Iraq

Anniversaries are often a time to look back and reflect. It was ten years ago today that the United States brought “shock and awe” to Iraq under the false pretenses of Iraqi involvement in 9/11 and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

We in the U.S. have all but forgotten those days, even after nearly 2,500 U.S. service members died in Iraq and over $800 billion were spent. The Iraq War was once the focus of a plethora of media coverage, congressional debate—it was even a campaign issue as late as the 2008 presidential election. The Iraq War, its false justification and the crimes committed to cover up the truth are now distant memories for most of America, only 53% of whom think the Iraq War was a mistake.

This is a sobering realization on a day when car bombs killed fifty people in Baghdad. Ten years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is a dangerous, violent and unstable place—but not because Iraqis are violent or “have been fighting for thousands of years and always will” as many have remarked over the years. Iraq is unstable today because of U.S. action there—beginning in the 1970s.

President Obama finished his third State of the Union Address the same way he began it—by touting what the administration considers foreign policy successes. “For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq” President Obama said, concluding his address by stating, “Ending the Iraq war has allowed us to strike decisive blows against our enemies.”

This kind of rhetoric is incredibly unfortunate. The logic contained within these thoughts says that force has worked to end wars when it has, in fact, failed to deliver long term peace and stability. We can clearly see this playing out in Iraq today—not to mention, as I wrote in December, the U.S. war in Iraq may have concluded, but the long term damage is far from done running itscourse.