Punditry Kristolized: Part II

TM note: as you read this, keep in mind that, under international law, the unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state is considered the most egregious of war crimes.

As Robert Parry has observed: "Under principles of international law applied from Nuremberg to Rwanda, propagandists who contribute to war crimes or encourage crimes against humanity can be put in the dock alongside the actual killers." [Consortium News, Posted August 21, 2006]

Wasn't the invasion of Iraq an unproved attack, i.e., a war crime? Did Bill Kristol contribute to that attack? Doesn't that make him a war criminal?

by BarbinMD
from DailyKos

Inspired by a New York Times editorial page editor's claim that William Kristol was "a serious, respected conservative intellectual," last week I began the Hurculean task of chronicling his incredible history of being wrong. This week I will be looking at Kristol's pre-war fearmongering about WMD in Iraq and then his rationalizations and revisionism when those weapons failed to materialize.

When looking at Kristol's role as the head cheerleader for war in Iraq, it's important to remember his background. Besides being the Editor of the Weekly Standard and a frequent contributor on Fox News, Kristol is also the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative organization that dreamed of a "catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor," that would, among other things, lead to the ouster of Saddam Hussein. And with the terrorist attack on September 11th, Kristol wasted no time, saying that, "we cannot afford to let Saddam Hussein inflict a worse 9/11 on us in the future." Soon after, Kristol wrote what would be his first of nearly 30 columns in the next year advocating the invasion of Iraq, and so it began. The following are just a few of the predictions of doomsday from Kristol in the months that followed:

The Iraqi threat is enormous. It gets bigger with every day that passes...Ultimately, what we do or do not do in the coming months about Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq will decisively affect our future security.

...Iraq is the threat and the supreme test of whether we as a nation have learned the lesson of September 11.

Nor is there any doubt that, after September 11, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction pose a kind of danger to us that we hadn't fully grasped before.

And if we haven't learned this much from September 11, then all that we lost on that day will have been lost in vain.

If we turn away from the Iraq challenge...then we will have made a momentous and fateful decision.

And it was only a matter of time before the ultimate horror of terrorists armed with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons confronted us all.

While the president and his team have been ineffectually playing at peacemaking, Saddam has been moving ahead into a new era, a new age of horrors where terrorists don't commandeer jumbo jets and fly them into our skyscrapers. They plant nuclear bombs in our cities.

And don't forget the anthrax attacks.

(Continued here.)