THE IRAQ WAR AT 20: IT WAS A BLUNDER. WORSE THAN THAT, IT WAS A CRIME.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

ON MARCH 20, 2003, what was officially one of America's shorter wars began with an airstrike on Saddam Hussein's presidential palace in Baghdad. U.S. armed forces, 160,000 strong, moved out of Kuwait and across Iraq, and after overcoming a few small roadblocks along the way took the capital city within three weeks. On May 1, President George W. Bush declared victory from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, off the coast of San Diego. With combat over, "our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country," Bush said. "In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world."

As it turned out, neither the U.S. military mission nor the broader cause of liberty and peace were accomplished by May 2003, nor were they in the months and years to follow. What the Bush administration sold as agrim but necessary surgical strike for democracy and stability in the Middle East and the world has been revealed over the past two decades as one of the most grievous errors in superpower history. Mendacious in its beginnings, incompetent in its aftermath, and downright criminal in the death and civilizational wreckage it caused, the Iraq War was a catastrophe America has not yet properly reckoned with.

MANGLED BODIES FROM TANGLED LIES

TO UNDERSTAND WAR, your vision must focus on details more intimate and specific than geopolitical generalities and greatpower prerogatives. This particular war began with human bodies split open with bombs from the air and shells from the ground and bullets from every direction. In some cities, more than half of the accomplishments that make us civilizedbuildings and homes and the complicated machinery that brings us safe water to drink and electricity to light up the darkness and power machines--were damaged or destroyed.

Because of the "kinetic actions," in bloodless militaryspeak, that the U.S. government initiated in March 2003, for many years Iraqis would view the common automobile--usually a symbol of industrialized society meetingbasic human needs--as a potential harbinger of violent death. The vehicles would, with a frequency too horrible to accept, explode, shattering the glass that kept homes and stores secure from the elements and intruders; tearing the skin and arteries that kept human bodies alive; robbing children from parents and parents from children and breadwinners from families and merchants from the customers who relied on them; sending Shockwaves of grief and rage that set up motive and opportunity for the next violent assault on life and on the orderly operation of bourgeois society that constitutes the good life.

The invasion eliminated a brutal dictator, something many Iraqis were grateful for in itself. But it also for years eliminated even the distant vision of that good life. As one Iraqi woman told journalist Nir Rosen for his 2010 book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World, "My message to the American people after five years, they destroyed us and didn't help us, they didn't reconstruct the country, they even added more destruction to us. The days during Saddam were better. Now there is killing and nothing good. Before there was security and life was going on easily... now things are getting worse and worse, killing in the streets." As late as 2016, 93 percent of polled young Iraqis considered Americans their enemies for a war that Bush and his team framed as their liberation.

WAR OF CHOICE

THE BOYS DOING Bush's foreign policy thinking had a prewar paper trail planning...