“LEGAL ASPECTS OF THE AGGRESSION TO IRAQ”

The intervention founded by the aggression against Kuwait in 1990 and the invention of a Casus Belli to justify the US invasion against Iraq in 2003 is still a pending matter for international justice.What will happen with the claim that has been made lately before the Criminal Court Swede on Damages Caused by the Use of Depleted Uranium - Prelude to Broader Investigation Before the CPI?

By Charles H. Slim

The lack of knowledge about the origin of the causes leads to their consequences being manipulated. It's that simple when an interested party has the resources with which to massively deploy a version tailored to their own interests. It is there when knowledge becomes power and deceptions lose their force.

When the excuses to invade Iraq were launched from the White House (including Collin Powel's performance at the United Nations in February 2003), the argumentative ground was being prepared that -in collaboration with the media- would manipulate global public opinion and the At the same time, it was forming a falsified legitimacy that would promote that action. Thus George W. Bush used as excuses to launch the aggression the implication of Baghdad in 9/11, the possession of weapons of Mass Destruction, the defense of human rights and peace through a preventive war, the latter an execrable formulation without any legal support and in turn, violation of the prohibition of war (Art. 2.4 of the United Nations Charter and Briand Kellogg Pact of 1928).

It did not take long for the questioning of these arguments to begin until the deception was irrefutably confirmed, but for the sovereignty of Iraq, the Iraqis themselves and respect for international law, it was too late. Powell's later excuses that tried to clean up its implications in that massive crime, apart from nothing credible, should not serve to argue an alleged negligence or clumsiness in the collection of information from its intelligence agencies that cost Iraq more than a million and half dead, accepting such excuses would imply endorsing a true scoundrel.

But in the meantime and until the scam was proven, Washington in March 2003 launched its invasion against Iraq and in this way the operation of the international legal structure was put to the test, which in theory should be respected by all the members of that entelechy called “International Community” that is often used continuously in the speeches of officials in Washington as a legitimizing subject with no clear limits to its composition.

Several studies have been carried out on the responsibilities of Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, but nothing similar has been done with the responsibilities of the US and its coalition after the start of the 1991 war and the subsequent invasion of 2003. If we take a look One can quickly sense that the magnitude of what happened in both situations, in this last one they far exceeded the violations of international humanitarian and war law that were handed down to Iraq, subjecting it to a collective punishment of thirteen years of a brutal clutch that later would be crowned with an indescribable occupation.

iraqi suspects detenied by US troops

In this way, one of the first violations found were the provisions of International Humanitarian Law (ICRC) and particularly the 1954 Hague Convention that the US troops simply ignored, as evidenced by the casuistry seen in the development of both wars. In 1991, the United States was able to take control of the air and communications over what was happening. The bombing of civilian sites that included hospitals, schools and mosques, claiming that there were weapons and military communications posts, were some of the excuses to cause mass massacres carried out in the middle of cities as populous as Baghdad and Basrah.

During the operations in the "Desert Storm", the Allied Command based in Riyadh affirmed that those were carried out applying the concept of “surgical attacks” as a way to deny civilian casualties that were being caused. When the Iraqis were able to reconnect some of the television antennas that had been deliberately bombed by the allies and showed various sectors of Baghdad devastated by the bombings, Washington claimed that it was propaganda but the destruction and the deaths were real. Buildings had been demolished to rubble where many families died and due to the chaos produced only estimates could be made by eyewitnesses of the number of deaths caused.

Another of the sinister episodes that were conveniently hidden from public opinion were the almost 500 Iraqi soldiers who were crushed some (when they tried to surrender) and others buried alive by the tanks with plows that passed them over their trenches on the border with Arabia Saudi. Although a secret Pentagon report only gives an account of 150 cases, Iraqi soldiers who were able to flee before the onslaught of the US 1st Mechanized Infantry Division, were able to see that event from a distance and later gave testimony of that exasperating episode.

Another episode that ended in an unnecessary and unjustified massacre occurred between the night of 26 and the early morning of February 27, 1991 when the allied aviation, knowing that the Iraqis were withdrawing, bombed with cluster bombs and napalm (weapons prohibited by International Conventions) an extensive caravan of civilian and military vehicles leaving Kuwait for Basra in Iraq. Once again, Washington and the western media before the leak of this fact, tried to moderate the impact of this bestiality by hiding the corpses (which included women and children) in mass graves and relativizing the number of Iraqis killed in the back. With this, the Americans and British violated all the provisions of the Law of War, the Geneva Conventions (Additional Protocols I and II), The Hague on the means and conduct of Hostilities and in general all CIRC International Humanitarian Law without doing so would have prompted some investigation.

Perhaps the most questionable thing about this was that the United Nations did not have the presence or the political courage to promote an impartial and in-depth investigation into the commission of these crimes, making it clear at that time the questionable partiality that had evidenced its authorization to that the US launched the “Desert Storm” operation and that it would then be repeated with no effectiveness in stopping the 2003 invasion.

Likewise, the West led by Washington (and with the strategic cooperation of the media) focused on holding Iraq responsible for the war catastrophe without having considered the entity and magnitude of its responsibilities. Iraq was even accused of violating international regulations, including those relating to the protection of the environment in the face of deliberate use and as a means of combating the burning of the Kuwaiti oil wells, a position that is not unanimous in addition to being highly debatable.

But the violations of international regulations regarding this environmental manipulation had already begun long before the Anglo-American planes launched their attacks and this was due to the fact that most of the bombs and missiles that were dropped on Iraq were armed with heads of depleted Uranium (U-235), a radioactive element that, in addition to enhancing the destructive power of the launched devices, altered the environment by poisoning the soil, water courses and obviously living organisms with consequences noticeable today and that will extend into the years to come. Reports from the Netherlands Institute “Base Group” show that the contamination in Iraq from the use of Uranium exceeds that produced by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. The disastrous consequences of this and that they have violated the “laws of humanity” have been confirmed since the end of the 1991 war in the horrible deformations in newborns, tumor conditions and the development of cancers of all kinds in the population, especially from the province of “Al Anbar”.

Specifically, these actions violated the Convention on the prohibition of the use of Chemical Weapons, the Convention on prohibitions or restrictions on the use of certain conventional weapons that may be considered excessively harmful or of indiscriminate effects, the prohibition of the use of weapons of such a nature that they cause indiscriminate effects, the prohibition of the use of weapons that cause superfluous damage or unnecessary suffering within the framework of International Humanitarian Law and of those regulations that prohibit environmental modification techniques of December 10, 1976 for military or hostile purposes but the United States did not adhere to it and for this would not be applicable in the actions of 1991 But what can be said about the invasion of 2003?

That aggression that was the preface to one of the most bloody´s occupations of the beginning of the century, it was not exempt from the flagrant violation of all the rules of the law of war Jus in Bellum and international humanitarian law. Unlike the case of the 1991 war, it was the United States that invaded and occupied a sovereign nation, putting at risk the resources, historical assets, integrity and lives of all its inhabitants. Through this invasion, the use of Uranium ammunition was further expanded with the use by tank howitzers and some light guns of armored vehicles, deepening the poisonous pollution that their own aircraft had sown. In this case, the United Nations did not condemn or call for a call to the member countries to form an international Coalition to defend the Arab country from such aggression (Cf. Chapter VII Organic Charter).

Level of dead by iraqi regions

The casuistry that could be verified on the ground undoubtedly surpassed in brutality and arbitrariness the accusations that were made at the time against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. It also legitimized the right to resistance, which as part of the right to defense sought to preserve the integrity and preservation of a nation. Unlike the 1991 war, the United States was unable to maintain strict censorship of its actions and its presence was compromised thanks to the information activism of thousands of Internet users and alternative information sites that collected the reports of the Iraqi resistance from the Internet. It was in this way -and not the supposed commitment of the US media- that the atrocities in Abu-Graib, Campo Bucca and a dozen other places where Iraqis were tortured, raped and murdered were revealed. The list of these types of crimes that were carried out by the occupation troops that were later outsourced to civilian contractors and the armed forces of the collaborationist regime is so extensive that they have become an anecdote in the statistics. In this way, the systematic violation of the pre-existing provisions in Geneva Law and the Hague Convention was more than proven.

At this time, the government of Iraq is closely following the proceedings of a lawsuit filed at the end of December 2020 by the Swedish Criminal Court against the United States and Great Britain for the damage caused during both wars on the civilian population by the use of chemical and poisonous elements such as Napalm, Phosphorus and depleted Uranium, which have been the cause - in part - of the death and incapacitation of thousands of Iraqis. It is enough to see how the presentation of a judicial case before this international body will evolve, which could set a precedent and the gateway to a treatment of the specific responsibilities of officials from both states before the International Criminal Court.