Should Bush and Blair face war crimes charges - and will they ever face justice?
Cases are ‘morally’ similar but legally and politically different, says prosecutor who indicted Liberia’s Charles Taylor.
Sometimes histories collide.
Just days after the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced it was issuing an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes - the first time for a leader of one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the world marked the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Just as there is only an estimate to the numbers killed by the war launched last year by Putin when his troops invaded Ukraine - perhaps 200,000 Russian troops and 100,000 Ukrainians along with an unknown number of civilians - we have only the roughest guess to the total lives lost in Iraq.
While we know the US recorded 4,431 total deaths of its military, and Britain’s says 222 of its troops and civilians were killed, there was never a serious effort to keep track of Iraqi deaths. For an age, no officials even tried.
A study in 2006 by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health published in The Lancet suggested the Iraq death toll was 650,000. After 20 years of war and chaos unleashed by what Washington named Operation Iraqi Freedom, we can only assume it must, in truth, be much higher.
In its action against Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, the ICC kept its focus markedly narrow.
While many expect there could be more charges leveled against the Russian leader - especially if the UN agrees to establish a special tribunal for Ukraine which could seek to establish the crime of aggression - for now the charges are related to the alleged illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia as part of its military operations.
Several reports have detailed how hundreds of Ukrainian children, some of them orphans and some of them with parents, were transferred to Russian control after the capture of Ukrainian cities by Russian troops. Often these youngsters have been paraded at public events, sometimes with new Russian families to which they have been given.
Both the transfer of children and the public display of prisoners of war are prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, with children afforded special status.
“We must ensure that those responsible for alleged crimes are held accountable and that children are returned to their families and communities,” ICC prosecutor Karim AA Khan, said in a statement. “…We cannot allow children to be treated as if they are the spoils of war.”
Khan said his office was continuing other lines of inquiry, some apparently triggered by his visit last May to the town of Bucha, north of Kyiv, where many atrocities were reported and mutilated bodies were discovered after invading Russian troops later withdrew.
“As I stated when in Bucha last May, Ukraine is a crime scene that encompasses a complex and broad range of alleged international crimes,” added Khan. “We will not hesitate to submit further applications for warrants of arrest when the evidence requires us to do so.”
As it is, neither Russia or the US are signatories to the Rome Statute that created the ICC, and the Biden administration has been split on how far to assist the war crimes investigation in Ukraine. (Ukraine also is not a signatory but has asked the court to launch a probe on its territory.)
The US has long opposed the operations of the ICC, as it believes Americans could be prosecuted for war crimes committed by its troops in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Many scholars believe the invasion of Iraq, a war launched on false claims about Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, marks the definition of a crime of aggression, one of the core crimes in international law that were considered by the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
That court suggested the illegal invasion of another sovereign nation to be “the supreme international crime” because “it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
In the years since the invasion there have been many calls for George W Bush and Tony Blair, the two leaders behind the invasion, to face the sort of justice people are now demanding for Putin, who this week met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
There has been no formal effort, given the West’s dominance over many institutions and bodies, and the way the ICC has been allowed to operate. Critics point out that while it has indicted 40 individuals, all were from African nations, and none from the West. Ten were convicted.
A special tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, brought to trial dozens of individuals from the wars in the Balkans, most notably Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.
A couple of individuals tried to make a so-called “citizens’s arrest” of Blair, and for a while the Guardian journalist George Monbiot ran a website, Arrest Blair, that offered a cash prize to anyone who tried. There were a couple of attempts, but Blair, who in 2021 was knighted, never came close to being held to account.
Last year, Bush made what many believed was the purest definition of a Freudian slip when, in a speech condemning the Ukraine invasion, he referred to the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq”.
On the 20th anniversary Blair appears seemingly unrepentant, arguing there is no comparison between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Ukraine.
“At least you could say we were removing a despot and trying to introduce democracy,” Blair recently told a group of European journalists. “[Unlike Iraq, Ukraine is] “a country that has a democratically elected president who, to my knowledge, has never started a regional conflict or committed any aggression against its neighbours.”
Not everyone agrees.
“The invasion of Iraq was a textbook example of what was called at the Nuremberg Tribunal ‘the supreme international crime of aggression’,” veteran writer and activist Noam Chomsky told MSNBC journalist Mehdi Hasan. “The war has been refashioned in Liberal commentary, as a kind of a mercy mission to rescue suffering Iraqis from an evil dictator.”
Prof David Crane, the American lawyer who charged Liberia’s Charles Taylor for war crimes, says it is wrong to link what happened in Iraq, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Morally, says Crane, the former chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, there is no difference, as there was no legal basis for the invasion in his opinion.
“From a moral point of view, what took place in 2003 should not have happened,” Crane tells me. “There was no legal basis to do what they were doing.”
He argues that ought not to interfere with the efforts of the ICC, or the potential establishment of a special UN tribunal, something he says Ukraine supports.
Last year, Crane was among a group of legal and human rights experts, who drafted a 276-page draft indictment of Putin to establish a legal framework for any legal action.
It has since been updated, and he says he and others are working with Ukraine officials who support establishing a special tribunal, similar to the ones set up to deal with Sierra Leone and the Balkans, that could examine the crime of aggression.
“We don't make decisions on the future based on the past, particularly in law,” says Crane, a former law professor at Syracuse University College of Law.
“The fact that someone has committed a similar crime and was not prosecuted does not preclude other efforts by prosecutors to prosecute someone for crimes today. It would be a terrible precedent, and it would be a bad road to go down if you did it that way.”
He adds: “So the aggression of Putin and what happened in Iraq 20 years ago are separate and distinct and have no influence on the other.”
But will Putin ever be brought before the tribunal?
The ICC’s President Piotr Hofmanski said in a video statement while the its judges have issued the warrants, it will be up to the international community to enforce them. He pointed out the court has no police force of its own to do so.
Crane says prosecutions are always to some extent political actions. Serbia, for instance, agreed to hand over Milsoeveic after he had last held power in 2000, and the new government was threatened with the withholding of economic aid if it did not give him up. The same went for Liberia.
He says at some point a future Russian leader may decide to hand Putin over to the ICC.
Either way, even if it does not, Putin will forever be marked as an alleged war criminal, unable to travel beyond the confines of a handful of nations, such as Russia, Belarus, Syria and Iran.
“He is a pariah,” says Crane. “He’s an indicted war criminal that stays with him forever. There's no statute of limitations, so that 10 years from now he still can be prosecuted for any of these crimes.”
Special thanks to Susan Peskura for a great edit on my first post.
Thanks also to Nisha Saxena for the News Reel logo