US Special Presidential Envoy on Climate and former Secretary of State John Kerry said he would not support the international trial of former US President (2001-2009) George W. Bush for invading Iraq because he has not been indicted.
In an interview with LCI on Sunday, discussing the recent Paris summit on a new global financial pact attended by African and BRICS countries, program host Darius Rochebin noted that the Global South demands "more equality and justice, and it's not just about financing." In that context, he recalled the current calls from Western countries to organize a trial of Russian President Vladimir Putin for the special military operation in Ukraine and asked if Kerry would support a similar trial against George W. Bush, Jr.
"No," the former secretary of state replied. - "Because there was no direct indictment process against President Bush. If there were violations during that war, then yes."
Kerry noted that he personally opposed the Iraq war campaign and recalled that he witnessed violations during the Vietnam war, which he later recounted publicly. When a journalist asked whether the American invasion of Iraq was "a crime of aggression based on false accusations," the special envoy of the US president also replied in the negative.
"Well, it wasn't known then that it was a lie. The evidence was presented then, and people didn't know it was a lie," said the TV guest.
In response to the reporter's insistence on who lied, Kerry replied that he wouldn't revisit the Iraq war, a debate about which "has already consumed a lot of time in the past." He only expressed regret that he and Congress had empowered the president to use force. "When we found out it was a lie, people stood up and did the right thing," he concluded.
US invasion of Iraq
On March 20, 2003, US-led international coalition troops launched a massive military operation against Iraq, code-named Iraqi Freedom. During the investigation in Iraq, the UN inspectors and US military concluded that by the time the military operation began, Baghdad had no WMD programs and no ties to Al-Qaeda (banned in the Russian Federation), as Washington had accused it of doing.
The foreign invasion, the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein and years of war have plunged the country into the chaos of interethnic and interreligious warfare. Iraq's territory became a staging ground for numerous terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS, an organization banned in the Russian Federation). By 2014, more than 60 percent of Iraqi territory was under the control of IS fighters, and only by the end of 2017, with the support of a new US-led international coalition, Iraqi troops had cleared the country of the terrorist group's formations. During the war and while fighting the terrorists, the country's infrastructure was destroyed and Iraq faced a deep political and humanitarian crisis.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: ErikaWittlieb\Pixabay
Based on materials from TASS