America the Beautiful?

I sometimes wonder, when history is not kind to a country during a particular timeframe, how aware its citizens were in the moment. For example, were Germans on the street in 1940 aware of how horrific the Nazis truly were? I know there were “good Germans,” who engaged in heroic acts to save German Jews.

But were there other decent Germans who supported the Nazis because they just didn’t grasp the depravity of the moment they were living in?

Could Americans be living through such a moment, albeit less extreme, and be unaware? [Note: I’m not comparing present day America to Nazi Germany. Germany only was used as an illustration]

I go back and forth on this, but a piece at Truthout today, On Bringing War Criminals to Justice, is disheartening, to say the least. Here are a few snippets:

Narmeen Saleh and her husband Shawki were detained by US military forces during a violent 2004 raid of their home in Baghdad.

Saleh spent 16 days in prison, where “the interrogations didn’t stop for one minute.” She was beaten, electrocuted and threatened with rape if she didn’t “confess.”

“They [US soldiers] tortured and beat me a lot, and when they found out that I was pregnant they told me they would kill the baby in my womb,” she was quoted, as her testimony was read at the Iraq Commission conference in Brussels recently. “They then concentrated their beating and electricity on my abdomen area.”

Her daughter, who is now 8 years old, has cerebral palsy, and her husband remains in custody of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for the bogus charge of “illegally entering Iraq.”

Have we Americans been deluding ourselves into believing our actions in Iraq were only semi-depraved? We may find out, as it seems like the lawsuits are not going away:

Inder Comar, who testified at the commission, is the legal director at Comar Law in San Francisco, California.

“On March 13, 2013, my client, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan, filed a class action lawsuit against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in a federal court in California,” Comar has written about his case.

“She alleges that these six defendants planned and waged the Iraq War in violation of international law by waging a ‘war of aggression,’ as defined by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, more than sixty years ago,” Comar added. (The current complaint can be found here).

Comar’s client, Sundus Shaker Saleh, is alleging “crime of aggression” in the San Francisco Federal Court against the aforementioned. “Crime of aggression” emanates from the Nuremberg Trials following World War II and is what Comar is arguing was committed in the Iraq War.

The lawsuit includes all Iraqis who have suffered harm as a result of the war, and Comar’s firm is representing Saleh pro bono.

“This could be precedent setting,” Comar told the commission. “And this is the first time a US court is looking at a crime of aggression since Nuremberg, since 1945. We’re very curious to see how this judge will decide this issue.”

Is this just a case of “when you go to war, stuff happens?” Hardly:

Comar’s case against Bush is based on the conduct of members of his administration prior to their coming into office, as well as conduct taking place during and after the events of September 11, 2001.

Evidence of premeditation abounds.

Years before their appointment to the Bush administration, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were vocal advocates of a militant neoconservative ideology that called for the United States to use its armed forces in the Middle East and elsewhere.

They openly chronicled their desire for aggressive wars through a nonprofit called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz personally signed a letter to then-President Clinton urging him to implement a “strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” which included a “willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.”

On September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz openly pressed for the United States to invade Iraq, even though intelligence at the time confirmed that Saddam Hussein was in no way responsible. Richard Clarke, former national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, famously told President Bush that attacking Iraq for 9/11 “would be like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor.”

Comar’s case states: “Defendants planned the war against Iraq as early as 1998; manipulated the United States’ public to support the war by scaring them with images of ‘mushroom clouds’ and conflating the Hussein regime with al-Qaeda; and broke international law by commencing the invasion without proper legal authorization.”

Was it only the Bush administration? Has Obama restored America’s decency on the world stage? I’d like to believe that, but when I read Jeremy Scahill’s reports on our actions in Yeman, Somalia and Afghanistan, I just can’t.

We’ll never really know how history will treat the American moment were living in. By the time the ink is dry in the history books, most of us will be long gone. But I have trouble believing that when the children of the world read about the America of the early 21st century, the focus won’t be American exceptionalism.