"War Crimes Have Doomed the Occupation"

War Crimes
By Tom Engelhardt

It's always interesting to see what floats into the mind. If critics of the Bush administration's war and occupation policies in Iraq started talking about My Lai in the same breath with Abu Ghraib, you know what would be said. But it's a fact of this administration that part of its collective brain is still living in Vietnam (though Powell was the only one among its top officials not to escape that war in one fashion or another) -- hence the importance of the much-rejected Vietnam analogy. And of course, the murders of small numbers of Iraqis in prison and the abuse, torture and humiliation of many more is not the equivalent of the slaughter of more than 500 unresisting Vietnamese, mostly old people, women, and children in less than a day by Charlie Company of the Americal Division, while higher commanders circled overhead in helicopters. But it's interesting that My Lai leapt so quickly to Colin Powell's mind, and in fact there are parallels.

War Crimes Have Doomed the Occupation
By Mark LeVine

As Voltaire reminded us over 250 years ago: "Those who can make you believe absurdities will get you to commit atrocities... As long as we believe in absurdities we will commit atrocities." In other words, as long as the occupation of Iraq is based on the absurdities sold to us by the Bush and Blair governments, its very structure will make atrocities a necessary part of the functioning of the system it's put in place. And as long as Americans continue to believe in the absurdities behind the much larger "war on terrorism," they will continue to be accomplices to international crimes, and to increasing violations of the rights of their fellow citizens as well -- and on a grand scale at that. Full Article