By Debra Sweet

From World Can't Wait | Original Article

15 years ago, on the evening of March 19, the U.S. brought its full military weight down on the people of Iraq. A war based on lies, it was - and remains - illegitimate, immoral and unjust.  Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction; in fact, it had been weakened by years of Clinton-ordered sanctions.  Iraq's leadership opposed al Queda and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.  Yet when the US was attacked, the government seized the opportunity to wage a war that "Dick" Cheney said would last "generations." Bush's Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said within hours of the attack, "Go massive. Sweep it all up, things related and not."

March 20, 2003, U.S. bombing of Baghdad, Iraq. Photo: AP

The American Crime series cites in Case #70: "Operation Iraqi Freedom," 2003: "During a secret November 2001 meeting, as reported by Bob Woodward in State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, leading strategists close to the Bush administration argued that the 9/11 attacks required a 'two-generation battle' to defeat 'radical Islam.' One dimension was to quickly take down regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria that were contributing to the spread of anti-U.S. fundamentalism or that posed obstacles to the U.S. The Bush strategists thought this would open the door to transforming the entire region—'draining the swamp,' as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz put it shortly after September 11—to transforming the conditions giving rise to jihadism, as well as solidifying U.S. control. The participants concluded the U.S. couldn't defeat Islamic radicalism without first overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

Nicolas J.S. Davies and Medea Benjamin write in The Iraq Death Toll 15 Years After the US Invasion, "The number of Iraqi casualties is not just a historical dispute, because the killing is still going on today. Since several major cities in Iraq and Syria fell to Islamic State in 2014, the U.S. has led the heaviest bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam, dropping 105,000 bombs and missiles and reducing most of Mosul and other contested Iraqi and Syrian cities to rubble."  They estimate "that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million."

Why are these American criminal actions?  More from American Crime Case #70: "Because Iraq had neither attacked nor posed any threat to the U.S., and because the U.S. failed to secure UN Security Council authorization for its invasion, the 2003 war on Iraq violated the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, as well as U.S. law, making it a war crime under U.S. and international law."

Sinan Antoon, the Iraqi writer wrote Monday in The New York Times,15 Years Ago, the U.S. Destroyed My Country, "No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago.... The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a 'blunder,' or even a 'colossal mistake.' It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I watched Mr. Bush on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show,' dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and 'experts' who sold us the war still go on doing what they do. I never thought that Iraq could ever be worse than it was during Saddam’s reign, but that is what America’s war achieved and bequeathed to Iraqis."

Consider that the fascists in the White House now are not only more bellicose in pushing "America First," but are increasing the power, scope and use of the military in expanding U.S. domination.  Give them the powers that G.W. Bush and Barack Obama exapnded to wage war, allow them to do away with previous constraints at the commander level and we have extreme danger.  Trump has not only joked about using nukes, but he is moving to expand US nuclear capability, with the gloves off.

The Trump/Pence fascist regime has to be  driven out by massive non-violent, sustained protest, before it consolidates fascism and prevents dissent.