gracchusdixit

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would, should, or successfully could bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, Republicans in Congress threw a tantrum.  Their first impulse was to impugn the integrity of the Director of the FBI, an awkward gambit since he is a lifelong Republican who, among other things, once worked for Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who tried for years to drag Bill Clinton down.

Having failed to discredit their own man, Republicans declared that they would call for yet another investigation to determine whether Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for “lying to Congress” when she stated that she was unaware of sending or receiving emails containing information marked as classified, a statement that is not entirely unreasonable, given the thousands of emails a Secretary of State sends and receives, not to mention the ambiguous and ever-changing nature of security classifications.

If this latest witch hunt goes ahead, it will be the twentieth time or so that one group of Republicans or another has wasted taxpayer dollars trying to humble, humiliate or jail Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Thus far, however, the very people who are so obsessed with the slightest missteps of the Clintons haven’t spent a day or a dime investigating the criminal actions of the last Republican President of the United States, George W. Bush, when he decided to invade Iraq on false pretenses, or the criminal actions of the officials who egged him on.  The task of investigating those true and horrific crimes was left to our closest friend and ally, Great Britain.

Seven years ago, the British House of Commons empowered a committee of “privy counselors” to investigate the causes, conduct, and consequences of the invasion of Iraq.  A lifelong civil servant of unimpeachable integrity, Sir James Chilcot, was appointed to head the committee.  Its other members included an expert in military strategy, a former ambassador, and a distinguished Peer of the House of Lords.  More than 100 witnesses were interviewed, thousands of documents were examined, and £10 million were spent.  The findings of this exhaustive investigation were just released in a report that runs to nearly three million words, longer than Tolstoy’s epic tome, War and Peace.  Even the executive summary is a hefty 145 pages.  I haven’t tackled the full report, but I have read every page of the summary.  Though carefully and cautiously worded, it draws a damning picture of deliberate deceit by the government of the United States and cowardly compliance by the government of the United Kingdom.  To quote from the summary:

The declared objectives of the UK and the US towards Iraq up to the time of the invasion differed. The US was explicitly seeking to achieve a change of regime; the UK to achieve the disarmament of Iraq, as required by UN Security Council resolutions.  Most crucially, the US Administration committed itself to a timetable for military action which did not align with, and eventually overrode, the timetable and processes for inspections in Iraq which had been set by the UN Security Council. 

It appears that the British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, was determined, even desperate, to support the Bush administration. He was concerned that “vital areas of cooperation between the UK and the US could be damaged if the UK did not give the US its full support over Iraq.”  There was, in addition, a “belief that the best way to influence US policy was to commit full and unqualified support, and seek to persuade from the inside.”  In other words, the British government and its Prime Minister persuaded themselves, based on a delusion straight out of Kafka, that they could prevent an invasion of Iraq by supporting it.

On our side of the Atlantic, the problem was not merely that the decision to topple Saddam Hussein was illegal and contradicted every prior public announcement about our intentions and motives, it was that the Bush administration knew it couldn’t be “sold” to the American people for what it was, a blatant coup d’etat.  Another excuse had to be found, and that excuse was a double lie—first, that Iraq had been behind the attack on the Twin Towers; second, that Iraq was developing “weapons of mass destruction” which soon would be turned against the United States.

In its haste to “give the US its full support,” the British government did not even consider the possibility that these claims were not only wrong but had been fabricated.  To quote again from the report:

The assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.  Nor had the assessed intelligence established beyond doubt that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued.  At no stage was the hypothesis that Iraq might not have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programmes identified and examined by either the Joint Intelligence Committee or the policy community. 

The invasion of Iraq instigated by the United States, and joined by Great Britain,  cost trillions of dollars and lost millions of lives.  It was more than a fiasco and an utter failure, it was the worst military and political catastrophe in American and perhaps British history.  It was also based on deliberate lies.  There were no “weapons of mass destruction.”  We were not greeted as “liberators.”  The war did not “pay for itself” through the expropriation of Iraqi oil fields.  Saddam Hussein was toppled, but no better, freer, more democratic Iraq rose up to supplant his dictatorial regime.

Instead, the invasion of Iraq plunged most of the Middle East into chaos.  It spawned ISIS.  It caused Syria to come apart at the seams.  It sent millions of helpless, hopeless refugees pouring into Europe, stirring up the old evils of racism and xenophobia, which may eventually end the European Union.

Rather than investigating and prosecuting these undoubted and historical crimes, Republicans in Congress are hell-bent on taking one more shot at Hillary Clinton.  May they someday go to the circle in Dante’s hell where they belong.