By Darryl Mason
So here we are, seven years later, trillions of dollars gone, more than 5200 coalition soldiers dead, more than 300,000 wounded and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or disabled.
From the UK Independent :
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg today restated his view that the Iraq War was illegal, saying: "I don't think the legality of that invasion has been proven."
Apart from questions over the legality of the conflict, Mr Clegg said the wisdom of the 2003 invasion "certainly hasn't been proven at all"."You can turn it on its head - I don't think the legality of that invasion has been proven. The wisdom of it certainly hasn't been proven at all."
What will they say about this age of senseless war on some of the world's poorest people 300 years from now?
"In the second year of the 21st century, the dying meganation of the United States launched an illegal war on Iraq, in a desperate attempt to stop the Iraqi dictator Sadddam Hussein selling oil in Euros instead of US dollars. The war claimed more than one million American lives, in the warzone, and back home. The War On Iraq, and the decades of rehabilitation for the millions of Americans who were recruited by war corporations, finally bankrupted the United States, economically and spiritually, leading to its break up."In early 2003, 10 million people around the world, at tens of thousands of protests, chanted that the Iraq War was illegal, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the war was wrong and would bring death and suffering to the people of Iraq.
And they were right.
But our leaders, at least in most Western nations, pretended they knew nothing of what the protesters shouted, and they did as they always do, and started another war against the will of the people.
That's it. No country will ever fight another Trillion Dollar War.
The next time they will probably just for nukes instead.
It's so much cheaper.
For now, the three biggest chearleaders of the War On Iraq - US President Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard - walk free, write books and refuse to deny the war was illegal, they say instead, in perfect imitation of each other, "it was the right thing to do."
But the truth is, in the end, the Iraq insurgency won. They fought the world's most powerful war machine to a standstill, with machine guns and improvised bombs. The insurgency only stopped killing dozens of soldiers a month when they were paid cash to lay down their arms.
The greatest lesson of the Iraq War was learned decades ago, but the myth of Military Victory has kept the truth hidden, behind million dollar recruitment ads, and hundred million dollar movies promoting the military and war. Insurgencies are hard to defeat. All but impossible to defeat in a city of millions, like Baghdad, unless you are willing to sacrifice vast numbers of your own troops.
Or, by 2020, vast numbers of your expensive war robots.