#Iraq War

[uss-edsall]

Iraq was never from the sky what cable news tried to convince us it was on the ground. On the supposedly bloodiest day of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I flew over Baghdad at 200 feet, looking down into the streets. I saw nothing more than people going to market, children playing, people on cell phones, and a shepherd herding his goats through the city. At the end of a long, quiet day, I returned to Balad Air Base to catch cable news reporting bloody battles erupting in the streets of Baghdad, and flashing to scenes of dusty desert warfare. They never showed the plush, green side of Iraq’s agricultural belt, or excited children running into the meadow waiting for another candy drop from American helicopters, or a solitary shepherd in the middle of a peaceful plain with his flock. They preferred to show brown dirt, American troops in body armor and kevlar, the aftermath of a roadside bomb, and some added footage of an old firefight. I found myself thinking, ‘Wait a minute; I flew over that spot all day at 200 feet. I didn’t see anything!’ There were times when I thought maybe the Army had paid the media to glorify what happened day by day, but the media needed no help with that. There was already enough ambiguity about why we were in Iraq.

War & Coffee: Confessions of an American Blackhawk Pilot in Afghanistan, by Joshua Havill

[sayruq]

Don't forget that by clicking the link every dat, you can help Palestinians

[mysharona1987]

I do maintain that partly why Israel is losing the PR war is that they can’t stop the IDF acting like fucking idiot monsters on instagram and tiktok.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if social media had been a thing during the Iraq war.

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

Today marks 14 years since Wikileaks released the 'Collateral Murder' tape displaying American targeting of civilians & healthcare workers in Iraq. This chilling pattern of atrocity continues to this day, as evident from recent events, through the genocidal actions of America's 51st state, Israel.

[mapsontheweb]

Today is the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. This map shows the contrast between civilian and US/Coalition casualties in Baghdad, with each dot's size correlating with the number of casualties reported on a given day

[deadpresidents]

The reasons Mr. Hussein failed to clarify that he had no weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to 2003 are embedded in his tragic, decades-long conflict with Washington: his furtive, mistrustful collaboration with the C.I.A. during the 1980s; the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991; the U.N.-backed struggle over Iraqi disarmament that followed; and the climactic confrontation after Sept. 11. Shortly after the Gulf War, he secretly ordered the destruction of his chemical and biological arms, as Washington and the United Nations had demanded. He hoped this action would allow Iraq to pass disarmament inspections, but he covered up what he had done and lied repeatedly to inspectors. He did not tell the truth to his own generals, fearing that he might invite internal or external attacks. His decision to comply with international demands but to lie about it to U.N. inspectors defied Western logic. But Mr. Hussein would not submit to public humiliation, not least because he thought it wouldn’t work. “One of the mistakes some people make is that when the enemy has decided to hurt you, you believe there is a chance to decrease the harm by acting in a certain way,” he told a colleague. In fact, he said, “The harm won’t be less.” Mr. Hussein believed the C.I.A. was all but omniscient, and so, particularly after Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush accused him of hiding weapons of mass destruction, he assumed that the agency already knew that he had no dangerous weapons and that the accusations were just a pretense to invade. A C.I.A. capable of making an analytical mistake on the scale of its miss about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was not part of his worldview.

--Steve Coll, "Why Authoritarians Like Saddam Hussein Confound U.S. Presidents," New York Times, Feb. 28, 2024.

[emptyportrait]

never forget

[thenib]

Jen Sorensen.

[wallisninety-six]

I’m just gonna say it, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rightfully being condemned, is barbaric & beyond stupid, and left them with heavy sanctions- The US deserves that exact same treatment and should have been the most sanctioned country in the world after they invaded Iraq 20 years ago

1 million Iraqis dead- family, friends, children, and community gone, a whole region of the world destabilized, infrastructure destroyed, abuse of women and children, and extensive torture & torture networks and black sites that defy humanity. All from an *illegal* war, and it’s even worse when you look at all the other places we invaded- and the US received *zero* consequences for what it’s done. It’s only fair, right?

[eccedeus]

🎉🎉Happy 15th Anniversary of the Bush Shoe Throwing Incident!!! 🎉🎉

[gazanarchive]

Twenty years ago on this day, the US-led ground invasion of Iraq began. Death and destruction quickly became a common sight in the country. The war caused the deaths of more than 200,000 Iraqi. Chaos and instability gripped the whole region as a result of this occupation.

Source

[sayruq]

The United States is responsible for the deaths of millions just this century so Kirby is right but its not something you'd expect a government spokesperson to admit

[mysharona1987]

[dev-solovey]

Reading up on the history of American Idiot (album) and realizing exactly how revolutionary it was and I just have to yell about it for a hot second

So, before they started working on American Idiot, the band was having problems and they were thinking they were going to break up. But for a couple of reasons, they switched directions, most notably because they all felt strongly about the Iraq War and how it was manufactured by greed and warmongering from the Bush administration, which was amplified by the news media. I read a quote from Billie Joe Armstrong where he talked about how the news media was becoming "more of a reality show" than it was news, and he couldn't have been more right. In fact, that problem got worse, and now we're living in an era of rampant misinformation where everything is politicized to a point where just supporting human rights for marginalized people is considered controversial. The song American Idiot came out in 2004, and when Donald Trump first visited the UK at the beginning of his presidency, it was the top played song on every UK radio station, 12 years after it was released. Most things would be culturally irrelevant at that point.

When creating the album American Idiot, a lot of thought went into it - they had a very specific message in mind, and their goal was to send that message to youth. This is because they realized at some point that their fanbase was a bunch of teenagers, and even though they hadn't necessarily intended it that way, they suddenly had a platform with the youth of America and they decided they ought to do something good with it. The drummer, Tré Cool, said something along the lines of "I've never really liked the idea of preaching to kids, but I realized we don't really have a choice at this point." And I love that so much because like, so many people who get rich and famous just become completely out of touch, and when they get a platform, it's very easy to exploit that platform, influence them with terrible ideas, or encourage them to act in terrible ways for self-serving reasons (ex: JK Rowling, Andrew Tate, Dream, Logan Paul, Onision, etc etc). Green Day refused to allow themselves to get to that point. They know the platform they had gave them power and they made an active choice early on to be responsible with it. And a lot of that moral code comes from the fact that they came up in the DIY punk scene in Oakland, which held its members to a very high standard of ethics, a code that they still follow even after they were disowned by that scene when they signed on with a major record label in 1994.

The song American Idiot has a message of "this mass media hysteria is manufactured bullshit, don't fall for it," and it is not subtle about that message. It punches you right in the face. I remember being 12 years old and listening to it and thinking, "yeah, I don't want to be an American idiot." And now, at the age of 28, I am a staunch leftist who is firmly against the atrocities the US government commits, and I feel strongly about stopping misinformation. So I can say with absolute certainty that they succeeded.

I also get like, really upset when people say that American Idiot is the album where they sold out, because that's objectively not true, both for the reasons I've provided above, and also because of the song Wake Me Up When September Ends. Not a lot of people know the story behind this song, but it's actually a song that Billie Joe wrote about the experience of his dad dying of cancer when he was 10 years old. The story, as he tells it, is that when he came home from school, his mom gave him the news, and being (understandably!) upset, started crying, ran to his room and slammed the door. When she knocked on the door to try and talk to him, he shouted "wake me up when September ends!!" in response. It took him decades to be able to write this song, and it shows because it's the perfect grief song, having been played at benefits for 9/11, hurricane Katrina, and so on. The first time I heard that song it reduced me to tears, because you can hear the intense sadness in it. A "sellout" would never write a song like that!! (Side note: maybe stop tweeting at Green Day to wake up every October 1st, it's super tone deaf given the subject matter,,,)

Anyway, I think I'm done being autistic about Green Day (that's a lie, they'll forever be my special interest), so TL;DR:

Thank you, Green Day, for creating a generation of leftists who aren't about the bullshit

[terracottahearted]

Damon Albarn of Blur/Gorillaz // Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack - The Independent February 2003

[mapsontheweb]

Governments' position on the Iraq War prior to the invasion that started 21 years ago today.