On March 20 the Iraq war turns three years old. On such a milestone it makes sense to go back and reminisce: to remember the days of near-universal support for the U.S. around the world during the days immediately following September 11, 2001; to look back with a fond smile at some of the ridiculous notions advanced by people on both ends of the political spectrum; and finally, to try to figure out how this whole SNAFU started in the first place.

The neo-conservative mad-on for Iraq naturally has its roots in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, with many people (of many political stripes) thinking George Bush Sr. should have pressed on into Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein. Ironically then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said they “did not want to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq,” and Bush himself said he did not want to be “an occupying power – America in an Arab land – with no allies at our side.” Iraq was ordered to disarm after the war, which it did; the weapons inspectors of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) saw to that. Nonetheless President Bill Clinton didn’t think Saddam was cooperating and so had the inspectors removed in 1998 so he could fire some cruise missiles into Baghdad; after that Saddam wasn’t too keen on letting the inspectors in.

During this time the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think-tank, was formed in 1997 with the intention of spreading American global leadership. Using Iraq as the first step to a permanent Middle Eastern presence was at the top of its list. They knew the American people would need a push, though, something to get them eager to go back into the desert.

September 11 proved to be just what they were hoping for. Many of PNAC’s founding members (Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, to name a couple) were now on board the George Bush Jr. administration, and before the dust had even settled around Ground Zero, concerted efforts to find anything that could possibly link Saddam Hussein to the deaths of 3,000 Americans were enacted. A controversial British government document from July 2003 known as the Downing Street Memo was uncovered, with the sentence “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” suggesting (if not outright implicating) that the administration was cherry-picking intelligence to suit its needs.

The Bush administration made its case for war with Iraq, claiming Iraq had re-instituted its production of Weapons of Mass Destruction™ and was a threat to the United States. The inspectors returned and were making decent progress, when on March 17 Bush decided things were not proceeding fast enough and that, unless Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay left Iraq in 48 hours there would be dire consequences. Well, they didn’t, and there were.

Over time the rationale for invading Iraq has been rather amorphous; the threat of Saddam Hussein was later shown to be greatly exaggerated (to put it lightly). Since the end of the first Gulf War the U.S. and Britain had been enforcing No-Fly Zones and economic sanctions on Iraq, taking out military targets and in general lowering the standard of living. While the blame for the thousands of deaths attributed to the sanctions rests with Saddam and his manipulation of the U.N. Oil for Food program, we still bear responsibility in that we knew that these sanctions were not helping and yet continued to enforce them.

By 2003 Saddam was barely a threat to his neighbors, much less us. Even before we invaded the country we stepped up the aerial bombings, in effect breaking our opponent’s legs before challenging him to a race. We have yet to find any WMDs in Iraq and gave up looking along time ago.

An equally ludicrous scare tactic was the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Let’s get something straight: Osama is an Islamic Fundamentalist. He’s OGI (Original Gangster Islam). Saddam’s regime was secular, only paying lip service to Islam to try to win favor among his people. He was a poser. Osama thought and still thinks Saddam was/is an infidel with Muslim blood on his hands, which he does/is. The two of them working together is about as likely as Pat Robertson enlisting Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey to go back in time and fight Muhammad.

So once fear-mongering fell through, the Bush administration shifted its focus onto Saddam’s egregious human rights violations, of which there are many. Here’s the problem, though: most of them were committed back in the 1980s when he was on our side! We didn’t care what happened to the Kurds as long as he prevented the spread of theocratic Iran. Many of Bush’s cabinet members (like Rumsfeld) were part of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations and were complicit in many of the deaths during that time, especially in regards to the gassing of the Kurdish village of Halabja. While these people were willing to cite these events as reasons for war, they would not acknowledge, much less apologize for, their inaction when these things were actually happening.

Such moralizing also rang hollow in light of the fact that, while Saddam hadn’t actively been killed people en masse for over a decade, there was (and still are) mass murder going on in plenty of other places around the world; during the beginning of the war massacres were going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example. So who’s to say which group of oppressed citizens gets first priority? Shouldn’t it be the people who are actively in danger? As of March 30, 2005, the United Nations estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties as a result of the war. Now we talk a good game about smart bombs and minimizing ‘collateral damage,’ and how evil the 9/11 terrorists were for targeting our civilians. But who’s worse: the people who target non-combatants and kill 3,000 of them, or the ones who don’t target them but end up killing (or being directly or irresponsible for the deaths of) 100,000? Just a thought.

Eventually they settled on democratizing the Middle East (and someday, the world) as their reasoning. A lot of the recent attention on Iraq has been in regards to its burgeoning democracy, if you can call it that. Sure there have been parliamentary elections, and a constitutional referendum; there have been inspiring, feel-good stories about Iraqis braving the threats of violence to vote for their country’s future and pictures of people with inky fingers to prove it. This has yet to pay off, however; Iraq has not formed a parliament and the constitution (drafted by Shiites with the tacit support of Iran) lists Islamic Sharia law as a fundamental part of the justice system. Meanwhile, results around the rest of the world have been mixed: we’ve had various democratic revolutions around the world such as the peaceful “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, but then we’ve also had the Palestinian parliamentary elections in which the terrorist group Hamas (whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel) won a majority of seats. Democracy can be a double-edged sword; some people may use it to behead themselves (and others).

In spite of flimsy evidence and international opposition, Congress (including most of the so-called ‘opposition party,’ the Democrats) went along with the rush to war, and we went ahead and invaded Iraq on March 20. We came, we saw, we kicked ass. Anti-war ‘doves’ (including me) had warned in the early days of the war of the possibility of massive U.S. casualties; if Saddam had WMDs, what was to stop him from using them? He already knew we were going for his jugular and had nothing to lose. He didn’t use any non-conventional weaponry, though, so on that count we were wrong, but only because the ‘hawks’ were wrong on the WMD assertion. Anti-war activists also warned of a brutal struggle against the Iraqi army and, more specifically, the Republican Guard. Well, we all know how that turned out: Baghdad fell in three weeks. Just to drive the point home the U.S. military pulled down the statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s main square on April 9, directly opposite the Palestine Hotel, where most of the international media was staying and had actually been shot at the day before. Just because the Saddam regime fell easily doesn’t mean we were wrong, though; many of the Iraqi soldiers went underground and joined the insurgency that was just beginning to brew.

So where are we now? The American presence there is extremely unpopular, both home and abroad. Our go-it-alone attitude, combined with the enduring images from Abu Ghraib (which has only just recently been closed) and other symbols of contempt for international law (Guantanamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition), have squandered the almost-universal sympathy we received after September 11. The anti-war demonstrations held before the war began were the largest the world has ever seen, and public opinion is still much against us.

The doctrine of pre-emptive invasion has for now been pushed to the side, but Bush still likes to boast of its benefits; in late 2003 Libya’s leader Muammer Gadaffi gave up the country’s pursuit of WMDs, and Bush credits the Iraq-sabre rattling for the development. While such a claim is passable (albeit barely; Libya had first made the offer back in 1999 for economic reasons), in the meantime Iran has stepped up its nuclear production and North Korea, which actually has nuclear weapons, has dropped off of everybody’s radar. They claim they are producing weapons only to deter U.S. attacks. Once you open the Pandora’s Box of pre-emptive strikes, there’s no going back. Ever since Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier photo-op the Iraqi insurgency, in spite of Dick Cheney’s relatively recent claim that it was in its “last throes,” has continued to cause trouble and grow more sophisticated in its methods, using more concentrated blast charges and infrared lasers. As of March 14, 2006 2,303 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action and as of February 7, 16,653 have been wounded. Insurgent attacks have become so commonplace that in Baghdad especially that on August 31, 2005 nearly a thousand journeying pilgrims died as a result of a bridge collapsing; during the crossing someone shouted that a suicide bomber was among them, and they all began to stampede.

The only thing the Iraqis may hate more than us is each other. Ethnic and sectarian tensions between the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds have always existed, but have sharply escalated in recent weeks. Since a Shiite mosque was bombed on February 22, several hundred people, both Shiite and Sunni, have been killed in counterattacks and counter-counterattacks. The incident is the closest the country has come to civil war. Finally the there is the deposed leader, Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration has cited his capture as an accomplishment of the Iraq war, but between Saddam’s courtroom theatrics and the slowly-rising body count of his defense team, his trial has by now long since become a parody of itself.

We were told the war couldn’t possibly last more than a few months. It has. We were also told it would not cost much more $50 million. You’d better believe it has! So what are we to do when the Bush administration continues to ask for more money (at the expense of domestic programs like the refurbishing of the levees in New Orleans)? Say ‘no’ and leave the soldiers out to dry? Say ‘yes’ and let the Pentagon under-supply them anyway? I don’t know. All I know is this baby was conceived by an administration with a boner for war, and a passive Congress that was either too in love, too stupid, or too afraid to say ‘no.’ Judging by our current situation it would have saved us a lot of trouble if the whole endeavor had been aborted long before its March 20 date of birth.