Maybe we should remember that when Colin Powell told the big lie to the United Nations, he was not a soldier. He was America’s chief diplomat, our Secretary of State, possessed of the authority and dignity of one of the most respected civilian offices in the land.
It’s possible he had been misled on that day, but it is not possible that he remained ignorant for long. Historians tell us the Bush administration willfully led us to war using evidence they knew was manipulated and essentially false.
When the invasion happened, one of my eventual business partners was a 12-year-old-boy living with his family in Iraq. When he has a couple too many beers, he tells wrenching stories about houses blowing up all around him, about bombs falling in the streets, about watching some of his neighbors and cousins burn to death. He talks about the smell.
He’s never recovered from that trauma, though he’ll tell you he’s pleased to have been accepted as a refugee in the United States and to have made a life. He’s thrilled about that, but he’s not thrilled he needed that. His family were prosperous and happy in Iraq before the war, which he knows the war was for nothing. Pretty much every Iraqi knows that.
He also knows that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, rose from the ashes of a destroyed Iraq. He knows because ISIS killed more of his family than the bombs did. His family were Chaldean Christians. When ISIS took political power, they hunted down what was left of his family, then they executed them, sometimes in the street, sometimes in a jail cell.
He’ll tell you what every Iraqi will tell you. Life in Iraq today is infinitely worse for the Iraqi people than before we invaded. We didn’t just kill 200,000 of them, we destroyed their infrastructure and devastated a fairly stable (though authoritarian) political system. They have not even begun to recover.
And it was all based on lies, lies Colin Powell helped sell to the world.
I don’t want to dance on this grave or celebrate his death either. But I’m saddened and disturbed that we’re choosing to forget about our crimes in Iraq.
