Iraq: Two Decades After an Invasion That Shouldn’t Have Happened
In March 2003, a US-led coalition of countries identified Iraq as a war target, promising to bring freedom and democracy to that Arab nation. Twenty years later, history catalogs this action as a powerful social, military, and geopolitical failure.
Photo: Getty
LatinAmerican Post | David García Pedraza
Escucha este artículo
Leer en español: Irak: dos décadas después de una invasión que no debió haber ocurrido
The Republic of Iraq after 2003 has been different. Although its recent history has been marked by dictatorships, such as that of Saddam Hussein, wars with its neighbors Iran and Kuwait, and by a notable religious society, Western interventionism promised this Arab nation to free it from all radicalism and transform the Iraqi country into an economically prosperous territory.
Twenty years have passed since that promise has not been fulfilled, and the Western powers have disregarded all the interests of the Iraqis. One could consider that the painful invasion of March 20, 2003, has been colonialism disguised as an insurrection against Hussein's government, whose proper purposes were to ensure the well-being of one country at the expense of another.
The Cradle of Civilization in International Sabotag
Iraq has been in the constant sights of the West since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein authorized the use of weapons of mass destruction against the civilian population in 1980 in the context of the war with Iran and later in the 1990 Gulf War. Although the UN did extensive work to remove these weapons from Iraq and prevent their production, the West was not convinced they had been eliminated. This argument would be crucial for the United States and its development of the 'War on Terror.'
After the attacks of September 2001, the United States took the international leader in developing an agenda that would help it maintain its position as a world power. Under the pretext of the war against Islamic terrorism, behind closed doors in the UN Security Council, the West claimed that the Arab regimes were a global danger since they encouraged violence against the world. There, with the help of several Iraqi exiles, the world pointed to Iraq, especially Hussein, as a promoter of terrorism.
The Start of the Takeover of Iraq and the True Cause of the Invasion
The argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was enough to order a military takeover of Iraq to bring freedom to that Arab republic. However, several members of the Security Council and the population on the streets refused to believe this idea. The seizure was approved and executed on March 20, 2003.
For almost 50 days, the armies of the United States and their allies were the protagonists of the Iraqi invasion, leaving an initial result of 7,000 civilian deaths. and tens of thousands more injured. After this offensive, and with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the 'Multinational Coalition of Iraq' achieved its goal. However, the United States specifically had more plans in Iraq: territorial control and oil exploitation. But this only left political instability that served as a broth for creating other terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State.
The Lie about Chemical Weapons Gave Rise to Conspiracie
The "liberalization of Hussein's Iraq" went from being the pride of the United States to the error most questioned by the world until today. Since no weapons of mass destruction were discovered on Iraqi soil, theories about the actual cause of Washington's invasion of Iraq were immediate.
The private interests of two Iraqi exiles, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janab and Maj Muhammad Harith, triggered Iraq's invasion, occupation, and war. Both characters said that the Arab country was producing weapons of mass destruction based on uranium, which was the 'casus belli' to order the invasion.
It may interest you: Women in Iran make the Ayatollah's regime tremble. The end of the Islamic revolution?
The lie would not last long. Both Janab and Harith confessed to lying, justifying themselves by saying they did so to have a better life in the West. Despite knowing about these confessions, American and British intelligence continued searching for weapons to show results that never came.
What is most striking about this false positive is that the doubt always remained latent whether Iraq honestly had weapons of mass destruction. Even so, the United States and the United Kingdom did not give in and chose to trust those they should not, a decision that would cost the credibility of the institutions.
The credibility of international institutions such as the UN and NATO was undermined by seeing the results when Iraq did not possess such weapons. This has served as an excuse for the proliferation of false news and conspiracy theories on the motive to point out Iraq as a world enemy, so much so that it has come to be thought that September 11, 2001, was a self-attack.
Arab and Muslim Figures are seen as Terrorists
As if the War in Iraq were not enough, in 2014, a new criminal organization was born: The Islamic State, which separated from Al-Qaeda to create a caliphate for its conquered populations to live under the interpretations they make of it. Islam, with Sharia Law as its mandate.
Islamophobia and fear of Arab society are seen as a problem in European and Western societies since the stigma of the cruel contemporary history of countries where Arabs and Muslims are the majority does not favorably eliminate these prejudices.
