US-Iraq War

page type::article thing type::armed conflict

About
The US-Iraq War, commonly referred to as The Iraq War, has its roots in an apparent wish of US president George W. Bush to invade Iraq, which he expressed as early as the Fall of 1999: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it... If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it."

When the 2001-09-11 attacks on the 🇺🇸 occurred, Bush clearly saw that event as a kind of "instant political capital", and seized his opportunity to push through an invasion while the American people and their elected representatives were unlikely to question his undocumented justifications, most of which turned out later to be false (and some of which he knew to be false at the time), nor to notice that he had not in fact met the requirements set by Congress when they provisionally authorized the war.

The war officially began in 2003 with the US invasion of Iraq; the invasion phase officially ended on 2003-05-01, with Bush's arrival on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner. The US has continued to occupy Iraq despite mounting costs in both dollars and lives and despite growing opposition both within the US and internationally.

The ongoing "war" in Iraq, with its vaguely-defined and diffuse enemy ("terrorists"), is a companion peace to Bush's war on terror, successor to the war on drugs which had more or less reached the end of its political usefulness. They are both used as a dependable excuse, swallowed only by the very gullible, to continue excessive, corrupt, and illegal government activities (including torture) without oversight or responsibility. The occupation itself continues to claim lives and run up costs (and a budget deficit) now in the trillions of dollars, with inescapable and devastating long-term effects on the US economy.

Reference

 * Wikipedia: Iraq War
 * Mother Jones: Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 - 6/21/03)
 * Iraq editorials at Salon.com

Projects

 * AfterDowningStreet.org: "nonpartisan coalition ...[working]... to pressure both Congress and the media to investigate whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war"
 * Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW)
 * Why we're against the war
 * 2008-03-19 IVAW seizes National Archives Building (video)

Articles

 * 2007-01-22 "The Iraq War and the Sicilian Campaign" by Brent T. Ranalli, Part I and Part II: a history lesson from 415 BC, in which Athens, a "superpower" of the day, was ultimately destroyed by over-investment in an ill-considered war

Opinion

 * 2006-07-12 Exchanges with Mr. Bailey, a high school student (who may or may not have been actually a meme spammer)
 * 2005-08-30 Just one question for opponents of the war by Dennis Prager

News

 * 2007-10-30 graph: 2007 United States Research and Development Investments in Different Types of Energy Compared to the Cost of the War in Iraq
 * 2003-10-02 Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War: Study Finds Widespread Misperceptions on Iraq Highly Related to Support for War

Humor

 * 2007-05-17 I Drew This: some people warned the Bush supporters that invading Iraq would be a bad idea. The Bush supporters did it anyway, and then declared victory when there had hardly been enough time to see how things were going to shape up. Then, when the situation finally blew up in their faces, the Bush supporters blamed the nay-sayers for being defeatist.
 * Apple Presents the iRack from MadTV
 * We Want Iraq (originally written for the 1991 Gulf War)