20th anniversary of Iraq invasion has lessons for today's geopolitical landscape | Opinion

In 1946, one year after the use of atomic bombs in Japan, Albert Einstein penned his first letter as chair of the newly formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels,” Einstein wrote. “Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars.”

March 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq. As tensions rise around U.S. involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine and as painful similarities are inevitably drawn between the geopolitical stage today and in 2003, one cannot help but wonder, are we using a new type of thinking? Or are we sleepwalking into yet another world conflict?

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Iraq 2003 to 2023: My generation’s Vietnam

At least 4,400 American service members died in Iraq. Approximately 2,500 soldiers are still deployed in the war-torn nation, with several military deaths still occurring every year since the war officially “ended” in 2011. The price we paid affects us today, with thousands of families forever traumatized by the deaths of their sons and daughters and millions of veterans suffering PTSD, lost limbs, and cancer-causing burn pit injuries.

Number estimates of Iraqi civilians who died in the invasion range from 280,000 to 315,000. Several times as many Iraqis may have died as an indirect result due to damage to systems that provide food, health care, and clean drinking water.

To what end? Quoting the Costs of War Project, “The U.S. invasion of Iraq turned the country into a laboratory in which militant groups such as Islamic State have been able to hone their techniques of recruitment and violence. The formation of Islamist militant groups spreading throughout the region counts among the many human costs of that war.”

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The people who did the crime never did the time

Not only was the Iraq War a total failure, but the pretense upon which we waged that war was a lie. The argument for the war hinged on the Bush Administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction, which posed a “threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region.”

No WMDs were ever found, Bush’s narrative surrounding WMB was a lie, and the administration knew it. Mother Jones’s David Corn and others have chronicled a long list of examples in which Bush, Cheney, and administration officials told the American people “facts” about Saddam’s WMD, “facts” that the administration’s own intelligence agencies insisted were lies, omissions, or total fabrications.

Were an ordinary citizen to orchestrate a plot built on lies that led to the deaths of thousands of Americans, his life would be over. But when politicians, fossil fuel execs, and defense contractors get together to orchestrate such a plot, it’s considered just another day for this country’s war-hungry foreign policy establishment.

Fast forward to today, and the same U.S. leaders who supported the Iraq invasion are now at the microphone arguing for a more hawkish approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine. We would be fools to listen to them a second time.

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Russia’s adversarial stance can be traced back to the Iraq invasion

The United States has been at war for 222 of the 246 years this country has existed. War might be normal to us, but that’s not how the rest of the world feels about it. An article by Branko Marcetic published by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft lays out how Putin’s early-2000s efforts toward rapprochement with the U.S. via the Bush administration began to stall as the Kremlin distanced itself from the administration’s Iraq saber-rattling.

Russia eventually joined France and Germany in opposition to Bush’s desired war, rolling back its support for the U.S. and receding from much of its diplomatic efforts with the administration. “We remembered 9/11 and were there for you – but no linkage with Iraq,” said Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in March 2003. “No prior [Security] Council decisions authorized the use of force outside the UN Charter or approved the violent overthrow of the leadership of a sovereign state.”

While Putin and his supporters bear total responsibility for their brutal, illegal war in Ukraine, a teachable moment on this 20th anniversary of our own brutal, illegal war in Iraq is to consider the far-reaching consequences of the invasion, one of which seems to be pushing Russia away from cooperative, multilateral relations with the West.

Our future depends on creating a new type of thinking

Just because the U.S. has been warlike throughout history does not mean we cannot take Einstein’s advice and adopt new thinking. We must hold our leaders accountable and demand a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. Every day we do not, civilians, Ukrainian soldiers, and Russian conscripts die.

If we fail, if U.S. politicians and the corporate execs who pull their strings push us into yet another war and ask our sons and daughters to fight it for them, we must teach our children the history of our nation, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Vietnam and beyond. Teach them the truth and guard them against lies and propaganda. Maybe then our children will go on to shoulder the souls of Earth’s downtrodden rather than the butts of rifles.

Ren Brabenec is a Nashville-based writer and columnist.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: 20th anniversary of Iraq invasion has lessons for today's landscape