Never Again
On the 20th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq and the irreparable consequences of an unnecessary war launched by malicious minds.
Monday, March 20, signified the twentieth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Twenty years. Twenty years have passed since the neoconservatives of the Bush administration, in tandem with the corporate media and the Israel lobby in D.C., received what they had long advocated for years beforehand: an American invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power and “liberate” the Iraqi people.
Unbeknownst to countless Americans who supported the invasion at the time, the official reasons for going to war with Iraq were wholly based on egregious lies, as is now more universally known. Saddam didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t possess biological weapons. Saddam’s Iraq didn’t have an active nuclear weapons program at the time, nor did his government work with al-Qaeda to bring the twin towers down. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, knowing full well that this was true and that they were lying Americans into war, invaded Iraq anyway.
The invasion of Iraq is now erroneously characterized in the mainstream as a “big mistake,” obfuscating what it truly was: an evil, brutal, unnecessary, and unjustified war of aggression based on lies undertaken to advance the American empire’s interests in geostrategic control, Israel’s interests in the region, and control of oil resources.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died directly in the war. Millions more suffered due to the war’s brutal impact on the country, with sectarian civil war running rampant in the aftermath of Saddam’s ousting. Over 4,500 U.S. troops were killed in the Iraq war, as well as hundreds of mercenaries and other American contractors. Along with these horrifying tragedies, there was another calamity that arose as a result of the invasion that doesn’t get near enough attention: the genocide, displacement, and persecution of Iraq’s Christian population.
Iraq’s ancient Christian communities “date back to the first centuries of the religion and include Chaldean, Syriac, Assyrian and Armenian churches.” Once “a vibrant and integral part of the landscape,” Iraq’s Christians, who have been there for nearly two thousand years, have been “scattered” and are “in ruins” since the American invasion. Iraq was estimated to have roughly 1.5 million Christians before the 2003 invasion. Now, according to an Associated Press report in March 2021, there remain “only a few hundred thousand, or even less,” within Iraq.
“Christians in Iraq enjoyed protection and near-equal rights with Iraq’s Muslim majority under Saddam but were among the first groups targeted amid the breakdown in security and sectarian bloodbath that prevailed for years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that overthrew him.” With the toppling of Saddam and the destruction of the Iraqi army by the war, the protection of Iraq’s Christian communities dissipated, and the future rise of the Islamic State only exacerbated the persecution and killings of Christians in Iraq. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of Christians in Iraq is one of the many horrors emanating from the invasion, but it is ignored by the people who relentlessly advocated for the war years beforehand.
Despite the immense bloodshed and the horrific casualties wrought by the Iraq war, virtually no one of importance, whether in the Bush administration or the corporate media, has been held to account for their lies and crimes that crushed so many. The chief architects and planners of the war — Dick Cheney, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and numerous others — have all enjoyed evading accountability. The steadfast promoters of the Iraq war in the corporate media, instead of being shunned out of polite society for being immeasurably wrong and lying through their teeth, have obtained the spotlight for foreign policy analysis in the mainstream media as they are now currently suggesting America move towards war with both Russia and China.
America First conservatives, libertarians, and the antiwar left, who were presciently right before and after the invasion of Iraq, were all disparaged as “unpatriotic” for their noninterventionist position. Coincidentally, with the anniversary of the Iraq war also comes the twentieth anniversary of David Frum’s infamous “Unpatriotic Conservatives” article in National Review, in which he denigrated Pat Buchanan and other “antiwar conservatives” and libertarians for opposing the war in Iraq, suggesting, of course, that they were “unpatriotic” for opposing the war and that they hated their country.
As Frum knows now, people like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul were right from the beginning. Pat Buchanan stood virtually alone among notable Republicans in opposing the invasion. Ron Paul was one of only six House Republicans to vote against the war in 2002. They were right to oppose the Iraq war — and for good reason. Contrary to Frum’s expired 2003 assertions, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul were the most patriotic men of the time.
Bill Kristol, David Frum, Max Boot, and the neoconservatives of the Bush era were dead wrong, and yet today they still receive mainstream influence and attention in the corporate media, where they often unload more horrible foreign policy opinions, mostly on Ukraine. With the Ukraine war reaching dangerous new heights, the very same people who pushed us to invade Iraq under false pretenses are the very same ones now advocating for American escalation against Russia, China, and Iran. What could possibly go wrong here?
Over a million Iraqis died as a result of the American invasion. An estimated 4,500 American troops were killed. Nearly $2 trillion was spent on the war. Ultimately, only to empower Iran’s favored factions in Iraq. George W. Bush, who should be sitting in a prison cell for his war crimes, remains a free man while the man who exposed his war crimes, Julian Assange, languishes in a maximum-security prison cell in Belmarsh.
Never again must the American people so blindly soak up the lies and claims of their government and media regarding war as so many did with Iraq. Never again must America be dragged into a war in which there are no core American interests involved. Never again should America listen to the “experts” — the insufferable neoconservatives and liberal internationalists who got us into the war in Iraq — and who yearn for a new war with each passing day. We can only begin to imagine the consequences of their next war.
Most of the Bush-era PNAC "neo-cons", including Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Kagan, etc. were also members of the liberal-fascist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which has dominated US policy since WW2. Cheney and Bush Sr. were CFR directors. Colin Powell was a CFR member.
Same stuff, different decade. CFR members on the "Biden team" include the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Commerce and Homeland Security. Also the CIA director, Fed chairman, secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, plus dozens of deputies, advisors, ambassadors, etc.