Anti-war protesters were right. Iraq invasion has led to chaos. [View all]

[madfloridian]

The invasion of Iraq was a turning point for me in how I viewed politics and politicians. It still colors my thinking today. Our nation changed then, and not for the good.

A new moral atmosphere appeared, one in which too many accepted what we did. We invaded a country based on lies, hunted down its leader, executed his sons, and displayed their bodies on TV. There's still a link at the Guardian of those pictures, easy to find on a search.

There were many warnings about how our disastrous decision would cause instability in the Middle East.

From 2014 The Guardian.

We anti-war protesters were right: the Iraq invasion has led to bloody chaos


The Iraq war protest in London, on 15 February 2003. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

I have encountered no sense of vindication, no "I told you so", among veterans of the anti-war protest of 15 February 2003 in response to the events in Iraq. Despair, yes, but above all else, bitterness – that we were unable to stop one of the greatest calamities of modern times, that warnings which were dismissed as hyperbole now look like understatements, that countless lives (literally – no one counts them) have been lost, and will continue to be so for many years to come.

....The catastrophic results of the Iraq invasion are often portrayed as having been impossible to predict, and only inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. If only to prevent future calamities from happening, this is a myth that needs to be dispelled. The very fact that the demonstration on that chilly February day in 2003 was the biggest Britain had ever seen, is testament to the fact that disaster seemed inevitable to so many people.

The commentators who cheered on the conflict, far from being driven from public life are still feted: still writing columns, still dispensing advice in TV studios, still hosting thinktank breakfasts. "If nothing is eventually found, I – as a supporter of the war – will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again," declared David Aaronovitch in this newspaper.

I notice that our US political leaders who led us to war are still walking around and talking on TV as experts of something or other. There's been no reckoning.

Ironically I remember a Democratic think tank proudly proclaiming how the "Blair Democrats" were standing for progress in supporting the war, and the anti-war protesters here in the US were "fringe activists."

More:

In a way, opponents of the war were wrong. We were wrong because however disastrous we thought the consequences of the Iraq war, the reality has been worse. The US massacres in Fallujah in the immediate aftermath of the war, which helped radicalise the Sunni population, culminating in an assault on the city with white phosphorus. The beheadings, the kidnappings and hostage videos, the car bombs, the IEDs, the Sunni and Shia insurgencies, the torture declared by the UN in 2006 to be worse than that under Saddam Hussein, the bodies with their hands and feet bound and dumped in rivers, the escalating sectarian slaughter, the millions of displaced civilians, and the hundreds of thousands who died: it has been one never-ending blur of horror since 2003.

A 2007 article in the Washington Post had some of the warnings given by intelligence agencies pre-war.

Analysts' Warnings of Iraq Chaos Detailed

The report is the latest release in the Senate committee's ongoing study of prewar intelligence. A July 2004 report identified intelligence-gathering and analysis failures related to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Still pending is a study of how the administration used intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war.

.... In a statement attached to yesterday's 229-page report, the Senate intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), and three other Democratic panel members said: "The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists."

In addition to portraying a terrorist nexus between Iraq and al-Qaeda that did not exist, the Democrats said, the Bush administration "also kept from the American people . . . the sobering intelligence assessments it received at the time" -- that an Iraq war could allow al-Qaeda "to establish the presence in Iraq and opportunity to strike at Americans it did not have prior to the invasion."

There would be more to include in that 2007 article today. The chaos is spreading.

One of our previous Democratic presidents once said of Iraq that he wanted it to have worth it.

It was not worth it, the cost has been too great.