A decade and a half later, it’s clear there are no winners
Fifteen years ago, American troops invaded Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and under the guise that Saddam Hussein was harboring “weapons of mass destruction.”
It was George W. Bush’s war, but it didn’t end when Hussein’s government was overthrown. It didn’t end when Bush left the White House. It kicked off a wave in the Middle East that became the cornerstone of international politics in the 21st century.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died. The Middle East continues to suffer aftershocks from the war. No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. It’s time to reflect on the effects of what happened over the past 15 years.
In The New York Times, Matt Ufford, who served in the Marine Corps from 2000 to 2004, reflected on a war he entered at 24, writing, “We brought war everywhere we went”:
The case for the invasion was thin — or rather, it was thick, but, we now know, filled with faulty intelligence, half-truths and a fervor for war that was unsated by the conflict in Afghanistan. Back in the United States, President George W. Bush told the nation on March 19 that it was time to free the people of Iraq and ‘defend the world from grave danger.’ Within hours, thousands of troops, including my battalion, crossed the border to look for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
Longtime Atlantic correspondent James Fallows highlighted how the Iraq War’s roots began with the first George Bush in office:
The decision to invade Iraq was itself clearly one of those. The elder George Bush fought a quick and victorious war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991. But he stopped short of continuing the war into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power—and so his son learned from that “failure” that he had to finish the job of eliminating Saddam.
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Categories: America, Americas, Arab World, Asia, United States
Amazingly most correspondents do not realize that in fact the Americans DID ACHIEVE / ARE ACHIEVING exactly what they planned: Continuous war, destabilization, destruction for the benefit of arms trade, oil trade/control and for the benefit of the boss: Greater Israel (please note always, that my comments are my personal opinions and not the opinion of The Muslim Times as such !)