Whatever Saddam Hussein's crimes were, they pale in comparison to what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld did when they unilaterally invaded Iraq in a preemptive war based entirely on intentional lies and purposeful deceit of the American people and the world.

The assault on Iraq constituted a war crime of hitlerarian proportions.

More than 100,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed and every conceivably applicable Geneva Convention and Protocol has been arrogantly disregarded by the U.S. military under the direction of George W. Bush, their commander in chief.

From the opening volley of their "shock and awe" blitz of Baghdad in March 2003, to their razing of the city of Fallujah with phosphorous bombs and napalm in November 2004, to the infamous physical and sexual abuses of helpless prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib prison, Americans have written a shameful chapter in the history of their nation that will haunt them for centuries.

President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were and are directly responsible for the horrors of the war on Iraq--horrors that, unfortunately, continue unabated even today.

It is not sufficient that a few enlisted men and women have been given jail terms for specific instances of abuse and excess in the larger tapestry from hell that is the war on Iraq.

Those at the top of the chain of command--those that formulated a planned "regime change" in Iraq before September 11, 2001--before Bush came to office, in fact--should be held accountable for the untold deaths and miseries visited upon the Iraqi people by the American armed forces.

If Saddam Hussein was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity--and I have no doubt that he was--then Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are doubly culpable for their roles in the assault on Iraq--an assault that had no moral, legal or military justification initially and one that has none today--100,000 or more Iraqi lives and 3,000 American lives later.

The occupation of Iraq was and is a case of outright naked imperialistic aggression and should not go unpunished.

Its perpetrators should face an international war crimes tribunal at The Hague for their roles in the Iraq debacle.

D. Grant Haynes

December 30, 2006