A second Iraq war, twenty years on

Not all states that commit acts of aggression are subjected to the same sanctions. The Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) was described as a diktat that France’s president Georges Clemenceau imposed on a defeated Germany. Twenty-one years later, having taken its revenge, Berlin insisted that France’s defeat of 22 June 1940 was formalised in the same railway carriage in Compiègne forest where Germany had signed the armistice on 11 November 1918. There are no such perfect parallels in the case of Iraq and the United States, which also fought two wars in quick succession…

In the first of them, which pitted Iraq against the Western powers, the aggressor was Saddam Hussein: on 2 August 1990 his armies occupied a sovereign state, Kuwait, annexed it and made it his country’s 19th province. The international condemnation from the United Nations Security Council was unanimous. Within three weeks, a UN-authorised task force, mainly from the West, expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait after intensive bombing and ground fighting. Iraq was then placed under an embargo and ruthless sanctions. Over the next ten years, hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them children, died for lack of clean water and medicine.

As if this weren’t suffering enough, President George W Bush went to war with Iraq again in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, this time ostensibly to prevent further attacks on the US that might use ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – though the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon had been carried out by 15 Saudis with no Iraqi involvement. The existence of such weapons in Iraq was an invention of the US intelligence services that was immediately propagated by the White House, most Western media (especially the New York Times, Economist and Washington Post), the majority of politicians (both Republican and Democrat, including the then senator from Delaware Joe Biden) and a handful of exiled Iraqi opposition figures.

In March (...)

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