In March, 2003, the world watched on with horror as the US-led “shock and awe” bombing campaign lit up the nighttime sky of Baghdad with billowing clouds of flame and smoke.This campaign and the bloody ten years of occupation that followed had a devastating impact on what was once among the most advanced societies in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions were made homeless. One million Iraqis are estimated to have died.
The American military’s conduct of the war produced crimes of staggering dimensions. This included the turning of Fallujah, a city of 350,000 people, into a free-fire zone, the bombarding of its occupants with white phosphorus shells, banned by international law, and the summary execution of wounded prisoners. Close to two decades later, the rates of child cancer and birth defects in Fallujah are similar to those in Hiroshima following the US atomic bombing.
The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, illegal under international law developed in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars.
The Bush administration employed increasingly brazen lies, centered on the claims that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD).
On February 5, US Secretary of State Colin Powell made his infamous address to the United Nations Security Council. In a statement the next day, headlined “Powell's UN speech triggers countdown to war against Iraq,” the WSWS Editorial Board subjected his brief for war to a thorough analysis, noting that it “was predicated on a colossal lie: that the coming invasion is about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad’s supposed threat to US security and world peace.”
On March 21, the day of the invasion, the WSWS published a statement by Editorial Board Chairman David North, which began:
The unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States is an event that will live in infamy. The political criminals in Washington who have launched this war, and the wretched scoundrels in the mass media who are reveling in the bloodbath, have covered this country in shame. Hundreds of millions of people in every part of the world are repulsed by the spectacle of a brutal and unrestrained military power pulverizing a small and defenseless country. The invasion of Iraq is an imperialist war in the classic sense of the term: a vile act of aggression that has been undertaken on behalf of the interests of the most reactionary and predatory sections of the financial and corporate oligarchy in the United States. Its overt and immediate purpose is the establishment of control over Iraq’s vast oil resources and reduction of that long-oppressed country to an American colonial protectorate.
The American ruling class carried out the invasion of Iraq to seize control of Iraqi oil as part of a broader strategy to utilize military force to counter US capitalism’s economic decline. Unending war served as well as a mechanism for directing increasingly explosive tensions within the United States outward. The attempt to resolve the crisis of American capitalism through imperialist aggression, however, was doomed to failure:
Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal contradictions of American society.
The integral role played by the media in laying the groundwork for the war reached its logical conclusion once the conflict finally began: both in its unprecedented and obedient censorship of the human suffering imposed on Iraq and in its willing participation in the invasion of hundreds of “embedded journalists.”