US Invasion of Iraq and After Effects.

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 -

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