The last thing I would say is this: the purpose of the action was not regime change.
Here is his testimony about an hour earlier, taken directly from the Inquiry transcripts:
SIR RODERIC LYNE: ... The American administration's stated objective was to change the regime in Iraq, and they didn't feel that further UN authorisation for that was required. At this point, these two objectives came to a crunch and time ran out for your diplomacy.
RT HON JACK STRAW MP: In terms of the American objective for regime change had gone back to President Clinton.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Yes, we have been through all of that.
RT HON JACK STRAW MP: We have been through all of that.
Here the right honorable Mr Straw says clearly that the American aim
was regime change, and that he knew it was regime change all along.
Therefore, when "time for diplomacy ran out," he willingly and
deliberately helped facilitate a war for regime change -- which in the
circumstances obtaining in Iraq in 2003 was, by any possible construal,
a blatant war crime under international law. It was, in terms of its
illegality, the precise equivalent to the crime of aggression for which
the Nazi leaders were prosecuted at Nuremberg.
Note too Straw's reference to "President Clinton." He apparently
thinks this nod to a good "liberal" Democratic president somehow makes
his kowtowing to the barbaric rightwingers of the Bush regime less
humiliating. [A good deal of his testimony is taken up with whining
about the "neocons" like Don Rumsfeld who put so much pressure on
everybody to go to war.] But of course this reference makes his lie
about the war's aims even more egregious, for it confirms the fact that
America's intention to overthrow the Iraq regime -- officially
enshrined by Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton -- was known
for years and years.
But Straw is not done yet. After assuring the grieving families of
Britain that he himself -- yes, he, the great right honorable high
minister of state -- feels their pain and shares their heartache, and
after acknowledging that yes, it seems that perhaps a few mistakes were
made (albeit only with the best intentions), he goes on to justify the
whole mass-murdering enterprise:
But that having happened, I think there are few in Iraq, despite the bloodshed, would now say that they want to go back to what existed before 20 March 2003.Putting aside Straw's unconscious but most apt echo of the poet Paul Celan's phrase for the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust -- "that which happened" -- the moral depravity on display here is astonishing, breathtaking, obscene. The right honorable minister might consider asking the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by the invasion and by the virulent extremists it loosened and empowered: would you want to go back to what existed -- i.e., you -- before 20 March 2003? The right honorable minister might want to ask the more than four million people driven from their homes by the war and the savage sectarian conflicts and "ethnic cleansing" it unleashed and abetted: would you want to go back to what existed before 20 March 2003? The right honorable minister might want to ask the tens of millions of Iraqis who have lost their loved ones: would you want to go back to what existed before 20 March 2003 -- and see if there were any alternatives for a better life other than a massive, unprovoked military invasion, mass death, mass destruction, chaos, collapse, civil war and violent terror from occupiers, mercenaries, sectarians and criminals?
O that the universe was not cold and indifferent, with no avenging furies to drive these bloodstained, sanctimonious wretches into soul-rending storms of madness and remorse. But there is not even an earthly venue where the scurrying servitors of power can receive even a modicum of justice. All we have are a few locked-down, buttoned-up, quasi-secret panels of worthies here and there now and then, to cause, at most, a moment or two of embarrassment before the servitors walk free to line their pockets and heap themselves with honors. Their only punishment, I suppose, must be to be what they are: the stunted, deadened husks of a full humanity that they have lost and will never recover.
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