Tomorrow will be 20 years since George W. Bush invaded the sovereign country of Iraq under false pretenses. He thought Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction" and even got permission to look for them using a delegation led by Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat charged with finding the deadly gas. Blix kept saying they couldn't find anything even though they had full access, but on March 17th, 2003 Bush's trigger finger got too itchy so he ordered the inspection team out of the country and sent troops in 3 days later.
There were no such weapons and had Bush given Blix the time he needed to verify this, Bush wouldn't have been able to justify the invasion. They never said that one of the real reasons they wanted to go in was to take Iraq's oil. Their petroleum industry was fully nationalized before the takeover, but afterward it became almost all privatized with American firms controlling much of it. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former executive of Halliburton, made sure of that. His company made $40 billion off the war.
We had good reason to go into Afghanistan after 9/11 to catch the men who attacked us. The entire world was with us, but no, we couldn't just stop there. We got greedy and took our eye off the ball.
So what do we have to show for it? Close to a million dead people, more hatred and animosity directed toward us than ever before, a whole bunch of oil, and a lot of rich fat cats.
