The Political Breakdown

Multiple sources have confirmed that the premise for the March 2003 invasion - the charge by the United States and the United Kingdom that Saddam hussein’s WMD programs represented an imminent threat - was groundless. The U.S.-appointed Iraq Survey Group would later spend billions of dollars to verify that the international inspectors were correct: Iraq had not revived its WMD programs. nor, apparently, was the alleged WMD threat the real motivation for the U.S. and U.K. aggression. The famously leaked “Downing Street” memo from July 2002 was one of the several sources indicating that the decision to go to war had been taken well before the inspections ever began.

To this day, I cannot read such accounts without reflecting on the thousands of soldiers who have died, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, the millions maimed or displaced, the families disrupted, the lives ruined - and I am astonished that there has not been more self-examination, more introspection on the part of the principal players. The shame of this needless war obliges us to all consider what went wrong in the case of Iraq and to reflect on how the lessons of this tragedy might apply to future crises.

…The United States and its allies must be genuinely engaged in the discussion, speaking with their perceived adversaries, demonstrating by more than lip service their commitment to a peaceful resolution of the underlying insecurities.

Mohamed Elbaradei, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.

Elbaradei royally burns the United States and its allies on the ridiculous pretense that led to the Iraq war, and the untold suffering that follows. I’ve never felt more embarassed to be an American citizen than when I read his words. We are a good country, but we could be so much better. We have to hold our leaders accountable and demand we behave as a fair, rational player in the international system.