Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, one remembers above all the war that violated international law and hardly the fact that a brutal dictator was overthrown at the same time.
Because there’s always something happening, there’s always something new to talk about. The past is only remembered when events such as the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 come back. What is remarkable, however, is what is usually in focus: the illegal war, which was based on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Less attention is given to the fact that a brutal dictator was overthrown who had started two wars and committed numerous massacres, including Operation Anfal between 1986 and 1989, during which an estimated 150,000 Kurds were murdered and those of Britain, Norway and Sweden officially recognized as genocide. A dictator who has committed so many crimes that three or four more lawsuits should have been brought against him – and even those would not be enough.
It is all the more astonishing how many comments and contributions on the Iraq war today neither mention Operation Anfal nor the poison gas attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja or the massacre of the Shiites , even in a subordinate clause. Not to mention the regime’s brutal torture apparatus. If you want to learn more about it, a visit to the Amna Suraka Museum in the city of Sulaymaniyah in the autonomous region of Kurdistan is recommended – a former torture prison designed by East German architects.
The fall of Saddam was a liberation
As early as 2003, perceptions of the military operation diverged widely. While some saw it as the pinnacle of imperialist warmongering, others celebrated Saddam’s fall as liberation. In many Kurdish families (including mine) the millions of people demonstrating in western cities against the Iraq war were viewed with dismay.
Where were these people 15 years ago when Saddam bombed the Kurds in Halabja with poison gas? And where were they eleven years later when IS murdered the Yazidis? Did they really care about the people of Iraq? Or did they just want to indulge in good old anti-Americanism again? And didn’t they care that German companies had just provided Saddam with the means of producing chemical weapons that killed 5,000 people in a single day?
That the US invasion was not an act of selfless goodness is clear. Otherwise she would have come 15 years earlier, when a genocide actually took place that should have been prevented – and one was guilty of omission. At that time, Saddam, who was waging war against Iran, was just an ally of the West. That only changed when he invaded Kuwait in 1990.
History seems to prove the peace activists of 2003 right. Iraq is seen by many today as a failed state: corruption, terror, and nothing works. But regardless of how cynical it is to mourn the loss of a mass murderer, the problem with this view is that it doesn’t start until 2003, when the Americans invaded.
Iraq today is a failed state
As if the Ba’ath Party (24 of them led by Saddam) hadn’t ruined the country for 40 years, a country rich in natural resources; as if many of today’s problems did not also have their roots in the Ba’athist dictatorship. Or, to put it another way: Is it surprising that after decades of tyranny, the persecution and murder of population groups, there is no cohesion? In a country that was only created by the colonial power Great Britain?
Perhaps one can say: the fall of the dictator was right, what followed was wrong – a cascade of mistakes and, there is no other way of putting it, stupidities. No sooner was Saddam defeated than the looting began. For days and everywhere there was looting, in museums, schools, hotels and universities. And the British and Americans watched.
They protected the borders just as little as the public buildings. International jihadists were able to enter the country unmolested. Then the Iraqi army was disbanded and hundreds of thousands just went home with their service weapons. There were also terrible human rights violations. The torture pictures from Abu Ghraib did not add to their own credibility.
Prisons like Camp Bucca were cleanly sectarian, jailing high-ranking Ba’athists alongside Islamists, creating a breeding ground for new terror. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the Americans and British withdrew their troops, leaving an unstable country in their wake. Iran made it its satellite state and has since controlled it through its proxy militias.
It’s not a solution – whichever way you look at it. It’s been 20 years since Saddam’s fall. But those whom he violated do not forget, not even their children and grandchildren. The dictator is gone, but not the wound he inflicted on them.
Source : Faz