Last week there was a lot of video of a slip by former US President George W. Bush who confused the invasion of Ukraine with that of Iraq, which began with his administration in 2003.
Speaking of poor democracy in Russia and the absence of real opposition, Bush said this led to “a single man’s decision to launch a brutal and wholly unwarranted invasion of Iraq.” He realized the mistake, corrected himself (“I mean, Ukraine”) and, to the amused laughter of the audience, added “seventy-five”, referring to his age and therefore to the fact that he may be a little ‘doting.
The US war in Iraq caused hundreds of thousands of victims (there is no agreement on the exact number, they were 151 thousand according to the New England Journal of Medicine, 288 thousand for the Iraq body count project, 650 thousand for the medical journal The Lancet) and it began on March 20, 2003 with the strategy shock and awe, strike and terrify: in the first forty-eight hours about three thousand bombs were dropped on Baghdad. Iraq had already been largely destroyed by the previous war, always fought by the United States and always by a Bush (the father), who in 1991 had left the country reduced to a “pre-industrial stage” and devastated by “almost apocalyptic bombings”, as a United Nations report of the time observed.
The pretext of the 2003 war was that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, had weapons of mass destruction and was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks. In the following years it was amply demonstrated that this was not true and that they were two lies. Today that war is almost forgotten, wrote Chip Gibbons of Jacobin, “despite the fact that it began less than twenty years ago and has profoundly affected the world we live in today.” Also for this reason the laughter at the slip of the man who unleashed it seemed, to many, out of place. ◆