Remembering the war criminals

Stephen Colbert had major war criminal Condi Rice on his show Monday night, discussing her thoughts on US foreign policy. Rice was one of the prime architects of the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings, because the George W. Bush administration lied to the American people about the non-existent threat that the Saddam Hussein regime supposedly posed to our national safety.

I realize it’s still considered highly uncivil to mention this, but Bush, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, University of California law school professor John Yoo (2017 compensation: $406,080), federal judge Jay Bybee, and the other prime architects of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq are, as a matter of international law, major war criminals.

Condi Rice continues to be a darling of high society because even most liberals have no interest in revisiting the Iraq “mistake.” (Calling premeditated war crimes “mistakes” is of course a strategy for denying their actual nature).

The lasting significance of the 9/11 terror attacks is that they served as a phony pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. That needs to be remembered and memorialized at least as often as the attacks themselves.

An important part of that remembrance is to call things by their proper names, and for people to treat war criminals as war criminals, not as honored celebrities.

This epitaph should be on the gravestones of every single one of these people:

A DEAD STATESMAN

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War” (1919)