12 Years After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq—Legacy of Death, Torture, Displacement, and Horror
March 23, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Twelve years ago—on March 19-20, 2003—the U.S. invaded Iraq, overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime, and then occupied the country for the next eight and a half years. The Bush regime claimed the U.S. went to war to eliminate “weapons of mass destruction.” That was a bald-faced lie to justify a war for greater empire. Barack Obama said the U.S. military had given “Iraqis an opportunity to claim their own future.” The reality is that the U.S. war and its aftermath have brought nothing but immense death, suffering, and horror to the people of Iraq.
U.S. Marines walk past bodies of people killed in the U.S. assault on Fallujah, Iraq, 2004. AP photo.
Iraqis killed as a result of the U.S. war, directly or indirectly (due to destruction and disruption of war, including to water and power systems, health care, and food production): 655,000 according to a 2006 study by the British medical journal The Lancet. Current estimate of Iraqi deaths: 1.2 to 1.4 million. Iraqis injured: 4.2 million. (See warisacrime.org/iraq)
A house destroyed by a U.S. airstrike in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. Four houses were hit and five people seriously injured. AP photo.
The U.S. war and occupation forced 4.5 million Iraqis from their homes.
A prisoner being abused in Abu Ghraib prison. AP photo
The U.S. military tortured and sexually degraded and abused thousands of Iraqi prisoners. At Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. troops stripped prisoners naked and terrorized them with dogs. No U.S. government or military official has been charged, much less convicted, for the torture they oversaw and commanded.
Far from “liberating” women, the U.S. war intensified the oppression of women in Iraq. Two million Iraqi women were widowed over the course of more than two decades of U.S. intervention, invasion, occupation, and U.S.--instigated wars, with many forced into prostitution. The U.S.-backed regime replaced the secular constitution with one based on Sharia (Islamic religious law) with separate, unequal status for women. There has been a rise in violence against women, including “honor killings” and forced veiling.
Screenshots from the Collateral Murder video, one of the documents Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was accused of leaking. The video shows American soldiers in an Apache helicopter in Baghdad, 2007, firing on and killing 12 Iraqi civilians.
One of the many war crimes carried out by U.S. troops was a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad when U.S. troops gunned down Iraqi civilians, journalists, and passers-by who tried to help the wounded and dying. The video of this massacre was one of the files that Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), a U.S. Army private, released to WikiLeaks. Manning was convicted in a military trial and outrageously sentenced to 35 years in prison for her courageous act.
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