No peaceful ending to W’s criminal Afghan war

The carnage at Kabul Airport Thursday is a reminder why unjust wars were identified as the supreme international crime at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. They can continue to claim life, property and destruction of a nation’s sovereignty at the end of the war and well into the future.

That is precisely what’s happening in Afghanistan. The American public is riveted first to scenes of the mad scramble to get out Westerners and their Afghan helpers; secondly to the terror attack that was predicted as inevitable.

It doesn’t matter that most Americans supported the war back in October, 2001. They were primed by scenes of carnage in New York and Washington to believe any fairy tale that America’s response must be to invade a foreign country neither attacking nor threatening the U.S. The logic used to attack Afghanistan, conflating the Taliban with Osama bin Laden, was used in an even more outrageous fashion to attack Iraq 17 months later by conflating Saddam Hussein with bin Laden.

George W. Bush recklessly decided to invade Afghanistan, toppling its rulers to install a puppet government that never gained Afghan credibility. That makes him and his war cabinet liable for all the violence these past 20 years, including the bloodbath at the Kabul Airport.

It is fair to question the handling of the U.S. withdrawal that has resulted in so much chaos and now violence. But to ignore the leaders who set in motion an unjust war that killed over a hundred thousand, displaced 2.7 million and squandered trillions is a travesty of justice and a stain on everything good America should represent.