Misdirected fury: The shadow of the Iraq war lingers on

WASHINGTON: The killing continues, two decades on. In February alone, at least 52 civilians died in Iraq in shootings, bombings, or other attacks.

The violence is an echo of the war in Iraq, which the United States launched in the overnight hours of March 19-20, 2003.

Iraq could do little against a “shock and awe” campaign carried out by a US-led “coalition of the willing” that included the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland.

Within three weeks, Saddam Hussein and his brutal dictatorship were gone. Three weeks thereafter, on May 1, a triumphant President George W. Bush announced “mission accomplished” from the deck of the aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln.

To that point, the US and its allies had dropped 29,166 bombs and rockets, according to the Pentagon. Large parts of Iraq’s infrastructure lay in ruins. More than 7,000 civilians were killed, according to Iraq Body Count, a British NGO.

It was the end of major combat operations, but the beginning of a long and deadly slog.

In all, at least 200,000 people — and perhaps as many as one million, depending on the estimate — have died. In 2006, the Lancet, a medical journal, came to a number of 650,000 “additional deaths.”

US troops left in 2011, only to come back to help fight the so-called Islamic State, a brutal Islamist group that sprung up in the ruins of Hussein’s Baathist regime. According to the German Defense Ministry, 120 Bundeswehr soldiers are stationed in Iraq today.

The military adventurism was “one of the last sorts of hubristic expressions of Western belief that they could reshape a country and a regional order to suit their preferences,” Dan Smith, the director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told DW.

Turning Iraq into a Western-style democracy proved harder than American policymakers initially suggested.

Iraq’s social patchwork of ethnic and religious complexities overwhelmed an under-prepared occupation administration.

A car bombing of the United Nations complex in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, which killed 22 people, marked the starting point of a relentless and deadly insurgency.

“If the mission was to free Iraq from terror, reconstruct the country and enhance security on all levels, it was an absolute failure,” Javier Solana, a former NATO Secretary General, wrote in a commentary for the platform, Project Syndicate, in 2018.

The war in Iraq was a “use of force contrary to international law and a violation of the UN Charter,” Kai Ambos, a legal expert at the Georg-August-University in the central German city of Göttingen, told DW. “The invasion of Iraq was not based on a UN resolution. That leaves only the possibility of self-defense for use of force.”

There was no case for self-defense, Ambos added. Then-Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, shared this view calling the war in Iraq illegal under international law.

Germany refused to participate in the war. However, Germany supported their offensive by granting overflight rights, the protection of US military bases on German soil, and by providing intelligence and financial contributions. Thereby, Berlin was, in Ambos’ view, “aiding and abetting an act contrary to international law.

At the time of the invasion, Jürgen Habermas, a leading German philosopher, wrote in the national daily FAZ, that one consequence of the US decision to violate international law by going ahead with the war was giving “superpowers a disastrous example” to follow.

“It was a case where they had made the decision that they wanted to do it and then tried to come up with reasons,” Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School explained. “It is not that the intelligence is informing the decision. They were manipulating it or sculpting it to justify what they had already decided to do.