Friday, January 04, 2013

Thank you, Dick!

Does Obama have it in him to accuse Bush and Cheney of genocide?

While the June 4, 2009, Cairo speech of Barack Obama came in for much praise within global audiences, what escaped attention was a supposedly inconsequential meeting of the former Vice President of United States, Richard Cheney, on June 1, 2009, with the press in Washington. While most of the meeting had Cheney spawning of forgettable anecdotes, what grabbed our attention was a series of statements, which started with the scandalous comment, “I do not believe and have never seen evidence to confirm that [Saddam] Hussein was involved in 9/11.”

As is fabled, Bush and Cheney had decided to go to war with Iraq post 9/11 accusing Iraq of being connected in some way with the 9/11 attacks and also of owning Weapons of Mass Destruction, which ergo gave Bush an excuse to preemptively strike Iraq – and specifically “Islamic terrorists” – under the US National Security Strategy. Not that any reason could be justification for causing such invasion, but the fact remains that while Bush’s Iraqi WMD spin had been proven horribly wrong some years back, the latest comments by Cheney seal the argumentative debate on the fact that all in all, the Bush-Cheney combine really had no justification to invade Iraq. And so we come to our Hugo Chavez spin, which is a question on why isn’t Obama’s administration now stepping up the policy ladder and accusing Bush and Cheney of deliberate genocide in Iraq? For records, the United Nations defines genocide as “Any of the [many] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

Many across the world have been accused, convicted and executed by international courts for such genocidal acts. For appropriate example, as BBC reported on December 30, 2006, “Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein is hanged for crimes against humanity... after a year-long trial over the killings of 148 Shias from the town of Dujail in the 1980s.” If Saddam could be hanged for 148 deaths, allow us to examine the civilian deaths caused due to the Iraq war. Though the figures have been disputed, but even the disputed figures range from between 150,000 (Iraq Family Health Survey) to 650,000 (Lancet Survey) to more than 10,00,000 (Opinion Research Business Survey).


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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