Tuesday, March 17, 2020
12 Ways the US Invasion of Iraq Lives On in
Infamy
The most
serious consequences of the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq confirm
what millions of people around the world warned about 17 years ago.
commondreams.org/views/2020/03/17/12-ways-us-invasion-iraq-lives-infamy
Seventeen years later, the consequences of
the Iraq invasion have lived up to the fears of all who opposed it.
(Photo: Alisdare
Hickson/flickr/cc)
While
the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the
Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion
of Iraq by ramping
up the
conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near
Baghdad on March 11, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory strikes against
five of the militia’s weapons factories and announced it is sending two more
aircraft carriers to the region, as well as new Patriot missile systems
and hundreds
more troops to
operate them. This contradicts the January
vote of
the Iraqi Parliament that called for U.S. troops to leave the country. It also
goes against the sentiment of most Americans, who think the Iraq war was not worth fighting,
and against the campaign promise of Donald Trump to end the endless wars.
Seventeen
years ago, the U.S. armed forces attacked and invaded Iraq with a force of
over 460,000
troops from
all its armed services, supported by 46,000 UK troops, 2,000 from Australia and a
few hundred from Poland, Spain, Portugal and Denmark. The “shock and awe”
aerial bombardment unleashed 29,200 bombs and missiles on Iraq in the
first five weeks of the war.
The
U.S. invasion was a crime
of aggression under international law, and was actively opposed by people and
countries all over the world, including 30
million people who
took to the streets in 60 countries on February 15, 2003, to express their
horror that this could really be happening at the dawn of the 21st century.
American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a speechwriter for President
John F. Kennedy, compared the U.S. invasion of Iraq to Japan’s preemptive
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and
wrote,
“Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy.”
Seventeen
years later, the consequences of the invasion have lived up to the fears of all
who opposed it. Wars and hostilities rage across the region, and divisions over
war and peace in the U.S. and Western countries challenge our highly
selective view of
ourselves as advanced, civilized societies. Here is a look at 12 of the most
serious consequences of the U.S. war in Iraq.
1. Millions of Iraqis Killed and Wounded
Estimates
on the number of people killed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq vary
widely, but even the most conservative estimates based on fragmentary reporting of
minimum confirmed deaths are in the hundreds of thousands. Serious scientific
studies estimated
that 655,000 Iraqis had died in the first three years of war, and about a
million by September 2007. The violence of the U.S. escalation or “surge”
continued into 2008, and sporadic conflict continued from 2009 until 2014. Then
in its new campaign against Islamic State, the U.S. and its allies bombarded
major cities in Iraq and Syria with more than 118,000bombs and the heaviest artillery
bombardments since
the Vietnam War. They reduced much of Mosul and other Iraqi cities to rubble,
and a preliminary Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report found that more than 40,000
civilians were
killed in Mosul alone. There are no comprehensive mortality studies for this
latest deadly phase of the war. In addition to all the lives lost, even more
people have been wounded. The Iraqi government’s Central Statistical
Organization says that 2 million Iraqis have been left disabled.
2. Millions More Iraqis Displaced
By
2007, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that nearly 2 million Iraqis had fled the violence and chaos of
occupied Iraq, mostly to Jordan and Syria, while another 1.7 million were
displaced within the country. The U.S. war on the Islamic State relied even
more on bombing and artillery bombardment, destroying even more homes and displacing an astounding 6 million Iraqis from
2014 to 2017. According
to the UNHCR, 4.35
million people have returned to their homes as the war on IS has wound down,
but many face “destroyed properties, damaged or non-existent infrastructure and
the lack of livelihood opportunities and financial resources, which at times
[has] led to secondary displacement.” Iraq’s internally displaced children
represent “a generation traumatized by violence, deprived of education and
opportunities,” according
to UN
Special Rapporteur Cecilia Jimenez-Damary.
3. Thousands of American, British and
Other Foreign Troops Killed and Wounded
While
the U.S. military downplays Iraqi casualties, it precisely tracks and publishes
its own. As of February 2020, 4,576 U.S. troops and 181 British troops have been
killed in Iraq, as well as 142 other foreign occupation troops. Over 93 percent
of the foreign occupation troops killed in Iraq have been Americans. In
Afghanistan, where the U.S. has had more support from NATO and other allies,
only 68 percent of occupation troops killed have been Americans. The greater
share of U.S. casualties in Iraq is one of the prices Americans have paid for
the unilateral, illegal nature of the U.S. invasion. By the time U.S. forces
temporarily withdrew from Iraq in 2011, 32,200
U.S. troops had
been wounded. As the U.S. tried to outsource and privatize its occupation,
at least
917 civilian
contractors and mercenaries were also killed and 10,569 wounded in Iraq, but
not all of them were U.S. nationals.
4. Even More Veterans Have Committed
Suicide
More
than 20 U.S. veterans kill themselves every day—that’s more deaths each year
than the total U.S. military deaths in Iraq. Those with the highest rates of
suicide are young veterans with combat exposure, who commit suicide at rates “4-10
times higher than
their civilian peers.” Why? As Matthew Hoh of Veterans for Peace explains, many
veterans “struggle to reintegrate into society,” are ashamed to ask for help,
are burdened by what they saw and did in the military, are trained in shooting
and own guns, and carry mental and physical wounds that make their lives
difficult.
5. Trillions of Dollars Wasted
On
March 16, 2003, just days before the U.S. invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney
projected that the war would cost the U.S. about $100 billion and that the U.S.
involvement would last for two years. Seventeen years on, the costs are still
mounting. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated a cost of $2.4
trillion for
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz and Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of the Iraq
war at more than $3
trillion,
“based on conservative assumptions,” in 2008. The UK government spent at
least 9
billion pounds in
direct costs through 2010. What the U.S. did not
spend money on,
contrary to what many Americans believe, was to rebuild Iraq, the country our
war destroyed.
6. Dysfunctional and Corrupt Iraqi
Government
Most
of the men (no
women!) running Iraq today are still former exiles who flew into Baghdad in
2003 on the heels of the U.S. and British invasion forces. Iraq is finally once
again exporting 3.8
million barrels
of oil per day and earning $80 billion a year in oil exports, but little of
this money trickles down to rebuild destroyed and damaged homes or provide
jobs, health care or education for Iraqis, only
36 percent of
whom even have jobs. Iraq’s young people have taken to the streets to demand an
end to the corrupt post-2003 Iraqi political regime and U.S. and Iranian
influence over Iraqi politics. More
than 600 protesters were
killed by government forces, but the protests forced Prime Minister Adel Abdul
Mahdi to resign. Another former Western-based exile, Mohammed
Tawfiq Allawi, the
cousin of former U.S.-appointed interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, was chosen
to replace him, but he resigned within weeks after the National Assembly failed
to approve his cabinet choices. The popular protest movement celebrated
Allawi’s resignation, and Abdul Mahdi agreed to remain as prime minister, but
only as a “caretaker” to carry out essential functions until new elections can
be held. He has called for new elections in December. Until then, Iraq remains
in political limbo, still occupied by about 5,000 U.S. troops.
7. Illegal War on Iraq Has Undermined the
Rule of International Law
When
the U.S. invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council, the
first victim was the United Nations Charter, the foundation of peace and
international law since World War II, which prohibits the threat or use of
force by any country against another. International law only permits military
action as a necessary and proportionate defense against an attack or imminent
threat. The illegal 2002 Bush doctrine of preemption was universally rejected because it went beyond this narrow
principle and claimed an exceptional U.S. right to use unilateral military
force “to preempt emerging threats,” undermining the authority of the UN
Security Council to decide whether a specific threat requires a military
response or not. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general at the time, said
the invasion
was illegal and
would lead to a breakdown in international order, and that is exactly what has
happened. When the U.S. trampled the UN Charter, others were bound to follow.
Today we are watching Turkey and Israel follow in the U.S.’s footsteps,
attacking and invading Syria at will as if it were not even a sovereign
country, using the people of Syria as pawns in their political games.
8. Iraq War Lies Corrupted U.S. Democracy
The
second victim of the invasion was American democracy. Congress voted for war
based on a so-called “summary” of a National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) that was nothing of the kind. The Washington Post reported that
only six out of 100 senators and a few House members read
the actual NIE.
The 25-page
“summary” that
other members of Congress based their votes on was a document produced months
earlier “to make the public case for war,” as one
of its authors, the
CIA’s Paul Pillar, later confessed to PBS Frontline. It contained astounding
claims that were nowhere to be found in the real NIE, such as that the CIA knew
of 550 sites where Iraq was storing chemical and biological weapons. Secretary
of State Colin Powell repeated many of these lies in his shameful
performance at
the UN Security Council in February 2003, while Bush and Cheney used them in
major speeches, including Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. How is
democracy—the rule of the people—even possible if the people we elect to
represent us in Congress can be manipulated into voting for a catastrophic war
by such a web of lies?
9. Impunity for Systematic War Crimes
Another
victim of the invasion of Iraq was the presumption that U.S. presidents and
policy are subject to the rule of law. Seventeen years later, most Americans
assume that the president can conduct war and assassinate foreign leaders and
terrorism suspects as he pleases, with no accountability whatsoever—like a dictator.
When President
Obama said
he wanted to look forward instead of backward, and held no one from the Bush administration
accountable for their crimes, it was as if they ceased to be crimes and became
normalized as U.S. policy. That includes crimes
of aggression against
other countries; the mass
killing of civilians in
U.S. airstrikes and drone strikes; and the unrestricted
surveillance of
every American’s phone calls, emails, browsing history and opinions. But these
are crimes and violations of the U.S. Constitution, and refusing to hold accountable
those who committed these crimes has made it easier for them to be repeated.
10. Destruction of the Environment
During
the first Gulf War, the U.S. fired 340 tons of warheads and explosives
made with depleted uranium, which poisoned the soil and water and led to
skyrocketing levels of cancer. In the following decades of “ecocide,” Iraq
has been plagued by the burning of dozens of oil wells; the
pollution of water sources from the dumping of oil, sewage and chemicals;
millions of tons of rubble from destroyed cities and towns; and the burning of
huge volumes of military waste in open air “burn pits” during the war.The
pollution caused by war is linked to the high levels
of congenital birth defects, premature births, miscarriages and cancer
(including leukemia) in Iraq. The pollution has also affected U.S. soldiers.
“More than 85,000 U.S. Iraq war veterans… have been diagnosed with respiratory and breathing
problems, cancers, neurological diseases, depression and emphysema since
returning from Iraq,” as the Guardian reports. And parts of Iraq may never
recover from the environmental devastation.
11. The U.S.’s Sectarian “Divide and Rule”
Policy in Iraq Spawned Havoc Across the Region
In
secular 20th-century Iraq, the Sunni minority was more powerful than the Shia
majority, but for the most part, the different ethnic groups lived side-by-side
in mixed neighborhoods and even intermarried. Friends with mixed Shia/Sunni
parents tell us that before the U.S. invasion, they didn’t even know which
parent was Shia and which was Sunni. After the invasion, the U.S.
empowered a new Shiite ruling class led by former exiles allied with the U.S.
and Iran, as well as the Kurds in their semi-autonomous region in the north.
The upending of the balance of power and deliberate U.S. “divide and rule”
policies led to waves of horrific sectarian violence, including the ethnic
cleansing of communities by Interior Ministry death
squads under
U.S. command. The sectarian divisions the U.S. unleashed in Iraq led to the
resurgence of Al Qaeda and the emergence of ISIS, which have wreaked havoc
throughout the entire region.
12. The New Cold War Between the U.S. and
the Emerging Multilateral World
When
President Bush declared his “doctrine of preemption” in 2002, Senator Edward
Kennedy called
it “a
call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should
accept.” But the world has so far failed to either persuade the U.S. to change
course or to unite in diplomatic opposition to its militarism and imperialism.
France and Germany bravely stood with Russia and most of the Global South to
oppose the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council in 2003. But Western
governments embraced Obama’s superficial charm offensive as cover for
reinforcing their traditional ties with the U.S. China was busy expanding its
peaceful economic development and its role as the economic hub of Asia, while
Russia was still rebuilding its economy from the neoliberal chaos and poverty
of the 1990s. Neither was ready to actively challenge U.S. aggression until the
U.S., NATO and their Arab monarchist allies launched proxy wars against Libya and Syria in 2011. After the fall of Libya,
Russia appears to have decided it must either stand up to U.S. regime change
operations or eventually fall victim itself.
The economic tides have shifted, a
multipolar world is emerging, and the world is hoping against hope that the
American people and new American leaders will act to rein in this 21st-century
American imperialism before it leads to an even more catastrophic U.S. war with
Iran, Russia or China. As Americans, we must hope that the world’s faith in the
possibility that we can democratically bring sanity and peace to U.S. policy is
not misplaced. A good place to start would be to join the call by the Iraqi
Parliament for U.S. troops to leave Iraq.
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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