IRAQ WAR: 20 YEARS LATER
20 years have passed since the US launched its disgraceful war against Iraq at the cost of 300,000 Iraqi lives, 8,250 US lives and $815 billion. And all for what? Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction were alleged as an excuse at the time but not even all the top US officials believed this rationale. The most likely explanation is that US neoconservatives (Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al) were looking for a way to show US resolve and desire to control the world after 9/11 and the end of the Cold War.
Iraq (pop. 43.5 million) remains a wounded country where there are few jobs in the private sector and public jobs belong to insiders and those willing and able to pay a fee for them. Corruption has reached new heights: last fall $2.5 billion was stolen from the office of tax revenue, and much of it was taken abroad. The government is an uneasy arrangement among ethnic and religious groups: Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. And by the way there are still 2,500 US soldiers in Iraq.
Source: The New York Times, 3/19/23.