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Will George Bush Be Listed Among the Mass Murderers?
by James Glaser
Nobody will ever list George Bush with murderers like Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, or Mao. The scale of Bush's killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan has been small compared to the numbers those three killed. George Bush ironically fits in with the likes of a Saddam Hussein or an Idi Amin. President George Bush might be covered with innocent blood, but he is not yet swimming in it. As Max Hastings writes in The Guardian, chances are a leader like George Bush will never be brought to justice. Most mass murderers escape justice. Uganda's Idi Amin lived out a comfortable retirement in Saudi Arabia. Pol Pot and Papa Doc died in their beds. Nearer to home General Franco not only prospered into old age, but remains highly regarded in European rightwing circles, as is General Pinochet. If a killer entertains shrewdly during his years of office, has a great power sponsor or confines himself to massacring non-white people, he is unlikely to end up at The Hague. Mass murderers on a governmental scale don't carry out the killings themselves, their armies and police forces do it under their direction. Because of the Iraq Study Group, we now know that deaths and violent acts in Iraq have been under reported by the American government by a factor of 10. That means that the estimate of over 600,000 innocent deaths in Iraq could be very accurate. This from the Wall Street Journal Oct. 11, 2006: WASHINGTON—A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate. The study, to be published Saturday in the British medical journal the Lancet, was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health by sending teams of Iraqi doctors across Iraq from May through July. Like any guilty leader before him, George Bush tries hard to make the number killed by his direction as small as possible. The Defense Department until 2004 eschewed any effort to compute the number of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study putting the civilian casualty rate between May and August at 117 people a day. Other tabulations using different methodologies put the range of total civilian fatalities so far from about 50,000 to more than 150,000. President Bush in December said "30,000, more or less" had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since. Mass murderers never admit to the spilling of innocent blood, and George Bush is no different. He will do what ever he must to keep that taint from his presidency, and his place in history. No matter what happens in the future, the fact remains that George Bush's attack on Iraq was unprovoked. The reason used for attacking (weapons of mass destruction) proved to be false, and the use of tactics like "shock and awe" bombing campaigns targeting innocent civilians and civilian infrastructure are universally known war crimes. George Bush will go down in history as one of the 21st century's first mass murder. |
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