excerpt:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15524.htmIs Bush Next?
by Paul Craig Roberts
Saddam’s trial itself is suspect. The most qualified lawyer in the courtroom, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from the trial for handing Judge Abdul-Rahman a memo in which he said the trial was a “travesty” of law. I am confident that Ramsey Clark has more integrity than Abdul-Rahman.
But, to get to the main point, let us assume that Saddam is guilty as charged and that his death so serves the cause of justice that it is worth heightened sectarian conflict and even full-fledged civil war. What did Saddam do that Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Blair have not done?
If Saddam can be sentenced to death for his responsibility in the killing of 148 Shiites, what about Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Blair’s responsibility for the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians slaughtered by Bush’s invasion of Iraq? This massive carnage is the direct consequence of an illegal invasion--a war crime in itself for which Nazi leaders were sentenced to death--that was based on lies and deception. Bush himself admits that 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Iraq Body Count puts the civilian deaths at between 45,000 and 50,000. The recent Johns Hopkins University study published in the peer-reviewed British medical journal, The Lancet (11 Oct, 2006), puts the Iraqi civilian deaths caused by Bush’s invasion as high as 655,000.