“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.