Monday, October 30, 2006

An evil thing

I want to recommend a short article here. It's succinct and to the point and, unsurprisingly, Canadian - from the Toronto Star, to be exact. It's entitled "The Real Problem is That it is Illegal for One Country to Invade Another Country". Here's an excerpt:

The real problem is, and always has been, that it is illegal — not to mention immoral — for a country to invade another country, in other words, to wage a war of aggression.

The fact that Iraq is the last unharvested oil bonanza on earth, in an era of increasingly fierce global competition for dwindling oil reserves, only makes U.S. motives all the more suspect.

As the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded after World War II: "War is essentially an evil thing ... To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

If the U.S. had a genuinely open media, there would be a ferocious debate raging about how to deal with the fact that Washington initiated a war of aggression that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of Iraqis, and almost 3,000 Americans.


But of course, we don't have a genuinely open media. Our Fourth Estate has been bought and paid for by big business. And war is profitable. For the already rich, that is.

2 comments:

  1. Yes Ellie and I think it highlights a difference between your problem and ours. The amount of money English businessmen will make directly from the Iraq War is minimal. Therefore, we are holding Tony Blair to account and he can be got rid of. The American problem is that you have an unelected government made up of world businessmen who are as guilty for the war as Bush (and Bush may only be a puppet). This makes the work of peaceniks in the States incredibly difficult. But I have confidence in you. Pick a fight with george Bush and all the multinationals or pick a fight with Ellie? Well, I'm mad but I'm not stupid - I'm on the side of the righteous.

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  2. Anonymous11:45 AM

    It is sad that we, as citizens, have not taken Bush to task for this. What is also sad, is that the United Nations has not been willing to take our country to task for what we have done. This is just the sort of thing the UN is supposed to prevent or correct. Yet, for all of the cries from this nation of the UN not being successful, this is an example of why it is not. It is because it allows the United States to run rough-shod over what it does. It is really sad that we have become such a bully that even the UN will not question our agenda.

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