Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War — an unnecessary "war of choice" built upon a mountain of lies and deception, fabricated intelligence, and media propaganda — that was illegal under international law and treaties because Iraq did not pose an "imminent threat of harm" to the United States.
To this day, not one of the architects of this unnecessary and illegal war, whether the Neocons in the conservative think tanks, members of the Bush-Cheney administration or Congress, members of the Tony Blair government in Britain, military contractors and military leaders of the Pentagon, the spectacularly failed intelligence agencies, or members of the propagandist media have been held to account for their crimes under the law. Not one.
Nearly all of the architects of the Iraq War have gone on living their lives as normal without nary a threat of prosecution under American or international law, or the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal. They continue to profit from their crimes by writing revisionist history books. In New Memoir, Dick Cheney Tries to Rewrite History | TIME.com. The media propagandists are all still busy at work, propagandizing the next Neocon war of adventure against Iran and its proxy state of Syria (just read the op-ed pages of the Neocon Washington Post) and this report today, Chemical weapon accusations in Syria.
Unlike Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth who is haunted by the blood-stains on her hands from King Duncan's blood, the architects of the iraq War do not appear to be haunted by the blood on their hands from U.S. and Coalition forces, or Iraqi civilians killed or wounded in pursuit of their Neocon dream of a Pax Americana Empire.
Dan Froomkin posted at the end of the Iraq War in December 2011, How Many US Soldiers Were Wounded in Iraq? – Huffington Post:
Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military the way the Pentagon does: 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded.
The death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly
understates the number of American servicemembers who have come back
from Iraq less than whole.
The true number of military personnel injured over the course of our
nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands — maybe
even more than half a million — if you take into account all the men
and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain
injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing
disorders, diseases, and other long-term health problems.
We don't have anything close to an exact number, however, because nobody's been keeping track.
Froomkin goes on to detail all the American casualties of this war and the long-term medical care they are going to require:
In the meantime, the figure for "wounded" constantly cited by
politicians and the media does not come close to reflecting the real
cost to the servicemembers who went to fight in George W. Bush's war of
adventure and will never be the same again.
We owe it to them to make a full accounting of their sacrifice — and then never forget it.
Todd Heisler/The Rocky Mountain News, via Associated Press – The night before the burial of her husband, Katherine Cathey refused to leave the coffin, asking to sleep next to his body for the last time. The Marines made a bed for her.
There are also the Iraqi civilians whom the architects of the Iraq War simply considered expendable "collateral damage." On October 22, 2010, ABC News reported
"a secret U.S. government tally that put the Iraqi (civilian) death
toll over 100,000," information that was included in more than 400,000
military documents released by Wikileaks.com. The Iraq Body Count Project, which uses media-based reporting to calculate deaths, reported that through the end of December 2012, the number of civilian deaths recorded by IBC since March 2003 to between
111,275 and 121,591. Civilian deaths from violence in 2012 (Iraq Body Count – January 1, 2013).
This does not include an estimated 2.8 million iraqi civilians (most recent figure) who are displaced persons or refugees because of the Iraq War. Iraq | Refugees International.
Nor does it include an ongoing sectarian war in Iraq that our invasion of Iraq unleashed when we toppled its strong-man, Saddam Hussein. Just today, a Wave of deadly violence marks 10th anniversary of U.S. war in Iraq:
A wave of bombings and assassinations rattled parts of Iraq, including the capital, on Tuesday, leaving at least 60 dead and offering a grim reminder of the country’s instability a decade after the United States military invaded.
Tuesday’s violence, which marked the deadliest day in Iraq so far this year.
And yet, the architects of the unnecessary and illegal war in Iraq are free to go on about their lives and, for some, to plot the next Neocon war of adventure in Syria and Iran. This is unacceptable.
If we Americans truly believe in our guiding principle that "no one is above the law," then we have an obligation to prosecute the architects of the Iraq War for their war crimes. They must be held accountable under the law. We must demonstrate to the world that we Americans practice what we preach and we are capable of holding our own accountable to our laws. It is the only way that we can wash out the blood-stains of our collective guilt from our hands, and to restore America's moral stature in the world, to prove to the world that we are what we claim we are — a nation of laws where "no one is above the law."