Reply #23: Nobody is saying that what Bush did was right, or that it wasn't morally repugnant.

[Occam Bandage]

What I am saying is that it is absolutely preposterous to claim that a President can be held liable for the particular crime of murder if his case for war ends up being false. I mean, that suggests that if the case for war was non-false but stupid (say, if he had said "we're going to Iraq to free them, because terrorists hate freedom"), then there's no murder, but if he also makes up some stuff about WMD in his speeches, then suddenly, hey, we got murder in the first degree here.

I mean, are all Presidential falsehoods that lead to some foreseeable deaths murder? Suppose that as a result of Kennedy's rhetoric about a non-existent "missile gap," we ramped up spy plane overflights of the Soviet Union, and a plane got shot down and the pilot died in the crash. Should, in that case, Kennedy be impeached, removed from office, and then tried and imprisoned for first-degree murder of that pilot? That just seems ridiculous.