All That Rage: America's Failures With Iraq

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the official U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, launched in March 2003 as part of George W. Bush's attempt to avenge America after September 11... and personal revenge against Saddam Hussein's attempts to assassinate George's father.

There's a useful timeline with AP News for a refresher, in case you've already forgotten the rage and tears of those years.

There were a lot of failures: 

Failure by our intelligence community to drown out the noise of Neoconservatives eager for war and nation-building they were ill-suited to undertake; 

Failure by Bush the Lesser to contain his personal vendetta; 

Failure by a Congress too cowed by the passions of 9/11 to deny the fantasies of the Neocons and the Bush admin who believed they had an easy war to win; 

Failure by our national media outlets both print and televised who ignored the millions of Americans who protested an uncalled-for attack on a nation that had NOTHING TO DO with Bin Laden's attacks; 

Even further failures by our government to prevent the torture regimes that rose up in the shadows, committing untold war crimes that stained our nation's international prestige.

The start of the Second Persian Gulf War - do people really remember the first one in 1991? - all came about because there were factions in the Republican foreign policy ranks who really wanted to "democratize" the Middle East, but we couldn't do with our allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt because it would disrupt their totalitarian regimes, and we couldn't do with our enemies like Iran or Iraq unless we were directly provoked. But hey, somewhere had to pop up to build that Utopia, right?

Bush and his administration - especially his Veep Dick Cheney, who had profits in mind for his corporation and his business buddies - used the excuse of the 9/11 attacks to paint Iraq and Iran as part of an "Axis Of Evil" to justify going after them, and then used Saddam's quest for Weapons of Mass Destruction - with unproven allegations of Saddam getting materials to build nukes - to justify invasion.

We had a plan to invade, and we rolled it out to the dismay of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in the "shock and awe" bombings and later on in the occupation.

Bush and Cheney kept justifying this all as "humanitarian" as though war ever was humane. Cheney himself claimed "We will be greeted as liberators."

These were all lies.

A lot of Americans still bought those lies, as we were still barely years away from the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. The pain and the rage were still raw and tangible.

We had a plan to invade, and also a plan to occupy and get out. Except the occupation was a disaster.

The search for Saddam's WMDs turned into a joke: Everything found were either rusted out, broken, or non-existent. Any evidence we had were either exaggerated out of proportion, or based on Saddam's own people lying about WMDs as a bluff (which didn't work). The justification for occupation faded away. Desperate to prove themselves true, our leaders signed off on extensive "enhanced interrogation techniques" better known as TORTURE to force people to confess where the (fake) WMDs went to. Our sins kept getting worse.

Anyone who criticized the WMD excuses were exposed and humiliated, which led to political and criminal scandals when Cheney's self-appointed intel office revealed an active non-official cover agent (Valerie Plame) and broke CIA protocols. The way Cheney and his people abused their access to big-press journalists also exposed how our national media outlets failed their ethical standards and the nation's trust.

The Bush Plan A for ending the war revolved around propping up an Iraqi ally puppet Ahmed Chalabi as Saddam's replacement, hold elections with a pro-American government, announce victory and get out. But the nation-building plans proved more complex, and Chalabi turned out to be an unreliable ally that neither the Iraqis nor Americans could trust in power. When Paul Bremer issued a controversial order to disband the still-needed Iraqi army and Ba'ath Party, it sparked an uprising that turned the occupation into an almost decade-long quagmire. Bremer's action, and the failure by the Bush administration to control such miscues, pointed out clearly that there was no Plan B dealing with Iraq.

And the poor citizenry of Iraq paid the price for it. They're paying it still, as the chaos of those years allowed sectional factions like ISIL to rise up and spill more blood well into the 2010s.

So here we are, 20 years later. Have we - the United States - learned from our failures?

Arguably No. 

We still have Far Right elements of our government still eager to start opportunistic invasions and occupations wherever they want (except for helping out Ukraine, because they don't want us facing off against Putin). 

We never held any of the architects of that godless torture regime - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld (RIP), John Yoo, Jay Bybee, several others - accountable for their human rights and Habeus violations. There are nations - not just Iraq but also our NATO and regional allies - still calling on us to do so.

We never fully repaid Iraq for the damages we inflicted, an insane amount of money meant for that nation's rebuilding efforts that literally disappeared into rich people's vaults.

Shocking for us at home has been the mistreatment and neglect given to our military veterans who served in Iraq (and Afghanistan) who have not received proper psychological, physical, and economic support from our VA and other federal agencies. Where are the funds to provide housing, medical care, educational opportunities? An entire generation that had been sent off to a decade-long war still ignored, still struggling to rebuild their own lives while Iraq rebuilds their own.

Our (mostly Republican, but even Democratic leaders from that period share the blame) political leadership failed us repeatedly, driven by blind rage and mindless ideological fantasy. Those failures keep happening, as the lack of accountability by all of them - Presidents and Congresscritters, Generals and Analysts, Media Elites and Corporate Criminals, all of them honorable bastards - haunt us to this day.