From Shane Smith at antiwar.com:
Most of us in the United States have a vague awareness of a Second Iraq War. There was invasion, devastation, death, “victory”, and the catharsis that seemed to flood over the nation after the lynching of a Third World dictator. Satiated revenge, finally, for 9/11, was the implicit mood of many. Even after enough people shouted that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers, there still remained the belief that that war just had to happen. Saddam had to go, because he was a bad guy, because he murdered his own people, et cetera. Regardless of rationalizations after the fact, the 2003 Iraq War was an act of nationalistic revenge. As was Afghanistan. There was an attitude that we were entitled to our own bloodbath, since one had been visited upon us. The attackers died in their attack, so no one was left in our immediate vicinity to quench our bloodthirst. The Iraq War solved that problem, at least temporarily. But while many are aware of the war, and aware of Saddam’s broken neck, few care about what really happened since the invasion, and what negative consequences may have arisen because of the invasion.
The reality of what happened has been the total destruction of Iraq as anything resembling a nation. The Iraq War has been directly responsible for the displacement of 3.5 million to 5 million or more Iraqis, according to MIT’s Iraq: the Human Cost. These are lives that, while not snuffed out, have been completely destroyed by the disintegration of Iraqi society following the invasion. The Iraqi refugees spread out to neighboring states, like Jordan and Syria, but since the U.S.-backed destabilization of Syria, the Iraqis were forced to find a new refuge. Iraq was indeed Ground Zero for the beginning of the refugee crisis, as Al Jazeera correspondent, Imran Khan, noted in a September 5th column:
“What no one talks about is the invasion and occupation of Iraq…
March 2003 was the pivotal point. Based on controversial evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the war drums beat loudly.
What the Iraq war did was allow space for anger at the unjustified actions of the Western coalition to be moulded into a hardline movement of fighters who would join al-Qaeda in Iraq and other groups.
Before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, radical and violent movements were tiny in number. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were the only real threat.”
Ignoring the self-evident long-term consequences of an Iraq invasion has proven costly.
To continue reading: The United States Is in the Refugee-Creation Business
