The lies that caused the disastrous invasion of Iraq didn't start on 9/11, and they've never ended.

It occured to me the other day that we've been bombing Iraq for over half of my lifetime. Despite billions of tons of high explosives being dropped on this country, the conditions in that country just seems to get worse and worse.
Maybe, just maybe, what is needed to fix Iraq isn't more deadly explosions. Maybe what Iraq needs is food, clean water, and fewer foreigners with machine guns.

 The United States has been messing with Iraq since the CIA recruited a young Saddam Hussein to assassinate President Qassim on October 7, 1959. When the assassination was botched, the CIA helped Hussein out of the country and into temporary exile.
  However, in the interests of brevity, I would like to begin this recounting of lies at 1990, right before we started dropping bombs.

The 'Good War'

 Everyone remembers some of the lies before our invasion of Iraq in 2003, but most people have forgotten the lies before our invasion of Iraq in 1991.

 An important part of selling the first Gulf War by Bush the Elder “was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September [of 1990]  that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.”
   One reporter — Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times - decided to not just trust the Bush Administration. She obtained two commercial satellite images of the area from the same days and instead of finding Saddam's army massing on the border, all she found was empty desert.

  At a hearing held by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October 1990, a young woman, who only gave her first name of Nayira, testified that she had seen Iraqi troops pulling dozens of babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the floor.
   Bush the Elder cited this testimony at least 10 times. At least seven US Senators also used her testimony in speeches.
  Amnesty International and independent journalists later discovered that this story was entirely fiction.
   Nayirah was in fact the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. Her testimony was written by a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, representatives of the Kuwait government in exile.

  Citizens for a Free Kuwait hired Hill & Knowlton, a New York-based PR firm for $10.7 million to devise a media campaign to win support for war.

The 20 Years War

"When asked on US television if she [Madeline Albright, US Secretary of State] thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children [from sanctions in Iraq] was a price worth paying, Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.""

  Most Americans think of the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq War of 2003-2011 as separate, unrelated events.
   Iraqis, on the other hand, see things much differently. They view the 12 years in between as years of military siege.

   The majority of the lies of the intervening 12 years are lies of omission.
For instance, most Americans think that the United States enforcement of the Iraq no-fly zones was simply enforcement of U.N. sanctions.
   In fact, the no-fly zones were not authorized or sanctioned by the U.N.

  In 2000, the Pentagon acknowledged that it had flown 280,000 sorties in the no-fly zones. How many civilians werre killed during the 1990's in the name of protecting civilians? It's hard to say, but its a lot.

 With no declaration of war, American and British warplanes bomb Iraq an average of 3-4 times a week. Baghdad says over the last decade more than 1,400 civilians have been killed in the US and British attacks in the no fly zones. While this cannot be independently verified, UN statistics say that more than 300 civilians have been killed in the raids since December 1998.
   "If you want to be very cynical then you say what has in fact resulted from these zones is death and destruction," says Hans von Sponeck, the coordinator of the UN Humanitarian Program in Iraq from 1998-2000. "On average, during the time I was in Iraq, there were bombing incidents every 3 days. The casualties were in the very areas that they allegedly established to protect people. How, at a 10,000-meter height, can you protect a Shi’ite population? That is a fantasy. The cruel reality is that people are dying as a result of these no-fly zones."

The British air force alone dropped 1.3 million pounds of bombs on Iraq between 1991 and 2001.
   The bombing of Iraq under Clinton was greater than the bombing of Iraq under Bush the Elder.

 In the first three months of 1999, U.S. led-forces bombarded Iraq with 241,000 pounds of bombs just shy of the 253,000 pounds dropped under President Bush in the eight months leading up to the final UN resolution before the war.
   By August of 1999, American and British pilots had fired more than 1,100 missiles against 359 targets that year alone.

If your country is getting bombed every three days, year after year after year, and an estimated 41% of the casualties are civilians, you might be tempted to think that the war never stopped.

  Despite that never-ending destruction, it simply wasn't enough for the neocons. So in February 2001, just weeks after taking office, Bush the Younger authorized bombing strikes on Baghdad, outside of the no-fly zones. The rest of the world did no approve and even the British government questioned its legality. But after 9/11 this all was forgotten.

The Sunni v Shia Myth

the generally accepted history of Iraq (for Americans) is that the Sunnis and Shias have been fighting for 14 centuries and peace is out of the question. But is that true?

Sure, Sunnis and Shias have fought wars in the past, but then so have Catholics and Protestants.
The truth is that the Sunnis and Shias mostly lived in peace in Iraq until we started bombing them.

If you listened to the American media you would never know that historically the Muslim world was more tolerant to minorities than the christian world was.
   For instance, in 1948 there were 150,000 Jews living in Baghdad and it was a center of jewish learning. They had been living there since the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C.
   It was only in the few years before the creation of Israel that hostility between Muslim and Jew began. By 1951 only 15,000 Jews were left in Baghdad.

  When I speak of sectarianism in Iraq in this diary I have to make clear that I am not talking about the Kurds. The Kurdish have never accepted being a part of Iraq. They have been in open revolt more often than not, and the period of relative peace since America's 2003 invasion is one of the longest periods of peace in the modern history of Kurdistan.
   In fact, until 1991, almost every drop of sectarian blood that was spilled in Iraq was in Kurdistan.

  The Shia community has been politically isolated and impotent in the Iraqi region since the Ottomans decided to favor the Sunnis in the 16th Century. Traditionally they were exploited as sharecroppers and manual-laboring slum dwellers. It was only with the land reforms, starting under Qassim in 1959 and accelerated by the Baath, combined the the oil boom of the 1970's that saw the fortunes of the Shias begin to improve. Nevertheless, there was very little sectarian violence in Iraq's history.

   The lone exception was the 1935 Diwaniyya revolt. The source of the uprising was both economic, involving the transition of power from tribal regions to the cities, and political.
   The previous year the Iraqi government started conscription into the army while cutting agricultural subsidies. Meanwhile, many important tribal Shia sheikhs of the mid-Euphrates region were excluded from the new parliament.

  In the end the revolt was crushed in just a week. Several hundred shias were killed in the process. But this was never more than a regional tribal uprising.

Nationalism over sectarianism

  Starting from the British conquest of Mesopotamia in 1917 right up to the First Gulf War, Shias and Sunnis generally worked and lived together. When there was an external threat, they fought side by side.
   You may have heard of the Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920.

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster."
   - T. E. Lawrence, August 22, 1920

  The Revolution ran from May to October of 1920, and cost the lives of 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqis, plus around 2,000 British. What was notable from this revolt was the cooperation between Shia and Sunni tribes.

   The year 1948 saw the Al-Wathbah_uprising. This was largely a student and urban worker led protest that had more to do with class unrest and anti-British feelings. 300 to 400 died from police bullets in this revolt.
  What is significant was that it was the first real show of popular nationalism in Iraq's history.

  The 1979 Iran Revolution threatened to undo this peaceful coexistence. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on Iraqis to overthrow the Ba'ath government. Saddam believed this call was a sign of weakness.
   When the government, suspecting a bomb, closed Karbala at the height of the pilgrimage season, violent clashes with police took place and spread to Najaf. After the Iranian Revolution, Shia frustration found an organized, religious outlet. In July 1979 riots broke out in Najaf and Karbala after the government refused to allow a demonstration in support of Khomeini. This alarmed the paranoid Baath government.

    The Iranian government tried to portray themselves as "liberators of the Shiites" in Iraq. Hussein tried to portray himself as "liberator of Arabistan" (i.e. the oil-rich province of Iran with a large arab Sunni minority). Neither the targeted Sunni or Shia populations believed the rhetoric.
    Hussein boasted he would be in Tehran in 3 days.

  And so on September 18, 1980, Hussein rejected the 1975 Algiers Agreement and claimed the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Four days later he invaded Iran.
   Much to Saddam's surprise, the Sunnis in Khuzestan (aka "Arabistan") failed to revolt against Iran, and instead came out in the tens of thousands to fight the Iraqi invaders. Meanwhile, the Shia of Iraq did the same.

 the theory of sectarian strife was undercut by the behavior of Iraq's Shia community during Iran's 1982 invasion and the fighting thereafter. Although about three-quarters of the lower ranks of the army were Shias, as of early 1988, no general insurrection of Iraq; Shias had occurred.

Even in periods of major setback for the Iraqi army--such as the Al Faw debacle in 1986--the Shias have continued staunchly to defend their nation and the Baath regime. They have done so despite intense propaganda barrages mounted by the Iranians, calling on them to join the Islamic revolution.

It appears, then, that, however important sectarian affiliation may have been in the past, in the latter 1980s nationalism was the basic determiner of loyalty.
[...]
In summary, prior to the war the Baath had taken steps toward integrating the Shias. The war placed inordinate demands on the regime for manpower, demands that could only be met by levying the Shia community--and this strengthened the regime's resolve to further the integration process. In early 1988, it seemed likely that when the war ends, the Shias would emerge as full citizens-- assuming that the Baath survives the conflict.

 The carnage of the Iran-iraq war seemed to solidify the peaceful coexistence of Sunnis and Shias in Iraq. This mutual tolerance was part of an overall trend throughout the muslim world.
   In Baghdad the Sunni and Shia lived in the same neighborhoods and often prayed in the same mosques.

   So what happened? Why did 70 years of peaceful coexistence end in 1991.

Gulf War

"There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: and that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations' resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations."
  - President George H. W. Bush, February 15, 1991 on Voice of America

   Very roughly speaking, the Shias of Iraq were discriminated against in the same way that Catholics were discriminated against in Ireland before 1916. So there was always some tension.
  The Baath party was always a paranoid organization, and that meant that influencial Shia clerics were often targeted for brutal treatment at the hands of security forces.

  In the end, the trigger for the Shia Uprising in 1991 was Saddam's defeated army.

  On 3 March 1991 an Iraqi tank commander fired a shell through a vast portrait of Saddam Hussein which hung in Basra's main square.
   This act ignited an uprising across Iraq's Shia-dominated south.

In Najaf, a mostly Shia demonstration erupted in a gun battle between army deserters and Saddam's security forces. The uprising quickly became spontaneous and spread across southern Iraq.
   Iranian-trained Iraqi exiles, mostly the Badr Brigades crossed the border and fought alongside the rebels. At the height of the revolution, the government lost effective control over 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces.

   In a small way, the fact that the fleeing army travelled through southern Iraq first, the Shia sector of Iraq, was one reason the uprising took the form of a sectarian rebellion.

  The uprising was partly fuelled by the disastrous defeat of Iraq's security forces and their forced retreat from Kuwait.
   People were convinced that the army would never be weaker or more demoralised.
 But crucially, the rebels were convinced that they had the backing of the US, who would come to their aid to help oust Saddam.

 The proximity of American forces was the other crucial factor. The coalition army could have rolled into Basra very easily, but it also would have meant the end of Saddam's regime.

 Baghdad, on the other hand, remained peaceful. Even the huge Shia suburb of Sadr City remained mostly quiet. That allowed Saddam's loyal forces to regroup.

   According to Human Rights Watch, "in their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of anyone who opposes them whether a rebel or a civilian by firing indiscriminately into the opposing areas; executing them on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them with or without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack those who try to flee the cities."

   Between 80,000 and 230,000 people died in the month-long 1991 Uprising. Nearly 10% of the population became refugees, and tens of thousands of Shias fled to Iran. Conflicts in the south continued until 1994.

   The legacy of the 1991 Uprising was to drive a wedge in Sunni and Shia relations that has only grown wider and spread to other muslim nations.
   President Bush's legacy now threatens to destabilize much of the Muslim world and destroy American influence in the region.

And then there was Bush

"Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]."
  - minutes taken by Rumsfeld aide, 9/11/01

"Well, the evidence is pretty conclusive that the Iraqis have indeed harbored terrorists."
  - Cheney on Meet the Press, 12/09/01

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
  - White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, 1/25/02

"Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don't hate America like liberals do,"
 -  Ann Coulter, February 2002

"Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out."
  - Bush, March 2002

"Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed…Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions…what happens the morning after?"
  - Downing memo, 3/14/02

Saddam "is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."
  - Cheney, 3/24/02

"Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance, the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will."
—Richard Perle, 7/11/02

"There are Al Qaeda in Iraq…There are."
  —Rumsfeld, 8/20/02

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends…and against us."
 —Cheney, 8/26/02

"The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."
  - Judith Miller, front page NYT, 9/9/02

Tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs…we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
  —Rice on CNN, 9/8/02

"We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."
—Cheney on Meet the Press, 9/8/02

"What's happening, of course, is we're getting additional information that, in fact, Hussein is reconstituting his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs."
 - Cheney tells Rush Limbaugh, 9/13/02

Saddam "has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, and mustard gas."
 - Rumsfeld tells Congress, 9/19/02

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."
  —Bush, 9/25/02

link between Iraq and Al Qaeda "accurate and not debatable."
 - Rumsfeld, 9/27/02

"The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more, and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given."
 - Bush State of the Union Address, 9/28/02

"[A] growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war. These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses…'Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books,' said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity."
 - Knight Ridder, 10/8/02

"Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."
 - Rumsfeld 11/14/02

"It's a slam-dunk case."
 - Tenet on WMD's, 12/21/02

$50-$60 billion
  - war cost estimates

"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American."
—Bush, 1/3/03

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
 - Bush, State of the Union, 1/28/03

"Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
 - Powell to UN, 2/5/03

"serious planning gaps for postconflict public security and humanitarian assistance…could result in serious human rights abuses, which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally."
 - secret State Department memo, 2/7/03

"what's so damning about the knee-jerk opposition of so many anti-war liberals -- it's based in animus, not logic. Almost every week I have to debate some opponent of the war on CNN or radio, and most of the time, I get the sense that their reasons for opposing Bush are echoed in McGrory's sentiments. They don't like war for vague, emotional reasons."
  - Jonah Goldberg, 2/7/03

"President Saddam Hussein's government, apparently emboldened by antiwar sentiment at the U.N. Security Council and in worldwide street protests, has not followed through on its promises of increased cooperation with U.N. arms inspectors, according to inspectors in Iraq."
  - actual news headline from Washington Post, February 19, 2003

"UN weapons inspectors are being seriously deceived…It reminds me of the way the Nazis hoodwinked Red Cross officials."
 —Perle, 2/23/03

"I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators…the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark."
 - Wolfowitz tells congress, 2/27/03

"We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq."
 —Bush,3/8/03

"We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."  Adds, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
 - Cheney on Meet the Press, 3/16/03

"As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports."
 - Washington Post, story on page A13, 3/18/03

"I want to rub it in the anti-war crowd's face so badly. I want to hear the protesters explain why it's a bad thing we released more than 100 children from an Iraqi gulag for underage political prisoners."
 - Jonah Goldberg, 4/11/03