The US Senate voted 66-30 on 29 March to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that allowed former president George W. Bush to launch a military invasion of Iraq under false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The bill is now headed to the Republican-led House of Representatives, where it remains unclear if lawmakers will put it on the floor for a vote.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 made several things about the American political system abundantly clear.

The recent 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has caused me to reflect on the two years (2007-08) that I worked as a field-level civilian advisor in Iraq followed by six years in Afghanistan (2009-14) and to correlate this experience to the current proxy war the US is funding and shadow fighting against Russia in Ukraine.

The Iraq War was spawned by a deadly combination of political depravity and media complicity. Unfortunately, on the twentieth anniversary of the war, both elements of that conspiracy are being whitewashed.  Instead, politicians and their pundit accomplices are prattling as if the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, not a crime against humanity.

SECRET AND PERSONAL / PM/02/019 /PRIME MINISTER

CRAWFORD/IRAQ

1 The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few. The risks are high, both for you and for the Government. I judge that there is at present no majority inside the PLP for any military action against Iraq, (alongside a greater readiness in the PLP to surface their concerns). Colleagues know that Saddam and the Iraqi regime are bad. Making that case is easy. But we have a long way to go to convince them as to:

It was snowing and the roads were empty on an early Saturday. The dread was, is it really him? Will he agree to speak?

We arrived at his apartment and were greeted by a friend who took us up. He introduces himself in smart attire. Meet Ali Shallal al-Qaysi, the man under the hood of the torture photos from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Writing this, I must admit that my rage and pain build up inside, still twenty years later. Below, see what TFF and I wrote back then and why we were, simply put, making better predictions on a shoestring budget than the US and other NATO decision-makers on multi-billion-dollar budgets.

Like other wars and interventions, this was no “mistake”. It was an unavoidable consequence of Western MIRE – Militarism, Imperialism, Racism and Exceptionalism.

I had thought this would be a good week for gloating, 20 years after so many fools supported the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq or (in many ways more shamefully) failed to oppose it. Here's what I said on this page almost exactly 20 years ago, refusing to drop my opposition to the war just because troops had gone in.

Al Jazeera's Abderrahim Foukara asks the former US defense secretary whether toppling Saddam Hussein was worth the many lives of those killed during and after the 2003 Iraq war.