Saddam Hussein and his sons
must leave Iraq within 48 hours.
These are Arabs who are gonna welcome us as liberators.
Who will govern Iraq when Saddam Hussein is removed?
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was supposed to be easy.
The most powerful military in world history would go in,
kill the bad guys and transform Iraq into a democratic, pro-American oasis.
But the Iraq War blew up in America's face.
Stuff happens.
And it changed both countries.
It changed the entire Middle East.
In fact, it changed much of our world forever.
- A million Iraqis are dead because you lied.
Should we start?
Within weeks of the Sept. 11th attacks,
the United States had occupied Afghanistan,
where Al Qaeda was based at the time,
and removed the ruling Taliban from power.
But very quickly after, the George W. Bush administration began
selling another war. It wanted to invade Iraq.
There was no link between 9/11 and Iraq.
So the Bush administration began manufacturing justifications.
Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda.
There are Al Qaeda in a number of locations in Iraq.
Iraqis needed saving from their dictator.
- Saddam Hussein's violations of human rights.
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
But those weapons of mass destruction were never found.
Millions of people knew invading Iraq was wrong.
20 years on, they've been proven right
time and time again. The invasion of Iraq
resulted in death, destruction and massive blowback.
And it gave us these guys.
There's something President George W. Bush
said in 2007, four years into the invasion of Iraq,
that ironically sums up how badly the U.S.
messed up.
And there's another part of this clip that we'll be coming back to a little later,
so pay attention here.
Imagine Iraq where Al Qaeda
has established sanctuaries
to safely plot future attacks on targets all over the world.
It's ironic because, by the time Bush said this, Al Qaeda had established
itself in Iraq, even though the group wasn't there before the U.S. invaded.
As one of the justifications for war, Bush and his officials insisted
to an American public still reeling from 9/11 that Al Qaeda and Iraq were linked.
The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam
and Al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Like pretty much all of the Bush administration's justifications for this war,
this was a lie.
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden were both Arab men
who were once allies of the United States,
but they didn't have much else in common.
In fact, Al Qaeda showed up in Iraq only after the U.S.
invaded the country, dismantled the Iraqi army and security forces,
and created a security vacuum
that allowed all sorts of foreign fighters and violent groups to enter,
tapping into anger at the U.S.
for invading a Muslim country,
as well as the disgust at scandals like the torture at Abu Ghraib,
Al Qaeda was able to recruit and grow into something even more menacing.
The invasion of Iraq propelled the group from a small, isolated organization
into a genuinely global network that eventually became
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or Iraq and the Levant,
as President Obama would say.
ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq
that grew out of our invasion,
which is an example of unintended consequences.
Those unintended consequences included Al Qaeda sparking
a sectarian civil war in Iraq by bombing some of the holiest sites in Shia Islam.
They included hundreds of suicide and car bombings that killed thousands of Iraqis.
And they included ISIS at one point controlling not just 40% of Iraq,
but about a third of neighboring Syria as well.
During the mid-2010s, the group was constantly in the headlines,
as it killed thousands and thousands of people,
not just in Iraq and Syria, but also in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Bangladesh, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, France, Turkey, Belgium, Indonesia, Russia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Germany, Somalia, the UK,
Iran, the Philippines, Spain, Algeria, the United States, Nigeria, Sri Lanka.
ISIS is no longer as powerful as it was, but it took years of a major U.S.-led
military operation that cost thousands more civilian lives,
all to solve a problem created by the U.S.
occupying Iraq in the first place.
OK, remember that George W. Bush quote from a few minutes ago.
This time, I'm going to play the first part of that soundbite as well.
For all those who ask whether the fight in Iraq is worth it,
imagine an Iraq
where militia groups backed by Iran control large parts of the country.
This is going to be a bit of a running theme here because, again, the U.S.
ended up causing the exact things it said it was invading Iraq to prevent.
One of its goals in invading Iraq was to make the entire region
friendlier to American interests.
Instead, the war helped strengthen its biggest adversary there.
Iran and the United States don't seem to ever agree on much.
But in 2003, Saddam Hussein was a common enemy.
Iranians hated him because in 1980, he had launched a war against them
that lasted eight years and left half a million people dead.
It was a brutal war.
Iraq used poison gas against Iranian soldiers,
and the U.S. helped prolong the fighting by sending weapons to both countries.
Although most of its support went to one side.
So even as Iran was probably glad to see the end of Saddam,
the U.S. was strongly hinting that Iran could be next.
Here's George W. Bush talking about Iran, Iraq and North Korea,
a few months before invading Iraq.
States like these, and their terrorist
allies, constitute an axis of evil,
arming to threaten the peace of the world.
And all nations should know America will do what is necessary
to ensure our nation's security.
But something else happened.
Iran, not the U.S., ended up benefiting the most from the invasion of Iraq.
In less than two years, the U.S. had ended
the rule of Iran's enemies on both its eastern and western borders.
Iran and the Taliban had bad blood between them too.
Before the U.S. invasion, Iraq was a buffer against Iran's presence in the Arab world.
But after the invasion, Iraq became a foothold
for Iranian influence to spread in neighboring countries.
For example, Iran was able to build supply lines across Iraq to Syria,
where Iranian-backed groups fought alongside Syrian
dictator Bashar al Assad in that country's war.
During the 1980s and '90s, Iran had cultivated
and protected Iraqis who opposed Saddam's rule.
And it was these Iranian-backed parties that dominated Iraqi politics
after Saddam was gone.
Today, posters of Iranian leaders hang all over Iraqi cities,
Iranian commerce dominates the Iraqi market, and Iraq's security forces include
powerful militias that are trained, supported and sometimes even led by Iranians.
It was these militias that helped defeat ISIS in Iraq.
They fought on the ground with support from the U.S.
Air Force in the sky.
Still, the U.S. and Iran are adversaries.
But the possibility of the U.S.
invading Iran the way it did Iraq, that's basically gone from next on the list
to effectively zero, because the invasion of Iraq
very quickly changed America itself and its commitment to these kinds of wars.
Here's how. It might seem odd now, but the war was actually
very popular with Americans at first.
[Chanting] USA! USA!
That didn't last long.
Almost everything that had been used to justify the war
turned out to be a lie, including how quick it was supposed to be.
Over 4,000 American soldiers were killed,
and it took the U.S.
more than eight years to withdraw from Iraq without much to show for it,
other than, as we’ve seen,
the strengthening of Iran and the spread of ISIS.
Turns out the U.S.
wasn't able to impose its will on another country by force.
Bush, who at one point had a 90% approval rating, ended his presidency
with just 22% of Americans approving of him. After Bush,
the next two presidents both insisted they'd always opposed the war,
unlike the political establishments in both parties who had backed it.
Many of us looking at the evidence ahead of time
understood that there was not an imminent threat.
Bottom line, there were no weapons of mass destruction.
They said there are weapons of mass destruction.
I was against the war when it started.
But the U.S. war machine didn't stop after Iraq.
It adapted.
Today, you won't hear many American politicians talk
about Bush-style goals like “nation-building” or “regime change.”
Instead, U.S. military power
is deployed in small doses all over the world for assassinations
or other special forces missions. Drones,
missiles, airstrikes, all these let the U.S.
hit targets from thousands of miles away without American troops being in harm's way.
That's made the drone program much more popular than the Iraq War.
But drone warfare isn't clean.
These strikes have killed thousands of civilians, with drone
pilots often unable to tell exactly who they're targeting.
And since the drone program is directly under the president's control,
it's given American presidents the power to execute people all over the world,
including, in several cases, American citizens.
The Iraq War was always going to be a disaster on so many levels.
It was also an illegal war.
It's not in conformity with the UN
charter, from my point of view and
from the charter point of view. It was illegal.
But the U.S. insisted it was above such rules
and that it had a right to preemptively attack whoever it wanted.
Most of the world refused to go along.
When we went in,
there were three countries: Great Britain, Australia and the United States.
That's not a grand coalition. We can do better.
30 seconds.
Well actually, he forgot Poland.
The problem with acting like you're above the law is that it
gives others an excuse to break the rules as well.
Listen to Bernie Sanders, at the time, one of the only people in Congress
opposing the war,
warning of those consequences.
If President Bush believes that the U.S. can go to war at any time against any nation,
what moral or legal obligation can our government raise
if another country chose to do the same thing?
In the years since, we've seen that playing out
all over the world, governments breaking international law
and committing war crimes with impunity, whether they're cracking down on dissent,
stealing territory or invading other countries.
But maybe the guy at the heart of it all saw a link between what he set in motion
in Iraq in 2003 and Russia invading Ukraine in 2022.
The decision of one man
to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq,
I mean, of Ukraine.
Iraq, too.
Anyway.
Conservative estimates say that around 300,000
people were killed because of America's decision to illegally invade Iraq,
although the real number is probably much higher.
In Iraq today, sectarianism is rife.
The economy is weak.
Poverty is widespread.
Basic services are sporadic.
And the security situation is, in many places, still dangerous.
Iraqis have always paid the highest price for the U.S. decision to invade their country.
But the people who pushed for that war, they were never held accountable.