WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – Looking back at the past two decades since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, foreign policy experts warn that Washington has learned few lessons since then, and the lack of accountability for the war’s proponents has created an environment where a similar American-led war could occur.
“My basic answer to the question of ‘could it happen again?’ is for sure, absolutely it could happen again,” Ahsan Butt, an associate professor at George Mason University, said during a panel hosted on Thursday by the Cato Institute in Washington.
“The real lessons of the Iraq war really haven’t been learned.”
In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, top officials in the American government, including former President George Bush, said that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
They cited U.S. intelligence, including on the basis of information from a now-discredited Iraqi opposition group, which turned out to be false. Nevertheless, Washington launched an invasion with little opposition from Congress, leading to a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, and later in Syria.
And leading up to the invasion, there was near unanimous support for the war in Washington, with few news outlets pushing back against the links between Iraq’s Hussein, WMDs, and Al-Qaeda.
Individuals like Bush, former deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, former secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, and many others who supported the war efforts, did not face any consequences for their mistakes nor did their reputations suffer.
“We have to be honest that the worst advocates, cheerleaders and purveyors of the worst lies of the Iraq war have not been held accountable. They continue to exercise outsized influence in most of our key institutions and the media,” said Don Caldwell, vice president of the Center for Renewing America and a veteran of the Iraq War.
“The worst thing though, is the fact that there has not been a repudiation of the mindset that led us to the war in Iraq.”
The experts noted that in the past two decades, several factors have changed in the U.S. that help to create more opposition to U.S. policy decisions.
One is that the U.S. political landscape is more partisan than it was in 2003, which makes it more difficult to come to unanimous decisions about going to war.
Caldwell also noted that there are many more institutions in place in Washington that would push back against the drums of war.