Iraq War

The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition with Great Britain that overthrew the internationally-recognised government headed by President Saddam Hussein. Eventually numerous other NATO countries were also persuaded to provide military units. The use of hoods, cable ties, torture, mercenaries, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, aggressive patrols and dogs, the seizure of the oil fields and Britain's continuous use of the RAF to bomb Iraq, the destruction of Fallujah, the burning and looting of libraries, museums and historic monuments; and the contempt shown towards the Iraqi population have, it is argued, all provided prima facie evidence that The Hague and Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg and the United Nations Charters have been breached.

The conflict continued as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion puppet Iraqi government.

USA troops were officially withdrawn in 2011. However, following the spread of the Syrian Civil War (with the insurgency there supported by the United States via their proxies, such as Saudi Arabia) and the territorial gains of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, US forces were again sent to Iraq in 2014. Iraq captured ISIS's last major strongholds in 2017 and declared the war over, but a lower-scale insurgency continues.

Claimed causes

The start of the conflict is associated with the aftermath of the earlier First Gulf War (1991), the 9/11 attacks (2001), and Israeli and USA manufactured false claims of Iraq holding weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, there was no co-operation between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group, and United Nations Weapons experts who went to Iraq stated they did not have weapons of mass destruction. It has been argued that Western intelligence agencies before the war knew this and/or had no reliable evidence.

Another claimed motivation for the invasion was to spread "democracy" and the democratic peace theory, so beloved by the USA.

Some critics (such as Noam Chomsky) have argued that the war was an "oil war". However, this has also been criticized as a smokescreen or only a partial cause. The war has not been financially beneficial for the United States but has instead been enormously costly (see below).

The influence of the Israel lobby and neoconservatives have often been argued to be a major cause, in for example The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, but sources such as Wikipedia state nothing on this in its articles on Iraq War.

Results

Some of the current results of the war include that

• A relatively stable and secular country with a good civilian infrastructure, which was hostile to Israel, was devastated and ruined and greatly weakened.
• The war, civil war, terrorism, and other war associated effects causing large scale combat casualties, mass killings/deaths of civilians, and other atrocities.

268,000 - 295,000 people were killed during the Iraq war from March 2003 - October 2018, including 204,575 civilians.

• Enormous financial costs.
• Increased tensions between NATO and Russia.
• Increased tensions between Shia and Sunni Muslims and Shia and Sunni majority countries.
• Rising religious fundamentalism and terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere.
• A mass migration with individuals claiming to be "refugees" from the war arriving mainly in Europe.
• Terrorists from the war arriving mainly in Europe.

These results are often similar to those from other recent wars in Muslim countries with outside interventions.

Estimates regarding some of the costs for only the first ten years of war and civil war, before the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, have included:

• More than a half a million deaths from war related causes (including from violence but also from causes such as destroyed infrastructure due to the war).
• Many more physically and psychologically injured and maimed.
• 4,488 U.S.A. service personnel killed directly and 32,223 injured (not including psychological injuries such as PTSD).
• A financial cost for the US alone of $1.7 trillion. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been estimated to cost the US alone $4 trillion.
• Many trillions more in cost for the U.S.A. alone on interest payments due to the wars being paid for by borrowed money. The cost of the Iraq war alone for the U.S.A. could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest.

These estimates were only for some of the costs for the time period before the recent large increase in fighting and violence associated with ISIS.

Britain

Following the war, a public enquiry was ordered by the UK Parliament into it and into Prime Minister Tony Blair's responsibility for Britain's involvement. This enquiry resulted in the Chilcot Report, which summarised the findings into Britain’s role in the war. It concluded Blair deliberately blurred lines between what he believed and what he knew. It found that Blair had convinced himself with unjustified certainty that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, when intelligence reports had not established “beyond doubt” that they existed. In July 2017 a wide-ranging survey in Britain found that a third of British people wanted to see Tony Blair tried as a war criminal over Iraq. During the Iraq War, 179 British Armed Forces personnel and at least three UK Government civilian staff died. Many more were wounded and/or maimed. Of the more than 183 fatalities, 138 personnel were classified as having been killed in hostile circumstances, with the remaining 44 losing their lives as a result of illness, accidents/friendly fire, or suicide.

See also

• A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
• Civil war - on "regime changes", democracy, and civil wars
• Libya
• Syrian Civil War

External links

• Iraq, A War for Israel
• The Iraq War
• Iraq Body Count