WMDs. Aluminum tubes. The 9/11 connection. The lies that were told in the warm up for the Iraq invasion are numerous and glaring.
But as you prepare to celebrate five glorious years of liberation, long time Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn has some news to share -- everything that you've been told about what came after was also a lie -- a narrative created jointly by our government, our government's proxies in Iraq, and a press that's still willing to carry the administration's water in swimming pool sized containers.
The glorious, hard-fought invasion against battle-hardened troops?
The US and its allies never really understood the war they won that started on 19 March 2003. Their armies had an easy passage to Baghdad because the Iraqi army did not fight. Even the so-called elite Special Republican Guard units, well-paid, well-equipped and tribally linked to Saddam, went home. Television coverage and much of the newspaper coverage of the war was highly deceptive because it gave the impression of widespread fighting when there was none. I entered Mosul and Kirkuk, two northern cities, on the day they were captured with hardly a shot fired. Burnt-out Iraqi tanks littered the roads around Baghdad, giving the impression of heavy fighting, but almost all had been abandoned by their crews before they were hit.
That civil war that we were working so hard to prevent?
Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.... the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left. ... There is now an 80,000 strong Sunni militia, paid for and allied to the US but hostile to the Iraqi government. Five years after the American and British armies crossed into Iraq, the country has become a geographical expression.
And the prospect for a McCain Millenium in which Iraq becomes our home in the Middle East?
The war was too easy. Consciously or subconsciously, Americans came to believe it did not matter what Iraqis said or did. They were expected to behave like Germans or Japanese in 1945, though most of Iraqis did not think of themselves as having been defeated. ... There was a further misconception that grew up at this time. Most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein. He had been a cruel and catastrophically incompetent leader, who ruined his country. All Kurds and most Shia wanted him gone. But it did not follow that Iraqis of any description wanted to be occupied by a foreign power.
The Iraq we see on the news -- when the news bothers to show it at all -- is as mythical as Colin Powell's speech before the UN. It's a collection of administration propaganda woven through with media narratives.
It's no wonder that Iraq is the first war where the movies and TV programs starting coming out while the bullets are still flying. The Iraq we're being sold is a script, not a place.
Whenever there was an American soldier killed or wounded in Baghdad, I would drive there immediately. Always there were cheering crowds standing by the smoking remains of a Humvee or a dark bloodstain on the road. After one shooting of a soldier, a man told me: "I am a poor man but my family is going to celebrate what happened by cooking chicken." Yet this was the moment when President Bush and his Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, were saying that the insurgents were "remnants of the old regime" and "dead enders".