TUN Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the two-time prime minister of Malaysia, would have recognised former United States president George W. Bush's "slip" of the tongue in Dallas last week — "a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq" — for what it was.
An admittance of guilt for the genocide in Iraq. After all, Dr Mahathir was responsible for the setting up of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT), which found Bush, Tony Blair and several others guilty of genocide in Iraq. True, they are roaming free, terrestrially speaking, but their souls are manacled. Though medicine hasn't got anywhere near understanding the human soul, our good doctor at home knows what guilt does to war criminals.
Sleep doesn't come easy to them, even in Texas, a place so far removed from Iraq, the crime scene. One just can't kill thousands and forget about them. Even if you are the heads of state of two of the most powerful nations in the world. We humans are wired to regret and repent. Neither Bush nor Blair has done any of the two in public. But in private, they are troubled souls. Hence the Dallas disaster.
We must not let Bush and his ilk get away with this. Is the International Criminal Court paying any attention? We are told that it is busy with its war crime investigations in Ukraine, but that doesn't mean that it should ignore Iraq, a scene of an older illegal war. Want help, ICC?
KLWCT is ready, able and willing to help. Besides, the tribunal had immediately after its ruling lodged its findings and recommendations with the ICC in The Hague in 2011. Isn't a decade enough for the ICC to act? The ICC mustn't allow itself to be dictated by the geopolitical interests of the West. If it does, as it is doing now, it will not serve the cause of justice. Remember, justice is blind. We put it to the ICC that justice and geopolitics are two different things.
We are not finished with Bush's Dallas speech as yet. He said Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine was only possible because of a lack of checks and balances in the governance of the country. Bush wants us to believe that no one man, be it the president or prime minister, can do that in America or Britain.
That is exactly what Bush and Blair did, despite the empty claims to checks and balances in the two countries. The Iraq invasion was hawked to the world, including the US Congress, the British Parliament and the United Nations, on the basis of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the possession of president Saddam Hussein. None was found because none was there. It was a Bush-Blair invention. And they knew it.
The real reason as we have come to find out is Iraq's oil. Anything for oil, including regime change. Saddam and the Iraqis had to pay the price. Not only there aren't any checks and balances in Bush's and Blair's countries, but the heads of states there can literally get away with murder.
Dr Mahathir had an old prescription for the UN to stop this: "No single nation should be allowed to police the world, least of all what action to take and when." It didn't listen then. And it is not listening now.