The people who were wrong about Iraq won’t shut up
You shouldn’t get to be shill for a war that killed thousands and boast you’d do it again
Twenty years ago this week the war in Iraq started. It officially ended December 2011 with the U.S. withdrawal (after not being able to secure immunity from prosecution for crimes), and by that time fighting killed 4,923 American and allied troops and at least 30,000 Iraqi fighters. The civilian death toll isn’t certain but it is magnitudes higher.
I don’t have much to offer on the war itself. It was based on repeated and confirmed lies. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians, died as a result, Iraqis live in poverty and suffering continues. It’s awful. But I’d rather leave those stories to those who lived it, the veterans, the survivors, anyone who took part. There are excellent pieces produced for the anniversary and I recommend them.
But I want to instead go after some of the hand wringing and guilt avoiding that has been going around in the last month leading up to the anniversary of the war. It’s from a certain group of people: the people who helped sell the war and the pundits who enabled them. These are people who advocated for the war and worked on the messaging for it, who in almost every instance since refused to admit any involvement in proven lies, or at the very least any sense of shame.
It’s a who’s who of people doing it. Whether it’s the “Axis of Evil” speech writer David Frum arguing that the United States went to war to spread democracy (that was not the argument in 2003 and Frum should know, he was crafting messaging) or centrist pundit Jonathan Chait saying he had some mistakes, but not really since he still stands by his beliefs. His argument is built around saying the war was necessary due to truce terms from 1991, essentially ignoring the lies and jingoism of 2003 that really led to the fighting. Then there’s climate denier Bret Stephens in the New York Times — which also helped push for the war based on falsehoods in 2003 — outright saying he had no regrets. Against, hundreds of thousands of people died.
Back in 2003 they had powerful places to share their thoughts. And now 20 years later they still do. They’re deciding to speak up, to talk about how they thought they were acting on good intelligence or how they were misled or why they don’t regret it, who could have known better any way?
Turns out, many people did. At least six million people marched on Feb. 15, 2003. It was the largest demonstration ever when it occurred. Despite what some people are saying now, it was clear that the argument that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction weren’t true, and the war was going to be a disaster. As Hamilton Nolan bluntly put it:
Yes, there are bigger issues in the world right now — climate change will reach a level of unpreventable devastation in a few years without drastic, radical action, for instance, per a new report — and while these people should not be worth one’s time, the thing is, they are. They still hold powerful positions. The people who were right in 2003 and who have remained over the last 20 years should be calling them out. Not just because it’s an “I told you so” moment but because letting them rehabilitate their images is an injustice. These were not calm views of sober analysis of evidence, these were acts of lies or ego.
Let’s go through the supposed claims: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. United Nations weapons inspectors found no signs of WMDs before the United States ordered them to leave so the United States could invade and look for WMDs. The U.S. and its coalition partners also found none. The claim that Saddam worked with al-Qaeda? Thoroughly debunked. Instead the repeated to the point of near-parody line “no blood for oil” turned out to be right; as Spencer Ackerman reminded me, former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir that “the Iraq War is largely about oil.” He would say that wasn’t the motive, but then also admit he presented the case for its economic benefit before the invasion happened.
And yet, here’s New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman making a case for the war after it started.
This is from May 2003, after Baghdad fell and around the time when Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard an aircraft carrier. And Friedman does a weird bit about a “bubble” of terrorism and why it’s time for America’s enemies to “suck on this.” Truly an articulate, nuanced argument.
At the same time these ghouls are waxing poetic about their 2003 views, another person is speaking up: Hans Blix. Blix was the head weapons inspector for the United Nations when the war started. He and his team found no weapons and asked for more time to verify that. Instead he and his team were kicked out by the United States. And Blix was ultimately proved correct, as the bodies were piling up. Blix was recently a guest on Mehdi Hasan’s show discussing the anniversary of the war. There he said that ”I think, in principle, yes,” people such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair should be tried in the Hague. Blix is no judge, he has no wisdom or jurisdiction to pass judgment on so many people by himself. But he was someone who at the time was working to find out the truth, who was vocal about his findings and deserves to be taken seriously, unlike so many of the people publishing their columns this month.
People are essentially arguing that they were either misled or the lies do not matter because Saddam is gone, deaths and destruction be damned. Or, in one of the more shocking and depraved arguments I’ve seen, the war can’t be illegal because there simply hasn’t been a trial ruling it as such.
Let’s see. The United States acted without the approval of the United Nations. Kofi Annan called it illegal. Keep in mind, the United States has a law on the books — the American Service-Members' Protection Act or the “Hague Invasion Act” — that says if any American was tried at the International Criminal Court So what kind of real trial could there be, particularly when the United States’ leadership itself seemed uninterested in punishing anyone for the war?
These pundits’ confidence in being able to talk about Iraq without same stems in part from the lack of accountability the architects of the Iraq War faced for a disastrous act. What repercussions did any of them face? Paul Bremer, the de facto ruler of Iraq after the invasion who mismanaged the immediate aftermath through a series of disastrous orders, ended up a ski instructor. Paul Wolfowitz? Became head of the World Bank. Frum has a cushy gig expressing distaste of fascist policies under Trump while spewing fascist immigration rhetoric. Donald Rumsfeld? Died in 2021 in a ski resort town. Bush? He paints. A lot. Sure Obama explicitly used Bush’s failures including the Iraq War as a major argument in the 2008 election but now they’re civil. Even David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who took part in dark periods during the war, got rehabbed. And yet as the years went by and deaths and injuries piled up the critics who marched in 2003 would be proven right time and time again.
It’s a familiar pattern. Nixon escaped any real consequence for Watergate and his noted minion Kissinger is a revered foreign policy thinker in D.C. circles. The lack of any real justice for Watergate and the various attempts to suppress dissent in the 1950s and 1960s gave way to the lack of accountability for Iran-Contra, which gave way to Iraq. Some of this cast of characters kept reappearing through it all.
The lack of accountability for Iraq didn’t just affect domestic politics. It set a precedent for similar abuses. Putin has pointed to Iraq when criticized for his invasion of Ukraine, a war similarly built on lies. And just this month there was the start of an attempt at holding him accountable.
And this is good. The ICC is far from perfect but it. Putin did start an unjustified war and his forces are slaughtering innocents. There are some on the left who like to view it solely as Ukraine being a NATO proxy and think that Kyiv somehow instigated this war, but Putin is the cause of this. He sent troops in. He’s doing war crimes. And there should be some kind of attempt to hold people, on all sides, accountable for these kinds of crimes.
This is what happens when people get by without any consequences. And if there can’t be any real justice, there should be enough shame over the war that these people feel less confident advertising their support for the war. And, hopefully, a bit more recognition of the suffering and death that the war in Iraq caused.