The US-led invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 was a war now accepted to have been built on lies and is said to have killed as many as one million Iraqis. However, despite the horrific bloodshed inflicted on the Iraqi people, the Western public seem to have forgotten so many of the lessons that should have been taken away from the disaster that was the Iraq War.
In the build-up to the war on Iraq, Americans were told that eliminating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was necessary for world peace. This was due to his alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) as well as his alleged links with Al-Qaeda, among a number of other claims about Hussein’s genocidal ambitions. Britain’s then-prime minister, Tony Blair, even likened Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler; this was at a time when anti-Middle Eastern sentiment was high and the 9/11 attacks were ripe in the minds of the Western public, who had been informed by then-US President George W. Bush that the ‘war on terror’ was akin to a ‘crusade’.
It turned out that almost none of the major allegations about Saddam Hussein were true, despite the Iraqi president’s other crimes against humanity. Yet, with no evidence, Western media fell in line and presented the invasion of Iraq as a just war, despite the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva stating that it constituted a war of aggression and a flagrant violation of international law prior to the invasion occurring.