As the unscripted tragedy of the horrendous war in and over Ukraine unfolds with no sign of any end, we mark, sorrowfully, the twentieth anniversary of President George Bush Jr.’s ill-starred invasion and occupation of Iraq that started on 19-20 March 2003.
We start by mentioning two commonly accepted wrong beliefs in this regard. First, the aggression against Iraq did not start in March 2003. By July 2002, the CIA’s Special Activities Division (SAD) started sending in its forces to Iraq. They, along with the Kurds, known as Peshmerga, formed the Northern Iraq Liaison Element (NILE), whose task was to prepare the ground for the invasion.
Historically, Washington has maintained a hostile posture toward Iraq even after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, not to mention the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq. When asked about the UNICEF assessment that about 500,000 children might have died as a result of such sanctions, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and a future Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, infamously responded in the famous programme 60 Minutes:
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