15 years ago today, America started a war based on lies

Today marks 15 years since the United States began the ill-fated war in Iraq, a war predicated on lies and misinformation propagated by the American intelligence community, the mainstream media and Democrats and Republicans alike.

In August 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us…Ladies and gentlemen, there is no basis in Saddam Hussein’s conduct or history to discount any of the concerns that I am raising this morning.” That was not true.

In October 2002, President George W. Bush told the American people Iraq had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons. That was not true.

The once honorable Colin Powell was trotted out before the U.N. to lay out the rationale for war in Iraq using false intelligence information about Iraq’s nonexistent WMD program and the nonexistent “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network.” It was a speech Powell later admitted was a “blot” on his record. That would be an understatement.

In all, one study found that Bush and his cronies made 935 false statements in the lead up to the war in Iraq.

The New York Times’ coverage in the lead up to the Iraq war was so atrocious the Times itself had to concede in 2004 that it found a “number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been…Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in reexamining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.”

The result of all of this was the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam.

According to one estimate, approximately 165,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives to violence since the invasion, though likely many more were killed when factoring death indirectly connected to the war, including the disruption to sanitation and medical services.

The war also created millions of refugees, resulted in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and an incalculable number of psychological and physical injuries.

The Iraq war has cost $1.7 trillion, with hundreds of billions more due to take care of all the veterans.

And of course, the Iraq war started the chain of events which later gave rise to groups like ISIS, which in turn has bogged the American military in even more countries, and thereby resulted in the slaughter of even more innocent people.

Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell should always be remembered for the mess they got us into. But we shoudn’t forget the help they got from Democrats like Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton, or Rep. Adam Schiff (still proudly receiving campaign support from the defense industry).

Nor should we forget that the mainstream media completely failed the American people.

Whether the public has learned anything in the 15 years since isn’t clear to me. The American military is still deployed in missions around the world without congressional authorization. The military budget remains far greater than it should be.

Since the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. has continued to push for regime change in multiple countries without regard for the consequences. And the U.S. military is still stuck in the Middle East, with President Trump constantly oscillating between moments of clarity on how doomed the Iraq war was and regurgitating the talking points of those who want conflict with Iran.

At some point America’s destructive meddling in the Middle East must come to an end.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@ scng.com