Why are people still suggesting that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? Or that the invasion of Iraq was justified?
The sole truth is this: despite repeated attempts to create associative links, there were none. By all relevant legal and ethical standards, the US invasion of Iraq (2003–11) was deeply unjust.
Why? The so-called Just War Theory (JWT)—the most widely recognized framework in the Western tradition for judging military interventions, even if not uncontested in International Relations or postcolonial critique—establishes several criteria for legitimacy. The US-led invasion clearly fails these tests:
a) Just Cause: The principal justifications for invasion (“Operation Iraqi Freedom”)—alleged WMDs and terrorism links—were constructed on intelligence that was not merely faulty but, as the Downing Street Memo revealed, “fixed around the policy” (see also Chilcot Report, Senate Intelligence Committee Report). David Kay’s Iraq Survey Group confirmed there were no WMD stockpiles. The Bush administration’s strategic messaging (see Kathleen Hall Jamieson) employed associative priming to sustain public misperceptions, as documented by Nyhan & Reifler (“backfire effects”).
b) Proportionality: Civilian casualties exceeded 185,000 (Iraq Body Count, 2019), with The Lancet suggesting even higher figures. Extensive reporting from Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross documented the scale of infrastructural devastation, displacement, and the wider collapse of Iraqi civil society.
c) Last Resort: While some US and UN officials (e.g., Colin Powell, Hans Blix) advocated for further inspections, these diplomatic alternatives were overridden in favor of a pre-emptive strike. The legal scholar Christine Gray and UN records confirm that military action was launched prior to exhaustion of peaceful avenues, violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Dissenting voices within the State Department (see Wilkerson, Pillar) were marginalized.
d) Legitimate Authority: The lack of a UN Security Council mandate deprived the invasion of collective legitimacy (Goldsmith Memo; see also Annan’s explicit 2004 statement: “From our point of view... it was illegal”).
No one disputes that Saddam Hussein’s regime committed atrocities—from chemical attacks to mass repression—but these crimes were long known, inconsistently invoked, and ultimately played a minor role in the public rationale for intervention. Substantial documentation—including the Chilcot Report and John Mearsheimer’s analyses—points instead to a convergence of economic, geostrategic, and reputational motives (“liberal imperialism”).
On the aftermath: The narrative that the war “caused ISIS” might be an oversimplification, but the evidence is overwhelming that coalition policies—especially de-Baathification and military dissolution—created a power vacuum, fostered sectarianism, and radicalized both Sunni and Shi’a populations (see Jessica Stern, Charles Tripp, and Toby Dodge for the detailed genealogy). ISIS’s rise was accelerated by the disintegration of Iraqi governance and the unintended consequences of occupation. While Hussein’s continued rule might have produced its own pathologies, the specific conditions for ISIS’s emergence were undeniably enabled by the occupation’s structural failures.
Some IR scholars insist that the invasion reflected rational strategic interests (regional power balance, oil security, hegemonic demonstration post-9/11). Others point to “responsibility to protect” (R2P) as a theoretical humanitarian rationale, even if not genuinely invoked. However, the timing and pattern of intervention—selective, opportunistic, and strategically self-interested—undercut any such justifications (see Martha Finnemore, Mary Kaldor).
Still friends…
The wider lesson remains: robust democratic accountability depends on transparent motives, rigorous scrutiny, and resistance to the seductive simplifications of power politics. We must not allow policy elites to systematically exploit public cognitive biases—instrumentalizing narrative, correlation, and causation to manufacture consent for unjust military interventions. In a world where justice too often becomes a pawn on the chessboard of power, it is our collective duty to demand that the rules of the game be upheld—an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
#JustWar #HistoryMatters #PowerPolitics #IraqInvasion #LeadershipEthics
(Published Originally: 22.06.2023)