President Bush Is A War Criminal

So I finally snapped today. I'm not sure what exactly did it, but I went from believing the Iraq war was an unfortunate mistake made by a president eager to combine political and economic agendas with his own personal one to a war which has degenerated into the same ugly killing of the Balkan wars of independence. Estimates of the number of dead Iraqi civilians reach up to 100000. Its difficult to grasp these numbers, but thats, for reference, about the same as the population of Hartford. The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (for which Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian prime minister at the time, is now on trial at the Hague for) was responsible for 145000 deaths. The recent invasion of the city of Fallujah, before the war home to 300000 people, has reduced that city to rubble, with witnesses comparing it to the German city of Dresden after Allied firebombings in 1945. US troops routinely rounded up and executed civlians during the invasion, and have killed prisoners as recently as the fighting in Fallujah. While it's easy to hold the soldiers themselves accountable for their actions, their being stuck in a hostile evironment, overworked, underpaid, and always in constant danger can be attributed to those above. Even yesterday, I expressed disdain for those who referred to Bush as a war criminal, believing such bombastic rhetoric accomplished nothing. But I finally connected the dots and realized that Bush has precipitated a conflict that fulfills no purpose and has left tens of thousands dead and millions more with lives that will be forever ruined. Nearly 1100 US soldiers have been killed in combat and another 10000 have been wounded, 6500 seriously enough to be unable to return to duty (quite seriously). This adds up to about one out of every 15 soldiers in Iraq either being killed or wounded in combat. Bush has not attended any funerals of the soldiers (nor has Rumsfeld, but he's an easy target) and the Pentagon until recently refused to allow the press to release photos showing flag-draped caskets of American dead. After a suicide bomber at a US base left 14 US soldiers dead , Bush responded by saying that they died in "a vital mission for peace." He seems to fail to understand the pain and suffering his decisions have wrought, instead preferring to take a moralistic stand about a battle between right and wrong that he has been pushing since September 11. More and more I have to wonder what differentiates him and Slobodan.