Ernest Hemingway wrote here

"Here" is the Toronto Star and when is after the First World War when Hemingway came back from being an ambulance driver in Italy. Guess he wowed 'em with his writing. Yesterday, the 29th, there was a punishing op-ed piece in Ernest's old paper. It was about the commission of the war crime of aggressive war. Spot has a soft spot for the prosecution of war crimes, as you know boys and girls.

The piece does a good job of describing what the crime of aggressive war is.

Canada's own Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leadership front-runner,
tries to slough off his former enthusiastic support for the war by now
saying he hadn't "anticipated how incompetent the Americans would be."

But incompetence is a side issue. The real problem is, and always has been,
that it is illegal — not to mention immoral — for a country to invade
another country, in other words, to wage a war of aggression.

The fact that Iraq is the last unharvested oil bonanza on earth, in an era
of increasingly fierce global competition for dwindling oil reserves,
only makes U.S. motives all the more suspect.

As the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded after World War II: "War is essentially an evil thing ... To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an
international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole."

Supreme international crime. Pretty strong words. Bet you didn't know you were signing up for that, did you boys and girls?

B29 George McGovern, pestered by that conscience of his, thinks the country should do this as reported by the Star:

As former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern argued in Harper's, the withdrawal [sooner rather than later] should be accompanied by a payment of about $17 billion to compensate the Iraqi people for the immense suffering caused by the invasion. McGovern sets out in detail how the money should be allocated. He calculates that a U.S. pullout, even with a $17 billion payment, would save the U.S. $200 billion over the next two years, and help restore America's reputation.

War reparations as an economy move. Who would have thought?

But Spotty, can't a country defend itself?

Yes of course grasshopper it can, and it can even invade another country if it is in imminent danger of itself being invaded. Don't make Spot look it up, but it's in the UN Charter. In Iraq's case however, it is clear that the threat was not imminent, and in fact it was non-existent. And it is also pretty clear that the administration knew it.

Here's another question for another day, boys and girls.Is the commission of the supreme international crime an impeachable offense?

Update: Link to Toronto Star op-ed from BuzzFlash

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