Desmond Tutu: Blair and Bush should be tried for war crimes
Desmond M. Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of South Africa gestures during the session 'Believing in the Dignity of All' at the Annual Meeting 2009 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, February 1, 2009. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Remy Steinegger. CC BY-SA 2.0
“Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague,” The Guardian reports, “and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war”:
“The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain,” Tutu argues, “fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.”
But it is Tutu’s call for Blair and Bush to face justice in The Hague that is most startling. Claiming that different standards appear to be set for prosecuting African leaders and western ones, he says the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict is sufficient on its own for Blair and Bush to be tried at the ICC.
Read the whole article here.
While Desmond Tutu is to be respected for his efforts, the charge of death toll is in no way usable in the ICC. To simply view Blair and Bush in vacuums without their respective governments is wrong as they run democracies that voted to go to war.