What is the issue?
- The present day Iraq largely bears the impact of US-led invasion of it in 2003.
- The humanitarian catastrophe that Iraq is witnessing is a reminder to bring before law those responsible for this.
What was the 2003 event?
- The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 marks an important turning point in Iraq's history.
- The events brought an end to Ba’ath party’s decades-long reign and Saddam Hussein's dictatorial administration.
- US attacked Iraq citing mainly two reasons -
- Saddam administration possessed weapons of mass destruction
- the administration had ties with al-Qaeda
What are the contentions?
- Support - The U.S. did not have a UN mandate to use force against Iraq.
- Repeated attempts by the George Bush administration to get Security Council approval failed.
- But the U.S. went ahead with forming an international coalition that included the U.K.
- Claims - The war notably had no legitimate basis and was founded on misleading intelligence information.
- The reasons cited were not convincing and proved to be false.
- Evidently, the occupying troops failed to find any weapon of mass destruction in Iraq.
- Moreover, al-Qaeda in Iraq was actually founded after the US invasion.
What impact has the war left?
- Fifteen years on, Iraq is still fighting the horrible effects of the destructive war.
- People - The war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displaced millions.
- The U.S. first disbanded the Iraqi military, leaving tens of thousands of soldiers jobless overnight.
- This posed a huge security threat.
- Power - There was no coherent strategy to stabilise post-Saddam Iraq.
- There were no plans to address the sectarian power struggle to fill the vacuum created.
- Destroying the state apparatus led a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country of Iraq into utter chaos.
- Terrorism - In this chaos, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi found the fertile ground to build his terrorist empire.
- This, after his death, came under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
- He transformed itself into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the IS of today.
- In effect, the war got rid of a dictator, but left the country in a worse and much more dangerous situation.
- Despite a functional government in Iraq, humanitarian and political tragedies are still unfolding.
- Deepening sectarian and ethnic fault lines are evident.
What does it call for?
- Those responsible for the present chaos and disruption in Iraq have not been brought before the legal system.
- No action has been taken even based on the U.K.’s Chilcot report, which took apart the arguments used to justify the war.
- The present situations call for correcting the grave failure of the international system.
Source: The Hindu
