By now everyone has heard or seen it, the thirty-second video clip having been destined to go viral the moment it happened.
In an understandably rare public speaking event at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University, the 43 president made a Freudian slip of almost unimaginable proportions: he admitted to being a war criminal.
The moment came at the end of an extended condemnation of Vladimir Putin, his regime, and his war in Ukraine. It was in his condemnation of the last of these that the younger Bush familiarly stumbled, saying out loud what critics of the Second Iraq War have said all along: criticizing the systemized stealing of elections and repression of critics, Bush indicated his belief that it was this system which had led to “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
Dead silence.
“I mean, of Ukraine,” Bush corrected himself.
He gave a laugh and so did the audience.
Bush continued: “Iraq too…Anyway.”
While some in the hypocritical corporate media were quick to express their own disapprobation and condemnation, this in the name of at a war they had screamed for and called traitors everyone who didn’t support it, the rest quietly observed Bush’s humble willingness, after 20 years, to admit that he had been responsible for the unnecessary and criminal deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Iraqis. Together with his disastrous and unnecessary invasion and occupation of Afghanistan—we now know from Donald Rumsfeld’s own papers that the Taliban regime had offered to surrender Osama and itself within weeks of the initial US special operations beginning—the body count Bush Jr. is responsible for is likely some millions, to say nothing of the tens of millions of refugees.
“…Anyway.”
And that is exactly how it looks.
In a country where the politicians are at least nominally carrying out the will of the people, they get to casually mention they destroyed the Middle East under false pretenses to a response of chuckles and collective ethos of “we don’t really care.”
Because it doesn’t matter to them, the political elites. And frankly, to any objective observer it didn’t and doesn’t seem to matter to the great majority of Americans. The American public would have let the war in Afghanistan go on forever, never mentioning the war in their pre-election priorities, and the corporate media collectively going months without even mentioning it. As for Iraq War Two, all the American public really objected to were the American casualties, though this could be attributable to the fact that the corporate media had obediently conjoined the two under the black and white rubric of the War on Terror—which was always an obvious lie, since Sadaam hated and killed every Islamist and Jihadi he could get his hands on.
This isn’t world leadership, not worthy leadership: it is criminal, and Bush has finally made a public acknowledgement of it. However late, however inadequate, it should do.
The path now is clear: charge and hand him over the International Criminal Court at the Hague. That is where war criminals belong - and if we’re being completely honest George W. Bush isn’t the only living US president of recent memory who should go.
Whatever else it might do—from encouraging Russians to throw Putin in the docket, to keeping Xi patient over Taiwan—it would at least begin the process of trying to account for the great stain upon the nation George W. Bush and the Congresses that abetted him perpetrated during their time in office.
Of course, many of those who voted for the war are still in Congress—or like perma-hawk Hillary Clinton went on to be Secretary of State and the Democratic nominee for president.
And while Bush gave the order and so should take the blame, no one believes for a second that it wasn’t the decision of his advisors, especially his vice president, Dick Cheney. The fact that those same advisors suffered no great personal loss for their deceptions and miscalculations, but sit comfortably in think tanks, or appear on nightly television news broadcasts to tell us how to fix the current crop of messes their policies created in the first place, is a continuing reminder of the failure of the American people to fulfill what democracy says is its most basic function: public accountability.
