Have We Learned Anything From The Iraq War?

Seventeen years ago, the U.S. and some of its allies launched an illegal invasion for the express purpose of overthrowing the Iraqi government using the bogus justification of eliminating “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist. This magazine was founded in 2002 in large part to oppose that war and the destructive, hubristic foreign policy ideas that fueled it. Seventeen years later, the U.S. is still fighting in Iraq. Now our troops are fighting against the jihadists who flourished in Iraq because of the invasion, and they are facing new threats to their safety because of the current administration’s reckless policy of pursuing regime change in Iran. Americans and Iraqis are still dying as a result of that criminal decision to invade, and the obsession with regime change has found a new target. As I said the other day, the U.S. lost the war, and there was nothing that the U.S. could have “won” when the war was completely unnecessary and unjust.