Support in the US for President Bush’s Iraq War policy has fallen to a new low; every legitimate poll shows that more than 60% of Americans believe the war was a mistake, and a simple majority now want US troops to leave. To rally support for the failed policy, the Bush administration has resorted to using Nazi imagery and phrases to describe the situation. President Bush now speaks publicly at every opportunity of Islamic "Fascists" who must be stopped. And his embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld never tires of playing the Hitler card. Yesterday he equated opponents of the Bush war policy with Hitler appeasers in 1938:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned yesterday that "moral and intellectual confusion" over the Iraq war and the broader anti-terrorism effort could sap American willpower and divide the country, and he urged renewed resolve to confront extremists waging "a new type of fascism."
Drawing parallels to efforts by some nations to appease Adolf Hitler before World War II, Rumsfeld said it would be "folly" for the United States to ignore the rising dangers posed by a new enemy that he called "serious, lethal and relentless."
Well okay. If we are going to draw parallels to World War II then let’s take a look at the Nuremberg Principles. These were established at the Nuremberg Trials as a guideline to determine what constitutes a war crime. The first – and most serious – crime mentioned is a War of Aggression:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
Was the unilateral invasion of Iraq by the United States a War of Aggression as defined under the Nuremberg Principles? According to Benjamin Ferencz, the Chief Prosecutor of War Crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, the Iraq invasion was indeed a war crime:
A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting "aggressive" wars – Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime," the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council.
Ferencz said that, after Nuremberg, the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place.He said the atrocities of the Iraq war – from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by U.S. forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs – were highly predictable at the start of the war.
UPDATE: We now know where Rumsfeld gets his hack Hitler analogies: they are from the neocon pundit and torture advocate Charles Krauthammer. Nice work by The American Prospect.
