War Crimes and the Hague: a moot process.

Georgia and Russia are now going to duke it out in the International Court of Justice, each accusing the other of 'war crimes'. Ostensibly, this will take months to investigate on the ground, with Human Rights Watch observers getting an earful from both sides. In the end, there will likely be a stand off as both parties have incidences which they cannot justify.

This seems rather like the Judge Judy type of infraction when one considers the horrendous violation of human rights committed by the USA in Iraq. The Bush Administration has smugly redefined torture so that none of it's atrocities are war crimes; not the horrible pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib, not the 'rendition' flights kidnapping prisoners all over the world, not the years of incarceration and torture of 'detainees' at Guantanamo, not the displacement of four million Iraqi citizens, not the bombing and destruction of irreplaceable historical sites in Iraq, not the rape and murder of an entire family in Haditha, to name but a few of the horrors USA troops have visited upon innocent people, guilty only of trying to live.

If any country should be the focus of the Hague Court, it should be the USA. There is a good reason why the Bush Administration refuses to recognise the authority of the international war crimes court; it is the most guilty of all. Is there a person in the world, besides Americans and their neo-con buddies, who does not know this? Yet the media conveniently ignores this elephant in the room.

This of course does not take into account the million of people who have suffered and died as a result of America's corporate imperialism in Central America, South America, Indonesia, Africa
and Central Asia. First come the American corporations looking for resources; next comes the American military to guarantee access. This story has been repeated for a hundred years of USA's 'foreign policy' in dozens of countries. In each case, the gullible public is flooded with propaganda about the spreading of democracy and USA championing it. If the measure of democracy is what America has, then the rest of the world had better take a pass.

The real reason for this debacle in Georgia is an oil pipeline. All the world leaders know this: how many people realize this when they are reading the fairytale propaganda the media feeds us about democracy? WW3 is coming up surely; but it is not about democracy, it is about the rights of oil companies like BP and Exxon, Shell to politically occupy countries where they have laid pipelines. It's just 'good business'.

The problem is that the human cost of this 'good business' is tremendous. Real people have suffered, starved, been maimed, lost family and homes to implement the long term business interests of the Oiligarchy which now runs the USA. These corporations are now multi-national and can sustain loss on one continent while tapping into new markets on another. The suffering of any given people, be it Americans at the gas pump or Iraqi women and children, homeless or dead, is just the cost of doing business for these masters of the universe.

It is unimaginable that many people still think Georgia-Russia is about democracy and war crimes. To a great extent, this view is force fed to the people, as journalism, a term which today has become synonymous with corporate and government 'public relations'. People get to read the version of events they are meant to read to manipulate public opinion, while the powers that be can comfortably assume most people are too busy to research issues for a truer perspective.

They say the first casualty of war is truth; forgetting that is a critical mistake. This ought to be listed amoung the war crimes under jurisdiction at the Hague. When Europe and the USA start huffing about war crimes, perhaps they had better start with their own first. George Bush is guilty of so many war crimes that directly violate the Geneva Convention, it would be too lengthily to enumerate them here. It hardly seems relevant to examine Georgia-Russia claims with the overwhelmingly atrocities of the Americans in Iraq.

People of the world are getting smarter, and hopefully, Americans will. Bush has lied about every issue he has taken a stand on since he was elected, from WMD in Iraq to denying his own countries National Intelligence Estimate, which clears Iran of any intentions to produce nuclear weapons. And what kind of lie is this 'Mission Accomplished' rhetoric? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The way the world can tell if Bush and Rice are lying, is if their mouths are moving.

If the International Court of Justice cannot condemn the worst perpetrators of war crimes, the Bush Administration, then is has no moral standing to judge or condemn any other country. Worse than that; it is moot.