Sarah Lazare – Have We Learned Nothing? 13 Years After America’s Disastrous Iraq Invasion, Obama Quietly Deploys More Troops

It has been thirteen years since former president George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office and announced [3] the invasion and large-scale bombing of Iraq to “free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

That war and occupation would go on to take the lives of over one million Iraqi people, according to [4] some estimates, and leave behind decimated infrastructure [5], environmental poison [6], asectarian [7] political system and the conditions that fueled [8] the rise of the “Islamic State.”

Met with the largest [9] coordinated global protests in human history, the 2003 invasion was, for people in Iraq, one of many violent U.S. interventions in the country.

As the Iraqi Transnational Collective recently documented [10], it has been 25 years since the U.S. attacked a bomb shelter in Baghdad’s Amiriyah neighborhood, killing 403 civilians as part of “Operation Desert Storm” assault on cities, infrastructure and people. The brutal U.S. sanctions regime during the ‘90s is estimated [11] to have killed at least half-a-million children – a death toll that was cruelly described [12] in 1996 by Madeleine Albright as “worth” the price.

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