Martin Peretz at the TNR, whom you may recall, shilled for the Iraq war, is attacking Soros for saying the following (hat tip Clemmons.)

After asserting that the United States is recognizing the error it made in Iraq, Soros said, "To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future."

He went on to say that Turkey and Japan are still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history, and contrasted that reluctance to Germany's rejection of its Nazi-era past.

"America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany," Soros said. "We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."

Soros spokesman Michael Vachon told Page Six: "There is nothing unpatriotic about demanding accountability from the president. Those responsible for taking America into this needless war should do us all a favor and retire from public office."

Now let's first acknowledge that using the Nazi word is generally considered off limits because people get their backs up. That said, however, it's not a bad metaphor, for a number of reasons.

The first, and most simple, is that America hanged a large number of Nazis, not for the Holocaust, but because they engaged in pre-emptive war. Let's start with a couple of quotes from Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg:

Quote One: "We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

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Quote Two: "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

There is at this point no doubt that when the United States attacked Iraq it was attacking a country which had not attacked it; which had nothing to do with 9/11; which had no nuclear weapons or program to create them (its having them would make no difference, mind, but simply to note that the ostensible reason was a lie). The evidence at the time was so laughable that it was debunked within days of coming out, and the pathetic list that then Secretary-of-State Colin Powell laid out was so weak even at the time, that Powell's reputation will likely never recover from the way his credibility was used to try and sell the war.

We don't know how many Iraqis have been killed because of the war; the occupation and the ongoing civil war, but we know it's large - at least tens of thousands and quite likely hundreds of thousands. The reason we don't know, of course, is that the US and the Iraqi "government" don't want to count, because the answer would be a constant bleeding sore. We do know that over a million Iraqis are now refugees who have fled the country. We do know that ethnic cleansing is occurring within the country. We do know, then, that the Iraq war, like most wars, has had a terrible human cost.

And that, to make the obvious point, is why Robert Jackson said that no grievance can justify aggressive war - ie. starting a war. In wars very bad things happen. A lot of people die. People are maimed for life. Women are raped. Towns and people's livelihoods are destroyed. Torture occurs, even when it isn't officially mandated as has been the case for the Bush administration. And all of this happens on a very wide scale.

The decision to fight a war should be the greatest test of any politician - of anyone who aspires to be one day called a statesman and it is because you know, going in, that horrible things are going to happen. It is also the test of all of those who cluster around the halls of powers, whether they be journalists, pundits, bureaucrats, generals or the staffers attached to various powerful men and women - the consigliere's whispering dreams of glory and treasure on the Tigris in their ears.

Bush, the neocons, and all of their enablers, were responsible for the horrors of the Iraq war. They were responsible for the same crime that Americans hanged Germans for after World War II. It should be pointed out that amongst these Martin Peretz ranks very high, which is why he must attack Soros for suggesting de-nazification, for surely in any real soul searching purge of enablers in the US, Marty Peretz would be one of the first to suddenly need to learn how to make a real living by the sweat of his brow. Marty needn't worry, I suspect, about facing jail time - as with Blair, who has sanctimoniously stated that he will take his judgment only from his creator and not any mortal man, the true weighing of the scales for people like Marty will probably have to wait till they shuffle off the mortal coil.

Nonetheless it should be well understood that men like Peretz are morally implicated in what happened in Iraq. They shilled for an illegal, aggressive war and they got what they asked for. They were also, of course, wrong about the practicalities, leading one to observe that while it's always immoral to start an aggressive war; it's even worse to, in effect, lose one. It's not just the evil, it's the incompetence.

Perhaps like Richard Perle, Peretz might whine that he could never have expected the Bush administration to be so incompetent, but in the end he must also take responsibility for his chosen tools. What was on the table wasn't "War against Iran run by a dream team of competent politicians and generals"; what was on the table was a war run by Bush and Cheney and Rusmfeld; and the generals left after they had purged those with the guts and integrity to try and tell them what needed to be done to actually win their war, if they were so stupid as to wage it.

But ultimately competence is besides the point. The US has, for over 30 years, since Watergate, refused to properly deal with elites who have committed crimes. Nixon was pardoned and those involved got off close to scotch free. Many of the same men were involved in Iran Contra and they came back under Bush II and had the US commit a series of war crimes. They have been involved in almost all of the most shameful foreign policy episodes in the last thirty years. They, their protégées and their enablers need to be purged from American civic life. Since it is clear that that cannot be done simply by unelecting them (there's always another Republican administration) it will be necessary to try them for their crimes and lock them up for them.

Failure to do so means that their protegees will cause the US to be involved in yet another shameful episode. And it is questionable at this point how many more the US can survive. Contra Soros this is not just a case of needing to live down the past; this is a case of needing to secure the future.

Those who have failed repeatedly, in criminal fashion, and horribly damaged the US, need to be prevented from ever having power in the US again. If they are not then the US will quite predictably reap what it has sown.

Soros was right. Peretz, trying to save his own skin, is wrong, and morally wrong, as he has been from the day he started troweling down propaganda for aggressive war.

Let us hope that the US does indeed live up to its highest ideals; ideals displayed by men such as Robert Jackson at Nuremberg, and takes for itself the medicine it would prescribe for others.