"J'Accuse!"

Lang in SST, here

"Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neocon scum will be held accountable somewhere, someday for their crimes against the American soldier.

Here is a partial list of my accusations. It will be argued that some of these things are not technically "crimes." I think that irrelevant. These specifically apply to Iraq. You may add your own and I may comment further:

- "Planning and waging aggressive war.." Keitel and Jodl were executed for this. In this case the "aggressive war was against Iraq, a country that, however ill governed, had not attacked the United States and that did not have WMD weapons any longer. This latter point was in the process of being proven by the UN's inspectors when the miscreants under dicussion succeeded, with the help of White House staff still in the public square, of deliberately propagandizing the American people by making a false case against Iraq in the public media. By carrying out these actions those charged involved the United States in a senseless war in which many thousands of American military personnel were killed or mutilated.

- Those charged directly intervened in the operational planning of the invasion of Iraq in such a way as to risk defeat in detail in many smaller actions. They did this by denying to the ground component commander (Mckiernan) the forces that he reasonably and prudently requested and by "nickel and diming" him endlessly in such a way that the forces involved were still minimal and barely adequate. The success of these forces is not an indication of whether or not the force was adequate in strength. The additional risk assumed by fielding too small a force placed the troops involved at risk.

- Those charged insisted on assuming in pre-invasion planning that Iraqi resistance would be minimal and that the coalition invasion force would be met with "open arms" rather than IEDs by the Iraqi populace. This foolish and willfully blind assumption caused the death or wounding of many American soldiers. Many experts tried to tell the accused that their assumption was wrong but they would not listen.

- Those charged insisted on disestablishing the public institutions of Iraq; the army, the police, the civil service, etc. These actions were taken against the advice of US Army and USMC senior officers on the ground who were in the process of sorting out which units and commanders could be used to re-establish public order. Considerable progress had been made. These disestablishments drove many Iraqi officers and men into the various insurgent groups where they formed a hard core of competence that killed and wounded many American soldiers.

- Those charged refused to accept the plain and abundant evidence present in the first two years of the war that what was faced by the coalition was nothing less than a full-blown national resistance insurgency. By so refusing, they caused US forces to operate in an inadequate planning environment that exposed US soldiers to much greater risks than might otherwise have been the case.

- Those accused encouraged the use of brutal and illegal methods of interrogation of prisoners. This was done in spite of US doctrine and law that specifically forbade such conduct. Was this not a crime against the souls of the junior soldiers encouraged and pressured to do such things?