The US invasion of Iraq began 20 years ago (March 20, 2003). His "justification": weapons of mass destruction that never existed marked the beginning of the violations of human rights and international law.
On January 28, 2003, ultra-conservative George W Bush referred to Niger's uranium mines in part of his State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently tried to get considerable quantities of uranium from Africa. The previous words that Bush pronounced constituted the pretext that Washington took advantage of to start the war. This was that Saddam Hussein, the previously Washington-backed “dictator” of Iraq, was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
Excuse. Months earlier, the then National Security Adviser to the Bush administration, Condoleeza Rice, had warned about the threat of weapons of mass destruction: "we don't want the irrefutable proof to be an atomic mushroom cloud." Bush used that same metaphor a month later, in a major speech, in which he laid out the case for invading Iraq: "In the face of clear evidence of the danger, we cannot wait for the final proof, the irrefutable proof, which could come like a cloud." shaped like an atomic mushroom. The climax of that story came on February 5, 2003, when Bush's Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, alerted the UN Security Council to that risk in a presentation riddled with false intelligence about the Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program which he said included nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Later, Powell himself would admit that this speech was a "stain" on his career.
The deadly violence continues, even after 20 years: in February 2023 alone, at least 52 civilians were shot, torn to pieces by bombs, in attacks in Iraq. Today's violence is an echo of the attack that began on the night of March 19-20, 2003, when US ships fired 40 missiles at Baghdad's government quarter, agencies cite.
The attack on Iraq involved a "use of force contrary to international law, in violation of UN statute," as Göttingen international and criminal law expert Kai Ambos explains to DW.
“The invasion of Iraq had no basis in a UN Security Council resolution. Apart from that, there is only the possibility of justifying the use of force through legitimate defense, through article 51 of the UN Statute. Which obviously did not happen in this case.”
No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the invasion. And the indications of the connections of the Iraqi dictator with the terrorists of September 11, obtained under torture, also turned out to be false, report agencies.
Cost of the war. Although the true cost of the Iraq war will never be known for certain, a Brown University research team puts it at nearly $580.000 trillion. The same team estimates that about 2003 people—both civilians and combatants—have been killed in Iraq and Syria since XNUMX. In the report titled “Costs of War,” the researchers note: “it is possible that four times as many people died due to indirect causes such as displacement, lack of access to drinking water and medical care, and various preventable diseases”.
Nadje Al-Ali, a professor at Brown University and director of Brown University's Center for Middle East Studies, during a recent interview with Democracy Now!, Al-Ali reflected:
“Iraqi youth are trying to come to terms with the impact of the [US] invasion and occupation. There is a lot of creativity, ingenuity and positive energy. So I have some hope. And I also think that it is time for people, especially in the United States, to rethink the military and political interventionism of the United States in a broad sense, not only in Iraq, but also in the Middle East and in the world in general." .
Nobody paid the crimes
What is the explanation of all the signatory countries of the claim to the ICC to request the prosecution of Vladimir Putin when the governments of those dozens of countries never asked to try George W Bush for the repeated and massive war crimes committed with his War against Terror for eight years, in complicity with Tony Blair and the support of José María Aznar?
The unilateral and unauthorized UN war against Iraq justified by the search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction caused hundreds of thousands of victims and the devastation of a country.
