The West’s Glaring Double Standards on Display in ICC Indictment of President Putin on Eve of Iraq War Anniversary

The indictment of Russian President Putin on March 17 by the International Criminal Court (ICC) provides more evidence that the effort by western governments to use the war in Ukraine to destroy Russia is a project run by arrogant elitists, with no contact with the real world.  The announcement, made by ICC chief prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, a British attorney, charges Vladimir Putin, along with Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, with illegally deporting Ukrainian children to Russia.  Claims have been made that at least 15,000 children were kidnapped by Russian forces, while the Russians admit that 1,400 were moved from the areas of Ukraine annexed by Russia, mostly from orphanages and hospitals in war zones, for their protection.

The indictment was clearly issued for political, and not legal, reasons. Nonetheless, President Biden called the charges “justified” and said it “makes a very strong point”, while acknowledging that, like Russia, the U.S. does not recognize the ICC as a legitimate authority.

The timing of the indictment is replete with ironies, coming on the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s summit with Putin in Moscow, and when U.S. media are reporting that military and intelligence officials now believe that Ukraine cannot win, and the time has come for negotiations.

An even more profound irony, however, which probably escaped Joe Biden’s questionable powers of discernment, is that the indictments came two days before the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq war, an occasion marked by multiple articles pointing to the failure to hold accountable any of the military or government officials responsible for that war.  Neither the ICC nor any other legal body has prosecuted George W. Bush or Tony Blair for their launching of the war on false pretenses, which is estimated (by British medical journal Lancet) to have led to more than 601,000 deaths of Iraqis between March 19, 2003 and 2006, and countless more in the following years, due to civil society breakdown, and the outbreak of terrorism and religious civil war resulting from the invasion.

Recall that the decision to attack Iraq was based on a fabricated dossier claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which threatened the West, and that Saddam Hussein was allied with the Al Qaeda terrorists alleged to have been the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. That MI6 dossier had been delivered by the Blair government to U.S. officials, and was used by Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell in his address to the U.N., to advocate invading Iraq — though Powell later admitted he knew the charge was false.

Blair used his speech announcing the launch of the war on March 20, 2003 to reiterate the fabricated intelligence (otherwise known as lies), based on which he ordered military action in Iraq, with the mission to conduct regime change, “to remove Saddam Hussein from power and disarm Iraq of its [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction.”

Tony Blair and George W. Bush and his team of neocon war hawks are correctly seen by most of the world as war criminals, who have inexplicably not been brought to trial for their crimes, while the ICC, founded in part due to the initiative of George Soros’ Open Society NGO, has indicted Putin for removing defenseless children from a war zone.  Knowing this helps explain why the “Global South” has refused to join the U.S. and NATO in condemning Russia and arming Ukraine, to conduct regime change in Russia.