America's Invasion of Iraq, 20 Years On
On the evening of March 19, 2003, I went with a friend to the movies to see The Quiet American, adapted from Graham Greene's novel about American ideology's failure to understand Vietnam. Little did I know how appropriate that choice would turn out to be.
I came home from the movie, and a couple of hours later, I watched the start of "shock and awe" with absolute horror. Rumors of war had been circulating for months, with a whole kabuki theater of nuclear inspections and Congressional testimony making the public believe this was about "weapons of mass destruction." I was in the minority of Americans who knew this was all bullshit. I had shown up to anti-war protests, had been yelled at by "patriots" from their pickup trucks, and told I was ignoring threats to this country. Right before the invasion a “pro-America” rally sponsored by a local talk radio host stole our usual spot. He yelled invective against us through a microphone while playing, I kid you not, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Hearing a song about how America fails the people it sends off to kill and die used to promote a senseless war fit the Zeitgeist of early 2003 like nothing else. It seemed to me like the whole world had gone insane.
A week after that protest, sitting there in the basement watching Baghdad being blown up, I felt such profound despair. So many other awful things have happened since then (the 2008 crash, multiple police murders, Trump's election, COVID, January 6th, etc.) that we have failed to account for the consequences of the Iraq invasion. Beyond the human consequences, it represented the end of the United States' post-Cold War predominance.
The invasion of the anniversary has passed unmarked in this country because the overwhelming majority that supported it at the time now wants to pretend they had nothing to do with it. Its former boosters know in their hearts it was a disaster, but they would rather deny their support than admit their guilt. Even ultra-nationalists like Trump have done this, allowing his supporters, the same people yelling at me back in 2003, to wash their hands of the whole affair.
The majority in this country still may not feel the Iraq invasion to be a gravely immoral, but they still understand that it ended America's post-Cold War dominance. After 1991 the United States stood as the lone superpower. 9/11 gravely shook the feelings of invincibility, but those same feelings spurred Bush's actions in Iraq. It was a completely elective war. Iraq posed no threat to the United States, nor was it threatening any of our key allies. Bush's crew really thought they could use this invasion to remake the Middle East to America's liking. Many of its own allies cautioned against this course of action, and the "weapons of mass destruction" had not been located, but no matter. They wanted to images of Saddam’s statues being torn down to be the image of the war, but the defining images ended up coming from the torture prison at Abu Ghraib.
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The Quiet Amerian, both the Graham Greene novel and the 2003 film, concerns Alden Pyle, a CIA agent in 1950s Vietnam in the twilight of French colonialism. He naively believes that he can create a "third force" in the country that is both democratic and anticolonialitst that will push both the French and the Vietnamese communists aside. Furthermore, Pyle is willing to fund terror attacks and sacrifice lives for his unrealistic vision. The narrator, a British journalist named Fowler, understands the country's realities far better and is not surprised when Pyle meets a bad end. Greene wrote the book years before American "escalation" in Vietnam, but like many of us on that night in March of 2003, he clearly saw what was coming.
Like Alden Pyle, Bush and the neo-cons soon discovered that not every group of people in the world are just Americans beneath the skin, trying to come out. They hadn't even bothered to consider the most basic issues in the war's aftermath, watching mobs loot priceless artifacts from museums and calling it "the price of freedom." Any moral credibility the United States had managed to amass in its post-Cold War humanitarian interventions in the Balkans was erased in that moment. But it wasn't just America's moral hypocrisy that was exposed by the invasion. The American military's inability to win a decisive victory against Iraqi insurgents or to quickly capture Saddam Hussein revealed the clay feet of a supposed Colossus.
And so a lot of people died, including someone I went to college with. We wrecked Iraq, with the ultimate strategic winner being our regional rival, Iran. We destroyed homes, killed civilians, and shredded infrastructure for less than nothing from a strategic standpoint. Hussein is no longer in power, but I get the feeling that's cold comfort for those mourning their dead in Iraq and in America.
From a moral standpoint, it was far far worse than that. War is hell even when the cause is just. The Nuremberg Trials included the category of “crimes against peace” to punish those who would unleash such horror for purely self-motivated reasons. It’s the same basis we use to condem Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. If there was any justice in this world, Bush and Cheney would be in the Hague right now.
Twenty years on, I want to remember the dead, but also acknowledge that the vast majority of Americans supported the invasion. It is easy to blame this all on politicians, but if there had been more robust opposition, those politicians would have changed their tune. The media helped too, treating protestors like me as unserious or naive. Practically every media outlet became a cheerleader for the invasion. Country music stations banned The Chicks when they criticized George W Bush. All of this has been forgotten because it is inconvenient for so many to recognize that the self-immolation of the American empire happened with the majority's full faith and support. Right-wingers certainly need to be held to account for their cheerleading of this conflict, but I should hope that this would prompt the Left to rethink their naive ideas about "the masses." In my despair after the invasion I learned far too late that propaganda works, and that once nefarious people take power, it is almost impossible to stop them.