16 Years Since The Iraq War Started, It’s The Anti-War Movement Which Has Won

Today — 3/20/2019 — marks the 16th anniversary of the start of the 2003 Iraq War. The goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein — not one that was necessarily bad, especially when previous attempts to deal with him ended with him going back to kill his own people — ended up going the worst way possible.

It must be telling to the war’s few remaining supporters that the only major presidential candidate who served in Iraq — Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (who, full for the sake of transparency, I am supporting in 2020)— is running largely on the end of war. If Gabbard were to win, it would make the first president to be a veteran in Bush’s war the most anti-war president since Jimmy Carter.

I have seen this many times. It’s an old joke the people most likely to support war are those who have never fought in it, and vice versa. They even have a term for that — chickenhawk.

Smedly Butler, the anti-war activist who wrote the groundbreaking War Is A Racket, was a general in the first World War. Theodore Roosevelt, a war-hero who hated Woodrow Wilson for not entering World War One, had his views on war change greatly after one of his children died while fighting in said war.

I also find it no coincidence Great Britain gave up there empire status after they were nearly destroyed by Germany during the Second World War. They even threw out Prime Minister Winston Churchill for slightly over six years due to his supporter for war with the USSR. Since then, Tony Blair had to tiptoe around the idea of supporting the toppling of Saddam Hussein with President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Everything the anti-war movement predicted came true: Al-Qaeda was able to get a hold in Iraq, a new terrorist group (the then unknown ISIS) was able to enter prevalence, and the United States has had to remain in the Middle East.

Iraq hates us, even after “liberating them.” There new prime-minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi openly hates the United States and has refused to work with them. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the man who threw a shoe at Bush in 2008, is still extremely popular and just had a successful ran for Iraq’s council of representatives. To give you an idea of how badly we failed, he ran as a member of the Alliance Towards Reform party. A party primarily ran by Shia Muslims who were the most oppressed under Saddam. For god sake, Shia movements in Iraq started as a way to oppose Saddam!

It must make you think that the people who were supporting the overthrowing of Saddam have made an alliance with his supporters against the United States. While on the topic, it seems they do a better job at fighting terrorists than we do. Kurd armies have done a better job defeating ISIS than any US army has done, to the point where they are nearly defeated now.

All of this has caused a large amount of nihilism and pessimism towards the idea of the United States empire as opposes to the optimism we saw before. The Gabbard and Sanders movements have proven the United States is sick of foreign interventionism. RT American and TYT are getting better ratings than CNN, Hedges and Chomsky are only getting more well known, and the former neo-conservatives are just laughed at.

So who won the Iraq War? Those who were against it in the first place. History will see that.