The Unlearned Lessons of the Iraq War, 20 Years Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable

 

 

"The fiction of weapons of mass destruction and "shock and awe." The facts of American occupation—of looting and lawlessness and Abu Ghraib.

It all started 20 years ago, when the war in Iraq began with massive U.S. airstrikes over Baghdad—what George W. Bush infamously called, in his televised address from the Oval Office, "the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." It sounded like a neoconservative fantasy, and it was.

Twenty years later, after the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—perhaps more than a million according to some credible estimates—and nearly 5,000 American soldiers, the war's legacy is a seemingly never-ending debate about the folly of American power and the failures of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Much has been written and said about lessons supposedly learned from the war, although the war's very architects and cheerleaders have studiously avoided any reckoning and accountability—and gotten away with it.

To understand and spotlight perspectives from the Middle East, rather than the usual suspects in Washington, Democracy in Exile reached out to Iraqis and additional voices in the region, along with other regional experts and observers, with a question on this anniversary. What is one lesson that still has not been learned from the war in Iraq, 20 years after the invasion?"

The Unlearned Lessons of the Iraq War, 20 Years Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable - DAWN