Remembering the Crime of the Century

As we mark the 20th anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq, no one has faced meaningful accountability and few lessons have been learned.

Twenty years ago today, George W. Bush launched an unprovoked, premeditated invasion of Iraq. In the opening salvo of this invasion, Bush, backed by lackeys like the UK’s Tony Blair, engaged in a massive aerial bombardment of Bagdad, a city where 5.6 million people lived. This was based on a military doctrine called “shock and awe,” in which one engages in an overwhelming display of military might in order to achieve “rapid dominance.”

Two months before the invasion, an unnamed Pentagon official speaking to CBS said of the invasion plan, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.” Unsurprisingly, civilian casualties were higher during this period than any other during the brutal war. To much of the world, this looked like terrorism. As Bush had been particularly sanctimonious on this topic, the irony was not lost on those looking on the blatant act of aggression with horror.

When the US sought to achieve rapid domination over Iraq, decapitate its government, and destroy its army’s will to fight, it was launching an assault on an already badly devastated nation. Bagdad had once been a highly developed, modern city. But after the US’s on-again, off-again friend Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait, possibly with what he assumed was a US green light, the US, under the guise of expelling Iraq from Kuwait, launched a massive bombing campaign of the country. The United Nations described the impact of the bombing on civilian infrastructure as “near apocalyptic” and that Iraq had been reduced to “to a pre-industrial age.”

Iraq never recovered, as the US and UK refused to allow the UN to lift the sanctions that had been placed on Iraq. Bill Clinton, who inherited the sanctions from George H.W. Bush. arrogantly proclaimed the sanctions would remain on Iraq “until the end of time” or until the end of Hussain. The impacts on civilians was further devastation. A 1995 Lancet study sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization concluded that 576,000 children under the age of five perished due to the sanctions. When Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked about this figure by 60 Minutes she coldly stated, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.” As a result of the sanctions, three separate UN officials resigned in protest over them, with the UN Humanitarian Coordinator Dennis Halliday in Iraq calling the impact of the sanctions genocide.

Clinton didn’t just continue the sanctions, he continuously bombed Iraq. By the end of his administration he was bombing Iraq once every three days. The bombing was considered at the time to be the longest US air war since Vietnam. (In 2016, I wrote an entire piece for Jacobin on Clinton’s Iraq policy and how it set the stage for Bush’s invasion). On February 16, 2001, George W. Bush, having been in office less than a month, escalated the bombings. This is a full eight months before 9/11, a full two years before the Iraq War (though from the perspective of the Iraqi people, we were already waging war on them).

On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked US civilian airliners and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people, the vast majority of which, like the vast majority of Iraqis, had no responsibility for their government’s policies. The attacks were cruel, senseless, and criminal. The US people and the world were understandably horrified, saddened, and enraged.

Since the (very limited) reforms of both domestic and intelligence agencies in the 1970s, the right had been conspiring to undo them. Nearly as soon as the Church Committee had released its reports, New Right groups like the Heritage Foundation began to warn that everything from restrictions on covert action to the dismantling of organs of McCarthyism like the House Un-Americans Activities Committee and the Subversive Activities Control Board, put the US at risk of terrorism. Only unlimited presidential war making and mass political surveillance could save us. When the Cold War ended many hoped for a peace dividend. But the Heritage Foundation boldly declared there could be no easing of US militarism, as now was the time to declare a global war on terrorism.

This hard right cabal came to power after Bush stole the 2000 election. And they wasted no time mourning the murder of their fellow Americans before cynically using the tragic and criminal 9/11 attack to enact their decades long agenda.

A global war on terrorism, a blank check check for presidential war making, an invasion of Afghanistan, CIA kidnappings and torture, and expanded mass surveillance did not satiate them. They had long held Iraq in their sights. In 1998, future members of the Bush Administration, including Donald Rumsfeld, Eliott Abrams, and John Bolton, signed an open letter from the Project for a New American Century calling for regime change in Iraq.

The Bush Administration began churning out a steady stream of lies designed to acclimate the public to their impending war of choice. They peddled fake news about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and promulgated conspiracy theories about an Iraqi connection to the 9/11 attacks. Many in the media went along with validating these lies, making them partners in selling the war.

And then came the horrible invasion, which was followed by a brutal military occupation. Like all military and colonial occupations, the occupation of Iraq required brute force by the occupier and the dehumanization of the occupied. Many soldiers who witnessed the war first hand felt compelled to speak out about this brutality at events like Winter Soldier.

Twenty years later, no one has ever been accountable for the war in the US. No one has been jailed. There have been no Congressional investigation like the Church Committee into the Iraq War. While the British held its own inquiry into their role in the Iraq War (commonly called the Chilcot Inquiry), we have not. We simply resolved to look forwards, not backwards.The failure in our country to account for what remains the worst war crime of the 21st century is astonishing.

It is also worth recalling how the like all of the post-9/11 atrocities, the Iraq War has very distinctive pre-9/11 origins. The hard right figures around Bush had long dreamed of regime change in Iraq. But we cannot also ignore the Clinton Administration’s decision to make regime change an official US goal. It’s air war and sanctions were dubbed a quiet war. But quiet wars become loud ones. The Vietnam War had also begun with this sort of slow creep. First, we backed French efforts to recolonize the country. Then we sent hundreds of military advisors, which became thousands of military advisors. With both Iraq and Vietnam, the final “war” was the culmination of longstanding policies.

Not every global conflict where the US supplies arms, intervenes covertly, or engages in bombings will escalate into an Iraq or Vietnam style war. But every one has that potential. And given the failure to reckon with the lessons of the past, it will almost certainly happen again. Whether it will be Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, Ukraine, the Horn of Africa, or somewhere else, Washington is almost making policy decisions today that will send us careening into the major war of tomorrow .

On the 20th anniversary of this terrible crime, that is what I am thinking about.