George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein, and fight an eight-year civil war, was the greatest U.S. foreign policy blunder of this generation and arguably the biggest mistake made since Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter America into World War I.  The cost in lives, dollars, and liberties has been astronomical, and the consequences of the dominos knocked down by Bush’s invasion continue to be suffered by Americans and people all over the Middle East.

After the September 11th attacks, the Bush administration and its influencers immediately turned an eye to Saddam Hussein, a man the U.S. had been intent on overthrowing for years, dating back to 1991 when America fought the first Persian Gulf War to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.  While George H.W. Bush declined to “Go all the way to Baghdad” and remove Hussein from power following the American victory in Operation Desert Shield, the U.S. imposed a full-scale financial and trade embargo against Iraq throughout the 1990s with one of the goals being to cause enough suffering among the Iraqi people that they would eventually rise up and overthrow Saddam.  Instead, the mass suffering caused by the sanctions provoked increased animosity towards the U.S. among a group of radicals who plotted to fly airplanes into the World Trade towers in New York City, a catastrophe that would subsequently be used as fodder for a propaganda campaign to start another war with Iraq.

The al-Qaeda hijackers who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 were not Iraqis and had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator who never had any affinity for radical jihadists like Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader.  The vast majority of the principals of this terrorist group were from American allied countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, including bin Laden, a Saudi, and lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian.  While the initial U.S. military response was an attack on Afghanistan, the country where bin Laden and his closest confidantes were hiding, by early 2002 the focus had shifted directly onto Iraq. This regime change effort that was desired by many in the U.S. establishment dating back to the 90s was revitalized within hours of the twin towers being struck.

From early 2002 through the eventual launch of the invasion on March 20, 2003, the Bush administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and many other high ranking officials within the national security state, relentlessly promoted their agenda for a war with Iraq.  The push was based primarily on the accusation that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction that were illegal and a threat to neighboring countries as well as the United States itself. The war advocates claimed that Hussein had aluminum tubes that he was using to enrich uranium to potentially build a nuclear weapon, anthrax and various other biological and chemical weapons.  The accusations that Iraq was allied with al-Qaeda or was even directly involved with 9/11 were implied subtly by the administration more so than stated explicitly, although many of the influential pundits on talk radio and TV much more aggressively ran with this narrative. Instead of directly claiming that Saddam Hussein did 9/11, Bush made suggestive statements like, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” implying Iraq’s culpability.

The constant wave of war propaganda and endless accusations against the Saddam Hussein regime, almost all of which were eventually debunked or proven untrue, was enough to garner sufficient public support for the invasion of Iraq in early 2003.  Hussein was removed from power within months and on May 1, Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.”  However, instead of leaving with its proclaimed victory, the U.S. remained in Iraq and attempted to construct a new government in place of Saddam’s deposed Ba’ath Party-led regime.

Iraq’s religious makeup consisted of nearly 60 percent Shi’a Muslims and 35 percent Sunni Muslims at the time of the invasion.  However, the Hussein government had a majority Sunni presence, which provided a balance of power that helped keep the country somewhat stable.  When the government fell, it led to an inevitable fight over the vacuum of power, which the Iranian-backed Shi’ites won by holding democratic elections in 2005 and exercising their majority will.  The Americans, who had sold the war in part as a way to spread democracy to Iraq, had no choice but to support the new democratically elected Shi’a government, and ended up fighting a civil war on their behalf against the Sunni insurgency who challenged them.

Sectarian fighting continued and the Sunni insurgency was co-opted by radical factions who declared loyalty to al-Qaeda and bin Laden and used terrorist tactics like suicide bombings.  No al-Qaeda existed in Iraq before the war and no recorded suicide bombings had happened in Iraq, but during the eight-year war, an estimated 12,000 civilians were killed by this tactic.  These Sunni jihadists would later declare themselves the Islamic State, forming the original version of what we now know as ISIS.

In 2007, the U.S. did what was referred to as “The Surge,” a large increase in troop deployments, which led to a massive increase in violence and the complete sectarian cleansing of Sunni Muslims from Baghdad and the consolidation of power by the Shi’a in the capital city.  At this point, the Shi’a controlled the capital, as well as all the oil rich land in the south, while the Sunnis had been pushed back into the desert in the northwest of the country, so the Shi’a had no real reason to compromise with the Sunnis or try to include them in the government. The Shi’a also no longer had much use for a U.S. presence and began pushing for American withdrawal from the country, which occurred gradually over the next few years until all troops had been removed by December, 2011.  By then, the violence had died down some, but sectarian tensions were still far greater than before the war, the country lay in ruins, and radical jihadist elements of the Sunni insurgency still remained.

The Iraq War was sold as a quick and easy mission in which America would be greeted by the Iraqi people as liberators for freeing them from the tyrant Saddam Hussein.  The phrase “cakewalk” was regularly used by the administration and proponents of the war.  It was said that the threat posed by Iraq was so dangerous and imminent that we couldn’t wait around for the evidence because “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” over an American city.  As it turned out, the war was anything but a cakewalk and the supposed threats used to scare the American people into supporting the war were all based on nonexistent or fabricated evidence, or simply flat out lies.  The result was an estimated nearly 4500 dead American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and a country turned to chaos and still decimated by the effects of the war to this day. Additionally, the war led to a dramatic rise in Iranian influence in the region, as its Shi’a allies took over and still remain in power.  This political shift in favor of Iran would become a primary justification for many of America’s future interventions in the region, specifically in Syria, which have only caused more chaos, devastation, and instability in the Middle East.