The 20th Anniversary of the US Invasion of Iraq

by Thinq Tanq

March 24, 2023 / 6323 AFK

April 1, 2023 Update: "Additional Information" section added

Twenty years ago, this week, the United States invaded Iraq. I remember standing in our family's living room, watching one of CNN's embedded journalists report from a fleet of tanks as they sped over the desert toward Baghdad. This captivating, concerning spectacle was one of many hours of pro-invasion propaganda. I remember turning to my parents on the couch and asking why the US was invading Iraq. Appropriately, they shrugged and shook their heads in response. They didn't get it either.

The invasion made no sense to me. At 13 years of age, I'd had all of two years of experience in passively reading the news on the internet and that was all it took for the obvious to be obvious. The United States' contrived invasion of Iraq taught me that, in this world, deliberate atrocities of cataclysmic proportion happen while the world is watching.

This isn't just a swipe at George Bush. Joe Biden and elected Democrats were integral in driving the invasion forward. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress when they voted overwhelmingly to give Bush authorization to use military force in Iraq. The stark "ideological division" between the Democratic and Republican Parties miraculously transforms into closed ranks when it comes to how the US will govern other people's countries. Many would explain this by pointing to the two major parties' ideological roots in colonialism and to the racism, paternalism and violence that colonialism requires.

I posit that part of the United States' addiction to war and foreign intervention is that American culture developed, in part, on the basis of turning a blind eye away from violations of peoples' rights and illegitimate hierarchy. Education and socialization within a young, ethnostate like the United States or its colonies trained its people to pretend that indigenous peoples and African peoples weren't complete humans, with rights that are actually capable of being violated. The US military cut its institutional teeth in "Indian Country". How could anything less than a fascist government actively support chattel slavery, genocide and ethnic nationalism? Without the cultural practice of turning a blind eye to the unjustifiable, the institutionalized practice of raining blows of hardcore fascism and authoritarianism against African and indigenous peoples, the United States could not exist in anything like its current form. Today, education and socialization revise US history so that violent authoritarianism in the US is assumed to be an aberration of the dominant political tradition. As such, the United States' excessive military interventions abroad and its glowing embers of fascism domestically appear to be "new" to many of us. An unfortunate consequence of this is that people believe that these recent aberrations can be addressed by a few policy tweaks from the same political establishment that remains unrepentant and unwilling to engage in meaningful introspection about its founding authoritarianism.

Even the culture of business and work in the US has been dominated by anti-democratic ideas and systems. There were people in the US and elsewhere, like Frederick Douglass, who opposed the capitalistic arrangement of industry in favor of democratic ownership of business capital. Still, the dominant culture of capitalism arguably mis-educated generations of people in the US into believing that anti-democratic authoritarianism from nine to five, 365 days a year is acceptable as long as some people are allowed to exercise "democracy" once every two years in the public sector.

This norm of day-to-day anti-democracy at work primes us to accept less legitimate authority in other areas of life. So, when an authority figure, like George Bush invades Iraq, we've had so little practice with genuine democracy that we allow it. When an authority figure like Barack Obama wants to launch an undeclared invasion of Libya, we're so used to following orders that we allow it. When the authority figure of a financially wealthy, primarily Caucasian country invents a burden of responsibility to colonize and civilize the dark-skinned, foreign savage, fascism ensues and the people acceptingly look away.  When an overtly racist, proto-fascist like Donald Trump ignores and even undermines "rule of law" and openly engages in racist, xenophobic invective, of course the culture of American voters affords him massive, and increasing, support from 2016 to 2020.

A moral conscience never developed among the class of people who own most of the economic assets nor among the bootlicking politicians who enable their foreign policy agenda at the expense of everyday people's agenda.

• The US is the only country that has ever dropped a nuclear bomb. Not only that, after the bombing, it observed the carnage, thought about it for three days, then dropped another nuclear bomb.

• The US is the ultimate ally to violent apartheid against Palestinians.

• Some estimates say that approximately one-third of the global population lives under the United States' economic sanctions, restricting everyday people's access to food, medicine and other life-saving needs. Many of these sanctions are unilateral and therefore disallowed under international rules.

• US Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump maintained the US war in Afghanistan despite lacking a coherent strategy for years.

• Barack Obama campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq War, got elected and had the US involved in at least seven conflicts at one time.

• As far as I can perceive, federally elected Democrats and Republicans may constitute the most deadly gang on the face of the Earth and a consistent impediment to anti-war movements in the United States.

• Historically and presently, the US is almost always waging war somewhere.

Watching the US government start a contrived war on television was one of many moments in my life that ignited a burning necessity to see change in our society from whatever this is to a society with a more legitimate distribution of power. Over time, I've connected with others who have the same fire in them. Around the world, there are millions more whom I will never meet, but have the same fire. They are part of the reason why I put blind faith in the unlikely prospect of peace. And they're waiting for those of us who live in the United States to remove the boot of our governing class from the rest of the world's neck. If the US ever implements a humane foreign policy regime, then it will be because the fundamental nature of American political culture will have drastically evolved. Or, more likely, it will be because poor and working class brown peoples' of the world managed to put a boot of our own on their fascist necks. A US foreign policy regime of peace, non-exceptionalism and reparations will not come about by appealing to our leaders' moral conscience nor by electing barely-different leaders in the other, imperialist political party.

Those of us who are perversely privileged to live on the less bloody side of US foreign policy can join an anti-war, political organization (e.g. Black Alliance for Peace, The Red Nation, Veterans for Peace, US Peace Council, United National Antiwar Coalition). Such organizations should consciously remain free of corporate influence and take an explicit position against imperialism anywhere in the world. As long as some of us are willing and able to imagine a much more peaceful world, then there's hope. The fact that our chances of success are so slim makes it no less of a moral and practical imperative.

Additional Information

• Margaret Kimberly of the Black Agenda Report interviewed CIA veteran, Ray McGovern about the parallels between the political hand-waving that enabled the invasion of Iraq and the United States' belligerent foreign policy toward Russia. The interview is separated into part one and part two.

• Margaret Flowers of Popular Resistance and the Clearing the F.O.G. (Forces of Greed) podcast, recorded a discussion with foreign policy experts from the CIA and Veterans for Peace about the United States' historical expansion of NATO and military bases eastward toward Russia in direct contradiction to a commitment not to do so.

• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh published a report presenting overwhelming evidence that the United States was most likely responsible for destroying the Nord Stream Pipeline in order to shift the balance of power over Europe's energy sector away from Russia to the United States. Former New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges interviewed Hersh about his report

• Ajamu Baraka recently wrote an article in Black Agenda Report explaining the United States' tendency to selectively use or exempt itself from the rules-based international order that it helped to create after World War Two.

• This March, Erica Caines, an activist and organizer with Black Alliance for Peace, Liberation Through Reading and Ujima People's Progress Party, published an article explaining that the federal government feels "morally" compelled to spend tens of billions of dollars on war in Ukraine as it cuts food assistance benefits to the most vulnerable people in the United States.