20 years after the Iraq War, it’s clear our elites learned no lessons
Twenty years ago, a crime was committed against the people of Iraq, the consequences of which continue to be felt the world over.
Despite the severity of this crime, and despite the false pretences that led to war, no one has been held accountable. Indeed, the architects of the war may as well have been excused, and the rehabilitation of their legacies already well underway. But what is far more significant is that the hubris and exceptionalism that allowed a nation to disregard both the obvious incompetence of their leaders, as well as mountains of irrefutable evidence against their cause, is now no longer merely an American problem. And we Canadians who were once so proud of our defiant stand against reckless American imperialism, have seemingly surrendered our sovereignty and are now enthusiastic and uncritical supporters of the empire.
The world is a far more dangerous place today than it has ever been, and how we got here is worth re-examining because the Iraq War is central to our present predicament. Because the justification for the conflict was inextricably related to a broader American culture war - where facts all too often were of secondary importance to emotions - revising the deliberate falsehoods that led to invasion is a worthy exercise.
These facts have been - and continue to be - downplayed, denigrated and denied, to our detriment. Only by having a thorough command of how the George W. Bush administration misled the world into a conflict that has potentially claimed as many as one million Iraqi lives do we have any hope of avoiding a similar calamity in the future. It is because the waters have been, and continue to be, deliberately muddied, that we have come close to repeating the mistakes of the past several times in recent memory.
There are no good wars or bad wars - every war is failure - but Iraq was a special case: the failure was anticipated, and no one really tried to stop it.
To begin with, Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, was not working on developing such weapons, and had been fully compliant in allowing United Nations weapons inspectors into Iraq to confirm as much. This was known and confirmed before the invasion began.
There was no Iraqi biological weapons program, despite the small vial of white powder Colin Powell held up before the United Nations Security Council and alleged to be representative of Iraq's apparent anthrax capability. Powell knew he was lying at the time. He described misleading the entire world as a blot on his record" and was eulogized as a hero when he died in 2021.
Powell, Bush, former vice-president Dick Cheney, and then-national security adviser Condoleeza Rice alleged on numerous occasions that they had unambiguous evidence, supported by CIA intelligence, of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. This was a complete fiction. The aluminum tubes they alleged were to be used as gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment were in fact nothing more than the outer casings of conventional small-diameter artillery rockets. They also omitted a key point in their quest for conflict: the tubes never made it to Iraq, thanks to a successful intervention two years before the invasion.
Most significantly, at least two other U.S. government agencies (the Department of Energy and the State Department's intelligence service) as well as leading international experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency all pointed out that in order for the tube theory to be correct, Iraq would have also attempted to purchase hundreds of thousands of other specific, specialized components, of which there was no evidence.
Another fiction was the allegation Iraq had attempted to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger. Though this has since been excused as a case of bad intelligence," it is more appropriate to call it a case of deliberate disinformation. Though intelligence agencies had reviewed the information and dismissed it no less than 14 times before the infamous 2003 State of the Union address in which Bush presented his fabricated and erroneous case against Saddam, the White House turned it into their smoking gun.
More than any other lie, the yellowcake hoax was instrumental in securing public approval for the invasion. The Bush administration deliberately misled the American people, and the world, with a false premise for war. Iraq was not invaded because of bad intelligence, but in spite of it.
While it is true that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and had at various times before the Persian Gulf War of 1991 attempted to develop nuclear and biological weapons, none of these efforts produced actual weapons.
Experts were rightly suspicious of American claims about Iraqi nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs because the Saddam regime had fully co-operated with international agencies in accounting for, and then destroying, the chemical weapons still in their possession, as well precursor chemicals and related equipment. All of this was accomplished by 1996, seven years before the invasion.
Inspectors remarked that they often found Iraqi officials to be more co-operative in their efforts to prove they had destroyed what WMDs they once had than U.S. officials were in sharing their apparently irrefutable intelligence on Iraqi WMDs. Former chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix captured the Kafka-esque nature of the Bush administration's groundless claims when he stated to the Council on Foreign Relations on June 23, 2003, It's sort of puzzling that you can have 100 per cent confidence about WMD existence, but zero certainty about where they are." Blix would resign seven days later.
In total, some 700 inspections were carried out without finding any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. The Americans, Blix later said, were like the witch hunters of the past, interested only in evidence that would support their foregone conclusions. The Bush team was so focused on building its case for war that senior officials, including then-deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, instructed the CIA to spy on Blix. Rather than using the CIA to find incontrovertible evidence of Saddam Hussein's alleged WMD programs, the spy agency was instead used to try to find negative information about Blix such that it might be used to undermine his credibility. When the CIA ultimately determined that no such information existed, Wolfowitz was apparently livid.
Perhaps most importantly, there was no relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, a point that was obvious to just about anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Middle Eastern geopolitics but which could not have mattered less to Bush and his enablers. Bush's interest in creating a cause to invade and occupy Iraq can be traced back to the beginning of his first term in office, and he was at least privately alleging a link between bin Laden and Iraq within days of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
While Saddam had no relationship with bin Laden, al-Qaida, the Taliban or any other group of Islamist extremists (as he was unambiguously opposed to them), his removal from power led to a brutal insurgency and the rise of the barbaric Islamic State. It is a remarkable irony that a war instigated at least in part because of a deceitful claim of alliance with a global terrorist network had the effect of creating a new, larger, far more powerful terrorist network, to say nothing of the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of impoverished, angry young men who have since been radicalized. If George W. Bush's goal was to create a self-perpetuating terrorist threat to the United States, well, mission accomplished.
There's no happy ending to this story. American troops remain in Iraq to this day. The Islamic State has expanded to new cells across the world. But what is far worse is that it doesn't seem like anyone in the West has learned any lesson from this experience. Perhaps that's all we can expect when no one on our side" is held accountable for their actions. If there were any justice in this world, Bush, Cheney, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz (and hundreds of others) would have been tried - and likely convicted - of war crimes.
The Americans and their allies (and we are very much included) continue to use lethal violence as a measure of first resort, and continue to conjure up spectres of foreign boogeymen to justify ever-expanding military budgets.
Canada, which had once championed U.N. peacekeeping and bravely opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq, has succumbed to its chronic low self-esteem problem. We have not only abandoned our once cherished and laudable role as global peacekeeper, but now eagerly sell weapons to tyrannical and genocidal regimes, and waste billions of dollars on new weapons of war.
Whereas we once had the presence of mind to judge the available evidence and turn away from participating in an unforgivable crime, today we shoot down weather balloons and lament not being invited to purchase nuclear attack submarines. Rather than rejecting war, we live in perpetual fear of a third world war, and rather than doing anything to stop it, our political elites spend their time talking tough on Twitter while sending weapons abroad so someone else can do the dying.
The Orwellian dystopia so feared by the anti-war movement 20 years ago has become our reality.
Today political elites warn us constantly of threats from abroad as much as those from within. Our perpetual enemy shifts from Eastasia" to Eurasia" almost from week to week. We live under constant surveillance, our collective face trampled by the boot of the military-industrial complex. And the past is already being rewritten.
In his recent retrospective on the Iraq War, former Bush speech writer David Frum claimed in The Atlantic that an arsenal of chemical warfare shells and warheads were found. In truth, no arsenal of chemical weapons was found in Iraq. What U.S. troops discovered were 1980s vintage, largely U.S.-supplied, chemical munitions so degraded they couldn't be safely moved out of the country for disposal, and so were sealed up in bunkers back in the mid-1990s, under U.N. supervision.
If those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, I fear for those whose past is actively being rewritten. What fate awaits us?
Taylor C. Noakes is a public historian and independent journalist. Follow him on Twitter @TaylorNoakes