If anybody needs to be prosecuted for war crimes it should be Donald Rumsfeld and Dic k Cheney. Bush should be allowed to plea bargain and serve as a witness. Bush is a good guy with bunch of @sswipes as advisers.

This crass talk about prosecuting Bush for war crimes beggars belief.No where have the Iraqi people indicated that they would rather Saddam was not removed from power.Polls after polls show that Iraqis,despite all they have gone through,are glad that Saddam was removed.

The meme,"Bush lied,people died",like all memes is incompatible with reality and logic.The supposed lie,that there were WMDs in Iraq,was something repeated by even Jacques Chirac himself in April 2003.Indeed,this claim was embodied in UNSC 1441 passed unanimously by 15 countries-that will mean that all 15 countries were lying.

A lie presupposes that the liar knew the truth-in this case,that there were no WMDs-but insisted on claiming otherwise.A lie does not include honest mistakes otherwise the whole of humanity is one mass blob of dishonesty.For Bush to believe that Iraq had no WMDs when his CIA chief told him it was a "slam dunk" would have been stunning.

Even Saddam's military generals were certain Iraq had WMDs:Read this excerpt from the NY Times-

¶The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

Source:NY Times

Saddam probably kept up the facade that he had WMDs in order to deter his enemies including Iran,Israel and various rebellious elements within the country.His was a policy of deliberate ambiguity.Fortunately,it backfired on him

The case for a Bush war crimes trial has little basis or support in law or in political reality.Maybe we should start another thread-should Bush be tried for ruining my egusi soup?

@4play

There are honest mistakes and they are deadly mistakes. . . . . .

And I am not even referring to the flimsy evidence.

The prosecution of the war has been America's greatest undoing.

In the military, they say 'assumption is the mother of all 4ck ups' and the invasion strategy was one long litany of assumptions, fueled by conceit.

It is in that respect they failed those of us who thought some good might come from this whole excercise.

The issue of the conduct of the war is moot in this regard.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.Many thought the war will be best served by 'light' US military presence,others projected troop numbers that were quite simply unsustainable given the state of the post-Clinton military.

In Germany post-war,some 2.3m died(I have seen figures of 5m).Posterity now casts the German occupation in a favorable light.I suspect it will take decades for a valid judgment to be made as to whether the war effort was successful or not.

@Topic

Yes!  But who will do it?

Yar'Adua and Osama?

I dont believe what I am reading from some here.

Was the war premised on Saddam's removal? Would the war have been sanctioned if it was for the removal of Saddam?

I always believe that Americans are not excessively brutal. However, if you tell me that the American parliament voted for a war which has led to the extermination of probably hundreds of thousands of lives just because they wanted to remove Saddam, then one needs to seriously think about the kind of people who make laws in America

As for war crime or not, I don't care - all I know is that Bush quadrupled aid to Africa or something like that - so he's alright by me.