For the next eight years, America will be commemorating the 20-year anniversaries of the ill-fated decision to invade Iraq. March 20, 2003 was only the beginning of the killing and maiming of tens of thousands — American troops and Iraqis alike. The reverberations of that war, based on a Bush administration fabrication that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hoarding weapons of mass destruction and harboring al-Qaida terrorists, continue in both countries today.
Iraq lurches from one crisis to the next. There’s an ongoing shortage of medical doctors, for example. That’s because doctors in Iraq at the time were all trained under Hussein, tended to share his Sunni Muslim faith, and thus were deemed as enemies when the nation’s Shiite majority took control. Doctors and other medical personnel were threatened and told to leave, even as hospitals were overflowing with war casualties.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, the primary promoters of the war, planned the first few weeks of the war with an eye toward efficiency of troops and expenditures. But they didn’t plan for post-invasion chaos. They rashly assumed that ridding Iraq of its dictator would spawn a new dawn of free elections, where Iraq’s oil riches would fund a model of prosperity and democracy for the rest of the Arab world to follow.
