Iraq is ‘anarchy’ 20 years after invasion -novelist
STORY: "Especially Americans and those who supported the war should think, when in history, did missiles and bombings bring democracy?”
Twenty years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqi writer and associate professor of Arabic literature at New York University Sinan Antoon thumbs through the headlines from his home in New Jersey.
“Most people don't have hope. The situation in Iraq now is really terrible, and the Iraqis who live in Iraq will live with the consequences of the invasion, sadly. The people who decided to go to war... They don't have to live with the consequences of war."
For Antoon, what’s left of his home country is hopelessness and anarchy.
“All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours…”
The invasion was meant to topple a dictator and usher in a thriving democracy.
Instead, Iraqis faced years of upheaval and chaos…
A devastating insurgency – first by Hussein loyalists, then by al Qaeda – was followed by a sectarian civil war and later, the rise of the Islamic State, which occupied a third of the country and slaughtered thousands.
"As much as I wanted to see the end of Saddam Hussein and his regime, I wanted that to be by the Iraqi people, not by military occupation. If you go now and ask Iraqis, 'Do we have a democracy in Iraq?' No, we have an oligarchy. We have one of the most corrupt systems in the world. Iraqis have lost $1.3 trillion, 1 million people have died, these are some of the estimates, very conservative estimates put it at 300,000, and that's already a huge number, 1.2 million people are internally displaced. This is not democracy."
U.S. credibility also suffered from Bush's decision to invade based on bogus, exaggerated and ultimately erroneous intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Brown University’s “Costs of War” project puts U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Syria over the past 20 years at 4,599.
It estimates total deaths – including Iraqi and Syrian civilians, military, police, opposition fighters, media and others – between 550,000 to 584,000.
This only includes those killed as a direct result of war, but not estimated indirect deaths from displacement, disease or starvation.
The project also estimates the U.S. price tag to date for the wars in Iraq and Syria comes to $1.79 trillion.
If you add projected veterans' care through 2050, it rises to $2.89 trillion.
“Although the American media keeps saying about the cost of the war, the cost, yes, the cost of the war and billions of dollars to taxpayers, but the people who planned the war and who supported it, their portfolios tripled. Weapons companies and weapons manufacturers made a lot of money. But definitely, the war was unnecessary, ask the mothers, ask the 4 million orphans in Iraq, ask the 1 million widows, ask the people who are born in Falluja with birth defects every day because of the depleted uranium and the phosphorus that was used there by the U.S. So saying one is against the war doesn't mean that one is for dictatorship. It's not that simple.”
In his 2019 work “The Book of Collateral Damage,” Antoon sought to chronicle what has haunted him since 2003, the stories of civilian lives destroyed by war.
