Somebody to ask him why

Helen Thomas presses for the real reasons behind the war


Facing The Beard about the Bush press conference


Will a tribunal in the distant future try him for Aggression? Will a day ever arrive when the world gathers enough power to bring the president to justice?

Helen Thomas has pushed the envelope for years. Now we should all thank her for her strength in trying to get answers from the president about why Iraq was attacked, given the stated arguments for doing so always were false. A pretty simple consequence if the basis for the war was false is the war is illegal. Helen's the only one with enough courage and force to bring this out in the open in a press conference.

Here's a short version in an exchange between Helen and Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: But you can't forget 9/11, 3,000 people were killed.

THOMAS: But the Iraqis didn't do it. I mean -- why don't you go bomb some other country? If you have no reason. This is -- I don't believe in preemptive war and it certainly is against international law. It's against the U.N. Charter. It's against Geneva and it's against Nuremberg.

I should note here, as Rodger Payne pointed out in comments a few posts back, that Helen is wrong on the semantics of international law with the often-misused term ``preemptive war'', which might be legal when attack is imminent. But I don't think Helen was referring to Article-51-based preemption under ``...the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations''. She's really talking about preventive war, or what is sometimes called ``anticipatory self-defense''.

Bush doctrine says that international law is basically inoperative when the biggest bully on the block throws its weight around, crushing self-identified ``threats'' before they ``materialize.'' But if this doctrine were to be enshrined with legality, what would stop, say, Iran or N. Korea from attacking US missile silos or aircraft carriers arguably poised to ``materialize'' into a threat to these countries. Desire not to commit suicide, I suppose is the simple answer.

President Bush, for his part, as Josh Marshall points out, just can't get his facts straight about events three years ago:

I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences ... and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it.

I don't think he's lying. He's just repeated the wrong information so many times--unlike what the president said, UN inspectors were allowed into Iraq prior to the war--he believes it. Furthermore, UNSCR 1441 did not confer the automatic right for the US to invade. See this post for more...