Truest statement of the week

AMY GOODMAN: Marjorie Cohn, a lot of people talk about the war as being a terrible mistake. You don't. You go way further than that.
MARJORIE COHN: Yeah. The war was a premeditated, deliberate violation of the law. The UN Charter, also a treaty, also part of US law, says the only two instances where a country can use force against another is in self-defense or when the Security Council agrees. And there was never any evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to us or to any other country. He hadn't invaded any country for twelve years, since Kuwait, and he had really been -- his military had been neutered by the Gulf War, by the punishing sanctions, by the bombings in the no-fly zones. And the Bush administration knew that. They knew that, and yet they sold this war. They sold this war.
They intended to invade Iraq since way before 9/11. And now it's really clear why they did that. And that is, to install huge permanent military bases, the biggest in the world, and the biggest US embassy in the world in Baghdad and to privatize Iraq's oil. They're trying to push through this Iraqi oil law that even Congress is touting as a benchmark for Iraqi progress, and it would give control of three-quarters of Iraq's oil to foreign oil companies.
And yet, we see the leading Democratic candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is saying, well, she is not talking about taking the bases out. She's saying we'd leave a force there, which means we would leave the bases there. So -- and I don't hear anyone but Kucinich actually talking about an end to the occupation, which is what we should be talking about.
But I think that it's very important not to say "the war was a mistake, the war is being fought incompetently." The war is illegal, and it's also immoral. It's killing thousands of US soldiers. It's killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, and it's draining our National Treasury. And the majority of American people know this, but Congress has not caught on yet.



The president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, speaking with Amy Goodman last Monday on Democracy Now! (August 6, 2007).