We’re at War with Iran Because We Never Punished Bush for Iraq
The similarities between Iran in 2026 and Iraq in 2003 are obvious, and have been commented on before, most thoroughly by Frederick Deknatel in New Lines magazine. Like Trump, George W. Bush promised a quick, easy victory, only to plunge the U.S. into a conflict much more protracted and bloody than the one he’d advertised. Like Trump, he slaughtered untold numbers of civilians. In both cases, this was a unilateral assault on a sovereign nation in the Middle East which had not attacked the United States, making it a clear-cut war of aggression. Aggression is the “supreme crime” in international law, and one of the primary crimes Nazi officers were hanged for at Nuremberg. The point of those trials, as chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said at the time, was to establish for the world that actions like invading Poland would never be acceptable: “civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
And yet, more than 20 years after the fact, Bush and his associates have never faced any serious penalties for their invasion of Iraq, or for the litany of human rights abuses they committed in the process. Bush himself continues to be treated as a respectable figure in mainstream American politics, often compared favorably to the more vulgar and erratic Trump. This year, Bush has written an op-ed for Bari Weiss’s Free Press in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, and is expected to attend the opening of Barack Obama’s presidential library in June. And because he never saw the inside of a tribunal courtroom, a standard of impunity was created. Whatever international law might say on paper, the de facto rule became that American presidents can invade Middle Eastern countries when it suits them, even commit blatant acts of torture, and get away with it. And so, just a few decades later, Trump has walked through the door that Bush left wide-open, secure in the expectation that he, too, is unlikely to ever face real consequences.
It didn’t have to be that way. Over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, plenty of people made noble efforts to bring Bush to account for his crimes, and if they had been listened to and empowered, the world might be a very different place today. One of the first was former Representative Dennis Kucinich, who brought articles of impeachment against Bush in July 2008, charging him with “fraudulent representations made to Congress” about weapons of mass destruction which had caused “the deaths of over 1 million innocent Iraqi civilians.” The charges were true, give or take some uncertainty about the precise number of casualties, and everyone knew it. By 2008, of course, it was arguably too late for impeachment, since Bush was on the way out regardless, but it might at least have set an example for future presidents that some punishment would be imposed for lying and killing en masse. But Kucinich’s articles were “kicked into limbo” in committee by the House Democratic leadership, most notably then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who felt they were too “divisive.” No justice was to be had from Congress.
That same year, there were at least two book-length summations of the evidence against Bush, published to give future prosecutors the tools they would need to secure a conviction. The first was George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes, written by a professor of political science named Michael Haas. The second was The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, by famous attorney and crime writer Vincent Bugliosi. As you might expect, Bugliosi’s book was the more dramatic of the two, written for a popular audience; he’d previously prosecuted the Manson family (strictly small-time killers compared to Bush) and co-wrote the best-selling Helter Skelter about the case, and took a similar tone here. The Prosecution of George W. Bush sold 130,000 copies. Haas’s title was published by Bloomsbury, and is more academic and exhaustive; not exactly beach reading. But both of them accomplished their basic goal of collecting all the facts in a neat, easily accessible format, and either of them would have given a motivated prosecution a decent starting point to work from.
There were actual attempts to prosecute Bush administration officials, too. One of the first, and most notable, was brought to a Spanish court by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). The ECCHR chose Spain because it had established the so-called “Pinochet Precedent,” issuing arrest warrants for the Chilean dictator in 1998. At the time, Spanish law claimed “universal jurisdiction” to prosecute the most severe violations of international law and human rights, regardless of where in the world they occurred. And it worked: shortly after the warrant came down from Madrid, Pinochet was actually arrested by police in London. Now, the Center’s lawyers hoped, Spanish courts might once again help bring mass murderers and torturers to justice, this time from the USA. So they filed a fairly narrow set of charges, indicting six U.S. officials—including infamous Bush legal advisor John Yoo—in connection with the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
At first, the case seemed promising: the same judge who had ruled against Pinochet, Baltasar Garzón, was initially assigned to weigh the case against the “Bush Six.” But as diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in 2010 reveal, the U.S. pressured Spain’s judiciary to remove Garzón from the case, and they succeeded. He was replaced in 2011 by another judge, Eloy Velasco, who CNN reported had “little, if any experience in these kinds of cases,” and Velasco soon dismissed the Bush administration case, “claiming the U.S. would conduct its own investigation.” As if that weren’t enough, the Spanish parliament—dominated at the time by the center-right People’s Party—changed the law in 2014, eliminating Spain’s claim to universal jurisdiction altogether. Mass killers everywhere, no doubt, slept well that night.
Not every country allowed itself to be pushed over that easily. In fact, Malaysia became the first to hand George W. Bush a guilty verdict in 2011. They did it through an institution called the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, which Prime Minister Mathahir Mohamad created in 2007 as an alternative to the International Criminal Court. Like a lot of people in the Global South, Mohamad couldn’t help but notice that the ICC exclusively prosecuted African leaders in its first decade of existence, while ignoring vastly more powerful figures like Bush and Tony Blair. (For more on this, see Current Affairs’ interview with professor Richard Gaskins, an expert on the Court.) So in November 2011, the Commission took an attitude of we’ll do it ourselves if we have to, and staged a four-day tribunal for both Bush and Blair, trying them in absentia.
You can read the 300-page transcript of the trial online, and the Malaysian lawyers did a thorough job of building their case step-by-step, laying out all the evidence that the accused had “committed Crimes Against Peace by willfully waging war against the sovereign nation of Iraq without any just cause and in breach of international law, international conventions and the United Nations Charter.” They examined Bush and Blair’s memoirs for evidence of intent, considered defense arguments about “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect,” and invoked parallels to the My Lai massacre and other historic atrocities. And after four days of proceedings, the judges returned a unanimous verdict—guilty on all counts:
The Defendants took the law into their own hands. They acted with deceit and with falsehood. They acted in flagrant violation of international law of war and peace. In the absence of any convincing evidence, defence assertions lack credibility. They appear to be fig leaves for hiding naked economic and political ambitions. On all counts we find that the charges against the accused are proved beyond reasonable doubt.
The problem, of course, was that the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal had no means of enforcing its ruling. The most it could do was forward its findings to the ICC and the United Nations, urging them to take action—which was never forthcoming. But all the same, thanks to Malaysia, it’s perfectly accurate to call Bush a convicted war criminal.
It was Barack Obama who had the power to bring his predecessor to heel, and Obama refused to do it. Plenty of people urged him otherwise, including Human Rights Watch, which wanted to see Bush and his associates prosecuted for authorizing torture. But at the critical moment, Obama deployed the fine-sounding, content-free blather that would become his defining characteristic, saying that there would be no charges:
This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.
Translated into ordinary English: no dice, suckers. (The use of the word “retribution” is especially odd; did Obama think all law enforcement is “retribution?” Would he say the same of arresting any other killer or torturer, outside the context of war?)
Worse, the Obama administration would go out of its way to thwart others who were looking for justice. They intervened on Bush’s behalf when he was sued in a California court by Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi refugee from the 2003 invasion. In 2013, Saleh brought a class action suit against Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and several other administration officials, arguing that they had committed the crime of aggression—exactly the Nuremberg principle—and premeditated it as early as 1998, when Cheney was writing think-tank papers about deposing Saddam Hussein by force. But Obama’s Department of Justice moved to grant Bush and Co. immunity from the charges, and the court granted their request. Yet again, the guilty escaped the net.
This was a pivotal moment in history, and Obama got it completely wrong, with disastrous consequences for the entire world. The argument for his decision, as Senator Lindsey Graham put it in 2009, was that for a president to criminally prosecute officials from the previous administration would create “a very bad precedent.” But what he and Obama failed to consider—or simply didn’t care about—was that declining to do so also creates a precedent. The world was watching, and it learned the lesson well: international law doesn’t really count. Not if you can break it in the most flagrant way imaginable, kill a million people, and retire comfortably to your art studio. The real law is what the system will allow, and the system decided Bush’s actions were allowable. A decade later, Vladimir Putin would launch an Iraq-style invasion of his own in Ukraine, following the precedent Bush and Obama set—and in a moment of perfect irony, George W. Bush would make a Freudian slip in a speech to his own presidential center, calling the Ukraine war “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” Possibly for the first time in his life, he told the truth. Putin could look across the Atlantic to Bush, evaluate the outcome of the Iraq invasion, and with perfect honesty, say “Uncle Sam, I learned it by watching you.”
So could Donald Trump. There’s a timeline where Barack Obama did not fail his historic moment, and where Bush was sentenced for his crimes at the Hague, circa 2010 or 2011. On this happier Counter-Earth, maybe he’s sitting in a humane detention facility somewhere in Europe, like Anders Breivik—or better yet, been assigned to rebuild the homes he destroyed in Baghdad and Mosul and Najaf, by hand. In this timeline, if he became president at all, Donald Trump would know those facts, and would be far less likely to wage a criminal war on Iran, because there would be consequences for doing so. All those schoolgirls in Minab might still be alive, going about their lessons. But we don’t live in that world.
That doesn’t mean we can’t get to it, though. Disgracefully, Dick Cheney was allowed to die free and rich. But Bush—the greatest mass murderer of the 21st century, even eclipsing Netanyahu—is still walking among us. As Pinochet discovered, there is no statute of limitations on war crimes; even Belgium recently prosecuted former diplomat Étienne Davignon for his role in the assassination of the Congo’s President Patrice Lumumba, all the way back in 1961. All it would take is a single government with a detectable backbone to finally round this fugitive from justice up, and correct a grave historic wrong.
More importantly, though, a future Democratic administration—if there ever is such a thing again—can’t make Obama’s mistake. If the concept of “international law” is going to mean anything whatsoever, the Trump administration has to be prosecuted for its war crimes. That means Trump himself, and JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio, and the whole bloodstained gang. Their guilt isn’t hard to establish: they brag about it every day online, posting video footage of themselves blowing up random fishing boats or threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in Iran. On Gaza alone, they’re genocidaires, let alone the invasion of Venezuela, or the crimes of collective punishment they’ve inflicted on Cuba in the last four months. Prosecuting a former president would undoubtedly be difficult: it’s never been done before, and Trump’s army of MAGA loyalists would do their best to get in the way. But the consequences of not doing it are apocalyptic. If Trump and his allies walk away from what they’ve done unscathed, the way Bush did, there are just no limits or standards whatsoever on killing; the UN charter and the Geneva Conventions can be shredded and used to line hamster cages, for all the use they are in the real world. We can’t allow that to be the case.
Alex Skopic is an associate editor of Current Affairs.