Because these are uncharted legal waters. There is no precedent for charging a former US president with a crime.

    Yet.

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    • Archpawn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You mean there wasn’t yet? I don’t know if that’s true, but I know there most definitely is precedent now.

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    • Quexotic@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Image

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  • Rand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Because the law is only applied to the poors

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  • darthelmet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.

    In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.

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  • djsoren19@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Who’s going to charge him with a crime? Iraq and Afghanistan both have the most to gain, but good luck getting the U.S. to extradite a former president to sit trial for a foreign power. The U.S. sits on the United Nations security council, so the U.N. can’t do anything. Realistically the only one who could charge them is the U.S. themself, but that would require a formal admission that the wars were unjust. Not to mention, we’re already struggling to arrest a former president who attempted a coup, and potential charges against Bush would be much more difficult.

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  • AnyProgressIsGood@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Afghanistan was legit, how are people sold that it wasn’t so close to 9/11?

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    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudis lead by a US-trained individual that was later found and executed in Pakistan. The only way Afghanistan was close to any of this was geographically.

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      • severien@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        You (intentionally?) leave out the important detail that the main orchestrator of the attack bin Laden was at the time in Afghanistan and Taliban refused to extradite him.

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      • charonn0@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Weren’t they protecting bin Laden?

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      • GreatGrapeApe@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It’s where the majority of Al Qaeda was

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      • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yeah it’s kinda hard to isolate sunni terrorism to a single location. America and Saudi Arabia funded a whole bunch of extremist madrasa in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a bid to oust the Soviet occupation.

        This militant force was primarily led by Arab fighters who operated largely in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the hijackers were mostly Arab, but a lot of their organizational infrastructure operated out of central Asia.

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  • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ahh god dammit. Yep… Happened when I was a kid, still furious.

    I don’t know dude, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to die mad about it.

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  • PerCarita@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I’m not a legal scholar.

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