Anatomy of a disaster

Two decades later, Iraqis are still paying the price for Bush's ill-judged war

Twenty years ago, on March 19, 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq. Two claims were put forward by the Americans and their British allies to justify the unprecedented overthrow by force of the leadership of a sovereign state: that President Saddam Hussein possessed and was preparing to use weapons of mass destruction, and that his regime had been complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks on America by Al-Qaeda in 2001.

Both claims proved to be false.

On Sept. 18, 2001, one week after the 9/11 attacks, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, visited US President George W. Bush in the White House.

As Bruce Riedel, a member of Bush’s National Security Council, would later recall, when the president told the ambassador that he thought Iraq was behind the attacks, “Bandar was visibly perplexed.”

The prince, Riedel said, “told Bush that the Saudis had no evidence of any collaboration between (Al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden and Iraq. Indeed, their history was of being antagonists.”

But Bush “was obsessed with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and deliberately misled the American people about who was responsible for the 9/11 attack ... Consequently, the United States went to war in Iraq on a false pretense that it was somehow avenging those killed by Al-Qaeda.”

In an article published on the Lawfare blog on Sept. 11, 2021, Riedel wrote that after meeting Bush at the White House “Bandar told me privately that the Saudis were very worried about where Bush’s obsession with Iraq was going. The Saudis were alarmed that attacking Iraq would only benefit Iran and set in motion severe destabilizing repercussions across the region.”

It was a prediction that would come to pass, with horrifying consequences that echo down to this day.

This is the story of how the US and its allies falsified or deliberately misrepresented intelligence to justify an invasion that, in hindsight, proved unjustifiable.

It is also the story of the human cost of that invasion, for which the people of Iraq are continuing to pay a heavy price.

As a study of the war published in 2019 by the US Army would conclude, only one winner emerged from the years of civil war and insurgency that followed the US invasion and occupation: Iran.

Iran Reminds West of Its Other Iraq War Crime: Giving Saddam Hussein Chemical Weapons

Sunday will mark the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and "end the tyranny in Iraq," as former President George W. Bush once put it. It's become a largely forgotten fact of history, but Washington was actually an ally to Baghdad during the brutal Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988.

A senior Iranian diplomat has called out Western hypocrisy on human rights by pointing to the thousands of Iranian and Iraqi civilians killed in chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War using weapons provided by the US and its allies.

"The results of arming Saddam’s regime with chemical weapons by Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are as follows: 13,000 deaths and 130,000 injured by chemical weapons in Iran, including 130 killed and 8,000 injured in Sardasht, 5,000 killed and 10,000 injured in Halabja," Iranian Judiciary deputy chief for international affairs Kazem Gharibabadi tweeted, referencing the Iraqi chemical attacks in western Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan in June 1987 and March 1988.

“Attn: human rights advocates: this is also a crime against humanity. Please deal with it,” Gharibabadi added.

The official's comments, which came as a response to a European Parliament resolution demanding a probe into a string of mysterious poisonings (which the parliament linked to "peaceful protests demanding democracy', but which Iranian officials said is tied to a covert "hybrid war against the country") come after months of rising tensions between Tehran and Brussels over EU attempts to interfere in the Middle Eastern nation's affairs. They also come ahead of the 20th anniversary of the March 19, 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Although Washington had a falling out with Saddam Hussein after Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq and the US were close partners during the Iran-Iraq War –the brutal, eight-year conflict that began in 1980 when Hussein, seeking to take advantage of unrest in Iran following the 1979 Revolution, invaded the Islamic Republic to try and seize the oil-rich province of Khuzestan.

The US and its NATO allies began funneling billions of dollars in weapons, dual-use technology, and military technology to Baghdad after a string of defeats reversed Iraq’s fortunes, and a series of Kurdish uprisings in the country’s north threatened the country with collapse. This included the sale of chemical weapon precursors, as well as chemical warfare equipment.

The Iraqi Army began using chemical weapons against Iran on a large scale from late 1983 onward, killing thousands of soldiers and civilians and sickening over 100,000 more in over 350 large-scale gas attacks. After the war, Iraq acknowledged that it had used 1,800 tons of mustard gas, 600 tons of sarin gas, and 140 tons of tabun, a toxic nerve agent.

Iran also had stockpiles of chemical weapons in its arsenal during the war, but never used them, notwithstanding its legal right to do so under international law. The Islamic republic was one of the first countries to destroy its chemical stockpiles, completing their elimination when it ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997.

In 2018, the United States accused Iran of operating a secret chemical weapons program, in breach of its commitments under the CWC. Iran denied the claims and pointed out that the US has one of the largest declared stockpiles of chemical weapons in the world, with the timeline for their destruction pushed back over the decades in spite of Washington's pledge to eliminate them in the early 1990s.

Iraq began to destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles in the 1990s after being required to do so by the United Nations Security Council. By the time the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq rolled around, Saddam Hussein had eliminated the country's chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction programs, forcing the Bush administration to fabricate evidence of Iraqi WMDs as a pretext to justify the invasion.