Opinion: Ten years in Iraq, but who's counting?

Last week marked the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Many commentators took the opportunity to bemoan the wayward leadership of the previous Administration. The underlying assumption in many commentaries was that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney hatched a devious plot that gulled the country into supporting a war based on lies, and so every other proponent of the invasion was guilty of being duped, but not guilty of complicity.This perspective is a symptom of leader-centric thinking. Such a perspective serves several purposes.First, it gives the impression that the Iraq war resulted from bad leadership, and so the problem isn’t systemic. This perspective also creates the comforting illusion that the Iraq war marks a break in an otherwise unsullied stream of benevolent U.S. interventions, rather than being emblematic of an ongoing imperial project to dominate lucrative resources worldwide. Blame should’ve been shared widely, but was instead foisted upon two already-discredited political cardsharps, thereby perpetuating the myth that the U.S. is basically innocent, and only led into sin by the tempting prevarications of persuasive serpents.It is no surprise to see the mainstream media shoveling all the blame on the Bush Administration, because this allows the media to disconnect themselves from their crucial role in paving the path to war. This “fourth branch of government” utterly failed to check the other three branches of government, and instead acted as tepid cheerleaders who obediently dittoed every official dictum, as if fact-checking was unpatriotic, thus demonstrating that privately-owned media in a country that touts free-market capitalism can function in the exact same fashion as state-owned media in Stalinist Russia.Apologists for the U.S. invasion celebrated the ten-year anniversary by applauding the eleemosynary efforts to democratize Iraq. Their applause is peculiar because it assumes that the U.S.’s mission was indeed to democratize Iraq, which is absolutely false. The initial rationale for war was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaeda. When that was exposed as a fabrication, the White House claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When that was exposed as a fabrication, the White House claimed that it was undertaking the selfless task of bringing democracy to Iraq. One would’ve expected the nation to erupt with laughter at this quicksilver change of rationale for war - not to mention the mordant irony wherein the same bare-knuckled manipulators who brazenly suppressed the vote in 2000 now claimed they were on a mission to spread democracy abroad as they mobilized U.S. military forces from bases in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - a theocratic absolute monarchy. Instead of balking at this naked skullduggery, the mainstream media followed every wave of the maestro’s wand and enthusiastically showcased august liberals like Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, and Fareed Zakaria as they rallied public support for a criminal war of choice.Indeed, liberal complicity in the devastation of Iraq is often overlooked. Aside from the many Democratic members of Congress who marched lockstep to the Bush Administration’s cadence, many self-identifying Democrats forget the havoc wreaked upon Iraq during Bill Clinton’s presidency. After all, it was Clinton who signed the Iraq Liberation Act which made regime-change official U.S. policy.Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton Administration was the decisive enforcer of U.N. sanctions on Iraq. One study discovered that the U.S. intentionally used the sanctions to degrade Iraq’s water supply, which officials knew would mostly affect children. Over 500,000 Iraqi children died as a direct result of these sanctions. Madeleine Albright, who then served as Clinton’s U.N. Ambassador, famously concluded that the death of half a million Iraqi kids was “worth it.” President Obama recently awarded Albright the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her humanitarianism.Though March 19, 2003, marks the ‘official’ beginning of the Iraq war, the war on Iraq began much earlier. George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair launched the war in June of 2002, nine months before March 19, 2003. Earlier, in mid-2002, U.S. and British warplanes decimated Iraq’s air defense systems. Prior to that, the Clinton White House and British air forces dropped 1.3 million pounds of bombs on southern Iraq between 1999 and 2001 in response to allegations that Iraq violated the no-fly zone. Clinton also bombed Iraq in ’93 and ’98. All this destruction set the stage for the 2003 occupation.Despite the Bush Administration’s claim that its purpose in Iraq was to depose a tyrant and bestow democracy on a hapless population, the Administration tried to stall elections in order to cement its control of the post-invasion political atmosphere, which meant installing a client regime.To commemorate the “official” ten-year anniversary of the Iraq war, one is tempted to cite the “official” death toll of Iraqi civilians. But as history has repeatedly shown, official figures displaying civilian casualties are deliberately lowball. If one wonders why the U.S. propagates official figures that are inaccurately low, it’s because of official figures who are morally low.