The Iraq war

I found some old files in my basement from the days when I wrote the Today in Iraq blog. They reminded me of how much I used to follow, research and write about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was a big part of my political and intellectual life for many years. It makes one despair to see how it's gone down the memory hole.

Here are facts which are now generally understood and acknowledged even by many people who were enthusiastic supporters of the war, including some who were in substantial part responsible for it, such as Colin Powell. I'd have to spend the afternoon going through that 3 foot stack of papers to document everything I'm going to say here, but if anyone cares to deny it I'll just say that the historical record is clear, and you are in a category very similar to Holocaust denial. Rather than actively denying it, our political and journalistic establishment has chosen to forget it.

If you ask what this is  doing on a blog about public health, you shouldn't have to think very deeply to find the answer. In public health we use the term syndemic, which is a portmanteau of synergy and epidemic, to refer to two or more health conditions that interact to create a cluster of health problems concentrated within a particular population. Originally this referred mostly to diseases that mutually increased susceptibility, but it is now understood in a much wider sense. For example, a community may face a high prevalence of injection drug use, which increases the risk for HIV, overdose, and many other diseases; and is associated with economic decline, community disintegration, crime and violence. War is perhaps the ultimate syndemic.

Obviously, in a war, people get blown up and shot, which is not good for them. But that's just the beginning. They face the destruction of essential infrastructure, from housing to potable water to medical services; economic catastrophe that may lead to hunger and starvation; loss of friends and family, grief and fear and depression; and yes, infectious disease epidemics. You can easily think of more. Casualties of war always greatly exceed those directly caused by combatant weapons. Because of the enormous and amorphous scope of these effects, estimates of civilian deaths resulting from the Iraq war range wildly, from 150,000 to over 1 million; and that's not counting the secondary civil war and the war with the Islamic State, direct consequences of the war initiated by the U.S. For every death there are uncountable wounds, both physical and psychic.

We can also count the public health cost to U.S. troops. The cost in dollars for medical and disability costs alone is credibly estimated to be up to $1 trillion. That says nothing of the cost in bereaved families and ruined lives, which is unfathomable.

This happened because Richard B. Cheney, George W. Bush, Colin Powell and others around them organized a massive campaign of lies in support of an illegal war of aggression -- a crime against humanity. Cheney entered office with the goal of invading Iraq (not clear about Bush -- he appears to have largely been a stooge), as was asserted entirely openly by the so-called Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative group with which he was associated. 

In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to President Bill Clinton arguing that “containment” of Iraq “has been steadily eroding,” jeopardizing the region and potentially beyond. “Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate.”[18] PNAC followed up a few months later with an open letter to Senate leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), arguing that the “only way to protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction [is] to put in place policies that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his regime from power.”[19]

 

Note that this was almost 4 years before the 9/11 attack. All they needed was an excuse, and they got one. Iraq and Saddam Hussein of course had nothing whatever to do with 9/11; on the contrary Osama bin Laden despised Saddam as a heretic and would have used his head for a soccer ball if he had the chance. Bush administration rhetoric vaguely tied Saddam to 9/11, but was much more explicit about claiming that he had so-called "weapons of mass destruction" that posed an imminent threat to the United States. This is commonly portrayed a an "intelligence failure" but it was nothing of the sort. The intelligence agencies knew that he did not possess nuclear weapons or the capacity to develop them; they were less certain about chemical and perhaps biological weapons but a) these are battlefield weapons, not "weapons of mass destruction," and b) many nations had such weapons or the capability of producing them, including the United States. Cheney set up a personal pipeline to people in defense intelligence to feed him dubious or ridiculous information from known liars and characters associated with Iraqi exiles who were urging the invasion.

 

I'll say more about the catastrophe that followed, including innumerable specific war crimes and grotesque incompetence. For now I will say that all the people associated with this plot, including obviously Bush and Cheney, are guilty of crimes against humanity. But they are still welcome in elite society, and we even see many of them as talking heads on corporate media from CNN to MSNBC. I will also say that during the campaign to sell the war, the U.S. corporate media was totally credulous, including very notably the New York Times. Reading European media, you would have thought you were on a different planet. They all knew it was lies, and they said so. But there has been no accounting.