Iraq: twenty years later, neither Bush nor Blair have been tried

In a cruel irony of history, twenty years, almost to the day, after the Anglo-American aggression against Iraq, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for war crimes . The event is historic since the indictment targets a head of state who is moreover of a great power. An indictment as legitimate as it is founded, but which throws a harsh light on an international justice with variable geometry, at two speeds. Thus, neither George W. Bush nor Tony Blair were bothered and tried before an international tribunal, despite their responsibility for the aggression and the war crimes committed in Iraq. The contrast is all the more stark as President Joe Biden believes that the ICC decision targeting Putin was “justified”even though the United States refuses to ratify the Rome Statute and therefore to recognize this international jurisdiction…

Operation “Freedom for Iraq”: 500,000 dead

Operation “Iraq Freedom”. On March 20, 2003, the United States, the United Kingdom and their European allies (Berlusconi’s Italy, Aznar’s Spain, etc.) invaded Iraq. An illegal and criminal invasion that went unpunished despite the clear violation of international law and a gruesome record. Twenty later, the name of the operation still rings true. The legitimate celebration of the fall of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein cannot make us forget a disastrous record. The invasion, then the occupation (between 2003 and 2011) sowed a Dantesque chaos with an estimated excess mortality of nearly 500,000 people. Shattered, shattered lives. A war against a people (Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed on itself in a few days), a moral bankruptcy symbolized by the images of humiliation of Abu Ghraib and the trivialization of institutionalized torture .

The withdrawal of American troops has left a weakened state and a bruised society, still plagued by insecurity. A society whose dual ethnic and religious divide has contaminated the political and institutional system. This war officially justified by the “global war on terrorism” and the export of democracy has created a new hotbed of international terrorism. Al-Qaeda has established itself in a territory where it was absent, while the war is at the origin of a new creature: Daesh.

In addition to the violation of international law by the world’s leading power, this war took on a particularly strong symbolic and ideological dimension. Behind the fallacious argument of the presence of ” weapons of mass destruction “this expedition was nourished by the fantasy of a “Clash of Civilizations”. This aggression was the direct result of biased cultural representations justified by intellectual constructions based on an ontological contradiction: democracy by force. The Manichean rhetoric of “good versus evil” promoted by the neoconservatives adorned itself with the trappings of humanitarian interventionism and claimed to want to export democracy, as if it were a vulgar product for everyday consumption…

The "neoconservatives made in France"

In France, while Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin were able to embody a discourse worthy of the principles and values ​​of international law, the thought of the neoconservatives had found spokespersons among the Germanopratin clerics. Beyond their omnipresence in the media at the time, the platform of Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann and Romain Goupil ("Le Monde", April 14, 2003) will go down in history, as certain passages are particularly significant of their blindness:

“What joy to see the Iraqi people celebrating their liberation and… their liberators! (…) We will have to tell one day about the hysteria, the collective intoxication which has hit France for months, the anguish of the Apocalypse which has seized our best minds [contre l’intervention américaine]the quasi-Soviet atmosphere which united 90% of the population in the triumph of a monolithic way of thinking, allergic to the slightest challenge”…

We also remember that at the time, the alignment of the American press with the language of the White House tarnished the myth of journalistic counter-power across the Atlantic. The episode was the subject of a form of MEA culpa from some major American newspapers. A work of introspection still topical, which the press and the French media should not escape. A few days ago, on LCI, the veteran journalist Darius Rochebin questioned Turki ben Faisal Al Saud (former head of diplomacy and Saudi intelligence) in a deceptively naive tone:

“Are the imperialism of a democracy and the imperialism of a dictatorship equal? ".

The question has at least two merits. On the one hand, it sheds light on the reasons why our political and media elites are in no way offended by the impunity of Bush, Blair and Netanyahu. On the other hand, it explains the skepticism and even the rejection of Western discourse on democracy and the universalism of human rights. The global South is no longer ready to pay any attention to what looks like a simple fool's game… To the chagrin of genuine humanists and universalists, here and there.

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