Although Annan is being lauded for his recent admission that Tony Blair could have prevented the US from invading Iraq, in a recent Times interview (the link to the Times itself is protected by a firewall), he more than makes up for this criticism in the remainder of his interview. Such is the nature of all the token gestures to justice colonized elites make when they dare stray from the White Man’s narrative; for every such concession to truth and humanity comes an effort to compensate for their momentary betrayal of their oppressors. The following excerpt is a case in point of how the truth is “balanced” out with falsehood thereby cancelling out any potential positive effects of the former:
“However, Annan said he did not agree with fellow Nobel peace prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, over his suggestion that Bush and Blair should face proceedings in the international criminal court. Annan said they were democratically elected leaders acting in what they believed were their national interests.”
So according to Annan although Blair could have prevented the US from invading Iraq, and hence was ultimately responsible for the deaths of over 650 000 Iraqis between 2003 and 2006 alone (according to the Lancet Journal’s findings), neither he nor Bush should be prosecuted by the ICC because they were simply pursuing their countries’ “national interests”. Basically, war criminals pursuing Empire’s interests should be exempted from any accountability even when their actions lead to hundreds of thousands of violent deaths caused by massacres, assassinations, drone attacks, bombings of men, women and children.
Annan’s perverted logic suggests that although the Blair-Bush war on Iraq was illegal, as he declared in 2004, and therefore violated jus ad bellum criteria and the laws of war (back then he said that the invasion was not sanctioned by the UN security council or in accordance with the UN’s founding charter), they should not have to face justice.
So leaders who prosecute wars which fail to comply with western requirements of Just War theory and which contravene western-centric international law are still not guilty of any wrongdoing nor have they committed any injustice because they were elected to office and because they were seeking the fulfillment of predefined political objectives, the value of which Annan does not care to interrogate.
One need only apply this line of reasoning to Hizbullah officials or the Iranian president, both of whom are popularly elected and pursue their countries national interests, to note that Annan would surely not absolve either party of legal responsibility if they were to preemptively attack and invade Israel while killing a significant portion of Israelis in the process.
