This week marks ten years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

An anti-war protest in Dallas in 2003, one of many that took place across the country and worldwide. (Photo: Dean Terry)The Iraq war, which most today in the U.S. see as a mistake, has cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, billions of which were "wasted."

But the devastation for the people of Iraq is incalculable: hundreds of thousands have been killed, over a million remain refugees and U.S. weapons used in the country, such as depleted uranium, have left a haunting legacy far past the drawdown of U.S. troops.

While many mark March 19, 2003 as the day the U.S.-led invasion of the country began, crippling sanctions against Iraq began more than a decade before. And while the George W. Bush administration launched the war, it found willing partners in the Democratic party and corporate media. Below are some voices offering perspective on the anniversary and lead-up to the invasion:

On the invasion:

Arundhati Roy, writer and global justice activist, speaking on Democracy Now! Monday:

When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence, because there isn’t any. All of it is based on insinuation or to suggestion and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "free press," that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests. Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

Hans Blix, head of U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion, writing "Iraq War was a terrible mistake and violation of U.N. charter" in CNN on Monday:

The war aimed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but there weren't any.
The war aimed to eliminate al Qaeda in Iraq, but the terrorist group didn't exist in the country until after the invasion. [...]
The Bush administration certainly wanted to go to war, and it advanced eradication of weapons of mass destruction as the main reason. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has since explained, it was the only rationale that was acceptable to all parts of the U.S. administration.
U.N. inspectors were asked to search for, report and destroy real weapons. As we found no weapons and no evidence supporting the suspicions, we reported this. But U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield dismissed our reports with one of his wittier retorts: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Rumsfeld's logic was correct, I believe, but it was no excuse for the American and British governments to mislead themselves and the world, as they did, by giving credit to fake evidence or assuming that if weapons items were "unaccounted for" that they must exist. They did not exist.

Christian Parenti, investigative journalist, giving author Belen Fernandez his response to John Bolton's admission that the Iraq invasion "was never about making life better for Iraqis, but about ensuring a safer world for America and its allies."

That sort of honesty, spoken like a true war criminal, would be refreshing if it didn't reveal such an appalling disregard for the value of human life and happiness. The US has destroyed Iraq and in doing so broken the hearts and ruined the lives of millions of people… That sort of psychopathic lack of empathy belies a deep bigotry towards other cultures and a general alienation from the life of our species.

A group of progressives including Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies andLeslie Cagan of United for Peace and Justice write Monday

The US war against Iraq was illegal and illegitimate. It violated the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and a whole host of international laws and treaties. It violated US laws and our Constitution with impunity. And it was all based on lies: about non-existent links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, about never-were ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, about Iraq’s invisible weapons of mass destruction and about Baghdad’s supposed nuclear program, with derivative lies about uranium yellowcake from Niger and aluminum rods from China. There were lies about US troops being welcomed in the streets with sweets and flowers, and lies about thousands of jubilant Iraqis spontaneously tearing down the statue of a hated dictator.
And then there was the lie that the US could send hundreds of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars worth of weapons across the world to wage war on the cheap. We didn’t have to raise taxes to pay the almost one trillion dollars the Iraq war has cost so far, we could go shopping instead.

Widespread blame

Sam Husseini, director for the Institute for Public Accuracy, in a statement Monday:

It’s common to simply blame Bush and Cheney for the Iraq war, but it’s not accurate. Many voted for or otherwise backed the Iraq war — including Obama’s entire foreign policy team from Kerry to Hagel; from Clinton to Rice toBiden. Even among those who voted against the war, many facilitated it, likePelosi, who claimed during the buildup to the Iraq invasion that ‘there was no question Iraq had chemical and biological agents.’ None of these individuals have ever seriously come clean about their conduct during this critical period (and I’ve questioned most of them) — so there’s never been a moment of reckoning for the greatest foreign policy disaster of this generation. The elevation of Democrats who did not seriously question the war likely facilitated Bush and Cheney never being held accountable for their conduct.

2003 or 1991?

Raed Jarrar, Communications Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, speaking on Up with Chris on Sunday:

Unlike the perception that we have in the U.S. that the war started in 2003, the war started in 1991 and Iraq was pretty much destroyed by 2003. ... When the 2003 invasion happened, it came on the top of another 13 years of destruction, very destructive sanctions and semi-daily bombing campaigns.

(See more from the segment "Iraqis still face violence, corruption as they rebuild" here andhere.)

Iraq now

Norman Solomon, author, co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, writing in Common Dreams:

Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, don’t expect the vast numbers of media hotshots and U.S. officials who propelled that catastrophe to utter a word of regret. Many are busy with another project: assisting the push for war on Iran.

Raed Jarrar:

Millions of Iraqis have been killed, injured or displaced. One of the most developed countries in the region at the time of the invasion, Iraq now is among the worst in terms of infrastructure and public services. Baghdad ranks lowest in the quality of life of any city in the world, according to a recent global survey from the consultant group Mercer. Moreover, the Iraqi national identity has been replaced by ethnic and sectarian affiliations.

Danny Muller, formerly of Iraq Peace Team and Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign that broke US law to resist economic sanctions and prevent further warfare in Iraq, stated Monday:

The Iraqi people, especially children, have suffered and been brutalized by US troops, mercenaries and multinational corporations to such an extreme extent that a decade later, the US has managed to make a brutal dictator look tepid compared to the level of horror that the US has inflicted on civilians.
Epidemics of cholera after the 2003 massacre, to take one example, speak volumes to the level of destruction that the US caused to the water, sanitation and electrical grids in 1991 and 2003—those basic systems that provide for the public's health have still not been repaired. The ensuing corruption, inefficiency and outright theft still leave most Iraqis without basic access to the most human of needs.
This war lives on in the blood of US soldiers, in the birth defects of stillborn Iraqi infants, in the skyrocketing cases of cancer and toxicity countrywide. The US people saw an entire country of 25 million Iraqis as disposable and less than human. America seems to have developed the collective memory and historical consciousness of a dead moth, but what we have done is downright unforgettable and unforgivable. And as much as we choose to pretend otherwise, most of us know what we did in Iraq: our money, our weapons, our boys in uniform, were sent to kill kids for lies and greed. It's as simple and horrific as that.

Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, it is astonishing in a nation dedicated to the rule of law that every aspect of the war has been debated except the relevant law.

To be sure, a vast array of articles, books and films have documented how pre-war intelligence was "manipulated" or "misrepresented" or "twisted" or "cherry-picked" or "fixed around the policy," and how the Bush Administration's inadequate planning produced a "fiasco," a "blunder," and a "disaster" -- terms used to convey the sinister nature and catastrophic effect of White House miscalculations without actually accusing anyone of anything so incriminating as a felony.

Two notable exceptions are former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's book, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," which encountered a virtual boycott by the major news media when published in 2008, and "United States v. George W. Bush et al.," by Elizabeth de la Vega, a former Assistant U.S Attorney who meticulously presents the case for criminal fraud under a little-known federal statute that does not require monetary loss by the victim as a condition for conviction. Both books rest their case on proof of deliberate deception by the President and members of his war cabinet -- not an easy hurdle to overcome in a criminal trial, which requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Intentional killings based on a mistake are not accidents... if the mistake was predicated on an unreasonable belief about the justification for the killing.

Contrary to common belief, however, an American president can be found guilty of criminal conduct without proof of the corrupt state of mind of the deliberate liar or the malignant motives of Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. The criminal mind also encompasses the all-too-common consciousness of human beings acting carelessly in deciding to kill other human beings, however justified their conduct may seem in their own eyes.

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion, the only truly serious question about the war is whether President George W. Bush and those who participated in the decision to invade Iraq did anything illegal or unconstitutional or criminal.

To raise such a question about a war initiated by own's own country is always "a vocation of agony," as Martin Luther King, Jr. said of the war in Vietnam when he finally chose in 1967 to break his silence about the conflict. Whatever the reasons for avoiding the Iraq question, whether it is President Obama's understandable fear of further polarizing a sorely divided nation, or out of respect for the 4,422 Americans who gave their lives fighting for what they believed was a just cause, or because the legal issues are too big or too difficult, we must finally say about Iraq what Dr. King said about Vietnam. "We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."

The whole litany of excuses for the catastrophe in Iraq has been recited in the language of mistake and misadventure, as if the war were a tragic accident, like a colossal train wreck caused by an act of God.

Intentional killings based on a mistake are not accidents, however, if the mistake was predicated on an unreasonable belief about the justification for the killing. This is the case whether the person on trial is a police officer who killed an innocent citizen in the mistaken belief that the suspect had a gun and presented a lethal threat, or a president who ordered the invasion of Iraq in the mistaken belief that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs that posed a threat to America's national security.

If a police officer's belief that his victim posed a deadly threat was not only wrong, but unreasonable, in the sense that a prudent police officer exercising due diligence in similar circumstances would not have fired his weapon, the killing constitutes criminal homicide. There is considerable disagreement among the courts and legal commentators about whether the homicide is murder or is to be treated more leniently, either as voluntary manslaughter or the lesser offense of negligent homicide, but there is universal agreement that carelessness in the use of deadly force is criminal.

What did the President know and when did he know it? Wrong question. The proper question is: What should a reasonably prudent president have known about the legal justification for invading Iraq and why didn't the President know it?

We are so used to war and the threat of war as a legitimate adjunct of foreign policy that we easily lose sight of the reality that war consists of acts which, if performed by a private citizen or organization, would constitute serious felonies: mass murder, assaults with deadly weapons, maiming, arson, kidnaping, and the malicious destruction of property. The law immunizes political leaders from criminal liability so long as the war is legally justified. As a matter of international law, this generally means in compliance with the U.N. Charter. In terms of domestic law, it means in compliance with the U.S. Consitution, which requires either a declaration of war or a congressional authorization for the use of military force.

A careful reading of the Authorization for the Use of Force adopted by large bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate shows the congressional authorization was hardly the "blank check" the news media portrayed it as. Congress limited the President's use of military force against Iraq by authorizing war only to:

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."

The use of the word "and" after the first paragraph is critical. While Congress did not require an imminent or immediate threat, it was not prepared to authorize the President to go to war over a violation of a Security Council Resolution involving WMDs unless there was also some likelihood that if left unchecked, Saddam would present a "continuing threat" of using those weapons against the United States in the foreseeable future.

In fact, there was no continuing threat because Saddam did not actually possess any WMDs. Nor were there reasonable grounds to believe at the time of the invasion that Saddam Hussein presented such a threat. The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate(pdf), prepared for the President by the CIA and other intelligence agencies and made available to him five months before the invasion, made clear that while there were reasonable grounds to believe that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons," Saddam would not use them against the United States unless Iraq were attacked by us or threatened with an "imminent or unavoidable" attack.

The NIE, originally classified as Top Secret and released to the public in July 2003, contained this Key Judgment: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [chemical and biological warfare] against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraq involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war. Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared [that] an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."

In other words, a reasonably prudent president would have known from reading the NIE that as long as the United States did not attack or threaten to attack, Iraq posed no continuing threat to the United States, as the congressional authorization required. A reasonable president therefore would have known that invading Iraq would have been unconstitutional.

If President Bush knew he had no constitutional authority to go to war, then he knowingly broke the law and a properly instructed jury would have little difficulty in finding him guilty of murder. Even if he was not conscious of any wrongdoing, which seems more likely, a jury would still be warranted in finding him guilty, at the very least, of criminally negligent homicide if it found that his ignorance constituted a failure to perform the duties of his office with due diligence.

The mother whose dead body was found in the bombed ruins of Baghdad, holding her baby so tight they could not be pried apart and had to be buried together, can no longer be dismissed as "collateral damage." That mother and child, and the more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians killed directly by U.S. bombs and artillery fire in the first month alone, as well as the Iraqi troops killed while defending their country against an arguably unlawful and unreasonable attack, may have been victims of criminal homicide.

Without criminal trials, we will never know. The law, Justice Holmes reminded us, is nothing more than a prediction of how courts will rule in particular cases, and in cases involving jury trial, we should add, a prediction of what jurors will decide in applying the law to the facts. Until we have court decisions and jury verdicts, statements about the legality or constitutionality or criminality of the war in Iraq, or enhanced interrogations, or targeted killings, or the "war on terror" itself, will remain on the Opinion Page and continue to elude even the judgment of history.

Paul Savoy is a former prosecutor in the New York County District Attorney's Office and a past dean of the John F. Kennedy University School of Law.

Acclaimed Poet and Publisher Dr. Haki Madhubuti Joins Stand Our Ground

FreedomSeed Press is proud to announce the inclusion of Dr. Haki R. Madhubuti - one of the most prominent and relevant contemporary African American poets - in the forthcoming global anthology Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander.

Black Arts Movement pioneer, Madhubuti is founder of Third World Press, a publishing company that holds the distinction of being the oldest and largest Black publisher in the United States. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and essays that cover a span of forty-five years. In 1967, Madhubuti's first book of poems, Think Black, was published by the legendary Broadside Press. Since then, he has published a canon of work that encompasses the broad range of issues and concerns germane to the cultural and political advancement of the Black community in the United States. Among them are the classic works Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? and Groundwork: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1996. His latest books include YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet's Life and Run Toward Fear.

"To have Dr. Madhubuti's poetry in this anthology is an affirmation of the book and its mission. Brother Madhubuti has lived his life on the front-line of our community's struggle for justice and liberation as an educator, institution-builder and activist," says Ewuare Osayande, editor of Stand Our Ground. "It is an honor to include him and his work."

Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander is a global collection of poetry that brings together the voices of poets from all over the world including the United States, South Africa, the Maldives, England, Palestine, Kenya, Finland, Canada and Nigeria.

Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander is more than just an anthology of poetry. It is a call for justice! Once published, all the proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the justice campaigns for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander. For more information on the book and campaign visit the book's website at:StandOurGroundBook.com.

‘Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin & Marissa Alexander’ is Now Available for Pre-Order!

28 March, 2013 editor Comments off

Title: Stand Our Ground:Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander

Publisher: FreedomSeed Press (Philadelphia, PA)

Paperback, 272 pages

Publication Date: April 22, 2013 (Pre-Order Now)

$25.00

All proceeds will be shared with the families of Martin and Alexander to aid in their respective pursuits of justice.

Stand with us! This will be a limited publication run. Purchase your copy today!

Stand Our Ground is available online exclusively at StandOurGroundBook.com.

Contact: Ewuare X. Osayande

StandOurGroundBook@gmail.com

In Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander 65 poets from all over the world join together in one voice for justice, freedom and peace. Stand Our Ground is the definitive testament of a revolutionary generation. In this historic collection Black Arts Movement legends Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Haki R. Madhubuti and Askia M. Toure’ are joined by poets of all ages from across the United States and around the world representing countries in Africa, Asia, Europe as well as North and South America and the islands of the Caribbean.

The cases of Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander expose the duplicity of an American justice system that remains rooted in racism and sexism. Stand Our Ground is an effort to raise funds for both families to aid in their pursuit of justice even as it raises the consciousness of a generation toward the pursuit of a movement of justice for all!

The book’s editor, Ewuare X. Osayande, is a poet, educator and activist. The author of several books including Blood Luxury with an introduction by Amiri Baraka (Africa World Press) and Whose America?: New and Selected Poems with an introduction by Haki R. Madhubuti (Black Proletariat Press). He is an adjunct professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University.

In the introduction for Stand Our Ground Osayande writes, “This book has been a labor of love. My love for my people. My love for humanity. I acted because I knew it was not enough for me to just march, or write an editorial or to just allow myself to sit and simmer in the face of wrong. I acted because I knew that there were others like me. I knew that if I acted, others would join with me, and, together, we could create a work that would simultaneously raise collective support for these two families and raise the collective consciousness of our generation. So in the Summer of 2012 the call went out and this is the result. A collection of poems. But not just any collection of poems. Herein are contained –

Death-defying poems

Injustice-decrying poems

Poems that speak truth to power

Poems that break chains in freedom’s name

Poems that confront abuse

and provide sanctuary for the bruised

Poems that escape from cells

Poems that provide a pathway back from hell

Poems that refuse to be silent

Poems more just than the judge’s gavel

Poems that have tasted cop’s mace

stared down the barrel of a gun in defiance