When we are tempted to divide the world into good and bad, like “we who don’t invade our neighbors and others who do”, “we who respect human and gender rights and others who don’t”, “we who ‘can be trusted’ and not others”, let us remember – at least who was there and saw it – on the night of March 20, 2003when, without having been neither provoked, nor threatened, much less attacked, the United States launched up Baghdad the operation ‘Shock and Awe’lands and terrifies, which marked the beginning of theinvasion of Iraq.
The vivid images of explosions and fires during the night in the Iraqi capital ‘exploded’ on TV screens in the Usa at the beginning of the afternoon: nothing to do with the almost aseptic images, with no color and no sound, of the gulf war of 1991: Peter Arnett and CNN documented, with the means of the time, the bombing of Baghdad preliminary to the liberation of Kuwait.
Salt’Russian invasion of Ukraine is inexplicable, even read in the light of whose profits of geopolitics, it was – and remains – even more so that of the USA to Iraq: that for Saddam Hussein by George W. Bush jr was an obsession perhaps comparable to that of Russia – better, Putin – for Ukraine. The son president felt invested with a mission to accomplish what the father president, George WH Bush, had rightly failed to do in 1991, namely the regime change in Baghdad: once the independence of Kuwait occupied by Iraqi troops was restored, Bush senior stopped the conflict.
Twelve years later, the Bush junior administration justified the attack with the threat of mass destruction weapons of Saddam Hussein, taking advantage of the climate of patriotic numbing in which the United States were still living after suffering the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Back then, more than four out of five Americans they approved the attack, even though a similar percentage had no idea where Iraq was on the map; and Congress approved the use of force a priori.
The invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam’s regime was on the electoral agenda of Bush and his ‘neo-con’ advisers. When things were done, the threat of weapons of mass destruction was revealed inexistent. But many had from the beginning the perception that it was an invention, or at least an exaggeration, of intelligence; and everyone knew Iraq it had nothing to do with it with 9/11 – only one of 19 terrorists’ al-Qaeda he was of Iraqi origin.
Yet, the invasion found the endorsement of Great Britain under Tony Blair, Spain under José Maria Aznar and Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, as well as about twenty other leaders and countries: divided Europe and created a fault line between Europe and America, where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mocked Jacques Chirac’s France and Gerhard Schroeder’s Germany, which did not follow the United States in their adventure. At the Congress buvette, the ‘French fries’ were replaced by the ‘Liberty fries’.
Colin Powell, the widely respected secretary of state, became the face of the campaign to convince the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which there weren’t, and to justify invading the country and overthrowing Saddam’s regime. On the morning of February 5, 2003, Powell presented the – false – proof of the Iraqi threat to the UN: he will later say that he had in good faith believed the intelligence reportswhich however had only provided him with a vial containing white powder – presumed deadly – and photos of military trucks – presumed chemical laboratories.
The extent of Powell’s mission failure was immediate and thunderous: his words were heard, but they were not believed, and fell into the cold of a meeting of the Security Council extended to include all the UN countries. Instead, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s vehement anti-invasion speech drew rousing applause.
Even the pressures of Pope John Paul II: at the beginning of March, I was a witness and chronicler of the discomfort and disappointment of the papal envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi, who was supposed to dissuade the president from the invasion. The prelate left Washington saying that peace is a gift from God – but war remained Bush’s decision.
A few weeks later, theaggression to Iraq it left, perhaps a little ahead of schedule: it was said that intelligence had known where Saddam was that evening and that the attack was aimed at eliminating him – it didn’t happen that way. On May 1, after Saddam was overthrown and captured, then sentenced to death and hanged on December 30, 2006, Bush proclaimed, aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln, “mission accomplished”. Yet another nonsense. The war was set to last until 2017, when Western troops completed their withdrawal; to trigger uprisings against the occupation and internal clashes between shia e forced; to be the scene of horrors, such as those documented in the prison of Abu Ghraib; and to have terrorist appendages in Europe and to give birth to theIsis. Without, however, turning Iraq into a Mesopotamian Sweden.
The human costs are extremely uncertain. The losses of the western coalition are quite reliable: 4,839, of which 4,520 US military, 180 British and 33 Italian, almost half in the attack of Nasiriyah of 12 November 2003. To these must be added 468 contractors, aka mercenaries, USA. And then there are the losses due to collateral factors, such as the suicides of veterans – nearly 2,000 as of 2010, in the US alone.
Iraqi losses are much more difficult to calculate: they are estimated at 160 miles civilians killed, to which must be added 10,000 fallen of the Iraqi security forces who, under the aegis of the occupiers, replaced Saddam’s army, which was dissolved (and of which many officers and soldiers participated in the resistance).
Good and bad, you never know where to put the dividing line. And maybe there isn’t.