The 20th anniversary of the occupation of Iraq, the invasion of Iraq, or the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Baath regime passes. These days, the region is in a state of instability, chaos, and political vacuum, all of which are repercussions of that American-British occupation of Iraq in 2003.
We are an Arab generation that lived through setbacks, defeats, setbacks, and the siege of Beirut, and we ended our sad journey by invading Iraq live, televised from the depth of the tragedy.
I remember the stormy session of the Security Council in which America tried to obtain a resolution under Chapter VII to use force against Iraq and the sight of its Secretary of State Colin Powell lifting a plastic “tube” as evidence of Iraq’s biological weapons, as Washington and its support London claimed. The resolution did not pass in the Council, but America passed its war and invasion Iraq without him under the pretext that Saddam's regime threatens its national security in clear evidence of its political thuggery and the unipolar nature of the international system after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the nineties of that century.
Missiles rained down from the sea and from hundreds of planes pouring out their wrath on the exhausted Iraq under the pretext of inspecting weapons of mass destruction that the regime was said to be developing, which made the Iraqi people and their children in particular pay the price of the unjust siege, just as diseases and epidemics spread in a rich oil country. The ruling class did not suffer during that dark period. The war and the invasion did not take weeks, and the regime fell after a single fierce battle at Baghdad airport, in which the invading forces used internationally prohibited weapons after a strong confrontation with the elite forces and the Republican Guard. The scenes of American tanks roaming Baghdad are fresh in the memory, followed by the masses climbing the statue of President Saddam in Paradise Square to topple it. And when they were unable to do so, a group of the US Navy advanced and placed the American flag on the head of the statue and knocked it to the ground in a symbolic image of the end of a political, cultural and religious stage in modern Iraq.
In an interview a few days ago with the Iraqi Minister of Trade during the days of the fall of Baghdad, Mahmoud Al-Rawi with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper, he talks in precise details about those difficult moments he lived through and his asylum in Syria, where he had good relations with the Syrian leadership, which welcomed him for a very short period and handed him over days later to American forces that were She is waiting for his arrival at the Iraqi border, and he says that after completing the interrogation with him for a long time, the interrogator asked, "Why are you here?" The American interrogator told him, "We came to build democracy, and we will withdraw after completing that." I replied: You will not establish a real democracy in Iraq, nor will you withdraw from it. Iraq will be ruled by both the religious institution and the tribal institution, and Iraq, a safe country, will turn into a country where extremism arises.
This answer from the narrator sums up what Iraq went through in terms of sectarian wars and sects, and it became a fertile ground for terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, and Iraq and the region paid the price in terms of bombings and hateful sectarian fighting. The subsequent phase of the Arab Spring is related to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
An Iraq reconciled with itself and its social spectra, a developmental and political process, and security stability is what we wish for this country dear to us.
The mind of the mind