Fifteen years ago today, the US invasion of Iraq began. The war was justified in America based on the idea that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which he did not. Virtually all American political leaders knew he did not, as did the mass media, and a good portion of American citizens on the political left.
The Europeans knew it too. European media coverage of the proposed US invasion was almost uniformly against it. As were people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and a large part of the Middle East too.
No one wanted this war, it seemed, except for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the war criminals in the Bush Administration at the time.
The US media cheered the invasion on. Everyone is familiar with Judith Miller’s faulty and false reporting on Iraqi possession of WMD for the The New York Times, which was used as a major justification for the war. The Times Editorial page endorsed the war. Thomas Friedman, one of the paper’s most prominent columnists, was also in favor of invasion.
When Colin Powell went before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, one month before the invasion, he wove a tail of uranium and yellowcake so preposterous that it sounded like a fairy tale, Alice in Wonderland acquires WMD.
The UN Security Council didn’t buy it, and they authorized only “further [weapons] inspections.” France and Russia explicitly ruled out the use of force to overthrow Saddam.
But none of this mattered to George W., who many people believed was determined to oust Saddam and finish the job his daddy hadn’t been able to during the first Persian Gulf War.
The Persian Gulf War of 1991, as it was known, was George H.W. Bush’s answer to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. H.W. marshalled a large coalition of nations to oust Saddam from Kuwait, which they easily did. But he stopped short of authorizing the troops to go all the way to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam.
He did, however, manage to kill at least 100,000 Iraqis, mostly through bombing. He also destroyed most of Iraq’s infrastructure, making life miserable for Iraq’s civilians. The war was over within six weeks, and H.W. had his victory. But some critics said he should have gone all the way to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam.
In any case, over the next decade, US President Bill Clinton imposed sanctions so strict on Iraq that daily life became a struggle for survival for Iraqis. The middle class, the educated, and anyone with enough money to pay human smugglers, all got the hell out of the country, leaving the poor and the vulnerable to fend for themselves.
In short, the country was beaten down, destroyed and devastated by the time George W. Bush set his sights on ousting Saddam in 2002. But W. wanted to be a badass, and to show how tough the Bushes, originally blue bloods from Connecticut but lately of Texas, could be.
So the US invaded, under patently false pretenses, and swiftly captured Baghdad, and Saddam with it. The Iraqi Army, under equipped and underfunded, crumbled like a cheap coffee cake under the withering assault of US cruise missiles, fighter jets, M1A1 Abrams tanks, Cobra and Apache attack helicopters and assorted heavy, medium and small arms. We had everything, and they had nothing, so it was a route that lasted a matter of weeks.
In the aftermath, the US military searched, and searched, and searched some more, for those darned WMD’s that Bush/Cheney et al had claimed were a threat to the very existence of America. Unfortunately, nary a WMD was found, erasing the justification for the war and revealing what it truly was, an aggressive invasion by a cowboy President intent on reclaiming and burnishing his family’s legacy.
In that respect, it was a smashing success. But then problems ensued. A lot of Sunnis didn’t like how America was installing the long-persecuted Shia majority in all the most important government positions. We were also redistributing wealth to Shia areas over Sunni.
So the Sunni’’s rebelled, forming militias of their own and attacking both the nascent Iraqi government and the American occupation force. Car bombings became endemic. So, after a time, did beheadings, which were filmed by sunni jihadists and posted on the Internet for all to see.
I remember watching a beheading video on my office computer at work during lunch one day, out of morbid curiosity. I was only able to watch a few seconds of it, before I turned it off and thought to myself, I never want to see something like this again. I also thought, God help us, what has become of Iraq, once an intellectual and cultural capital of the Middle East and a shining light in an impoverished region?
So Iraq descended into complete chaos in the aftermath of the invasion, and the extent of the bloodshed and cruelty resembled the Middle Ages. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an evil thug who had been a minor warlord and player in the resistance, captured a good deal of power and formed al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI became an early iteration of ISIS. Of course we all know about ISIS, which would inflict so much damage on America, the Middle East and the world just a few years later.
Eventually the tide turned, for a while, with the Anbar Awakening, in which Sunni sheikhs turned on the jihadists and militants and agreed to work with the US military. This was around 2006. Later there was “The Surge,” when Bush ordered an additional 20,000 US soldiers into Iraq, on top of the 100,000 that were already there.
So the violence slowed, and by 2010 the US was thinking about withdrawing from Iraq. But make no mistake, the country was completely and totally devastated by that time. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed. A large portion of the country’s infrastructure had been destroyed. Shia and Sunni gangs and militias battled it out in the streets for control of territory, and a climate of fear pervaded every corner of the nation.
Despite this, compared to 2004-7, when the violence was at its worst, things had “quieted” a bit, whatever that means in a country swept up in a low-intensity civil war.
So the US withdrew in 2011, leaving behind a small number of bases to carry out specific “anti-terrorist” missions and to work with the Shia-dominated, corrupt to its core Iraqi government. There were barely a thousand US troops left in the country in 2011.
But, as can happen when a country has been totally decimated by twenty years of war, going back to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq was in shambles. And really, when you think about it, Iraq had been at war since the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, so it’s more like thirty plus years of war.
When a country is in a constant state of war, chaos and fear for three decades, the fabric of society breaks down, and institutions collapse. On top of that, there was very little reconciliation between Sunnis and Shias, and none whatsoever between America and Iraq.
So by 2012 or so, the Sunni rebellion had gained steam once again. Car bombings returned. Beheadings returned. The worst forms of brutality from the middle part of the war reared their ugly head again. Iraq, which had been bombed into the middle ages, was now going back to the stone age.
By 2015, the US had seen enough, and Obama ordered troops back to Iraq. Only several hundred at first, but then more, and then more, and the US troop count in Iraq currently stands at around 10,000. So it’s not the 130,000 of the mid-2000’s peak, but it’s still significant.
So the war rages on.
At this point, we must ask, what has the toll been on Americans and Iraqis from this brutal fifteen year war with no end?
It’s estimated that 1 million Iraqis have been killed, out of a population of 35 million. That’s roughly 3% of the population. That would be as if nearly ten million Americans were killed in an invasion by, oh I don’t know, Iraq? It’s a lot of people killed, is what I’m saying.
Not all of them were killed at the hands of the US military, but a lot were, and the groups that arose to oppose the US occupation killed the rest, along with war-induced famine, disease and poverty.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have also lost their lives. That’s right, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, meaning innocent, noncombatants, including women and children, have been killed. Wrap your mind around that one.
On the American side, the toll, while not on the same level as Iraq, has been equally grim. At least 3,000 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Tens of thousands have been injured and thousands have lost limbs.
Is there any sight worse than seeing those commercials on TV for Wounded Warriors, and seeing those young men missing arms or legs, striving to get their lives back together and overcome the challenge? It’s absolutely tragic, is what it is, and it never should have happened. Because they lost their lives for nothing, for George W.’s cowboy macho agenda.
America owes them a debt of gratitude we can never repay.
And let’s not forget the psychological damage done to our young men and women. The massive and widespread suffering from PTSD. The traumatic brain injury sufferers. On and on it goes.
In the end, we must ask, as we do with all wars, was the outcome worth the price? My answer to that is emphatically and definitively no. The war was started under knowingly false pretenses. Iraq was decimated and a full generation of Iraqis were robbed of their lives and livelihoods.
Thousands of young American men and women also lost their lives. Or else they managed to save their lives but are forever scarred by their experience in Iraq. Some have physical scars, and some have emotional ones.
George W.’s image has been rehabilitated somewhat in recent years, particularly after he’s come out against Trump. He’s enjoying his Golden Years, and he’s become something of an amateur painter.
But I say no to this rehabilitation, and to this reclamation of his image. You are guilty, George W. Bush, for the death of one million Iraqis, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent American lives.
You are guilty, sir, and you are covered in all their blood. If there is any justice in this world, you will suffer immensely in the afterlife. Everyone who enabled you, from Cheney to Rumsfeld to the American media to the US Congress, is also guilty, and they should be made to suffer too.
Someday, if the scales of justice balance, you will be all be called to answer for your sins.
Be ready.
