March 20, 2019 marks the 16th anniversary of the Iraq War. History permits some answers to questions such as what led to this war and what, if anything, was gained. What was lost? Where has the Iraq War taken the U.S. and the world?
In 1998, five years prior to the war’s onset, a handful of neo-conservatives calling themselves the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) had convinced themselves that through U.S. military might, they could be giants who would transform the Middle-East by forcing its nations to embrace western democratic government and western societal norms.
Their (erroneous) assumption was that, one-by-one, other Middle Eastern nations’ governments would be transformed, falling like dominos to the lure of secular democratic government and western ideals. PNAC’s dreams, as it turned out, were to evaporate within the fog of war in what turned out to be the worst U.S. foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War.
Convinced of both the rightness and the viability of their plans, in 1998 PNAC’s members wrote to President Bill Clinton, urging him to invade Iraq. Their letter cited “Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production….” and urged that, “In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from Power.” Signers of the letter to President Clinton included Donald Rumsfeld who would become George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, as well as two men who would become top assistants to Rumsfeld in the Pentagon and who would be termed architects of the Iraq War, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Also among the signers were conservative pundit Bill Kristol, GOP operative Richard Armitage and John Bolton who later would become Bush’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N. but would withdraw his nomination after saying that the U.N. would be improved by blasting off several of its upper floors. Later still, President Donald Trump would select Bolton as White House National Security Advisor.
President Clinton reviewed PNAC’s request to invade Iraq and quickly rejected it. PNAC’s members, however, would bide their time.
Three years passed until January, 2001 when George W. Bush was inaugurated President with Dick Cheney as his Vice President. New President George W. Bush quickly jumped aboard the Iraq War train. According to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill who was present, a week after the inauguration, Bush met with his National Security Council and announced, “Saddam must go!” The American people had no way of knowing that Bush administration officials were scheming to begin a war in Iraq
But PNAC, Bush and Cheney lacked a reason to invade Iraq, given that Iraq was not a threat to the U.S. Then, eight months into Bush and Cheney’s first term, came the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the afternoon of the attacks, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld met with officials to determine what to do. His hand-written meeting notes included the phrase, “Hit Saddam,” referencing Iraq’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein.
As the smoke of 9-11 began to clear, the smokescreen of an Iraq-9-11 connection began to billow. Five months later, in his January, 2002 State of the Union address, Bush described Iraq as part of an “axis of evil.” Two months after that, in an interview with British television, Bush said, “I made up my mind that Saddam must go.” And the President and others within the administration were just warming up. At the 2002 West Point graduation ceremony, Bush said, “If we wait for [Saddam’s] threats to materialize, we will have waited too long.” In an August speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vice President Cheney told his audience, “There is no doubt that Saddam has WMDs….We‘ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors—including Saddam’s own son-in-law.” Cheney was referring to Gen. Hussein Kamal. But Cheney failed tell his VFW audience a very important fact--General Kamal had been dead for six years. Even more salient, during his brief defection Kamal actually had told U.S. officials, “All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.” It was not the first, nor would it be the last, of Cheney’s fabrications, a collection of lies that he concocted to exactly fit his, Bush’s, Rumsfeld’s and PNAC’s justification for a war in Iraq.
Before the end of August 2002, Bush referenced a report from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency. The President announced, “[The] IAEA [report says] that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.” But Bush was quoting from a report that was 11 years old. A more recent report, just four years old, concluded there were “no indications” of a nuclear capability in Iraq. It was a particularly egregious example of the barrage of Bush administration deceptions that by now were being routinely hurled at the American people.
As the next weeks and months elapsed, the administration’s drumbeat for war intensified. Paul Wolfowitz, now the Assistant Secretary of Defense, talked of, “the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Rumsfeld piled on saying, “There is no doubt…they have chemical and biological weapons.” Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, vowed, “We know for a fact there are [WMD] weapons there.” Bush pushed the nation ever closer to war, saying, “Should [Saddam] again deny that his arsenal exists, he will have entered into his final stage with a lie.” And for each such assertion, a dozen others were made, as well. And each was false.
By September, 2002 a year had come and gone since the attacks of 9-11. Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly saying, “Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.” Meanwhile, Dick Cheney, appearing on Meet the Press, described an alleged meeting in the Czech Republic between “20th hijacker” Mohammed Atta and top Iraqi officials, implying that al-Qaida had worked hand in glove with Iraq to coordinate the 9-11 attacks. National Security Advisor (later Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice echoed Cheney by asserting, “There clearly are contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq.” But Czech officials questioned whether such a meeting had ever taken place.
The push for war continued through the fall and into the winter of 2003 with dozens of similar lies and repeated false pairings of Iraq with 9-11 until, in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush warned, “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaida….” He added 16 words that will forever hang around the neck of George W. Bush as emblems of the hundreds of misrepresentations, fabrications and outright lies that were needed to convince the American people of the necessity of war: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” More than likely, the president knew his words were false because, two months earlier, Bush had removed the same sentence from his prepared remarks in a speech he had made in Cincinnati. Clearly, the president knew, or strongly suspected, that his uranium tale was not true. Moreover, former Ambassador Joe Wilson had been hired by the CIA to look into the “yellowcake” uranium allegations and earlier had advised the CIA that the story was false.
In a follow-up to the State of the Union speech, on February 5, 2003, Colin Powell addressed the U.N. saying that “Saddam is determined to keep his WMD.” Two days later, Donald Rumsfeld reassured Americans that any war with Iraq would last, “…six days, six weeks, I doubt six months.” Ultimately, however, the war would last more than twice as long as World War II.
Two weeks later, Rumsfeld’s assistant Richard Perle announced, “U.N. weapons inspectors are being seriously deceived….Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has MORE evidence of secret weapons dumps.”
But in stark contrast to the WMD hype that was daily being promulgated by the administration, on March 7, 2003, just 12 days before the war would begin, Chief U.N. weapons inspector Mohammed el Baradei, who was overseeing several hundred inspectors in Iraq, concluded, “After months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence of plausible indications of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.” Yet, just two days later, Bush announced, “Intelligence…leaves no doubt [that Saddam has WMD].”
Charles Darwin once described the “great power of steady misrepresentation.” Now the president, with his power to command the media, and aided by Fox News (whose owner, Rupert Murdock, later admitted causing his network to push for war), were successfully employing the steady misrepresentation of which Darwin had spoken.
The words of West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd rang from the well of the Senate on the morning of March 19, 2003: “The case this administration tries to make is tainted by falsified documents and suspect evidence. This is not a war of necessity, but a war of choice….There is no credible information to connect Saddam Hussein with 9-11, at least up to this point….This administration has directed all the images and grief of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to a tangible villain…and villain he is! But this is the wrong villain and the wrong war….” The Senator’s voice echoed to the rafters of the Senate Chamber, yet fell back to the carpets, unheeded by a nation that by then had grown deaf to reason.
That evening at ten o’clock, George W. Bush appeared on national television and announced that the Iraq War had begun. Progress was rapid. My son was among the first two or three hundred Marines to cross the line of departure from Kuwait into Iraq on March 20, 2003, Iraqi time. Ahead of him the guns of advanced artillery thundered. For three weeks, he and his unit advanced northward until they arrived at Baghdad. He described how the troops were greeted with cheers and “thumbs up” from smiling locals who applauded the troops as the iconic statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled to the ground.
The troops had performed their duty with valor and integrity, although problems soon would arise. Daniel’s unit was housed briefly in a Baghdad soccer stadium that featured a huge bomb crater in the playing field. Soon they were moved south to the city of Karbala. One evening with his unit billeted in a school building, three rockets screamed in from the brush a few hundred yards away. The mortar rounds had been fired through PCV tubes and had slightly overshot the building’s roof where Daniel and other troops had moved to catch some sleep in air that was a few degrees cooler than the 110 degrees inside the building. Had the tubes, which the Marines found a few minutes later, been positioned at angles a half inch steeper, he and others would have died in the rubble of the building. As he put it, thank goodness their aim was bad. And he said something else. If back home people were being told that the war was over, they were being misinformed.
There had been very little planning by the Bush administration for what would ensue once the invasion had removed Saddam Hussein. As a result, looting, sniping, car bombs, roadside bombs, insurgency and civil war soon would overwhelm the nation of Iraq. Its Parliament would become besot with sectarian squabbling that paralleled the street fighting between Sunni and Shia religious sects.
Six weeks into the war, on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech in which he announced that the majority of the fighting was over. Fewer than 200 U.S. troops had been killed to that point. But the numbers of the dead would mount to more than 4,500 over the years that followed.
Eight months after the invasion, LCpl. Dan Wyatt came home. Five months after that, he again found himself in Iraq, this time positioned at the western extreme of the country, in the city of al Qaim, on the Syrian border. But this time things were different. There were no more thumbs up from the Iraqi people. Instead, they lurked in the shadows, suspicious, guarded and dangerous. By now it was clear to him, as well as to all but the most “gung ho” among the Marines, that the war had gone terribly wrong.
In the years that followed many remarkable events occurred. Chief among them, from my perspective, is that my son returned home safely. Wiser, more worldly and ready put the Marine Corps and the Iraq War behind him. He became a police officer in a local community and has risen to the rank of Lieutenant.
As the war continued to devastate Iraq and American credibility, Mitt Romney was campaigning to unseat Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2012 election. Romney posited that if Obama were to be re-elected, “Tragically, all we’ve fought for in Iraq [is in danger of vanishing].” It was a moment that caused many Americans to ask themselves what, exactly, had we been fighting for in Iraq?
It had been said we fought to disarm Saddam of his WMD, but his WMD turned out to be fiction. It was said we fought Iraqis “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here, even though Saddam had neither the means nor the intention to launch a war with the U.S. It was said we fought for the domino theory of democracy, which turned out to be a colossal error in thinking by PNAC’s neo-conservatives. It was said we fought to prevent the “smoking gun from becoming a mushroom cloud,” as Condoleezza Rice had put it, even though there was no smoking gun. It was said that we fought to hold the perpetrators of 9-11 accountable, although Iraq had played no role in 9-11, nor had any of the hijackers been Iraqis. We fought because individuals such as Donald Rumsfeld thoughtlessly had assumed it would be easy. We fought for the astonishingly bizarre notion that we could overrun a nation that had been devoted to an Islamic theocracy for a thousand years and turn it into a secular, western-style nation. And it is likely that underneath the high-sounding rhetoric about democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people, oil was an unstated reason for the war, as well.
Any war has costs, and the Iraq War’s costs have been, and continue to be, enormous. More than 4,500 U.S. troops died in the war. More than 30,000 were wounded, some of them to need care for the remainders of their lives. Somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 Iraq citizens were killed in the war. Several million others became refugees. The war’s cost are ongoing and, ultimately, surely will exceed $3 trillion. The U.S. lost the global moral high ground as world esteem for our nation evaporated with the revelations of abuses and torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our relations with other nations continue to suffer, as the world looks upon us as instigators of an unjust war. And perhaps the great irony of the war is that it chipped away at our national security by creating more terrorists, particularly as the dark images and tales of prison abuses swept the globe, inflaming the passions of increasing the numbers of anti-American hearts, doubtless bringing some of them to swear vengeance on the U.S.
Will we forget how we were misled into a war in Iraq? The answer, I hope, is that we will not forget because now, in 2019, we are saddled with a president who was elected by a minority of voters and whose character is sufficiently twisted that, to make himself feel like a bigger person or to distract from his personal and legal difficulties, he may provoke a needless war.
Have Americans forgotten the hard lessons of Iraq? Perhaps many have. But we dare not. For we have much to lose by again being drawn into a war without good reason, by people who themselves did not fight earlier wars and do not know the cruelties of war. As my friend Lida Shepherd put it, the Iraq War should serve as a strong reminder to all of us: Never again.