I can agree with your view on war being a crime in and of itself. I have never agreed with warfare as an answer to anything and, indeed, it never has been. There are no winners when it comes to war.

The rules of engagement and the acceptable rules of war are designed to make killing legal within certain parameters. To me, war is nothing but genocide on a very grand scale. There is nothing humane about it. So, too, there is nothing humane or right in the way that George W. Bush and Tony Blair formed the coalition that would bring down Iraq and the leader we had been doing business with for decades! We needed a scapegoat for the events surrounding 9/11 and we had one in Saddam Hussein and the alleged "Weapons of Mass Destruction" Iraq had been thought to be squirreling away for years. It would seem as though intelligence had failed us and others around the world! Not even the U.N. could stop Bush from invading Iraq and he did so without their consent.

It pains me to say that détente and diplomacy seem to be a thing of the past. I only wish I could say the same for war. That wouldn't pain me in the least.

To pronounce ANYONE guilty of war crimes would be beyond the powers of my reason or conscience.

I don't know enough facts (and suspect that I never will) to make a decision. And even if I did, I wouldn't presume to accept the mantle of someone capable of pronouncing the guilt or innocence of such a serious offense.

I have an entirely different view that I would like to put forward. I find it a strange statement of the human condition that we CAN get together to declare that there are acceptable "rules of war" (it's OK to kill one another as long as we follow some humane guidelines of conduct), but we often CANNOT get together to talk away our grievances without resorting to violence.

How about we agree that war itself is a crime?