18 years ago, a United States-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ invaded Iraq on spurious pretexts. Toppling the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein.

Iraqis have paid a staggering human cost for Operation Iraqi Freedom, A conservative, independent assessment by Iraq Body Count estimates that between 180,807 and 202,757 civilian deaths from violence have occurred since 2003. By 2006, however, the medical journal Lancet had already pegged fatalities at more than 600,000, with subsequent studies validating and expanding this number to well over one million.

Successive waves of violence since 2003—insurgency, airstrikes, terrorism, communal violence—exacted a terrible toll by displacing people and destroying homes, infrastructure and livelihoods. Today, 8.7 million Iraqis are in need of humanitarian assistance, 2.6 million of whom are displaced, in a nation of approximately 37 million. Compounding the effects of the previous 15 years of war and sanctions, the invasion and its aftermath have turned a breadbasket of the ancient world into a country reliant on food imports.

The rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was Baghdad’s alleged possession of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs) that might be provided to al-Qaeda. War-planning began almost immediately following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, yet archive documents show that regime change in Iraq had been on the foreign policy agenda for years. In hindsight it’s clear that the neoconservative administration of US President George W. Bush sought a pretext for militarily confrontation and removal of Saddam Hussein. Linking Iraq to the threat of al-Qaeda provided that pretext.

The regime change agenda took the form of a disinformation campaign, largely driven by the US and UK governments, to discredit UN weapons inspectors and create public fear of Iraq. Bush branded Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, part of an “Axis of Evil” endangering world security; while the UK Blair government’s notorious ‘sexed-up’ dossier claimed Iraqi weapons posed an immediate danger to the UK. The US sought the UN’s imprimatur to provide international legitimacy for the invasion, hypocritically invoking previous resolutions regarding Iraq’s putative WMDs while simultaneously deriding the UN as irrelevant.

Not only were no WMDs found, there was no evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. The invasion of Iraq, however, breathed new life into the global jihadist movement. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) prior to 2003; the country’s rapid descent into pandemonium provided fertile recruiting ground for the jihadists.

The chaotic insecurity unleashed by the invasion, and the emergence of insurgency and jihadist terrorism, was compounded by the incongruous US decision to disband the Iraqi army and dismantle the bureaucracy. This effectively hollowed out the capabilities of the state while disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of former members of the security forces and government employees. Former Ba’athist officials and military personnel later constituted the core planning cadres of the successor to AQI, the Islamic State terrorist group: Da’esh.

Moreover, rather than bringing liberal democracy to Iraq—the new mission in the absence of WMDs—the occupying power installed a provisional government based on ethno-sectarian quotas. This was largely filled by ‘carpetbaggers’ returning from decades in exile. Many lacked a natural support base amongst the local population, so appealed to sectarian identities to augment their political standing. Today, Iraqis stage weekly protests demanding an end to this quota system and the corruption they believe it entrenches.


Hola Camaradas :fidel-salute-big: , Our Comrades In Texas are currently passing Through some Hard times :amerikkka: so if you had some Leftover Change or are a bourgeoisie Class Traitor here are some Mutual Aid programs that you could donate to :left-unity-3:

The State and Revolution :flag-su:

:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:

The Conquest of Bread :ancom:

Remember, sort by new you :LIB:

Yesterday’s megathread :sad-boi:

Follow the Hexbear twitter account :comrade-birdie:

THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:

COMMUNITY CALENDAR - AN EXPERIMENT IN PROMOTING USER ORGANIZING EFFORTS :af:

Join the fresh and beautiful batch of new comms:

!genzedong@hexbear.net :deng-salute:

!strugglesession@hexbear.net :why-post-this:

!libre@hexbear.net :anarxi:

!neurodiverse@hexbear.net :Care-Comrade:

spoiler :fidel-salute-big:

So i want to tell you guys that im going to take a break from the site for a few days

the current struggle session has taken a very toxic stance with the racism against indigenous people and has honestly drain my will to be in the site, even with some of the posts i liked it just very tiring the constant struggle sesion that has lasted for a week.

so because im going to take some days off i wont the megathread for the next couple of days, sorry for the inconvenience.

by the way in the 21th is the Selma March , so if someone could make the megathread about that and post it in !em_poc@hexbear.net and not main.

so yeah, here is a song i like from a mexican band :cocktail:

  • Steely_Gaige [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I was just an unwashed trailer park kid when this was beginning. I have a lot of weird recollections of what people in my life were saying.

    I remember that multiple people I knew said it was just for oil, and Bush and his dad's friends. I also remember people saying that if was for oil, that we should take all of it and lower gas prices. No calculation for the cost of human suffering.

    Country music was in a weird place, too. Who can forget Alan Jackson singing, "I'm not sure I could tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran". The Dixie Chicks had a very mild rebuke of Bush and the war and were blacklisted. Weird that Toby Keith's, "we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way" was the most accurate country hit regarding it.

    Sorry for a long paragraph regarding early 2000's country music.