12 Ways the US Invasion of Iraq Lives On in Infamy
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
US base near Baghdad on March 11, the US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US escalation
or "surge" continued into 2008, and sporadic conflict continued from
2009 until 2014. Then in its new campaign against Islamic State, the US and
its allies bombarded major cities in Iraq and Syria with more than 118,000
bombs
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 US 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 nonexistent
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 US military downplays Iraqi casualties, it precisely tracks and publishes
its own. As of February 2020, 4,576 US 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 US has had more support
from NATO and other allies, only 68 percent of occupation troops killed have
been Americans. The greater share of US casualties in Iraq is one of the prices
Americans have paid for the unilateral, illegal nature of the US invasion. By
the time US forces temporarily withdrew from Iraq in 2011, 32,200
US troops had been wounded. As the US 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 US nationals.
4. Even More Veterans Have Committed Suicide
More than 20 US veterans kill themselves every day—that’s more deaths each
year than the total US 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 US invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney
projected that the war would cost the US about $100 billion and that the US
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 US 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 US 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
US 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 US troops.
7. Illegal War on Iraq Has Undermined the Rule of International Law
When the US 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 US 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 US trampled the UN Charter, others were bound to follow.
Today we are watching Turkey and Israel follow in the US’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 US 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 US 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 US policy. That includes crimes
of aggression against other countries; the mass
killing of civilians in US 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 US 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 USfired
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 US soldiers. "More than 85,000 US 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 US’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 US invasion, they didn’t even know which parent
was Shia and which was Sunni. After the invasion, the US empowered a new Shiite
ruling class led by former exiles allied with the US and Iran, as well as the
Kurds in their semi-autonomous region in the north. The upending of the balance
of power and deliberate US "divide and rule" policies led to waves
of horrific sectarian violence, including the ethnic cleansing of communities
by Interior Ministry death
squads under US command. The sectarian divisions the US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US aggression
until the US, 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 US 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 US 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 US policy is not misplaced. A good place to start would
be to join the call by the Iraqi Parliament for US troops to leave Iraq.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK
for Peace, is the author of several books, including Inside
Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and
Kingdom
of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection. Nicolas J. S. Davies
is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK,
and the author of Blood
on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
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