Why MPs Who Vote for War Must Be Held Accountable as Combatants
In the theatre of Westminster, where power dresses itself in ceremony and affectation, a terrible truth is obscured by the pomp: the men and women who vote to send bombs, bullets and battalions into other people’s countries rarely hear the screams. They don’t see the charred remains of children in Fallujah, the mass graves in Helmand, the dismembered in Gaza. Yet they are just as responsible – no, more responsible – than the soldier who pulls the trigger. They are the architects. The war-makers. In a truly just world, they would be seen for what they are: combatants in suits.
Today’s wars are not the spontaneous eruptions of tribal hatred or defensive necessity that the media would have you believe. They are planned. Debated. Voted upon in the hallowed halls of parliaments by men and women who cloak their decisions in euphemisms like “humanitarian intervention,” “strategic interest,” or the grotesque lie of “self-defence.” They are not passive participants, but the initiating force.
In 2003, 412 British Members of Parliament (MPs) voted for the invasion of Iraq based on a lie conjured up by governments and parroted by a servile press. The result? More than a million dead Iraqis. Did a single British MP face trial in The Hague? Did Tony Blair, whose role in that war should render his passport a war crimes indictment, spend a day in custody? No. He’s now a multimillionaire consultant, in a sickening irony still lecturing the world on democracy.
This absurd dichotomy, where the soldier is held liable for war crimes under the Geneva Convention but the politician who made the war possible is shielded by parliamentary immunity, is both morally obscene and legally indefensible.
We must reimagine the role of the war-voting MP; when an elected ‘representative’ casts a vote to wage war, they too must be treated as parties to the conflict, and thereby subject to the same legal scrutiny as any other combatant. If a war they authorized leads to atrocities, to torture camps, to drone strikes on wedding parties and the use of banned munitions, then they too should stand before the same judges who tried Slobodan Milošević or Charles Taylor.
There may of course be cries of outrage: “How can lawmakers be treated as combatants?” – But if a man in Kandahar directing a drone strike on civilians is a legitimate target then why not the MP in London who made that strike a reality? If a soldier or a general must account for unlawful deeds or commands then why not the politician who sent them?
Responsibility for the outcomes of imperialist wars must be placed firmly at the door of not just those who carried out the act of war, but both those who demanded the war and those who made it a reality. It’s time for responsibility – the kind that’s been so absent in the age of endless wars. For too long, politicians have treated the act of voting for war as an abstract duty, as if they were merely moving pieces on a chessboard, but this is not a game. These are people’s lives, their homes, their children, and their futures – obliterated by a decision made thousands of miles away by someone who didn’t know them, and who couldn’t care less about the aftermath.
As imperialist nations drift toward new confrontations – with Iran, with China, with whatever enemy the war machine conjures next – we must remember: the next war crime doesn’t begin on the battlefield, it begins in Parliament, and until we strip public ‘representatives’ of the impunity they have cloaked themselves in, the slaughter will continue – signed, sealed, and delivered with a vote.
Consider, for a moment, the grotesque imbalance of outrage – as British MPs sign off on arms deals that fuel the genocide in Gaza, as bombs with “Made in Britain” stencilled on their casing bury entire families beneath the rubble, the artist who speaks the truth is vilified; the politician who enables mass murder is rewarded with a peerage.
This is the moral sickness of empire: it fears the lyric more than the missile, the microphone more than the warhead, and until we reverse that calculus, until people hold the warmongers to account with the same fervour they reserve for dissenting artists, the electorate is not just ruled by killers. They are accomplices.
