Western leaders, such as George Bush and Tony Blair, have not been held accountable for the crimes they committed in the Middle East.
By Scott Taylor
Friday Feb. 24th marked the one-year anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. On that date 12 months ago 180,000 Russian soldiers rumbled across the Ukrainian border in kilometres-long armoured columns.
Despite the fact that NATO countries, including Canada, had been training and equipping Ukraine’s military since 2014, no one gave Ukraine a snowball’s-chance-in-hell of resisting an armed aggression by Russia.
To add to the myth of the ‘David versus Goliath’ narrative spun by the pro-Ukrainian western media, in the early days of the war we saw numerous television reports of brave civilians arming themselves with Molotov cocktails to resist the Russian invaders. To date I haven’t heard of a single instance when Ukrainians actually engaged Russian armour successfully with a Molotov cocktail.
What we have seen over the past year is thousands of destroyed Russian tanks and armoured vehicles littering the battlefields from the outskirts of Kyiv to the recaptured streets of Kherson.
The scourge of Putin’s armoured forces is not brave civilians throwing bottles of gasoline, but rather well-trained professional Ukrainian soldiers equipped with NATO’s most sophisticated anti-armour weapons.
As in the mythical clash between David and Goliath, if you’re going to battle a giant it helps to have a slingshot, which in this case is actually a whole whack of Javelin anti-tank missiles.
The one-year anniversary of the invasion has generated a barrage of media coverage in western media. The CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, spent all last week anchoring the National newscast from Kyiv in advance of the war’s anniversary.
Soldiers killed and wounded on both sides of this conflict have been staggering. U.S. intelligence sources estimate that 90,000 Russians have been killed, wounded, captured or deserted in the past twelve months.
The decision of Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to invade Ukraine has resulted in thousands of casualties on both sides. Photo taken from Mikhail Klimentyev.
The United Nations has noted that, as of Feb. 15, 2023, 8006 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the conflict; 487 of those were children.
Although those civilian deaths were caused by both Russian and Ukrainian military actions, the fact that Putin launched the invasion naturally makes him solely responsible for these losses.
As such Putin is a war criminal, but as the war continues to be waged, the total extent of his criminality has yet to be fully determined.
Using that same moral yardstick, I wish to point out that March 19, 2023 will mark the 20th anniversary of the 2003 U.S. led invasion of Iraq.
It was on that date that 160,000 U.S. and allied soldiers crossed the Iraq border. The reason given for this violation of Iraqi sovereignty was it was an act of self-defence to protect the USA from President Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD’s).
Despite a detailed presentation at the United Nations by former U.S. General Colin Powell, the U.N Security Council refused to sanction any invasion of Iraq.
In the end, the UN’s decision was vindicated as the U.S. invaders failed to find any WMD’s for the simple reason that they never existed.
U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K Prime Minister Tony Blair had fabricated the threat of WMD’s in order to justify the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Had the end result of the invasion been a healthy prosperous democratic Iraq, one could argue that Bush and Blair had broken a few eggs to create a savoury omelette.
Instead the invasion led to a brutal occupation by U.S. forces, wherein the power vacuum created by Saddam’s removal, led to widespread bloody inter-factional violence.
The estimates of civilians killed during the U.S. invasion and subsequent anarchy vary widely from around 250,000 to over 1,000,000.
As with the war in Ukraine, the violence in Iraq had yet to be fully quelled so the full extent of Bush and Blair’s war crimes remains undetermined.
However, make no mistake, in any ‘rules based international order’, the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation is a war crime.
Ditto the unnecessary and failed U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
It was al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national, who plotted the 9-11 terror attack against the USA, not the Taliban. In the end, bin Laden was captured and killed by U.S. special forces in Pakistan in May 2011.
In August 2021, after a twenty-year U.S. led allied occupation, the last American soldiers fled from Kabul in advance of the victorious Taliban reclaiming control of Afghanistan.
During that illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation, 176,000 Afghans died with 46,319 of those killed being civilians.
For those who want Putin held accountable for his actions in Ukraine, the same calls for justice are equally applicable to western leaders like Bush and Blair. Anything else would be pure hypocrisy.
