cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/53216

It’s been three months since the United States and Israel launched their joint attack on Iran on February 28, assassinating Iran’s head of state and slaughtering schoolchildren in Minab. Ever since, the war against Iran has been an unfolding catastrophe. Day after day, we’ve seen U.S. soldiers coming home in coffins, an estimated 2,100 civilian deaths (and rising) across the region, a supposed “ceasefire” in April where the U.S. has continued striking southern Iran anyway, and an intractable blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that has spiked global energy prices, worsening the cost-of-living crisis for ordinary people everywhere. In the press, the emerging consensus is that Trump’s war is a failure on strategic terms. Less attention has been paid to the more basic fact: that the war is simply wrong, regardless of how successful or unsuccessful it might be.

As usual when the United States attacks another country, there is a range of overlapping factors that led to this war. There’s Trump’s personal psychology and desire to look tough on the world stage. There’s the well-documented behind-the-scenes pressure from Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel, the profit interests of U.S. weapons companies, and yes, even a convenient distraction from the disturbing revelations in the Epstein files. But there’s another factor that led us to war in Iran, which not enough people are talking about: the expectation of impunity that was created when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, and got away with it scot-free.

The similarities between Iran in 2026 and Iraq in 2003 are obvious, and have been commented on before, most thoroughly by Frederick Deknatel in New Lines magazine. Like Trump, George W. Bush promised a quick, easy victory, only to plunge the U.S. into a conflict much more protracted and bloody than the one he’d advertised. Like Trump, he slaughtered untold numbers of civilians. In both cases, this was a unilateral assault on a sovereign nation in the Middle East which had not attacked the United States, making it a clear-cut war of aggression. Aggression is the “supreme crime” in international law, and one of the primary crimes Nazi officers were hanged for at Nuremberg. The point of those trials, as chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said at the time, was to establish for the world that actions like invading Poland would never be acceptable: “civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

And yet, more than 20 years after the fact, Bush and his associates have never faced any serious penalties for their invasion of Iraq, or for the litany of human rights abuses they committed in the process. Bush himself continues to be treated as a respectable figure in mainstream American politics, often compared favorably to the more vulgar and erratic Trump. This year, Bush has written an op-ed for Bari Weiss’s Free Press in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, and is expected to attend the opening of Barack Obama’s presidential library in June. And because he never saw the inside of a tribunal courtroom, a standard of impunity was created. Whatever international law might say on paper, the de facto rule became that American presidents can invade Middle Eastern countries when it suits them, even commit blatant acts of torture, and get away with it. And so, just a few decades later, Trump has walked through the door that Bush left wide-open, secure in the expectation that he, too, is unlikely to ever face real consequences.

It didn’t have to be that way. Over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, plenty of people made noble efforts to bring Bush to account for his crimes, and if they had been listened to and empowered, the world might be a very different place today. One of the first was former Representative Dennis Kucinich, who brought articles of impeachment against Bush in July 2008, charging him with “fraudulent representations made to Congress” about weapons of mass destruction which had caused “the deaths of over 1 million innocent Iraqi civilians.” The charges were true, give or take some uncertainty about the precise number of casualties, and everyone knew it. By 2008, of course, it was arguably too late for impeachment, since Bush was on the way out regardless, but it might at least have set an example for future presidents that some punishment would be imposed for lying and killing en masse. But Kucinich’s articles were “kicked into limbo” in committee by the House Democratic leadership, most notably then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who felt they were too “divisive.” No justice was to be had from Congress.

That same year, there were at least two book-length summations of the evidence against Bush, published to give future prosecutors the tools they would need to secure a conviction. The first was George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes, written by a professor of political science named Michael Haas. The second was The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, by famous attorney and crime writer Vincent Bugliosi. As you might expect, Bugliosi’s book was the more dramatic of the two, written for a popular audience; he’d previously prosecuted the Manson family (strictly small-time killers compared to Bush) and co-wrote the best-selling Helter Skelter about the case, and took a similar tone here. The Prosecution of George W. Bush sold 130,000 copies. Haas’s title was published by Bloomsbury, and is more academic and exhaustive; not exactly beach reading. But both of them accomplished their basic goal of collecting all the facts in a neat, easily accessible format, and either of them would have given a motivated prosecution a decent starting point to work from.

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