America Needs War Crimes Tribunal: ISIS Beheadings Just Another Consequence of U.S. Invasion of Iraq

These ghastly crimes being committed by ISIS on a daily basis represent a nexus of events that began with President George W. Bush's plan to dismember Iraq.   The neoconservatives, whose main preoccupation was  furthering the interests of Israel, whatever the costs had convinced the President that the job would be quick and easy. While the U.S. public may have paid little attention to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, that carnage came with a price tag. How could we think otherwise?

While the GOP is busy figuring out ways to blame President Obama for this horror, Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post reminds us of what really happened.  He explained:   

It opened a Pandora's box of sectarianism: Saddam Hussein was a nasty, murderous tyrant who brutalized much of his country and was guilty of war crimes. But Iraq under the rule of his nominally secular Ba'ath party was not the sectarian charnel house that it became in the years following Hussein's overthrow and eventual execution.

The Iraqi politicians who found traction in U.S.-occupied Iraq did little to build an inclusive, pluralist politics. Nor did they have much incentive. Traumatized by decades of authoritarianism and indulged by foreign partners, they sought to consolidate their own political fiefdoms to the detriment of the fragile Iraqi state.
The Sunni-Shiite bloodletting that followed scarred communities that for centuries had lived in relative peace alongside each other. The divisive politics of Maliki's government inflamed passions in Iraq's Sunni heartland, while violence in Baghdad saw the once cosmopolitan capital become heavily Shiite.
Meanwhile, the invasion's aftermath hollowed out the country's Christian population, with hundreds of thousands fleeing as refugees. They were once protected minorities in both Iraq and Syria, but the upheavals that followed the collapse of Ba'athist rule have made them vulnerable targets.

It spawned terror groups and redrew the geopolitical map: ISIS emerged as al-Qaeda splinter group operating in the wake of the invasion, a fringe, lethal faction within a larger Sunni insurgency. While beaten back by the U.S. surge in 2007, the elements that would reform as ISIS would find fertile ground amid Syria's civil war, where it began a campaign of conquest and slaughter that has yielded it a virtual mini-state. 

 When I reflect on the lead-up to the Iraq war, I feel a wrenching shame for my country. The history books will look back on this period as a moment when the democracy we have fought for and nurtured for over two hundred years failed us.  It developed into ideologues in the White House and cowards in Congress.  Illinois Senator Barack Obama showed then that he was presidential material. His opposition to the war did not win.  However, he had the courage of his convictions.

This was George Bush and Dick Cheney's war.   But the Democrats are in some ways even more to blame.  They supported the invasion of Iraq even though they knew better.  They allowed the corporate media to mislead the American public into believing that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, when in fact because Hussein was anti-religion, the  two men were at opposite ends of the Middle East political spectrum.

So, why did the Democrats buckle under White House pressure?  They were terrified of the Israeli lobby, threatening to run opposition candidates if they did not go along with the invasion. The Jewish state believed, and still does, that creating utter chaos in the Arab world is their ticket to salvation.

The beheadings, the burial alive of women and children, the rape of girls, and sex slavery -- we were warned that this was going to happen, only the details were left out.    It comes under the heading of the "unintended consequences of war."