January 02, 2007
US Hypocrisy Reaches All Time High
By Paul Craig Roberts
One of the lessons of the
Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of Germans after
Germany’s defeat in WW II was that
obeying orders is no excuse for war crimes. US
prosecutors took the position that the German military
should have refused to obey Hitler’s orders.
Chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson established that
military aggression was a war crime.
US Army Lieutenant Ehren Watada took the Nuremberg
lesson to heart. He
refused to deploy to Iraq on the solid grounds that
the war is illegal, which it is under the Nuremberg
standard, and that he cannot order troops under his
command to commit illegal actions.
Watada is correct. If the US general staff had the
integrity of Lt. Watada, America and Iraq would have
been spared the pointless and bloody conflict. Bush was
able to illegally initiate the conflict, because the
American military behaved exactly as the German military
and followed the orders of a criminal
commander-in-chief. Watada must be
court-martialed in order to protect Bush and his
obedient commanders from war crimes charges.
By
prosecuting Lt. Watada, the US military has demeaned
the Nuremberg trials and demoted them to merely the
revenge of the victorious. Watada’s prosecution
demolishes the illusion that the Nuremberg trials
established a civilized principle of international law.
All it did was to reaffirm that might is right.
Germany’s ideology of domination was a war crime, but
America’s ideology of domination is not.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts
[email
him] was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.
He is the author of
Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of
Policymaking in Washington;
Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and
Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy,
and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of
The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice. Click
here for Peter
Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts
about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
