The Iraq War – Never Again

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, a conflict that was broadcast into our living rooms on our TV sets in great detail thanks to the many reporters who were allowed to become “embedded” with U.S. troops as they made their way across the battlefields of Iraq.

Some commentators today refer to the War in Iraq as a mistake, but that implies a mere error in judgment. However, that assessment completely ignores the simple fact that the war was predicated on a deliberately-false narrative.

It now has become common knowledge that the war was based on nothing less than complete and total fabrications by the administration of President George W. Bush. When Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations to claim that Iraq was harboring terrorists from 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction, those assertions — as Powell himself later admitted — were based on deliberately false intelligence.

Unfortunately, with few exceptions, the U.S. Congress fell hook, line, and sinker for this fabricated intelligence narrative — and we plunged into a war that had no purpose and accomplished nothing to improve the security of either the United States or the world in general.

In fact, the war had just the opposite effect: The ensuing destabilization of the Middle East allowed terrorist organizations such as ISIS to thrive and spread around the world.

This is by means to deny the incredible bravery of the American men and women who served in that war. As soldiers always do, they did their duty, bringing great honor to themselves and their country. Even as our lying politicians were doing their worst, our men and women in uniform were doing their best on the battlefield.

But the bottom line is that millions of innocent Iraqis were caught up in the chaos of war, with nearly a million dead and many more millions displaced. American casualties in the war totaled 4,203 dead and tens of thousands maimed and wounded. In addition, the well-documented psychological scars of that war will endure both for the soldiers themselves and their families for the rest of their lives.

The war in Iraq was an enormous tragedy for all who were touched by it, with its after-effects still reverberating today.

Hopefully, we’ll never again be led into a war by duplicitous politicians whose true motives to this day are known only to themselves.