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iraq invasion
Amid So Much War and Pain, the Arab Nations Must Seize Their Own Destiny
The Arab East must no longer be a playground for non-Arabs to compete for their own ends.
Jan 06, 2025
There’s no two ways about it, the Arab East is a mess. It is weak, divided, directionless, locked in multiple conflicts, and not in control of its own destiny. This isn’t new. It’s been this way for a century, with non-Arab powers preying off the region in pursuit of their own aspirations. This has been playing out in four major periods that define the Arab East’s plight during the last century. While the players dominating Arab history have changed over time, the constant is that Arabs have been the victims of manipulation by others.
One century ago, the Arab East was caught between the colonial designs and greed of the British and French. At stake was control of oil, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal. These colonial powers carved up the region creating states out of whole cloth with imposed forms of governance, planting the seeds of conflict that have born bitter fruit since that time. Palestinians were dispossessed and dispersed to make way for a Western client-state in Israel. The Kurds were cut off from one another under the control of four rival states. The French ushered in a sectarian state in Lebanon with their favored sects in control, while Syria and Iraq had imposed monarchies which ultimately gave way to ideological military coups that masked sectarianism.
During the Cold War, the Arab East became one of many platforms worldwide for competition between the US and the Soviet Union. While the Soviets were the patron of the region’s “revolution movements” and “anti-imperialist” military regimes, the US cultivated its client-state Israel, allies among the monarchies wanting stability, and sectarian groups seeking to preserve their positions of influence.
At the Cold War’s end, and especially after 9/11, the US seriously overplayed its hand with its invasion and occupation of Iraq, ideology-driven advocacy of democratization, and total embrace and empowerment of Israeli ambitions. The result was two-fold: the diminished role of the US, which lost treasure, troops, and prestige while on this fool’s errand to create a client-state in Iraq; and the emboldening of non-Arab regional powers who saw an opportunity to expand their influence over this region.
And so here we are today in the wake of wars in Gaza and Lebanon and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. While the Russians and the US still have their hands in the pot, it’s clear that the region’s newly emergent overseers are now, to different degrees, the non-Arab states of Israel, Iran, and Turkey.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounds megalomaniacal in describing his country’s dominant regional role, while ignoring the reality that Israel is only in its position because of massive supplies of US weapons, back-up military assets, and political support. He claims to be fighting and winning on seven fronts, saving the West from the scourge of Islamic extremism. He is operating without restraint, genocidally transforming much of Gaza into a no-man’s land, with permanent bases as signs of permanent conquest. Israeli forces are doing much the same in Syria and, despite an internationally accepted ceasefire with Lebanon, Israel has already made clear that it will violate the terms of the agreement by retaining a presence in the south of Lebanon.
Iran, undoubtedly weakened by its losses, especially in Lebanon and Syria, may be down, but it’s not out. It retains the support of significant groups in Lebanon and some in Syria, not to mention its deep penetration into Iraq and Yemen.
Iran may have lost its lynchpin, Syria, and with that a weakening of its axis of resistance, but Turkey and its support for the region’s Islamic movements has emerged as the new factor in that country’s and the Arab East’s political equation. The impact of this development on empowering or emboldening ideological Muslim affiliates in neighboring states is not yet clear. Nor do we know how religious or ethnic minority communities will be impacted by or react. But it’s not unreasonable for them to be wary of what some fear are Turkey’s Ottoman Empire-like ambitions.
At the same time, the fate of the two major victims of the British/French machinations, the Palestinians and the Kurds, remain both unresolved and impossible to ignore.
The Kurdish nation was forcibly separated into four portions and incorporated into Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Today’s major flashpoint is between the Kurdish region of Syria, backed by the US, facing resistance by Turkey who sees its independence as threatening their continued control of the Kurdish community in Turkey. It’s a flare-up waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, Israel’s projection of regional power remains challenged by their continuing genocide in Gaza and intensified oppression of Palestinians in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. This situation not only fuels greater Palestinian resistance, but also contributes to Israel’s isolation among Arabs and much of the rest of the world.
Some continue to blame the Arabs of the East for this sorry state of affairs, finding fault with their sectarianism or absence of leadership. This, however, is akin to blaming the victims. The divisions that exist are the result of external manipulation. And in the past, when movements emerged to create broadly-based unity based on a non-sectarian identity, external forces moved to crush or exploit them.
It's high time for the Arabs to take control of their destiny. The Arab East must no longer be a playground for non-Arabs to compete for their own ends. One place to start would be for the Gulf Arab states, the apparent locus of Arab strength these days, to convene a summit and lay out a vision for the future coupled with demands:
- a hands off policy for non-Arab states, with the threat that future relations will depend on adherence to this goal;
- a vision of non-sectarian Arab unity within each of the Mashreq’s states;
- an end to Israeli occupation, expansionism, and aggression against multiple Arab states;
- full self-determination for the Palestinian people and an end of the regional countries’ denial of the rights of the Kurdish people; and
- the creation of working groups to study the steps necessary to make these goals possible.
Some may dismiss this as a pipe dream. It won’t happen overnight because much accrued damage must be undone. But if a new vision isn’t developed, backed up by steps to translate it into reality, the region will continue to hobble along crippled by division and external manipulation.
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Rebuilding the Iraqi Economy 20 Years After US Invasion
Twenty years after the start of the military operation that led to the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraq is still trying to reclaim its status as a major regional economic player.
Nov 07, 2023
Research from Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates the cost of the Iraq war at approximately $2.9 trillion. Although it is harder to estimate the cost to the Iraqi economy—the approximately 300,000 dead civilians and combatants and 3 million internally displaced refugees was a trauma that is difficult to recover from—it is easy to see how much it has been set back by the conflict.
It seems a long time ago now, but back in the 1980s, Iraq was seen as one of the most advanced Arab economies, with some of the best infrastructure and the highest per capita income in the region. With the country so sorely dependent on oil revenues, which still represent around 87% of the government’s budget, the 1980s oil crash hit the Iraqi economy hard; the Iran-Iraq war also cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, and the international sanctions that followed Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait sounded the death knell for this period of relative prosperity.
Then, following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the economy contracted by up to 50% by some measures, due notably to the widely criticized destruction of the Iraqi state apparatus; as flawed and morally bankrupt as it may have been, the Baathist regime provided a measure of stability that no longer existed after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the chaos of internecine fighting that followed enabled the rise of the Islamic state.
Massive Resources for a Slow Reconstruction
The U.S. invested significantly in the country in the following years, but much of that was in security—with a need to replace the disbanded Baathist security forces—and the rest of the spending in infrastructure was highly inefficient due to corruption and a fractured social order. As a result of all this, per-capita GDP is roughly the same now as it was in 2003. A once-leading regional power had become a basket case.
Given the hardship that the Iraqi population has undergone over the last few decades, one can only be relieved that the authorities are making efforts to modernize the economy, but the road to economic recovery is long and littered with potholes.
Although it is true that Iraq seems finally to be on the mend, its economy remains extremely fragile and largely dependent on oil revenues. Indeed, a recent IMF mission concluded that a drop in oil prices could severely jeopardize the country’s macroeconomic stability and capacity to implement the reforms it needs. As such, it is concerning that OPEC is forcing Iraq to cut its oil production in 2023, which will amputate oil revenue.
The IMF estimates that growth was stagnant in 2022, although real GDP is expected to expand by 3.7% in 2023, but as Moody’s Investors Service said in its latest report on Iraq’s credit fundamentals, “Iraq is heavily exposed to significant carbon transition risks because of its economic, fiscal and external reliance on the hydrocarbon sector.”
The problem is that Iraq also still requires major investment. The new 3-year budget voted this spring allows for some of this; it was certainly crucial to allow the government to continue operating following several years of gridlock with the parliament unable to agree on a budget, and according to Prime Minister Mohammed Al Sudani the budget will enable the government “to start the implementation of the infrastructure projects and turn Iraq into one of the biggest workshops in the region.”
Al Sudani also believes that the budget “prioritizes the essential needs of Iraqi citizens and families, aiming to meet their expectations for government services, construction and infrastructure projects.” But critics disagree: “there is no real investment spending in the budget,” says Sajad Jiyad, an analyst and fellow at the Century Foundation, “it just focuses on expanding what was in previous budgets and leaves very little—a few billion—on investment.”
At any rate, as IMF mission chief Tokhir Mirzoev says, Iraq’s structural imbalances mean that even the government spending that is in the budget, such as it is, “could reignite inflation and foreign exchange market volatility.” Inflation is a chronic issue for Iraq, not helped by the fact that the country has a massive trade deficit: “Iraqi society buys everything from abroad, from agricultural materials to food and medicines, and industrial goods,” said Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein in a recent interview with VOA’s Kurdish Service. “If you look at Iraq's trade or its trade balance with other countries, you will see that everything comes from abroad,” he added.
This is one of the subjects that Hussein discussed on his recent visit to Washington. Since the dinar collapsed after the 2003 invasion, many Iraqis chose to use the dollar for their everyday purchases, but the Iraqi Interior Ministry has banned trade in U.S. dollars to prevent runaway inflation. The recent sharp decline of the Iraqi dinar against the dollar is further causing foreign exchange volatility which, according to the IMF, has “adversely affected import-dependent non-oil sectors.” One of the ways that the Iraqi government is trying to fight this is a system for monitoring American dollars that enter the Iraqi economy and tracking when they leave the country, which has the added benefit of preventing the financing of terrorism.
The Central Bank of Iraq in Action
The Central Bank of Iraq’s (CBI) actions seem to be bearing fruit in this respect, with the foreign exchange market stabilizing, helped by the growth of real non-oil GDP, which is expected to reach 3.7% in 2023. Inflation, which peaked at 7% in January 2023, has begun to fall and is forecast to average 5.6% this year.
Meanwhile, in May 2023, the Governor of the CBI, Ali Mohsen al-Allaq, unveiled a new state-owned financial institution, the Social Development Bank (SDB), which aims to promote inclusive economic progress in Iraq. The SDB will "diversify the non-oil economy by fostering small and micro-scale projects, thereby stimulating the private sector and reducing unemployment and poverty rates," said al-Alaq. "The bank will be the first in Iraq to cater to low-income individuals, offering facilitated loans and simple guarantees to support vulnerable groups," he added. The CBI also plans to open a Centre for Finance and Business, which according to al-Alaq, “will host the securities market, the business sector, and financial institutions."
The CBI has also signed an agreement with British banknote manufacturer De La Rue for the production of polymer notes. This decision seems somewhat at odds with the other recent positive initiatives by the Iraqi government to modernize their economy. Indeed, polymer banknotes are far from having proved themselves as a prudent fiduciary choice, and certain countries which had previously rolled out polymer banknotes because they were thought to be more robust, have backtracked because the notes started to show signs of wear and tear much more rapidly than originally thought. With a shorter-than-expected lifespan, it becomes harder to amortize the extra initial cost of polymer banknotes and the anticipated savings are not forthcoming.
Many of the central banks around the world who have made the transition to polymer banknotes also cite their greater security, but again, polymer banknotes add little in this respect; modern printing techniques mean that paper banknotes, like the Euro notes, which are made of cotton fiber, boast numerous cutting-edge security features like raised ink, security threads, and holograms. In fact, because some of these security features are woven into the actual fabric of the paper, modern paper banknotes may even be harder to counterfeit than polymer banknotes, on which security features are simply added to the substrate. It is easier for counterfeiters to obtain polymer material and try to imitate the security features that are printed on the surface of banknotes than to accurately reproduce the embedded threads, for example, that are used in banknotes like the new Euro series. According to the European Central Bank, the number of counterfeit Euro banknotes withdrawn from circulation reached a record low in 2021, and indeed, one of the largest counterfeiting operations shut down in recent memory was for polymer banknotes in Romania. Likewise, it is worth noting that the U.S. dollar—the world's principal reserve currency and the most widely used currency in the world—is still printed on paper. The U.S. dollar is subject to a high degree of regulation and oversight, so if the Federal Reserve is not considering switching to polymer banknotes, the consensus must be that paper provides strong enough protection against counterfeiting.
Given the hardship that the Iraqi population has undergone over the last few decades, one can only be relieved that the authorities are making efforts to modernize the economy, but the road to economic recovery is long and littered with potholes; to maintain credibility in Iraq’s fiscal policy, the government should continue to focus on more productive measures, rather than falling prey to fads that do nothing to promote actual economic stability.
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Twenty Years After George W. Bush's Infamous 'Mission Accomplished' Claim
The disgraced former president's rhetorical victory lap that came before protracted bloodshed deserves all of its notoriety 20 years later.
May 01, 2023
Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush landed in a twin-engine Navy jet on an aircraft carrier, strode across the deck in a bulky flight suit and proceeded to give a televised victory speech under a huge red-white-and-blue banner announcing “Mission Accomplished.” For Bush, the optics on May 1, 2003 could hardly have been more triumphant. From the USS Abraham Lincoln, he delivered a stirring coda, proclaiming that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” just six weeks after the United States led the invasion of that country.
But Bush’s jubilant claim unraveled as combat escalated between Iraqi insurgents and occupying forces. During the next nine years, the official death toll among U.S. troops went from under 200 to more than 4,400, while the deaths of Iraqi people surged into the hundreds of thousands. The physical wounds were even more numerous, the emotional injuries incalculable.
The “Mission Accomplished” banner and Bush’s speech going with it have become notorious. But focusing only on his faulty claim that the war was over ignores other key untruths in the oratory.
“We have fought for the cause of liberty,” Bush declared. He did not mention the cause of oil.
By dodging inconvenient truths about the impacts of U.S. warfare on “the innocent,” Bush was reasserting the usual pretenses of presidents who elide the actual human toll of their wars while predicting successful outcomes.
A few months before the invasion, a soft-spoken Iraqi man who was my driver in Baghdad waited until we were alone at a picnic table in a park before saying that he wished Iraq had no oil—because then there would be no reason to fear an invasion. Years later, some U.S. authorities were candid about Iraq’s massive oil reserves as an incentive for the war.
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his 2007 memoir. That same year, a former head of the U.S. Central Command in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, had this to say: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” And Sen. Chuck Hagel, who later became Defense Secretary, commented: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
While touting the war effort as entirely noble, Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech credited the Pentagon’s “new tactics and precision weapons” for avoiding “violence against civilians.” The president added that “it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.”
Such soothing words masked brutal realities. Civilian deaths accounted for 40 percent of “people killed directly in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11 wars,” according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. In fact, a large majority of the casualties of those wars have been civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars—because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”
By dodging inconvenient truths about the impacts of U.S. warfare on “the innocent,” Bush was reasserting the usual pretenses of presidents who elide the actual human toll of their wars while predicting successful outcomes.
On May 1, 2012, exactly nine years after Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier, President Barack Obama spoke to the American people from Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. With U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan near a peak of 100,000, Obama expressed confidence that “we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan.”
Both Bush and Obama would later be widely faulted for voicing undue optimism about fulfilling a war’s “mission.” But the critiques have rarely devoted much attention to scrutinizing the assumptions that propelled support for the missions.
The U.S. government’s inherent prerogative to intervene militarily in other countries has seldom been directly challenged in America’s mainstream media and official discourse. Instead, debates have routinely revolved around whether, where, when, and how intervention is prudent and likely to prevail.
But we might want to ask ourselves: What if Bush had been correct in May 2003—and U.S. forces really were at the end of major combat operations in Iraq? What if Obama had been correct in May 2012—and U.S. forces were able to “complete our mission” in Afghanistan? In each case, conventional wisdom would have gauged success in terms of military victory rather than such matters as adherence to international law or regard for human life.
Today, it's a wonder to behold the fully justified denunciations of Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine from some of the same U.S. government leaders who avidly supported the horrific invasion of Iraq. The concept that might makes right doesn’t sound good, but in practice it has repeatedly been the basis of U.S. policy. Wayne Morse, the senator from Oregon who opposed the Vietnam War from the outset, was cogent when he said: “I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right.”
George W. Bush’s performance with the “Mission Accomplished” banner—a rhetorical victory lap that came before protracted bloodshed—deserves all of its notoriety 20 years later. His claims of success for the Iraq war mission are now easy grounds for derision. But the more difficult truths to plow through have to do with why the mission should never have been attempted in the first place.
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Russian War Crimes in Ukraine 20 Years After US Criminal Invasion of Iraq
How can there be real accountability for war crimes when international law is replaced by an undefined "rules-based order"?
Mar 23, 2023
This week marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The war left at least 800,000 to 1.1 million Iraqis dead, and certainly many more injured, maimed, and permanently displaced.
The invasion and subsequent military occupation destroyed Iraq's once-modern infrastructure and much of its environment while shredding the country's social fabric. The war gave rise to religious and ethnic divides, created unfathomable levels of corruption, left a legacy of sectarian militias and terrorist organizations including ISIS. War crimes by the U.S. military and private contractors, even beyond the initial crime of aggression, exploded from Abu Ghraib to Fallujah to Nisour Square and beyond.
This week the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced its war crimes indictment of the president of the country whose troops had invaded and occupied another country, and committed horrific war crimes. While we continue to call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, we know that justice for war crimes—in all wars—remains an urgent necessity. The indictment of President Vladimir Putin is appropriate as the invasion of Ukraine was illegal and Russia's ongoing assault and occupation of Ukrainian territory is a clear violation of international humanitarian law. U.S. war criminals are missing from the same dock.
Accountability doesn't happen on its own, it must be fought for—in all cases, including that of the United States.
So it is also true that the president, as well as the vice-president, the secretary of defense (now dead), and many more high-ranking officials of the United States should have been—and still should be—indicted for war crimes. The invasion of Iraq was, like Ukraine, illegal. The U.S. occupation was a violation of international humanitarian law. And U.S. troops committed horrific and well-documented war crimes.
Moscow's clearly illegal Ukraine war is condemned by the United States primarily as a violation of Washington's self-defined "rules-based order." Accountability is demanded, and the United States even grants the ICC, albeit grudgingly, some level of legitimacy to impose accountability on Putin and other Russian officials. We have witnessed the possibility of Putin being held to account by the Court greeted with cheers in Washington and in the media across the United States.
President Biden and other officials are among those cheering Putin's indictment, despite the longstanding U.S. refusal to provide intelligence or other assistance to the ICC regarding war crimes in Ukraine or elsewhere. Indeed they recognize supporting the ICC would set a precedent for ICC jurisdiction over U.S. troops and political leaders responsible for Iraq and other war crimes in so many places in the world—an accountability long rejected in Washington.
War Crime Charges for Them, But Never for Us
It's not new for Washington to claim to support the ICC in principle even while refusing to actually recognize its jurisdiction. The United States was among the seven outlier countries—joining Israel, China, Iraq, Libya, Qatar and Yemen—that voted against the Rome Treaty which established the International Criminal Court in 1998.
Russia signed the Treaty in 2000, but withdrew its signature in 2016, two years after its intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Washington, finally, also signed on in 2000 but never ratified the Treaty, and withdrew its signature even before Russia did. In 2002 then-President George W. Bush, already mobilizing for his illegal war in Iraq, instructed his UN ambassador John Bolton to "unsign" the treaty. Three years later Bush signed what became known as the "Invade The Hague" Act, authorizing the U.S. military to use whatever force necessary to free any U.S. citizen ever arrested by the International Criminal Court.
The indictment of President Vladimir Putin is appropriate as the invasion of Ukraine was illegal and Russia's ongoing assault and occupation of Ukrainian territory is a clear violation of international humanitarian law. U.S. war criminals are missing from the same dock.
This kind of victor's justice—a longstanding component of American exceptionalism—is an old story in U.S. politics and historiography since World War II. But it has become less hidden and more explicit in the last two decades as the Global War on Terror reshaped so much of the world. In even more recent years, the elusive "rules-based order" has replaced international law as the basis (albeit aspirational, if nothing else) of global legitimacy for Washington. And some of that shift goes back to the war in Iraq.
What waging an illegal war necessitates
In 2002 and early 2003, as the United States and its British backers prepared to invade Iraq based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, imaginary links between al Qaeda and Iraq's government, claims of bringing "democracy" to Iraq and more, they pushed for a UN Security Council resolution that would explicitly authorize their war. Earlier resolutions threatening Iraq were not passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, a prerequisite for legalizing an act of war. At the time, 11 of the 15 UNSC members refused to pass a second resolution. Without Council authority, the U.S. and UK launched their war in clear violation of international law. The UN's then-Secretary General Kofi Annan would eventually acknowledge that the war was illegal.
But that finding was based on actual international law—the treaties, conventions, and covenants that were written, agreed to, signed, and ratified by governments committed to upholding their terms. Those included the UN Charter, the Geneva and Hague Conventions, prohibitions on producing or using specific kinds of weapons (now finally including nuclear weapons), and much more. The U.S. war in Iraq was illegal because the invasion violated Articles 39 and 51 of the UN Charter; the use of white phosphorous as a weapon violated the Chemical Weapons Convention; the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and a host of other military actions all violated many of the Geneva Conventions; and more. When U.S. officials and pundits accuse other governments of rejecting the never-defined, never written-down, never agreed-to "rules-based order," there is no identifiable law or rule being referenced, it is simply a statement that the U.S. doesn't like the way another government operates.
The "rules-based order" of the 21st century is the order defined and imposed by the United States and its closest allies.
Washington's clearly illegal Iraq war didn't violate some amorphous "rules-based order." It violated long-established and specific principles of international law. The war's violations of actual international law were widely known and discussed but largely ignored by officials and mainstream media, and U.S. accountability for war crimes has never been on the table. No U.S. officials have been held accountable for their crimes, no U.S. reparations for the massive destruction the war wrought on Iraq and Iraqis have been offered, and no apologies have been made.
The "rules-based order" of the 21st century is the order defined and imposed by the United States and its closest allies.
The comparison here is not a case of "what-about-ism" aimed at protecting Russia. There is little doubt that Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine and there should be accountability for those crimes. It is also undoubtedly true that authoritarian and aggressive leaders around the world have relied on the impunity enjoyed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others responsible for U.S. war crimes in Iraq, as a green light for their own crimes. If U.S. war criminals had been held to serious account, it is likely that some of the other militaristic authoritarians around the world, perhaps including Vladimir Putin, might have held back from some of their illegal actions.
Right now most countries around the world, including those critical of U.S./NATO provocations of Russia over the last decades, are critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Most European and other U.S. allies, some for their own reasons, others under U.S. pressure, toe the U.S./NATO line. But many other governments, while appropriately refusing to support Washington's sanctions and dangerous escalation of this terrible war, are reluctant even to denounce the Russian invasion, because they resent U.S. hypocrisy and double standards. Accountability doesn't happen on its own, it must be fought for—in all cases, including that of the United States.
The refusal of sequential U.S. governments to hold their predecessors accountable for war crimes in Iraq, indeed their continuation of many of those criminal actions, has had serious consequences for Iraq and for the world. The best way to help the people of Ukraine and the people of Iraq is to hold the United States accountable for its crimes too.
This piece was co-published with Foreign Policy In Focus.
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War Is the Ultimate Failure
War is immoral, illegal, and just downright impractical. War doesn't work.
Mar 20, 2023
On Saturday, March 18, 2023—marking the 20th anniversary of the U.S. war on Iraq—22 demonstrations against U.S. warmaking were held across the nation, including Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, hundreds gathered to protest outside the CNN building in Hollywood. What follows are the remarks made by longtime peace activist and author, Rev. John Dear:
Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: we are sick and tired of your endless wars, your military spending, your nuclear weapons, your global domination, your violence, your imperialism and fascism and corporate greed and permanent warfare. We remember the U.S. war on Iraq, and how we killed millions of sisters and brothers there for a great lie, to steal their oil and sell weapons and help the one percent get richer. We remember the U.S. war on Afghanistan, and how we killed and injured countless innocent civilians for a great lie so we could get their oil and sow chaos in the world and sell weapons. With thousands of people in over twenty demonstrations across the nation we say today, enough is enough! No more endless wars!
Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: stop building nuclear weapons, stop spending billions and billions to upgrade our nuclear weapons, stop bankrupting our country by spending for war and nuclear war preparations. Use that trillion dollars instead on food and water for the hungry and thirsty, schools, jobs, housing and healthcare for the poor and everyone. Stop preparing for and threatening nuclear warfare on our sisters and brothers around the world, stop risking nuclear winter! Resume all treaties for nuclear disarmament, sign the UN Ban treaty, ands join the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons so that we can welcome a new future without nuclear weapons!
Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the United States: stop the economic warfare of sanctions against 40 nations in the world, including Syria after the horrific recent earthquake. Close our 730 military bases in over a hundred countries around the world. Stop escalating the Russian war on Ukraine. We demand negotiations not escalation! We want an immediate ceasefire, not permanent warfare! The way forward is diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, not giving billions for another long war. Dismantle NATO, that relic of the Cold War and create new nonviolent institutions for global nonviolent conflict resolution. Stop selling weapons to all sides in all wars. Stop funding the Israeli occupation and killing of the Palestinians. Stop all hostilities and preparations for global war with China. And in the name of the Creator, stop the war on Mother Earth!
Today, in the name of the God of peace, we say to the people of the United States: war is the ultimate failure. War is immoral, illegal, and just downright impractical. War doesn’t work. War never leads to peace. War always sows the seeds for future wars. War is demonic, evil, anti-life, anti-creation, anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-democracy, and anti-humanity. War is the definition of mortal sin. Peaceful means are the only way to a peaceful future and the God of peace. So like the Abolitionists of old who announced the abolition of slavery and the vision of a new world of equality, we announce the abolition of war itself, and poverty, racism, corporate greed, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and the coming of a new nonviolent world of peace with justice for all people and creation.
Dear friends, today, in the name of the God of peace, we say with all the great peacemakers of history from Jesus of Nazareth to Saint Francis, from Dorothy Day and Rosa Parks to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.: we choose the way of peace and nonviolence! Today we pledge to be nonviolent to ourselves, nonviolent to all people, nonviolent to all creatures and Mother Earth, and to work for a new culture of nonviolence, to build up a new global grassroots, people power movement of active nonviolence for justice, disarmament and creation the likes of which the world has never seen, to abolish war and welcome God’s reign of peace and nonviolence here on earth.
Let’s keep on speaking out for peace, marching for peace, taking a stand for peace, taking action for peace, working for peace, asking the God of peace for the gift of peace, and being the peace we seek for the world. God bless you!Keep ReadingShow Less
It Is Time for a National Reckoning About the Iraq War
Twenty years ago, the U.S. destroyed Iraq with an invasion that also constituted an attack on the very concept of the international rule of law.
Mar 20, 2023
The attack against Iraq by the United States and its coalition in 2003 was a blatant and reprehensible act of aggression for which there has yet to be any meaningful accountability. At least hundreds of thousands and possibly more than one million Iraqis lost their lives through this illegal undertaking. Millions more were displaced. The self-determination of the people of Iraq and their ability to choose their own destiny and place in the world was irreparably shattered.
Numerous cultural and political elites in the United States gleefully supported the war as a courageous or even joyous act. It was the opposite. The Iraq War constituted an attack on the very concept of the international rule of law. In addition to the injuries inflicted upon Iraqis, two decades have now passed since the invasion without any examination of how U.S. conduct has contributed to current international anarchy and aggravated great power violence and confrontation.
There has never been a reckoning for the Iraq War
The planners and executors of the Iraq War have never faced a formal judicial reckoning. The Iraq Inquiry undertaken by the United Kingdom, which released a report in 2016 (the “Chilcot Report”) did not opine on the lawfulness of the war. Nevertheless, several submissions made to the Iraq Inquiry by international lawyers underscored the illegality of the invasion. Professor Nicholas Grief and others from Kent Law School concluded that without a second Security Council resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq, "the invasion of Iraq constituted an act of aggression, contrary to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter."
A formal process of national atonement should be initiated in the United States in order to create cultural reflection, political change, and judicial accountability for the heinous crimes committed against Iraq and the Iraqi people.
Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who was Deputy Legal Adviser to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and who resigned immediately prior to the invasion, told the Iraq Inquiry that, "I regarded the invasion of Iraq as illegal, and I therefore did not feel able to continue in my post . . . Acting contrary to the Charter, as I perceived the Government to be doing, would have the consequence of damaging the United Kingdom's reputation as a State committed to the rule of law in international relations and to the United Nations." These opinions affirm the conclusion that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself reached in 2004 when he stated unequivocally: "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal."
At the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Robert Jackson, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice who was named Chief Prosecutor against defeated Nazi leaders, promised the world that, "To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well." He argued, "The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched."
The Nuremberg Tribunal agreed with Jackson. In convicting high-ranking Nazi leaders for their grave international crimes, the Tribunal held, "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent States alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
The United States must engage in a process of national atonement
A formal process of national atonement should be initiated in the United States in order to create cultural reflection, political change, and judicial accountability for the heinous crimes committed against Iraq and the Iraqi people. Such a process of national atonement should, among other things and at the very minimum, ensure that:
- U.S. international relations are conducted in conformity with international law, including the principles of equal rights and self-determination for all peoples and the general prohibition of aggression;
- U.S. leaders are themselves held accountable by a U.S. court or other neutral legal tribunal for grave international legal violations, including the crime of torture and the crime of aggression; and
- Reparations are made to Iraq consistent with principles of international State responsibility for the aggression against Iraq.
This process of national atonement should further prompt the United States to work for a genuine international legal order in which all countries cooperate to maintain a just peace and the international rule of law.
This is now an urgent and possible existential matter given the planetary threats at hand, including imminent climate collapse, the sixth mass extinction taking place, and the threat of great power violence between nuclear-armed States.Keep ReadingShow Less
The Illegal Invasion of Iraq: Never Forget
None of us can afford to remain silent or apathetic about the devastation we continue to cause to innocent civilians. The money being spent on war must be redirected to those most impacted by U.S. aggression.
Mar 18, 2023
How did we get here? 20 years after the U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, we still refuse to reckon with the last decades of war as yet another decade of violence unfolds. Since the invasion, tens of thousands if not over a million lives have been lost. Millions of Iraqis are still displaced, while tens of millions have endured relentless violence ever since the destabilization of their country beginning in the 1990s through bombing, sanctions, multiple military invasions, and the occupation that began in 2003.
We share these reflections as two antimilitarist organizers in the U.S. who met years after the invasion through our shared work with About Face Veterans Against War (formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War). Twenty years ago this weekend, one of us was deployed as a communications technician and heard nothing about the massive protests the other participated in. One of us was organizing with Direct Action to Stop the War, coordinating twenty thousand people to shut down San Francisco's financial district, in an attempt to raise the financial and social cost of invasion that was being steamrolled through despite the largest global street protests in the history of the world.
We know the war on Iraq—like the war on Afghanistan—was a calculated grift for money and power. We can't allow the truth to be manipulated or forgotten. George W. Bush is being reanimated as a folksy painter instead of brought to account for his administration's war crimes. His creation of the so-called "Endless Wars" after 9/11 has so far cost incalculable damage to peoples' lives and over $14 trillion in Pentagon spending. Up to half of that massive amount has piped directly into the pockets of private military contractors.
Those who seek profit from wars rely on our consent, our confusion about what's really happening, and our willingness to submit to historical amnesia. The only voices allowed to speak on large platforms about this 20-year milestone are the ones attempting to rewrite history in favor of the architects and beneficiaries of war. A former speechwriter for Bush wants you to buy that the U.S. "went to war to build a democracy in Iraq," but listen instead to Iraqis like Riverbend (the pen name of a young Baghdadi woman writing during the early years of the occupation) who told us the truth at the time:
"You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq's first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile."
Even now in Iraq, everyday people still struggle daily for the bare minimum. As the nonpartisan Iraqi diaspora group Collective Action for Iraq recently described, "People have continued taking to the streets across Iraq to protest corruption, for basic services and to live their lives in dignity—from Kurdistan, to Najaf, and Dhi Qar. State and local security forces continue to respond with violence and the suppression of dissident voices." These are only a few effects of the cascade of violence triggered by the U.S. occupation.
The silence here about the devastation caused by U.S. wars abroad is by design. Obama came to office on a platform of "change" nodding strongly towards the populist antiwar sentiment of the late 2000s, and yet here we are, still prioritizing war. Under this ongoing "Global War on Terror" framework—under Bush and Obama and Trump and now Biden—the lead-up to each consecutive war utilizes tailored rhetoric but the patterns remain the same, even while weapons evolve. Now the contractors are the same corporations providing the software we use every day. Google and Microsoft work alongside Raytheon and Northrop Grumman to produce and operate weapons of mass destruction. The war machine is becoming more secretive, more connected, and more ubiquitous. None of us can afford to remain silent or apathetic about the devastation we continue to cause to innocent civilians. The money being spent on war must be redirected to those most impacted by U.S. aggression.
Instead of reparations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has stolen billions from the Afghan Central Bank; drained Iraq of people, its resources, and undermined civil society creating regional instability. If we allow ourselves to be lied to yet again about these wars, we are more easily manipulated to go along with the next iteration of the U.S. war. Obama's so-called "Pacific Pivot" initiated a shift back to China, yet again, as the leading rationale for continued military buildup. The fear-mongering is the same, yet the tactics of war-making are being implemented with evermore secrecy by intelligence officials and contractors preventing public discourse and effective oversight.
Our misleadingly named "defense" spending, the money earmarked for expanding U.S. control overseas, has doubled since the invasion of Iraq. Nothing stops the growth of war profiteering: not exposures of war crimes, not the inarguable destabilization of multiple countries with increased violence and displacement, not the epidemics of veteran suicide and war trauma coming home, not the avoidance of auditing or accountability for the use of such funds. Last Monday, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters that a $1 trillion defense budget is coming soon.
What will the world look like 20 years from today? If this country cannot relinquish its death grip on empire-building, we will have only continued to impoverish and incarcerate our own population while spreading unimaginable destruction abroad. The U.S. military is also the biggest polluter on the planet; in order to address the dangers of climate change, we must shrink this footprint immediately.
If we want a brighter future, we can and must divest from wars abroad and the increased domestic militarization that both pose serious threats to democracy. We can move that money from the Pentagon, police, and prisons to invest instead in community needs and real safety. We can pursue diplomacy, nonviolent interventions, and repair. This country is rich in leadership—especially in Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led grassroots community organizing. There are those working toward taking better care of each other amid conditions created by an overextended empire that deprioritizes human needs. Let's move towards collective healing instead of continually funneling money into the bloody pockets of CEOs of weapons makers and major corporations that profit off death and destruction. Let's return resources, including money and sovereignty, to the people most impacted by these wars.
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The Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with those around the world calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war while we also help build a genuine rules-based international order.
Mar 15, 2023
March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.
While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its "coalition of the willing" to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.
Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.
The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.
The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. "full spectrum dominance" to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as "a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept."
Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.
And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons' "regime-change" strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.
Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons' takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.
PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
Nuland's nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee's support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons' war plan.
It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden's administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden's campaign promise to "elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement." Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.
What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.
At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world's population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.
In a panel discussion on "Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order" at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists—from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to "build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war." Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, "We don't want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything."
Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: "Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame," she said. "We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities."
So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to "rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South" is to "debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard."
But the double standard between the West's responses to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.
The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia's crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.
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The Urbanity of Evil: 20 Years After the US Invasion of Iraq
Mar 14, 2023
Vast quantities of lies from top U.S. government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives. Don't expect them to shed light on the most difficult truths, including their own complicity in pushing for war.
What propelled the United States to start the war on Iraq in March 2003 were dynamics of media and politics that are still very much with us today.
Soon after 9/11, one of the rhetorical whips brandished by President George W. Bush was an unequivocal assertion while speaking to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001: "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Thrown down, that gauntlet received adulation and scant criticism in the United States. Mainstream media and members of Congress were almost all enthralled with a Manichean worldview that has evolved and persisted.
Our current era is filled with echoes of such oratory from the current president. A few months before fist-bumping Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman—who's been in charge of a tyrannical regime making war on Yemen, causing several hundred thousand deaths since 2015 with U.S. government help—Joe Biden mounted a pulpit of supreme virtue during his 2022 State of the Union address.
Biden proclaimed "an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny." And he added that "in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment." Of course, there was no mention of his support for Saudi autocracy and war.
In that State of the Union speech, Biden devoted much emphasis to condemning Russia's war on Ukraine, as he has many times since. Biden's presidential hypocrisies do not in any way justify the horrors that Russian forces are inflicting in Ukraine. Nor does that war justify the deadly hypocrisies that pervade U.S. foreign policy.
This week, don't hold your breath for media retrospectives about the Iraq invasion to include basic facts about the key roles of Biden and the man who is now secretary of state, Antony Blinken. When they each denounce Russia while solemnly insisting that it is absolutely unacceptable for one country to invade another, the Orwellian efforts are brazen and shameless.
Last month, speaking to the UN Security Council, Blinken invoked "the principles and rules that make all countries safer and more secure"—such as "no seizing land by force" and "no wars of aggression." But Biden and Blinken were crucial accessories to the massive war of aggression that was the invasion of Iraq. On the very rare occasions when Biden has been put on the spot for how he helped make the invasion politically possible, his response has been to dissemble and tell outright lies.
"Biden has a long history of inaccurate claims" regarding Iraq, scholar Stephen Zunes pointed out four years ago. "For example, in the lead-up to the critical Senate vote authorizing the invasion, Biden used his role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to insist that Iraq somehow reconstituted a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear weapons program and sophisticated delivery systems that had long since been eliminated." The false claim of supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was the main pretext for the invasion.
That falsehood was challenged in real time, many months before the invasion, by numerous experts. But then-Senator Biden, wielding the gavel of the Foreign Relations Committee, excluded them all from two days of high-impact sham hearings in mid-summer 2002.
And who was the chief of staff of the committee at that time? The current secretary of state, Antony Blinken.
We're apt to put Biden and Blinken in a completely different category than someone like Tariq Aziz, who was Iraq's deputy prime minister under despot Saddam Hussein. But, thinking back to the three meetings with Aziz that I attended in Baghdad during the months before the invasion, I have some doubts.
Aziz wore nicely tailored business suits. Speaking excellent English in measured tones and well-crafted sentences, he had an erudite air with no lack of politesse as he greeted our four-member delegation (which I had organized with colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy). Our group included Congressman Nick Rahall of West Virginia, former South Dakota senator James Abourezk and Conscience International president James Jennings. As it turned out, the meeting occurred six months before the invasion.
At the time of that meeting in mid-September 2002, Aziz was able to concisely sum up a reality that few U.S. media outlets were acknowledging. "It's doomed if you do, doomed if you don't," Aziz said, referring to the Iraqi government's choice of whether to let UN weapons inspectors back into the country.
After meetings with Aziz and other Iraqi officials, I told the Washington Post: "If it was strictly a matter of the inspections and they felt there was a light at the end of the tunnel, this would be a totally fixable problem." But it was far from being strictly a matter of the inspections. The Bush administration was determined to make war on Iraq.
A couple of days after the Aziz meeting, Iraq's regime—which was accurately stating that it had no weapons of mass destruction—announced that it would allow UN inspectors back into the country. (They had been withdrawn four years earlier for their safety on the eve of an anticipated U.S. bombing attack that took place for four days.) But compliance with the United Nations was to no avail. The U.S. government leaders wanted to launch an invasion of Iraq, no matter what.
During two later meetings with Aziz, in December 2002 and January 2003, I was repeatedly struck by his capacity to seem cultured and refined. While the main spokesperson for a vicious dictator, he exuded sophistication. I thought of the words "the urbanity of evil."
A well-informed source told me that Saddam Hussein maintained some kind of leverage over Aziz by keeping his son in jeopardy of imprisonment or worse, lest Aziz become a defector. Whether or not that was the case, Deputy Prime Minister Aziz remained loyal to the end. As someone in Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game says, "The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons."
Tariq Aziz had good reasons to fear for his life—and the lives of loved ones—if he ran afoul of Saddam. In contrast, many politicians and officials in Washington have gone along with murderous policies when dissenting might cost them only re-election, prestige, money or power.
I last saw Aziz in January 2003, while accompanying a former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq to meet with him. Talking to the two of us in his Baghdad office, Aziz seemed to know an invasion was virtually certain. It began two months later. The Pentagon was pleased to brand its horrific air attacks on the city "shock and awe."
On July 1, 2004, appearing before an Iraqi judge in a courtroom located on a U.S. military base near Baghdad airport, Aziz said: "What I want to know is, are these charges personal? Is it Tariq Aziz carrying out these killings? If I am a member of a government that makes the mistake of killing someone, then there can't justifiably be an accusation against me personally. Where there is a crime committed by the leadership, the moral responsibility rests there, and there shouldn't be a personal case just because somebody belongs to the leadership." And, Aziz went on to say, "I never killed anybody, by the acts of my own hand."
The invasion that Joe Biden helped to inflict on Iraq resulted in a war that directly killed several hundred thousand civilians. If he were ever really called to account for his role, Biden's words might resemble those of Tariq Aziz.
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Blood Does Not Wash Away Blood
Why we owe future generations our renunciation of all war and our continued vigilance to save this planet from further grief and destruction.
Mar 14, 2023
The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”
This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20th, 2023, that he believes Russia's war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more casualties.
"So when there's an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved ... seize the moment," Milley told the Economic Club of New York.
Twenty years ago, in Baghdad, I shared quarters with Iraqis and internationals in a small hotel, the Al-Fanar, which had been home base for numerous Voices in the Wilderness delegations acting in open defiance of the economic sanctions against Iraq. U.S. government officials charged us as criminals for delivering medicines to Iraqi hospitals. In response, we told them we understood the penalties they threatened us with (twelve years in prison and a $1 million fine), but we couldn’t be governed by unjust laws primarily punishing children. And we invited government officials to join us. Instead, we were steadily joined by other peace groups longing to prevent a looming war.
In late January 2003, I still hoped war could be averted. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report was imminent. If it declared that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), U.S. allies might drop out of the attack plans, in spite of the massive military buildup we were witnessing on nightly television. Then came Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, United Nations briefing, when he insisted that Iraq did indeed possess WMD. His presentation was eventually proven to be fraudulent on every count, but it tragically gave the United States enough credibility to proceed at full throttle with its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign.
Beginning in mid-March 2003, the ghastly aerial attacks pounded Iraq day and night. In our hotel, parents and grandparents prayed to survive ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds. A lively, engaging nine-year-old girl completely lost control over her bladder. Toddlers devised games to mimic the sounds of bombs and pretended to use small flashlights as guns.
Our team visited hospital wards where maimed children moaned as they recovered from surgeries. I remember sitting on a bench outside of an emergency room. Next to me, a woman convulsed in sobs asking, “How will I tell him? What will I say?” She needed to tell her nephew, who was undergoing emergency surgery, that he had not only lost both his arms but also that she was now his only surviving relative. A U.S. bomb had hit Ali Abbas’s family as they shared a lunch outside their home. A surgeon later reported that he had already told Ali that they had amputated both of his arms. “But,” Ali had asked him, “will I always be this way?”
I returned to the Al-Fanar Hotel that evening feeling overwhelmed by anger and shame. Alone in my room, I pounded my pillow, tearfully murmuring, “Will we always be this way?”
Throughout the Forever Wars of the past two decades, U.S. elites in the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex have manifested an insatiable appetite for war. They seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind after “ending” a war of choice.
Following the 2003 “Shock and Awe” war in Iraq, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon created a main character, Jawad, in The Corpse Washer, who felt overwhelmed by the rising numbers of corpses for whom he must care.
“I felt as if we had been struck by an earthquake which had changed everything,” Jawad reflects. “For decades to come, we would be groping our way around in the rubble it left behind. In the past there were streams between Sunnis and Shi͑ites, or this group and that, which could be easily crossed or were invisible at times. Now, after the earthquake, the earth had all these fissures and the streams had become rivers. The rivers became torrents filled with blood, and whoever tried to cross drowned. The images of those on the other side of the river had been inflated and disfigured . . . concrete walls rose to seal the tragedy.”
“War is worse than an earthquake,” a surgeon, Saeed Abuhassan, told me during Israel’s 2008-2009 bombing of Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead. He pointed out that rescuers come from all over the world following an earthquake, but when wars are waged, governments send only more munitions, prolonging the agony.
He explained the effects of weapons that had maimed patients undergoing surgery in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as the bombs continued to fall. Dense inert metal explosives lop off people’s limbs in ways that surgeons can’t repair. White phosphorus bomb fragments, embedded subcutaneously in human flesh, continue to burn when exposed to oxygen, asphyxiating the surgeons trying to remove the sinister material.
“You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” Abuhassan said. “And this also is why it's worse than an earthquake.”
As the world enters the second year of war between Ukraine and Russia, some say it’s unconscionable for peace activists to clamor for a cease-fire and immediate negotiations. Is it more honorable to watch the pile-up of body bags, the funerals, the grave digging, the towns becoming uninhabitable, and the escalation that could lead to a world war or even a nuclear war?
U.S. mainstream media rarely engages with professor Noam Chomsky, whose wise and pragmatic analysis rests on indisputable facts. In June 2022, four months into the Russia-Ukraine war, Chomsky spoke of two options, one being a negotiated diplomatic settlement. “The other,” he said, “is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence.”
UNICEF reports how months of escalating devastation and displacement affect Ukrainian children: “Children continue to be killed, wounded, and deeply traumatized by violence that has sparked displacement on a scale and speed not seen since World War II. Schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure on which they depend continue to be damaged or destroyed. Families have been separated and lives torn apart.”
Estimates of Russian and Ukrainian military casualties vary, but some have suggested that more than 200,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded.
Gearing up for a major offensive before the spring thaw, Russia’s government announced it would pay a bonus to troops that destroy weapons used by Ukrainian soldiers which were sent from abroad. The blood money bonus is chilling, but on an exponentially greater level, major weapons manufacturers have accrued a steady bonanza of “bonuses” since the war began.
In the last year alone, the United States sent $27.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, providing “armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles.” The package also included air defense support for Ukraine, night vision devices, and small arms ammunition.
Shortly after Western countries agreed to send sophisticated Abrams and Leopard tanks to Ukraine, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy Sak, spoke confidently about getting F-16 fighter jets next. "They didn't want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn't want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn't want to give us tanks, now they're giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get," he told Reuters.
Ukraine isn’t likely to get nuclear weapons, but the danger of nuclear war was clarified in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists statement on January 24, which set the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to ninety seconds before the metaphorical “midnight.” The scientists warned that effects of the Russia-Ukraine war are not limited to an alarming increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change. “Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers,” the report notes, “leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”
Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the Doomsday Clock sounds an alarm for all humanity. “We are on the brink of a precipice,” she said. “But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and livable planet. From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done. The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset.”
As do we all. The Doomsday Clock indicates we’re living on borrowed time. We needn’t “always be this way.”
Over the past decade, I was fortunate to be hosted in dozens of trips to Kabul, Afghanistan, by young Afghans who fervently believed that words could be stronger than weapons. They espoused a simple, pragmatic proverb: “Blood does not wash away blood.”
We owe to future generations every possible effort to renounce all war and protect the planet.
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