At the start of 2003, the American people were still living in the shadow of September 11th terrorist attacks. Our sadness was unimaginable, our anger was raw and our fear of another attack was palatable. We turned to our country's leaders for comfort and we were in no mood to hear duplicitous talk from the Middle East. This climate of emotional vulnerability often gets overlooked when discussing Iraq, but in my humble opinion, it made the path to war much easier.
Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi made the rounds in the media to say the United States would be welcomed as liberators but he along with the information he provided on a supposed link Saddam Hussein had to Al-Qaeda would later be discredited.
Then were were the faulty reports that United Nations sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. This erroneous information was used by Osama Bin Laden to justify terrorism against America. Liberals used it to criticize government policy and conservatives used it to stoke the fires of war.
To be clear, George W. Bush never blamed Iraq for the 9-11 attacks BUT he was no longer going to wait for potential threats to become real. From the way the government described Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program in the months leading up to the invasion, the threat from Iraq was becoming all too real. In February of 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who many saw as a voice of reason, justified a possible invasion in front of the United Nations Security Council by giving testimony on Iraq's WMD program. (The year before, he had actually cautioned the President on an invasion saying, "If you break it, you own it.")
Many of us were fooled because we wanted to believe our leaders were honest and competent. Even the late night comedians jumped on the WMD bandwagon with jokes about Iraq. I won't soon forget a skit from Conan O'Brien that featured Saddam Hussein disguising three missiles as his children.
When French and German leaders announced their opposition to the war, The New York Post ran an infamous “Axis of Weasels” headline. After France threatened to veto any resolution that mandated an invasion, a backlash against the French emerged with some restaurants renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries.” The only place in my travels that I actually saw do this was The Clam Box of Ipswich, MA.
Despite the drumbeat of war, many people weren't fooled and protests erupted throughout the country and the world. From around this time, I vaguely remember hearing a liberal guest host filling in on the usually conservative WRKO talk radio and for one broadcast, she brought with her actress Janeane Garofalo. They laid out good reasons why an invasion of Iraq would be disastrous and much of what they said turned out to be true but at the time, the audience wasn't having any of it. A divisiveness erupted in society and the good will President Bush enjoyed after 9-11 seemed to quickly disappear.
Operation Iraqi Freedom began with “shock and awe” style decapitation airstrikes that sometimes claimed the lives of innocent people. I am haunted by an image that appeared in the local newspaper just before the war began of a father enjoying pizza with his family at a restaurant in Baghdad called Pizza Hot. Did they survive such bombings?
When the ground war started, it just felt wrong to me on a visceral level and despite all the rhetoric and bluster, I couldn't believe it was actually happening. I recall how embedded reporter David Bloom gave some of the first reports from the battlefield but spending many hours in cramped armored vehicles with the hot sun caused a blood clot that claimed his life at the age of 39.
We soon heard heroic stories of Private First Class Jessica Lynch who had been captured when her convoy was ambushed but as with many aspects of the Iraq War, the tales of how she single-handedly fought off the enemy turned out to be grossly exaggerated.
In May of 2003, President Bush announced an end to major combat operations in Iraq while a banner hung in the background that said: Mission Accomplished. This would come back to haunt him because an insurgency caused many more causalities and dragged the war on for another 8 years. Things hit home for us when Swampscott native Jennifer Harris was killed when her helicopter crashed with all those on board lost. The military tried blaming it on a mechanical failure until a video surfaced of her aircraft being shot down. The American public saw a lot of gore in the news during those bloody years and some of the war's biggest supporters were starting to wonder if it was worth such a staggering toll.
Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck would admit in 2014 that the liberals got it right when they opposed the war in Iraq...but apologies don't bring back the dead. I lost all respect for President Bush years before that when he joked about not finding WMDs at a fancy press corps banquet. Early support for the war likely cost Hillary Clinton the presidency because a weary public turned to the candidate who had opposed the invasion from the get go, Barack Obama.
The invasion of Iraq not only distracted from the war effort in Afghanistan, it made terrorists smarter and more effective as the lessons learned in one battlefield were brought over to another. We eventually saw the emergence of ISIS and with it, more death and destruction on a scale we had never seen before. In 2003, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had warned the invasion of Iraq would create 100 Bin Ladens.
To this day I still hear some people say the war was all about getting revenge on Saddam Hussein for the 1993 attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush. Whatever the major goals for the Iraq War were, it's safe to say that few of them were met outside of "regime change." The United States also lost some of its credibility as a result of this conflict especially when trying to take the moral high ground regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It's unfortunate the nightly news networks punted on covering the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War because there are hard lessons to be learned from it....lessons that can't be properly explored in our current culture of soundbites.
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