Published Mar 09, 2026 | 2:32 PM ⚊ Updated Mar 09, 2026 | 5:03 PM
If the Baghdad equation is to be applied, shouldn't it extend to US presidents as well?
Synopsis: If the Baghdad equation is applied, Pennsylvania Avenue would not have enough trees or telegraph poles to hang the criminally responsible US presidents, vice presidents, CIA chiefs, generals, and military personnel for crimes against humanity. Whenever the US administration and CIA have tried to establish democracy, freedom, and justice, they have come away killing at least 100 thousand to a million people.
The unprovoked attack on Iran by the US and Israel, assassinations of the Iranian leadership, and brutal murders and burning of hundreds of girls were a deliberate act of mass murder to terrorise the people.
To bomb schools, hospitals, and refugee shelters “accidentally” has become the ‘standard operating procedure’ in US and Israeli campaigns, as we have seen in recent destruction and mass murders in Gaza. The US and Israel believe that the Iranian people would welcome them as liberators.
In the last 80 years since WW-II, the US has attempted several regime changes and repeated the same script. None of these countries welcomed them as liberators. America did not win a single war or succeed in a regime change despite all the death and destruction they unleashed on innocent civilians and killing millions of them.
Finally, in every situation, they had to run with their tail between their legs, be it in Vietnam or Afghanistan, to mention a few. Most recent being the brazen kidnapping of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro Moros and his wife, wife, Cilia Flores.
The gory televised hanging of Saddam Hussein for being responsible for the death of Shias in 1982 and the televised killings of Gaddafi and shooting of Osama bin Laden, bring home the urgency to seriously recalculate the arithmetic of hanging and retribution. This was a declaration that all those directly or indirectly responsible for crimes against humanity will have to face death. Certain parameters for justice have been clearly established in our univocal world.
Saddam’s neck was broken for allegedly giving the nod. The US was Saddam’s best friend and arms supplier. Having not protested, they continued their arms business and supplied, along with Germans, the chemical warfare facilities that were used to kill hundreds of Kurdish civilians.
If the Baghdad equation were applied to the responsibility, presidents Ronald Regan and George Bush Sr. would have had to hang for the murder of Kurdish civilians. Why did the buck stop with Saddam? It should have to go all the way to Washington and Bonn?
This list runs endlessly. Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland, Robert McNamara, and Richard Nixon should have been hanged for Vietnam War crimes. None was ever tried. political assassinations of Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Salvador Allende of Chile, Ernesto Che Guevara of Argentina, the entire central committee of Indonesia’s communist party along with its million members and sympathisers; 2.5 million civilians in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; and thousands of summary executions in the Philippines under CIA supervision. No US president was hanged or even tried for supporting the Taliban or creating Al-Qaeda, but the whole of Afghanistan got blown up instead.
Every single US administration has the blood of Palestinians, in their thousands, on its hands. In the league tables, the worst mass murderers of the 20th century were all great allies of the US, barring Hitler. They were overthrown by popular revolt and fled to the US with tons of plundered national wealth on board their private aircrafts, like Marcos of the Philippines, Shaw of Iran, Samoza of Nicaragua, and Batiste of Cuba, Suharto of Indonesia. They were politely escorted and protected by the CIA under guarantees from successive US presidents.
For being accomplices to thousands of murders worldwide, most US presidents should have been tried and hanged along with their friends. Pinochet of Chile is known to have authorised the killing of at least 30000 intellectuals and was never even barred entry into the US. He could always travel to the US and consult the presidents and deposit millions of dollars embezzled from Chile. Several thousand disappeared. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned.
Incidentally, Bush Sr. and James Baker were directly handling the issue from the CIA HQ in Langley. By the Baghdad equation, Gen. Pinochet and his generals should have been hanged over 200 times along with all the successive US presidents and CIA chiefs from the 1970s till recent years. This may sound horrific, but this is the equation the US applies to the rest of the world.
Ariel Sharon, who enjoyed continued support from the US, was indicted for the murder of Palestinian civilians at Shatila and Sabra Camps in Lebanon and should have hanged along with his US friends. No! He did not. None of Israel’s prime ministers, defense ministers, or soldiers has been hanged for brutal atrocities against the Palestinian population for 70 years.
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The (not so) free US and allied media is acting as the mouthpiece of this war machine and dehumanizing the victims of this unjust war. An Iranian mother, whose house has been firebombed by allied ‘precision bombs’ and whose child has been blown apart and stuck to the walls as mutilated, charred lumps of flesh, does not grieve any less than an English or American mother under similar circumstances.
She may not cry in English in a comfortable Anglo-Saxon accent, with blow-dried hair, makeup, and manicured nails and in convenient sound bites. She may wail inconsolably under a burqa in a foreign language that may be incomprehensible. But her tears, agony, anguish, her heartbreak, and her anger are all just as real and intense.
The real tragedy is that the so-called free world stands in silence watching it happen. The US is not invincible. Ordinary people can prevail. A boycott of every US Company and products in protest against this crime against humanity will bring the clay footed colossus to its knees.
Under the carefully crafted benign video imagery and euphemisms, lies the most inhuman and bloodthirsty death machine ever known to the humankind, under the pseudonym of US administration.
If the Baghdad equation is applied, Pennsylvania Avenue would not have enough trees or telegraph poles to hang the criminally responsible US presidents, vice presidents, CIA chiefs, generals, and military personnel for crimes against humanity. Whenever the US administration and CIA have tried to establish democracy, freedom, and justice, they have come away killing at least 100 thousand to a million people.
The US and their allies owe the world a huge debt in heads of states. (pun intended).
(Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
