The True Crime of the Invasion of Iraq

During the preparation for the Iraqi invasion, I tended toward the hawkish side. I never expected to find weapons of mass destruction, and didn't really think Hussein had the giant stockpiles the Bush administration alleged.

Instead, it came down to two relatively simple things:

1) During the years following the 9-11-01 terrorist attacks, the United States had a primal need to smash a bad guy. We had already smashed the Taliban, and that might have been enough under different circumstances, under a different administration. The problem with our actions in Afghanistan was that we didn't get to do much smashing. We mostly used air power, with some special forces units, to help the other factions. We weren't allowed to Impose Our Will. As a result, we turned our attention to Iraq.

2) Even without new weapons of mass destruction, Hussein's administration had it coming. He used chemical weapons on his own people. He invaded a neighbor just a few years prior. He defied as many of the ceasefire agreements as he could get away with. Considering only what we absolutely knew about him, he was a Bad Guy.

I stand by these assertions. However, I had no idea that the post-war rebuilding would be such a disaster. I'm no expert in these things, and I knew much less then than I do now about these things.

A few years after the invasion, I would have (and did) said that it wasn't worth it. The chaos was too much, too many people were dying. We should not have invaded. Then I learned that the chaos of the post war period had been predicted, that there is an art and science to rebuilding nations during an occupation, and that the Bush administration was completely negligent in its planning for and execution of the post invasion phase.

That's what we should be angry about. That is the truly heinous crime committed by this administration. These people had the experts, they had the warning, they had the resources. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died because of hubris of the Bush administration. These people died because our elected leaders didn't do their jobs.