Today is the 20th anniversary of the deadly and disastrous war US President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld inflicted on Iraq.  Victory would come easy for the Bush administration which wanted to project strength by mounting a well-publicised military response to the September 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

Global satellite television channels were primed with a carefully choreographed build-up to the war, making it clear the US would not be deterred from its “war of choice.”  The fictitious casus belli consisted of three lies: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein retained banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD), had ties to Al Qaeda and he posed a threat to the US.

The Bush administration’s unstated objective was to remove Iraq as an obstacle to US regional domination. Cheney and Rumsfeld were among 10 Bush administration officials who were founding signatories of the 1987 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think-tank.  In 1998 PNAC gave priority to regime change in Iraq as the means to achieve this end and pressured both the Clinton and Bush administrations to carry out this policy.

Following the 2001 attacks on the US, PNAC stepped up its efforts. Stunned and at a loss over these strikes and eager for a means to inflict retribution on Arabs who did not bow to the US, Bush was easily persuaded to mount his horrific war on Iraq and ready to use a pack of lies to convince Congress and the US public that this was the correct course of action.  Baghdad was in no position to conduct a credible defence.  Iraq had been weakened by the 1980-88 war with Iran caused by Tehran’s use of the Iraqi  fundamentalist Shia Dawa movement to oust the secular Baathist regime.  Although that war was a draw, both countries suffered mass casualties, destruction, and financial loss.  Iraq had also been seriously incapacitated by the 1991 US war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation and the punitive sanctions imposed ahead of the war.

In the weeks before the March 20th-May 1st war, I was in Baghdad covering the situation in the country and efforts to avert the coming conflict. UN weapons inspectors headed by Mohammed ElBaradei and Hans Blix, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were in the Iraqi capital to verify the Iraqi claim that its WMD had been destroyed and the nuclear programme had been dismantled. Although UN inspectors had toured the country and eliminated chemical and biological agents and nuclear material after the 1991 war, they made a fresh effort in the run-up to the 2003 war and found nothing. I was among a gaggle of journalists who chased a team of inspectors to Al Qaqa, Iraq’s largest arms factory where conventional bombs and artillery shells were manufactured.

Once the inspectors had concluded their mission, we were invited into the vast compound where security was lax and shift workers came and went carrying their lunch boxes.  We found sheds blasted by US air strikes in 1991 and 1998 and a vast field of rusting 1989-vintage empty red, silver and green bomb shells not delivered by war planes during the war with Iran.  I was told by US-and UK-trained Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri that the nuclear research programme was closed down during the summer of 1991 when he found comparable level jobs for fellow scientists and engineers involved. IAEA inspector Robert E Kelley reported to the agency in January 2003 that there was no nuclear material but said the US would pay no attention to his report.

When Blix returned to New York and ElBaradei to Vienna they said they believed Bush and then British Prime Minister Tony Blair were determined to go to war although their entire WMD justification was false.

Commenting on March of this year on the website of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Kelley — a US nuclear expert who had been an IAEA inspector in Iraq in during the crucial 1992–93 period — wrote: “The UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) and the IAEA Action Team carried out hundreds of person-days of inspections in Iraq. We discovered nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programmes and methodically destroyed them — even to the extent of blowing up entire factories and laboratories and bringing special nuclear materials out of the country.”

As Bush’s build-up continued, opposition to the war peaked. The Arab League, Arab governments, and a slew of Western allies, including France and Germany, rejected a war without UN authorisation.  An estimated 36 million people took part in 3,000 global protests against the war. Former South African President Nelson Mandela and British Labour Party leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook spoke out against the war. Cook resigned three days before the war began.

US former President Jimmy Carter argued in a New York Times opinion article that the US “seems determined to carry out military and diplomatic action that is almost unprecedented in the history of civilised nations. The first stage of our widely publicised war plan is to launch 3,000 bombs and missiles on a relatively defenceless Iraqi population within the first few hours of an invasion, with the purpose of so damaging and demoralising the people” that they will overthrow Saddam Hussein.  An Irish Labour Party parliamentary delegation, headed by Michael D. Higgins (Ireland’s current president), arrived in Baghdad where they had a meeting (which I attended) with Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz to urge the government to receive a visit by eminent world figures like Mandela and Carter. Aziz told Higgins Baghdad would welcome such a mission. Tragically, it never materialised.

Despite widespread opposition, at the outset of his March 20th “Shock and Awe” blitz, Bush felt himself on safe ground as 79 per cent of deluded US citizens supported the war. Once combat operations were said to be over on May 1st, Bush proclaimed “Mission accomplished,” from the deck of aircraft carrier USS Abrahim Lincoln.  But month after month, year after year, the US public has come to see the war as a disaster while the world public regards it a crime. Bush won the war, but the US occupation was even more damaging and disastrous than the war. He transformed a relatively stable country into a politico-security vacuum where al-Qaeda roamed freely and sectarian militias conducted ethnic cleansing. Iran-affiliated expatriate Shia fundamentalists returned “on the backs of US tanks” and took power under a sectarian form of government. In 2011, all but 2,000 US troops left Iraq. In 2014,  Al Qaeda-offshoot Daesh conquered 40 per cent of Iraq, forcing the US to mount an offensive to eliminate Daesh.

While Washington’s warplanes bombed Daesh, US allies on the ground were Iran-aligned Shia militia leaders who rose to power as a result of this campaign. Tribal, ethnic, and sectarian identities have erased Iraqi national identity. Mismanagement, clientism and corruption have deprived Iraqis of a decent standard of living.

Forty per cent of Iraq’s middle class has emigrated. In October 2019, tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the country’s streets and squares to call for an end to the failed system imposed on Iraq by the US. The protesters chanted, “Nureed Watan!” (“We want a homeland”) and “Out with foreign intervention” (by the US and Iran). Their protests were put down by the militias.  Bitter Iraqis have quipped, “Saddam has gone, but 1,000 more Saddams have replaced him.”