Reply #52: You Are Overlooking The Element Of Intent, Sir, And Also Of Agency

[The Magistrate]

The intention to exterminate is the key element in a genocide charge. It was clearly present in the Hitlerite crimes, and has been established legally in more recent years in Rwanda and in Bosnia, where the stated intent of the killers was indeed the extermination of a hated ethnic group, and that intention was backed by systematic and deliberate and murderous action towards the stated end. You would be wholly unable to prove any exterminationist purpose in the actions of the United states in Iraq, though you might be able to prove such intent existed in bodies of the Salafist jihadis, towards the Shia there, and possibly in the case of some Shia militia bodies towards Iraqi Sunnis. The International Criminal Court has ruled that absent proof of this motive, not even a prolonged regime of murderous atrocity meets the legal standard for genocide.

Further, the killing, even killing with an exterminationist motive, must be done by parties that are direct agents of the state charged with the crime, again according to recent rulings of the International Criminal Court, when it ruled that Serbia was not guilty of genocide in Bosnia, because the Bosnian Serb bodies that carried out genocidal killings were not agents of the Serbian state. The greatest proportion of the killing in Iraq today is being carried out by various bodies of Iraqis, and Salafist jihadis, who are by no conceivable construction agents of the United States, but rather the declared enemies of the United States.