Are Bush and Blair war criminals? Scott Ritter compared US/UK actions to Hitler's 66 years ago

Tehran Times

October 15, 2005

For President Bush and PM Tony Blair, the war in Iraq may never be over.

In remarks made earlier this week, Scott Ritter, former chief United Nations weapons inspector likened the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the U.S. President, George W. Bush, to the Nazi war criminal who started the Second World War.

Speaking at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London on Saturday, Ritter compared the U.S. and Britain's "aggressive warfare" in Iraq to German actions in Europe 66 years ago. "Both these men could be pulled up as war criminals for engaging in actions that we condemned Germany in 1946 for doing the same thing," he said.

"Tony Blair and George Bush are guilty of the crime of planning and committing aggressive warfare."

Ritter said that the "special relationship" between the British Prime Minister and the U.S. President left British honor as nothing more than a "disregarded mistress". He added that sharing information between the two countries is only benefiting the U.S.

"Britain gets nothing, other than to say they are America's closest ally in Europe," he said, the UK Press Association reports.

U.S.’s goal was never to disarm Iraq, but to oust Saddam Hussein, the origins of this policy, Ritter said, came from Bush the father who, in the run up to the first Persian Gulf War, labeled Saddam Hussein the "Middle Eastern equivalent of Adolf Hitler".

An international conference on peace scheduled to be held this year is expected to urge the American public to shun “liars” like their current president, AFP quoted former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamed as saying.

The Perdana Global Peace Forum, to be held from December 15 to 17, will call U.S. NGO’s to join forces against leaders like Bush who initiated Iraq war and brought disaster to the country and hatred and insecurity against his people.

“People like Bush should never be elected and they will not be elected if the people of the United States are agitated by, say, the non-governmental organizations, so they will not vote in anybody who is for war,” Mahathir said at the forum’s launch. “We would like to see eventually democratic countries electing only people who are for peace and against war,” he said. The forum, which will include war critics; British MPs Clare Short and George Galloway and former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, will go beyond rhetoric and help activists to “agitate against war and for peace”, the Malaysian PM said.

“That is the kind of thing that we hope will fall upon this global peace forum.

It is not a forum for people just to say things and then go home feeling good that they have voided all they have on their chest, and said all the nasty things about the people they don’t like,” he said.

“Hopefully it is going to be the start of a world-wide campaign,” he said. The former PM then commented on President Bush’s remarks that God has asked him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

If the American public really rejects the war, then “I am quite sure in such a situation they wouldn’t elect a person like Mr. Bush, who feels that God has asked him to invade Iraq. I don’t know what else God has told him,” he said.

“We may be one of the countries invaded if God should whisper in his ears, ‘Bush - invade Malaysia’,” he added.

Dr. Mahathir described President Bush, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Prime Minister Tony Blair as “proven liars” for lying about the true reasons of invading Iraq and claiming that the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction- none of those weapons were ever found.

Both leaders knew that many of the claims they made about Iraq’s alleged WMD were based on imperfect intelligence.

“You see three liars were re-elected. There’s Howard in Australia, and there’s Blair in Britain. Proven liars,” he told reporters.

“In the end they found no weapons of mass destruction. And yet they were re-elected. So we find that the democratic system is subject to manipulation by certain forces,” Mahathir said.

http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=10/15/2005&Cat=4&Num=8