It has been a decade since the US-led invasion of Iraq.
On 15 February 2003, millions demonstrated across the globe against that illegal and immoral war. The duo of Bush and Blair, who claimed that they wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, were not democratic enough to accept that the majority were against the war. They lied about the causes of the war, and 10 years on we know that they also lied about their intentions once the war was over.
While there are no accurate estimates of the number of Iraqis who died as a result of the war because – according to American army general Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the invasion of Iraq: “We don’t do body counts” – an estimate by the websites Iraqi Body Count and WikiLeaks puts the figure at 162,000. This might well be an underestimate, as those sites did not have access to all Iraqi health facilities and there are no accurate figures for Iraqis killed and buried without being taken to hospital. These figures also don’t take into consideration those who died due to lack of medicine as a result of the war, or children who were born with deformities as a result of the weapons used by the Americans in the first and second Gulf Wars.
New estimates, however, seem to ignore those who died as a result of 13 years of sanction prior to the war. Unicef estimated that 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of these sanctions. In reaction to that, the American Ambassador to the UN at that time, Madeleine Albright, said: “We think the price is worth it.” She later became US Secretary of State.
Just before the war, the Iraqi ministry of health estimated that the total number of Iraqis died as a result of sanctions was more than 1.7 million. And besides this death and destruction, the war produced millions of refugees and orphans, and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. The Iraqi government is unable to provide enough electricity to meet the country’s needs, which has implications for households and industries. Clean water supplies are affected as well – a problem that became more complicated thanks to the big contracts being given to American companies with ties to the Bush administration. These contracts were sold to smaller companies and then resold again to smaller inexperienced Iraqi firms that ended up doing a substandard job because there was so little money left.
Not only have the US and its allies infected the country with their destructive behaviour, but also with terrorism. We had never heard of extremist groups like al-Qaeda and other sectarian gangs in Iraq until the invasion and the chaos that it created, which provided the ideal environment for extremists to operate, to restrict women’s rights and cause mayhem that increased the number of civilian casualties significantly. Moreover, unemployment and poverty as a result of the war, and the failure of the coalition’s post-war plans or the lack of such plans, meant that more men felt they had no choice but to join such extremist groups.
The constant rise in casualties meant too that many families lost their main breadwinner, leaving Iraqi widows and orphans to bear the brunt of the war, with children having to leave school in order to support their families, resulting in a decline in literacy.
If there’s anything we should learn from this war, it’s that we should never allow it to be repeated, especially with the US and Israel talking about war with Iran. The destruction of a country such as experienced in Iraq should never be allowed to happen again.
Mohammed Samaana is a freelance writer based in Belfast.
