Once the international tribunal delivered its verdict for the former President of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadzic, Western political and media circles have been ecstatic. The verdict was greeted with particular enthusiasm by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who stated that war crimes shouldn’t go unpunished. The US Department of State also commented on the sentencing on the former president but underlying that the US will not forget the horrors of genocide in Bosnia and other crimes against humanity.
In this respect, while talking about the Western truth-seekers and pro-democracy fighters that are declaring their willingness to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes, I would like to recall those war criminals who have remained virtually unpunished over the years. In particular, those who committed their crimes against humanity, including mass slaughter of civilians and the creation of widespread hunger and poverty that followed their adventurous armed interventions of the US and UK forces in Iraq.
In sharp contrast, there is little to no interest displayed by Western authorities in the investigation of the causes and reasons behind aggression against Iraq, both Americans and the British people are genuinely interested in finding those responsible for leading this catastrophic war. In particular, American citizens still fail to understand why their government decided to bring the Iraqi state down, which is stated by a number of Western sources openly. The White House, along with former-British Prime Minister Tony Blair deliberately misled the international community and their own citizens into believing that Saddam Hussein’s regime represented a major threat to the world, while in reality all Western politicians craved for was to establish control over Iraqi oil fields. As a result, the United Kingdom and the United States invaded Iraq in direct violation of international law back in 2003, which resulted in the destruction of this secular state which was subsequently turned into an area of continuous violence and bloodshed.
As it has been announced by the US-British non-governmental human rights organization “Iraq Body Count“, in the period of the occupation alone foreign troops killed over 80,000 Iraqi civilians, leaving some 160,000 more injured and maimed. What is worse is that a quarter of all the victims were women and children.
Can these figures be simply ignored by the international tribunal that should have been established to investigate the actions of George Bush and Tony Blair as a potential crime against humanity?
However, the political elite in the United States and Great Britain, are reluctant to investigate the criminal policies of their formal leaders in the Middle East, and are instead taking every step to derail any ongoing investigation into the topic in question. In particular, UK authorities have been continuously obstructing the activities of the UK independent commission that is headed by Sir John Chilcot. This gentleman was entrusted with the task of answering on what grounds Tony Blair decided that he was in position to sacrifice the lives of 179 British soldiers and bring chaos and misery to the people of Iraq back in 2009, but so far Sir John Chilcot has failed to do so.
Barring an official tribunal, a symbolic tribunal has already been established in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur by the former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. This tribunal established that George W. Bush and Tony Blair are undoubtedly guilty of “crimes against peace.” Tony Blair’s guilt was underlined by the satirical film «The Trial of Tony Blair» shown in 2007 by the British cable television channel More4.
However, instead of being punished for tens of thousands of lives lost on his behalf in Iraq after the end of his term, Tony Blair was instead appointed to the position of a Middle East peace envoy due to the extensive amount of support shown to him by the White House and George W. Bush personally. All the details of this political farce have been vividly described by the Daily Mail. However, Blair has had little to no success in this capacity, since he has become known for a number of humiliating gaffs including the announcement he made that it’s not difficult at all to achieve a reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. A long list of such quotes-to-be has forced Federica Mogherini, who is responsible for the European foreign policy, to demand Blair to step down in November 2014. The Daily Mail notes that this humiliated politician demanded that Mogherini delay this announcement until May 2015.
In October 2015 Tony Blair, while being pressured by an ever increasing number of critical publications against him, was forced to admit in an interview with CNN that the invasion that was launched by the coalition in 2003 led to the rise of ISIS.
So will truth-seekers and pro-democracy fighters finally witness an international tribunal against Tony Blair and George W. Bush? Or is it that Western political forces won’t allow anybody to go any further than holding a quasi-trial over Karadzic?
Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.