This month marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. You could certainly be forgiven for thinking it might be a time for reflection, remembrance and, ultimately, moving on.
As it happens, though, this year’s anniversary is opening plenty of new wounds. From the Pentagon to the British court system, and even to Uganda, fresh revelations about torture, murder, kidnapping and alleged body-part snatching are surfacing.
The Guardian newspaper unveiled the results of a year-long investigation purporting to show that U.S. military advisers, with the knowledge and support of many senior officials, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and disgraced Gen. David Petraeus, oversaw a vast program of torture inside Iraqi prisons.
According to the British daily, two senior merican military officials, Col. James Steele and Col. James H Coffman, ran a high-level secret program inside Iraqi prisons to extract information from alleged insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists.
The program was reportedly funded with millions of dollars in American assistance, and was run with the connivance of members of several radical Shiite militias who tortured their captives. An Iraqi general, Muntadher al-Samari, told the newspaper that the two American advisers “knew everything that was going on there…the most horrible kinds of torture.â€
The revelation is, in the saddest possible way, the fulfillment of what James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine predicted six months before the March 19, 2003 invasion. In a piece last week taking stock of the real toll of the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Fallows wrote that the war was “the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II and perhaps over a much longer period.â€
If U.S. media coverage during the run up to the Iraq war is widely seen as less than skeptical, to put it mildly, the pushback ten years later is full-throated indeed.
Most of the stories appearing in newspapers and magazines this month focus on the tremendous losses the war incurred, be they economic ($3 trillion in taxpayer dollars evaporated), human (4,486 American dead, 32,226 American wounded and over 100,000 Iraqi dead) or political (the loss of American prestige abroad for years) instead of the victory over Saddam Hussein.
Writing in the St. Louis American about a recent scathing documentary film called Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, Jamala Rogers, a columnist, said, “We should be on fire abou the pack of lies that led us into a war.â€
Even conservative former Bush speechwriter and conservative columnist David Frum conceded in the Daily Beast that “most Americans have condemned it as a disastrous mistake.†And the Military Times, in the first of a four-part series, acknowledged that military leaders still had questions about the “legality†of the war.
Though America was the principle architect of the war, its chief collaborator, Britain, is also facing ghosts on this tenth anniversary. Hearings began this week in what’s known as the Al-Sweady inquiry - a long-awaited investigation into the deaths and subsequent mutilation of se! veral Ira! qis killed during a May, 2004 firefight known as the Battle of Danny Boy, near Majar al-Kabir, in southern Iraq.
Some twenty Iraqis were killed. The Iraqi complainants in the case have long said that some of the initial victims were only wounded in the battle, but later tortured and killed after being taken to a nearby British base for questioning.
The inquiry has been a long time coming, and is bound to dredge up painful - and costly - memories, even as Britain, like much of the world, tries to come to terms with all it lost in the war. “It is damaging and unacceptable that it takes so long to address these matters,†said an editorial in the Herald Scotland.
One of the units involved in the incident, the Sutherland Highlanders, ormerly a part of the British Army, was integrated into Scotland’s forces in 2006. “This is not only morally wrong but self-defeating. It robs the UK of its moral authority to criticize brutality and high-handedness in the army or police in countries such as Zimbabwe, South Africa and Russia,†the paper editorialized.
During the inquiry, a high court judge accused the British defense ministry of “serious breaches†and “lamentable†behavior.
The legacy of the Iraq war is still alive in Africa. Uganda, whose partnership with George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing†was mocked by many, was grappling with gruesome allegations this week when an African newspaper revealed that three Ugandan women who were lured to Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion allege that their organs were harvested there.
Last year, the BBC docum! ented a m! uch less sensational story: how more than 100 Ugandan women wound up in Iraq in the first place, attracted to the war zone by unscrupulous human traffickers posing as legitimate businessmen.
“If body parts are removed, do they grow†Chris Mudoola told All Africa News this week, calling for a medical examination of the women. Mr. Mudoola is accused of being the person who took the women to Iraq while working for an organization called Uganda Veterans Development Ltd, according to the paper.
No accounting of the war would be complete without a tally of the money lost in addition to the hundreds of thousands of lives. But even there, the news this week was grim. In its final, and perhaps most depressing, report yet, the Special U.S. Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said this week that the roughly $206 billion in Iraqi and American funds designed to rebuild the country “underperformed.â€
Scott Johnson is the author of the forthcoming memoir “The Wolf and the Watchman†about life with his CIA father, to be released by W.W Norton in May, 2013
