This campaign and the bloody years of occupation that followed had a devastating impact on what was once among the most advanced societies of the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions were left homeless.
The war produced atrocious crimes. Fallujah, a city with a population of 350,000, became a free-fire zone, its people bombarded with white phosphorus - prohibited under international law. Wounded prisoners were executed on the spot. Ten years later, the rates of cancer in children and of birth defects are similar to those in Hiroshima after the US atomic bombing.
The war in Iraq has involved the systematic decimation of an entire society. After more than a decade of economic sanctdions, the military might of the United States and its allies was used to totally destroy whatever was left of the economy, the infrastructure and the social fabric of the country.
Thousands of coalition soldiers died and many more were seriously injured. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of soldiers are suffering from psychological trauma. There has been a dramatic rise in suicides and in the incidence of violence against women and children by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All this was done on the basis of lies that can be summed up in the claims that the Iraqi government was hiding "weapons of mass destruction" and that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks - whatever may have been its crimes against the Iraqi people, Saddam Hussein's regime was secular and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
These false pretexts for war were no less criminal than those used by the Third Reich to justify its invasiion of Poland and of other countries at the beginning of the second world war. If the precedents established at Nuremberg for the surviving Nazi leaders had been applied, all those responsible for the invasion of Iraq would have been tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
No one has been held responsible before international law for a war of aggression that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings, and this unpunished crime has far-reaching consequences for the whole world. The only person to be put on trial is Bradley Manning, accused of treason for having revealed the crimes of US forces in Iraq.
Even though the war ended in chaos, with the lies used to justify it exposed, it established the bases for the intensification of the war in Afghanistan and e for the expansion of militarism throughout the planet. The war established a model for "regime change" interventions in the Middle East, that target secular regimes, tacitly or directly supporting forces that are linked to al Qaeda to achieve their objectives. Such was the case in Libya in 2011 and so it is today in Syria.
These wars and interventions are part of a strategy that aims to concentrate control of the world's natural resources in the hands of a few people.
With the start of the financial crisis, the rhythm of this strategy has accelerated, and the wars and looting abroad are no accompanied by attacks on welfare at home. In 2012, despite the economic recession and austerity policies, world military spending continued to rise, exceeding 1,700 billion dollars. In Italy, the government increased the defense budget from 19.96 billion in 2012 to 20.93 billion in 2013.
Instead of learning from the crisis that precious resources should be invested for our collective future, the government is wasting money, skills, and experience on the development of weapons and on war. These resources could be used to produce things that we truly need- renewable energy, green technologies, and health care.
