Why Bush Must Be Captured And Tried Alongside Saddam Hussein
By Dr. Bob Fitrakis
Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Senior Editor of The Free Press , a political science professor, and author of numerous articles and books.
As the new year unfolds, one unmistakable fact remains unreported in America’s submissive mainstream media: our
President George W. Bush is a war criminal. Any attempt to state this obvious fact is ignored and any Democratic
Presidential hopeful who suggests we repudiate the new Bush doctrine of American imperialism and instead, work for world
peace, is dismissed as a “vanity” candidate and told to drop out of the race.
The case against President Bush is overwhelming. The nonprofit American Society of International Law, consisting mainly
of scholars, has laid out the case against the President in article after article in a dispassionate fashion. Following
the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, both the United States and
Britain attempted to comply with international law. When Operation Enduring Freedom, the massive military assault on
Afghanistan, began on October 7, 2001, both countries adhered to the United Nations Charter Article 51 by notifying the
Security Council that they were attacking Afghanistan under the doctrine of individual and collective self-defense. Most
international law scholars accepted the United States’ right to self-defense against terrorist bases in Afghanistan.
From legitimate self-defense, the Bush administration suddenly resurrected the discredited Nazi doctrine of “preventive
war” with Bush and his collaborators arguing that in the battle of “good” versus “evil” the United States had the right
to attack any country that might pose a future threat to our nation.
The Bush administration is using the recent capture of Saddam Hussein for propaganda purposes to justify its illegal and
criminal war against Iraq. Some newspapers have gone so far to question the practicality of the “Bush doctrine” without
pointing out its illegal and criminal nature. For example, Matthew Hay Brown of the Orlando Sentinel wrote in a news
analysis piece the day Saddam was captured, that: “By striking at a country that was not threatening to attack the
United States and without hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction or links to al-Qaeda officials hope to show the
length to which the United States would go to protect itself.”
The Columbus Dispatch ran Brown’s analysis on its front page. Still there was no mention of the universal repudiation of
the Bush doctrine.
Let’s start with the obvious. Any law scholar will tell you that pre-emptive self-defense is unlawful under
international law – from Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter to the UN Charter. In fact, the United States was the
guiding force behind both the Nuremberg trials and the establishment of the United Nations. At the end of the second
world war, with the Nazis defeated and discredited, the United Nations Charter, a treaty binding on the U.S., prohibited
nations using preventive force in Article II, Section 4. Only the Security Council has the authority to take measures
against “threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.”
The only exception to this is the right of individual and collective self-defense that the U.S. and Britain invoked
under Article 51. The key, of course, is that you has to be attacked or that an enemy must be in the process of
attacking you. Under the UN Charter, you cannot simply say here’s a list of “rogue nations” who may at some undefined
time in the near future pose a threat to you because they may harbor weapons of mass destruction, which we have in
abundance, and they are not allowed to have. Nor is there anything under international law that says simply developing a
weapons program amounts to an armed threat or attack. If this were true, every country on Earth would be justified in
attacking the U.S., the country with the greatest number of WMD’s, at any time.
A few voices in the Democratic Presidential primary have attempted to raise substantial issues concerning U.S. foreign
policy but the mainstream media is obsessed with its “politics as horse race” mentality focusing mostly on who is in the
lead. So, while the talking heads analyze the post-Saddam capture “Bush bounce” and predict that no President with a
favorable rating over 60% going into a presidential election year has ever lost, they miss the point that if they
actually reported that world consensus holds their president to be a war criminal, then maybe his rating wouldn’t be so
high.
Perhaps the most egregious example of a journalist trying to silence debate on the Bush doctrine was ABC debate
moderator Ted Koppel who suggested that peace candidates Dennis Kucinich, Ambassador Carol Mosley-Braun and Rev. Al
Sharpton should drop out of the debate. When Kucinich directly challenged Koppel suggesting that it wasn’t the media’s
role to define who should be in or out of a presidential race prior to the people casting votes, ABC retaliated by
pulling the fulltime reporter covering the Kucinich campaign.
Recently the Pope reminded the world that the war against Iraq is illegal. Perhaps ABC could take the fulltime reporter
they pulled from Kucinich and put him on fulltime research on the illegality of the Bush doctrine and its eerie
parallels to Nazi Germany and its attack on Poland.
And they might want to look into the story Popular Mechanics broke in its December 2003 issue showing a satellite photo
of a pipeline through Kuwait looting Iraqi oil from the Ramalah oil field.