re: #509 palomino

Yeah, well said. Furthermore, no president wants to open himself up to prosecution later by prosecuting his predecessor right after taking office. Particularly given the fact that the incoming president knows he’ll have to make tough and nasty decisions once in office.

You can make a case—and a few on the far left do—that virtually every modern president was guilty of some war crime, or at least violation of federal law and/or international treaties or conventions. I don’t agree with that position, but here’s a partial list of how that argument would go:

FDR - Internment camps
Truman - atomic weapons
Eisenhower - overthrowing Mossadegh (elected leader of Iran)
JFK - Bay of Pigs
LBJ - Vietnam
Nixon - Vietnam, Cambodia, assassination of Salvador Allende, etc., etc.
Ford - I can’t think of anything off top of my head; not in office long enough
Carter - See Ford
Reagan - Iran Contra
Bush Sr. - Iraq
Clinton - bombing in the Balkans
Bush Jr. - Iraq, torture, Gitmo
Obama - drones

Gulf War II (I think of the Iran-Iraq War as Gulf War I) was authorized by the UN, so “international law” types do not generally consider it to have been ‘illegal’, the illegality falling on Saddam Hussein for invading and attempting to annex Kuwait.