Debunking various myths about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
Essential to much of the anti-war rhetoric of the last half century has been the propagation of various myths or conspiracy theories about the wars, their origin, and the impact often of U.S. or western involvement in them. There are often claims that the allied nations murdered thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of civilians, caused the wars to start, armed or trained the opposition, or was in some other way acting immorally. While these sorts of conspiracies are present in nearly all wars, and war is unpopular to begin with in general (with the U.S. only having the support 35% of the population upon entrance in to WWII, despite being the victim in pearl harbor), the extreme nature and the political importance of the myths surrounding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars highlights the importance of this issue. Many easily disprovable claims or flat-out fabrications were capitalized upon to push a political agenda, that formed the basis of the anti-war opposition, the most obvious being with the Bush 9/11 investigation, which investigated president George Bush at the time for supposed connections to 9/11 (similar to the Trump Russian-investigation of today), something which 53% of democrats at one point believed was true, even according to left-wing sources. [
1] Another common political argument was to suggest that WMD's had not been discovered in Iraq, when in fact they had, and even congressmen privy to the classified information, such as X, actually used it as a weapon to attack George Bush, despite knowing full-well that WMD's had been discovered. Finally, much of the anti-war sentiment surrounded around the idea that the war was over oil, despite the oil predominately going to France, China, and Russia, countries that actually opposed the war, had supplied Iraq with the majority of their weapons, and violated the Iraq oil embargo years prior.[
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3] That is before getting in to the fact that American oil companies were likely not happy with the idea of losing oil revenue to new Iraq trade, for the same reason American manufacturers don't like outsourcing to China. Despite many of these stories originating from Qatar, China and Russia, Qatar a country where slavery is legal and approximately 25% of the population are slaves, China another slave-owning communist state and Russia a fervently anti-western country, organizations like the New York Times had no problem repeating the story first produced by Al-Jazeera, the state-ran media organization of Qatar, and regurgitating the anti-western propaganda of these outlets and countries. Many other claims impacted elections and other political outcomes, and still have influence over voters today, claims such as supposed motivations (wanting to invade for oil), death tolls supposedly caused by the U.S. (particularly with drone strikes), methods of operation (false reports of napalm or white phosphorous), and other claims of corruption, such as secretly being responsible for creating or arming the enemy forces.
Perhaps the most effective and poinent political tactic of all is a strategy known as framing, that is simply by framing the the start of the war as being the U.S. lead invasion, rather than the U.S. invasion simply being a
response to the ongoing war that had been occurring in Iraq after Saddam's mass murder of innocent people and it's attacks against the Kurdish people. By simply calling the U.S. invasion itself the "Iraq war", or the start of it, it lead to the implication that the U.S. was indirectly responsible for everything that happened within it, despite Saddam murdering hundreds of thousands of his own people before the U.S. had even invaded. By the opposition therefore claiming that an opposing individual is in favor of "The War" they can automatically smear this individual as bad (as who can possibly want a war?), rather than assess their opinion as being of one that's pro intervention; obviously a more accurate description of the the "pro-war" side is that they are in favor of
U.S. intervention in to the
already existing war in Iraq. Like in WWII, the U.S. invasion in Iraq was not the beginning of the conflict, it was merely an extension of it, in an attempt to curb or prevent the humanitarian issues caused by Saddam Hussein and the Iraq regime. Obviously voting against U.S. intervention is not actually the same as voting against the vague concept of "war" itself, and so simultaneously those against U.S. intervention can believe they are voting against the war in and of itself as well as smear their enemies for being the cause of it, when in reality their position is merely being against the U.S.'s involvement in it. By merely framing the U.S. involvement in a war as the war itself, they can claim to be against "The War", both smearing their opponents as bad and raising themselves up as heroes, when in reality, obviously, voting against intervention in an already existing war, will not end that war. By framing themselves as anti-war, when they were really against intervention, This works in effect in the same way by calling yourself anti-fascist while attacking innocent people and yelling racial slurs at them, or calling yourself a civil rights group who wants to take rights away. It could be surmised essentially that both sides are anti-war, one simply believes that winning it, I.E. by defeating their enemies in combat, is the way to end it, while the other believes in non-intervention. A very simple language manipulation tactic, it nonetheless has been effective in driving many of the misconceptions or downright conspiracies about many wars in recent history. One can frame themselves as being "anti-war", "anti-racism", "anti-fascist" and so on, and then all their actions and beliefs after the fact, such as 9/11 being a hoax or the idea that the U.S. supposedly killed hundreds of thousands of people, are to the end to some inherently moral goal, and thus automatically right without need for facts, logic or even argumentation.
The problem that ties all these conspiracy theories and misleading tactics together, seems to be a sort of aggressive willful ignorance, demanding and insisting upon promoting clearly false or unsubstantiated views in order to promote a specific political viewpoint. A rejection of any and all things that do not support their initial opinion and a desperate cling to the tiniest shred of evidence or even worse, doubt, that may support their preexisting viewpoint, no matter how small or obviously absurd. It is in both this stubbornness and willingness to refuse anything that doesn't promote their preexisting and highly specific worldview, that we have extreme political opinions, that can ultimately become damaging to the real world.
Myth 1: The U.S. killed 500,000+ civilians: No claim is perhaps of greater factual importance however than the accusations of mass murder supposedly committed by the U.S., with nearly 500,000 civilians killed during the war, with estimates varying up to 650,000 civilians. While tragic, the claim the U.S. killed these individuals or was somehow indirectly responsible for it has largely been withdrawn and disproven, particularly with most of the original sources that made these claims admitting to severe errors in their methodology. Wikileaks initially claimed that out of nearly 109,032 deaths in the Iraq war, the U.S. was responsible for approximately 14,705, and thus was more culpable than the U.S. and United Nation's had claimed at 500 to 1000 civilian deaths during the war. [
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Guardian, New York times, and many politicians in the U.S. and abroad capitalized on these claims, attempting to paint the U.S. as responsible for large numbers of civilians deaths abroad. Even if these figures were accurate, this is still a far cry from the 500,000 civilians killed during the war, and the nearly 4.5 million refugees deliberately starved of water and food that likely would have died without U.S. intervention. On top of preventing war with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel (which Iraq had openly stated it planned on invading), the U.S. prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of local Iraqis through overthrowing the Saddam regime, as well as preventing the general oppression of the people under the rule of a dictator. After the U.S. overthrew the failing Saddam regime which had begun to destabilize the country and the middle eastern region as well, the massive death toll per year had dropped significantly, and the country's general stability improved, a claim widely reported even by prior anti-war sources. Saddam released virtually every single prisoner in the country including rapists and murderers, created military training bases for terrorist groups, and bombed entire cities, at one point gassing an entire Kurdish tow, known as the Halajbah poison gas attacks killing x, events which naturally destabilized the region and caused guerrillas to begin resisting the oppression of the Saddam Regime. While sad or tragic if any civilians would have died, let alone by U.S. hands, the idea that the U.S. was responsible for the nearly 500,000+ deaths in Iraq is simply not true, even by many of the largest critics of the U.S., and in fact the U.S. helped reduce how many civilians were being killed in the region as a result of the regime. The 14,000 figure presented by wikileaks was later reduced to 3,000, after it was proven that the wikileaks claims rested on counting the same events multiple times from different sources, and the inclusion of Iraqi government sources, which largely are seen as lacking credibility due to it coming from the Dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, obviously being known for producing false propaganda. The double, tripple, and quadruple counting of the same deaths were often repeated by the original wikileaks source, often counting the deaths from a single attack multiple times due to the simple error of treating different sources as different events instead of covering the same events, thus artificially inflating the numbers. In addition the wikileaks figures still included Saddam regime figures, which were easily disproven and discredited. As tragic as any civilian losses are, the exaggerated figures by media outlets at the time are easily disproven, and refute the concept that the U.S. and the other 30 countries involved in the war did more harm than good. This claim did not stop being repeated however, and has been repeated years later by many politicians including x and x, and by various major news outlets, such as x and x. Many of the same news stories remain unchanged even to this day. Another claim of 130,000 civilians being killed indirectly by U.S. actions cutting off vital supplies from the Iraqis were also widely reported by the same news outlets, however these were later disproven as U.S. actions tended to improve the well being of the local citizens and the authors of the study later admitted that they had based their estimates on mere guesses and removed the entire study from their website, of which only an archived version still exists. This tactic of making grand claims and then removing them after the damage is already done and the myth is spread is fairly common by the media.
Myth 2: Drone strikes are particularly deadly: A common practice for news articles is to write a story, let the fake information mull around in the public discourse, and then delete or change the article months or years later only after the lie has been spread and cemented in the public mind. The companies or organization only issue a retraction after their message has been spread, often to push a certain political agenda, knowing full well that few people who read the original story will ever see the retraction. This is a well known phenomena, a with X and X of the New york times, and etc. It's often been said that a lie has traveled around the world before the truth can even get off the ground, due to the fact that finding all the information about a situation takes time, and that lies can be created instantly and spread more quickly as a result, and are often difficult to refute, especially given the it takes to refute them. While used widely when propagating anti-war conspiracy theories, this particular tactic is perhaps no better exemplified during this time period than the supposed death tolls by drone strikes. With media outlets claiming as high as a 98% failure rate from drone stikes, with a mere 1200 drone strikes supposedly killing nearly 100,000 people Afghanistan alone, they later removed and deleted the articles (with Mic.com in particular removing the ability for their website to be archived to contest it, along with vox) after it became apparent that drones not only didn't kill 100,000 civilians, but that in fact no more than 20,000 civilians died from violent means in the Afghanistan war, total, making this 100,000 figure essentially impossible. Drones obviously could not have killed more people than were killed during during the entire war, making this claim obviously an exaggeration. The official numbers indicate that 85% of the 20,000 deaths in Afghanistan were from the Taliban, with the rest largely being various other terrorist groups in the regions and rouge groups of bandits which took advantage of the ensuing chaos from the invading Pakistan army, known as the Taliban, suggesting that only a fraction of that 20,000 could be from U.S. sources, let alone by drones. A much more reasonable claim of 400 civilians killed out of the 1200 U.S. drone strikes (or in essence civilian death rate of approximately 34%) was presented to the United Nations by the human rights advocacy group X, but was disproven not only by the United Nations, but by Pakistan itself, the country which made the Taliban itself and housed Osama Bin Laden just .8 miles from it's leading intelligence facility (and later admitted to housing Osama Bin Laden), with Pakistan only claiming 67 civilian fatalities from Drones, in comparison to the U.S. claim of 17. [
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5] While tragic that any civilian or innocent person should die, or any person in general, in general the U.S. correctly targeted militants, and did not kill very many civilians in their strikes, a claim which has been widely corroborated even by the U.S.'s enemies. Of course, this fact is inconvenient to the narrative that the U.S. is made up of insane, barbaric monsters who murder civilians for fun, and so the lie that drones were in fact particularly deadly when they were originally designed to prevent civilian casualties was necessary to continue the narrative of supposed western evil, even if this was proven to be obviously false by nearly every metric available. The great irony, or perhaps tragedy is that the drone program was designed specifically to prevent civilian casualties, using the smallest missile on the smallest plane we had with a mere 1 pound of explosive, versus the several thousand bomb explosives used in WWII or that can still be dropped from aircraft today. Precision prevents civilian casualties, and so 300,000 dollar smart bombs and missiles are ideal for avoiding civilian casualties, not causing them. But allowing the narrative that the U.S. and even the CIA were trying to prevent civilian casualties would potentially change people's minds about them, and thus the only solution was to lie in an attempt to galvanize in the minds of various
Myth 3: We armed the other side: Another common claim was that U.S. or western countries were predominately responsible for arming, equipping, or training the individuals in which they fought. Despite this not actually being a case against the invasion as this act would have occurred before any invasion and ironically perhaps necessitated the U.S. invasion, it was a claim often made despite working against the favor of anti-war arguments. The simple reality is that the motive of most anti-war rhetoric generally comes from generally anti-western organization, leading to anti-war western sentiments erroneously being mixed in with anti-war sentiments, resulting in many self contradictions. While the majority of individuals familiar with weaponry can tell you that the most prolific weapons in the world, and that particular part of the world, are from soviet and Chinese origins, such as the Ak-47 with nearly 100 million copies in comparison to only 8 million U.S. M16's (largely in government hands, vs. Ak-47's which generally are in illicit hands), some people unaware about this element of military history do not automatically recognize weapons by their countries of origin. For these people, objective databases of where weapon's that countries utilize come from can be found, for example in the SIPRI (Stockholm Institute of)
database. Large weapon's transfers by countries are generally easily tracked, due to their size and general nature, and as a result it is possible to trace the origin of weapons from countries, on each given year to an approximate million dollar figure. From the years between 1950 and 2005 (the years leading up to the Iraq war), the soviet Union Gave 31,067 million dollars or, 31 billion dollars worth of weapons and military equipment to Iraq, France gave 5512 or 5.5 billion dollars worth of equipment, and China gave 4278 million dollars worth of equipment of, 4.3 billion dollars. This is out of 44896 million total dollars or, 45 billion, in 1990's dollars, or is 40.8 billion out of 44 billion dollars, essentially 90.8% of all weapon's sales to Iraq. As we can see, the soviet union was predominately responsible for arming the Iraq military, which is easily understood when one actually looks at the weapons the military forces were using. In fact, France, which also opposed the war along with Russia, was largely responsible for arming Iraq with it's most sophisticated weapon's such as aircraft and radar systems, and supplied a total number of weapons to Iraq close to the figures of China, suggesting a heavy bias in favor of Iraq despite being a dictatorial regime. This was actually illegal to some extent; 45 out of the 88 politicians which lead the Republic of France were implicated in crimes by illegally trading oil with Iraq during the Iraqi oil embargo, and so France's claim that the U.S. was there to steal "their oil" is even less credible given that they were in fact the one's illegally trading oil with Iraq. The original claims that the U.S. was invading to take over the oil wells came from Al-Jazeera news, a government-ran media outlet in Qatar, and then was quickly repeated by none other than the New York Times and RT News. These claims originated literally from a slave-owning country, and then were disseminated by media outlets with left-wing views. Considering the Clinton's connections to the Democrats, New York Times, and Qatar, it's not actually a surprise that these outlets produced or proliferated propaganda that was anti-western at the time.
Myth 4: The invasion "Destabilized" the country: Finally, the notion that the U.S. invasion destabilized Iraq can largely be disproven as well. While the concept of "destabilization" is inherently subjective, the U.S. lead invasion is not what caused Iraq's primary infrastructure to collapse. By virtually every objective measure, such as the GDP, access to water, access to food, access to healthcare, access to electricity and other factors, Iraq's general stability was on the decline before the U.S. invasion, and improved rapidly afterwards. Iraq's decline reached it's peak in 2001, 2 years before the 2003 invasion by the U.S. For example, The notion that the destabilization was due to the U.S. lead invasion of Iraq, and that this lead to ISIS, or terrible conditions, is not only false, but easily disprovable by virtually every metric available.
The formation and creation of the terrorists and Saddam Regime
Myth 5: We created the Terrorists: The Taliban were created in 1994 by the Pakistani ISI (Interservice intelligence agency), six years after the end of the Soviet-Afghanistan war in 1988, as an organization to pose as a terrorist group in order to mask their entrance in to Afghanistan. [
1] Known as a state-sponsored terrorist group, the Pakistan government also did the same in the Kargil war, attempting to thinly mask their entrance in to India, by sending in soldiers who were posing as terrorists. "Pakistani Lieutenant general Shahid Aziz, and then head of ISI analysis wing, has confirmed there were no mujahideen but only regular Pakistan Army soldiers who took part in the Kargil War. "There were no Mujahideen, only taped wireless messages, which fooled no one. Our soldiers were made to occupy barren ridges, with hand held weapons and ammunition", Lt Gen Aziz wrote in his article in The Nation daily in January 2013." [
2] In the Afghanistan war, the Taliban as well had everything up to and including air strikes, artillery support, and special forces commandos from Pakistan on their side, indicating their Pakistani military support, a claim they later admitted to after it was exposed. "-"This is contrary to the claim that the Taliban were formed from the remnants of the American backed mujhadeen, who stood in opposition to the Taliban during the entire Afghanistan-Taliban conflict, and were again allied with the U.S. in the 2001 invasion, with the U.S. using the last remaining territory held by the northern alliance, which had just 10% of the Afghanistan territory (while the Taliban occupied the other 90%), as a launching point in to the rest of Afghanistan. Two days for 9/11, known as 9/9 in Afghanistan, the leader of the Afghanistan country, Massoud was assassinated by the Taliban after a lengthy war, as the American-backed mujhadeen had remain opposed to the Taliban during the entire conflict. The Taliban and American-backed mujhadeen had dichotomous, and polar opposite religious and ideological viewpoints, and thus it is unlikely that many of their side defected to the Taliban, who often executed not only Mujhadeen members on sight, but also Taliban members which merely did not immediately try and kill Mujhadeen, such as x who attempted to persuade the Taliban in to a peace agreement with Massoud some months prior to Massoud's death. It is unlikely very many Mujhadeen defected to the Taliban, and those that did would be likely to be executed immediately on sight, making such an action futile. Still, the myth that the U.S. created the Taliban or what would later form the Taliban has been crucial to the argument of non-interference, suggesting that the U.S. somehow accidentally creates the enemy's it fights. Other than a complete lack of evidence for Al-Qeada, formed in 1988, or as the Soviet-Afghanistan war was ending (and thus of no practical strategic value to the U.S.), it also would not have made sense to send in untrained, poorly equipped soldiers that did not speak the language and made up less than 100 fighters, who predominately attacked the U.S. backed mujhadeen, or that this organization that was reflexively hostile to U.S. and western powers that was already self funded by billionaires would be
Myth 6: The Iraq invasion caused ISIS to form: Another claim is that ISIS was formed by the ensuing chaos after a result of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, due to the destabilization of the country. However, Iraq's economy, social stability and living conditions have actually improved, meaning that Iraq has actually become more stable over time. The notion that Iraq was destabilized by U.S. actions is objectively false, as by nearly every metric the living conditions of the average citizen have improved. From X, to X, we can clearly see that Iraq is better off after the invasion, meaning it did not in fact destabilize the region. Further, as it was Saddam's plan to invade several surrounding countries, the lack of a war between Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Israel and other countries likely provided stability to the region, and prevented a major regional war, if not global war when Iran's Russian and Chinese connections are considered. In short, U.S. and western activities did not destabilize the region, and actually helped to increase stability. ISIS formed in 2014, 11 years after the U.S. invasion and 9 years after Saddam was captured, as a result of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, or 3 years before ISIS existed. ISIS formed partially as a result of the instability of Syria, which was caused by the brutal repression of it's own people. Members of the Syrian military defected, forming the Syrian defense force, after they refused to slaughter their own people. The Syrian government has killed nearly 200,000 civilians in Syria, while ISIS has killed approximately 4,000, or 2% of the figure as the Syrian government, and ISIS formed 3 years after the civil war began. The argument that increasing the stability in Iraq lead to Syria murdering it's own people and then the creation of ISIS is obviously impossible, unless there is a suggestion of time-traveling terrorists. A poor understanding of timelines often contributes to anti-war rhetoric, where claims of who attacked first or when are confused, often deliberately,
Myth 7: We made the Saddam Regime: Saddam Hussein and his regime were members of the Ba'athist Socialist Party, or the Arab National Socialist Party. Like the National German Worker's Socialist Party or, the Nazi party, they had a particular hatred of jews, and the Ba'athist were heavily inspired by National Socialism, adopting most of their political and worldviews. Established with the help of the Nazis during WWII, this organization later turned to the communists for help, as did many post Nazi sattelite states, and adopted some communist viewpoints, taking them on as a new benefactor. Like Poland, Estonia, and half of Germany, the soviet union was interested in absorbing post-national socialist states in to it's country, believing that socialist countries could more easily be converted to communistic one's. Lenin believed that socialism lead to communism, and thus supported socialism in so far as it was seen as a stepping stone to a communist state. United by their hatred of the jews, Russia and Germany began WWII together when they invaded Poland in 1939, and given that the Germans and many middle eastern countries were also united by their hatred of the jews, they naturally become allies after the war. The Stalinist regime since the 1950's supported the Palestinians against Israel, creating many of the anti-Zionist and anti-semetic conspiracy theories that are still prevalent today, and put hundreds of thousands of jews in gulags, in which many of them died. Saddam Hussein took over the Ba'thist National Socialist Party of Iraq, becoming the country's dictator, being the successor of X, and as explained above largely used Soviet, Chinese, and French weapons in his military. The rise of the Saddam Regime was the product of post-WWII, Cold War politics, largely influenced by the Soviet Union, and their creation can be easily traced to the Soviet Union and the Nazis. Syria, to this day, is still ran by the Ba'athist party and Assad, being allied with the Saddam regime.
Methods of Operation
Myth 8: The war was bad for the economy: In general, war is good for the economy. Be it the U.S. getting out of the depression after WWII when our industry was revitalized or the invention of nuclear power, computers, and the internet (all created by the U.S. military), the impact on industrial production and technological development by war is usually positive. Aside from instances where countries were completely obliterated, war is usually good for technology and the country's economy, and so the idea that a war was bad for a country's economy or cost too much money is rarely backed up by real evidence.
Myth 9: We used banned or improper weapons: Phosphorous, depleted uranium
Political implications and motivations - The war was "over oil", WMD's were never found
Another common issue of the conspiracy theories and it's tactics was to blame certain politicians for the war, such as George Bush, Dick Cheney, the British x, or more generally Republicans or conservatives as a whole, or to assert their motivations were for alternative reasons, such as the war being to obtain oil. As the myths and conspiracies often had political motivations to discredit the opposition (such as claiming JFK was assassinated by a conservative in the CIA rather than a communist with news clippings from the New York times which x percent believed, Trump is secretly working with the Russians which x percent believed, or Bush knew about 9/11 beforehand which 53% of democrats believed), it is important to address not only the claims themselves but the fundamental goals, which was often to accuse opposing sides of crimes or misdeeds to help remove them from office. The truth of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, whether you support them or not, was that overwhelmingly the majority of population within the countries who entered the war supported the actions, and not only specific politicians. Contrary to the concept that the war was Bush's war, or even the U.S.'s war, over 30 countries participated in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, making it a global affair. 56% of U.S. democrats supported the war, in addition to George Bush and Dick Cheney, meaning that despite claims to the contrary, democrats were just as responsible for entering the war as any other party. Bernie Sanders, who famously claimed he was against the war, supported both the Iraq resolution and the x resolution, suggesting otherwise that he was in favor of actions which would lead to the U.S. war. The voting record contradicts his previous statements, although his claim is that he was unaware that the Iraq resolution would lead to war at the time (despite explicitly being referenced in the document itself), suggesting either incompetence or further lies. Despite this, the myth of the Republicans being responsible for the war and it's efforts has often persisted, with democrats disavowing the war or falsely claiming they did not vote for it and it's provisions, when they often did.
Conspiracy theories by the left against the right have existed for decades, and vice versa. What makes the implications particularly important is that the conspiracies were not only negative towards the military and their actions, but also was used to attack or discredit right-wing politicians. The Clinton Foundation, which also lead DNC or Democratic national council, is known for both accepting money from Qatar and having strong relations with Qatar, as well as giving money to the New York times, with the New York times returning favors such as allowing Bill Clinton to write journalistic pieces defending himself in both the Monica Lewinski scandal, as well as the pardoning scandal where he pardoned or commuted the sentences of over 500 people, including a fellow congressmen who was a pedophile that sexually assaulted 12 children (and laundered money for the democrats) and a woman who refused to implicate Bill Clinton in the whitewater scandal, purjoring herself by refusing to testify against the Clintons. These are claims that the Clinton foundation and leaders have explicitly admitted to, and thus are open knowledge to all sides. Qatar is one of the few countries where slavery is still legal and commonly practiced, with nearly 1 million out of the 4 million people or approximately 25% being slaves, and the state-ran Al-Jazeera news with the self-reported slogan "death to America". Al-Jazeera was the first country to run the conspiracy that the U.S. wanted to invade Iraq for their oil resources, later followed by the Russian-controlled media outlet RT News, and then was picked up first by, the New York Times in the United State's. The conspiracy theory became central to the democrat-led anti-war effort, with at one point x percent of democrats believing in the conspiracy, despite today most democrats dismissing it as a hoax by modern standards. In essence, corrupt countries with dictatorships immediately ran the lies against the U.S., and affiliated political partners within the democrats and U.S. media took to the stories, in order to discredit and attack the U.S. government and people. This is not a matter of debate and is not a political attack against democrats, it is proven, and is something they have admitted to.
Myth 10: The Iraq invasion was to steal oil: One such common claim was that the U.S. was interested in stealing oil, or at least that George Bush and Dick Cheney were, along with various other Republicans. A common tactic is to simply accuse the opposing politician of an unprovable "thought crime", that the other side simply thought the bad thoughts about the situation while their side thought the good thoughts. As it is common in politics to falsely accuse your enemies of misdeeds, despite their being no objective difference between the political actions of both sides, the only remaining argument is to accuse the other side of supporting a policy deal for the wrong reasons, while your side supported it for the right reasons, essentially not accusing the other side of wrong doing but wrong thinking on the issue. As both the right and left in the U.S. supported the war in Iraq, and thus their policy decisions were largely identical, the remaining argument was simply that certain U.S. politicians did so for the wrong motivations, which is hard to disprove to those who have trouble understanding how other's think. Approximately 48% of Democrat senators supported the war, in comparison to X percent, including Bernie Sanders who supported the Iraq Resolution, but conveniently later claimed he was against the U.S. war involvement despite supporting the actions that lead to it. Essentially, the idea is not that they didn't support the same actions, but that they had different reasons for doing so, and that their side had good reasons for doing so, and the other side had bad reasons. Yes democrats supported the war, but not to steal oil like those evil Republicans! Despite all of this, the oil did not actually go to U.S. companies at all, let alone companies owned by George Bush or Dick Cheney, and instead was opened up to the rest of the world, largely at the behest of George bush and the Republicans. The oil predominately went to France, China, and Russia, countries known for violating the oil Embargo on Iraq beforehand, and that complained about the U.S. intervention in to Iraq. On top of this, it would not have made economic sense to try and open up foreign sources of competition for American oil companies. One does not make more money for oil companies by lowering the price of oil, and more oil flooding the market, such as in an oil glut or the current oil drop in prices, would have obviously not been a benefit to U.S. companies for foreign sources of oil to be introduced in to the market. For the same reason U.S. manufacturing sectors are opposed to outsourcing to China, outsourcing to Iraq would actually hurt U.S. oil interests, and therefore the conspiracy makes the claim that the oil companies wanted to do exactly the opposite of what would have benefited them. The notion that a complex conspiracy spanning dozens of countries who were involved in the Iraq war, tricking all of them to invade, was done in order to try and lose money, is obviously absurd. Other than the lack of evidence on their part, and the 21 million emails leaked from the RNC which proved they were not in fact interested in oil revenue at all, it also makes no logical sense.
Further, had the U.S. wanted to steal the oil, there is no country on earth that would have or could have challenged the military might of the U.S., particularly in the region, and thus no external force was capable of stopping the U.S. from stealing the oil if it had chosen to do so. Instead, the commander in Chief of the Armed Forces decided to open the Iraqi oil wells to the rest of the world, which as stated before, would have been detrimental to U.S. oil profits. U.S. oil companies petitioned George Bush to stop the sale of Iraqi oil, but this was largely ignored by Bush, suggesting he was not in fact acting in the favor of the oil companies, even after several open repeated requests by them. In a leak of nearly 21 million emails, not a single one found any obvious link to George Bush and oil companies, in effect vindicating him, and as a result the U.S. military, from supposed "imperialistic" oil ambitions, as well as the rest of Republicans. There simply is no evidence that there was any interest in stealing oil from Iraq, an act that would have hurt U.S. oil companies, and the logic behind the conspiracy fails to make sense as well. The conspiracy, like many others of it's type, often argues against the exact opposite of the truth, which is the intended political intent by those who make the conspiracy theories. On top of this there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, the theories still persist, largely due to ignorance on the subject or an insistence on a false reality.
Myth 11: No WMD's were found: Finally, there was a common claim that no WMD's were found overseas. WMD's were an overall small part of the war effort, and George Bush talked for a mere 14 seconds about them in his 4-hour state of the union address, with 30 minutes dedicated to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Despite the low emphasis by the government at the time, the anti-war rhetoric was dominated by claims that no WMD's were ever found, despite the massacres of innocent people and their brutal repression being the predominate focus of the Iraq resolution, which necessitated a U.S. invasion.
WMD's were in fact found in 2004, and in 2006 the information about them was declassified, Despite many of them being degraded, the majority still met the technical classification of WMD, and their exact location was classified until 2006, amid fears terrorists might find them and reverse engineer them, or other foreign powers (such as North Korea or Iran). Famously U.S. Democrat congressmen X criticized Bush about not finding WMD's, despite being made aware of their discovery by being part of the U.S. intelligence committee. He later responded to criticism over this, admitting he was wrong to do so but as he was against the war he felt anything was an acceptable means to defeat the war effort. WMD's overall were of minor importance to the war, with only so many 10's of thousands of victims being from the weapons, as compared to the hundreds of thousands by other weapons. Nonetheless the media framed the entire war as being over WMD's, thus pushing on to pro-war side a motivation that was never as important as suggested, and that ended up vindicating U.S. politicians as well. To this very day in 2018, X percent still believe WMD's were not found, despite evidence to the contrary. The power of the media's manipulation over the American and world public by the media is staggering, with evidence and facts often being less compelling than simple lies which were later disproven, often by the very people who made them.
In Conclusion and policy decisions
Despite the overwhelming saturation of misinformation, often from foreign military powers intending specifically to discredit the United States, all of these arguments and conspiracy theories are essentially a giant deflection. It's doubtful that anti-war conspiracy theorists fundamentally will change their minds if any single issue presented was proven not to be actually not true. It's unlikely that if drone strikes weren't used, or they thought the war made money, or that if the motivations were not about oil, that they'd change their mind and suddenly support the war after learning about these issues. The fundamental disconnect with reality combined with a general lack of understanding of the motivations for the war in the first place generally lead to the beliefs, with the confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance coming second to defend they're already stalwart position against the war they can't possibly begin to explain why they're actually against. With a total and fundamental lack about the actual motivations behind the war and the disregard for anything their political enemy's will say, most are at a loss for the stated objectives of the war itself, or why various countries wanted to invade in the first place. The reality is that none of this discusses the merits of specific policy about the war, be it why we invaded in the first place, or what our policy should be after the fact and if we should withdraw from the wars.
The first reality influencing policy is that we should not withdraw from the wars. Like in any situation involving a power vacuum, leaving before the country is built is likely to lead to a far worse situation. Simply overthrowing a local regime and leaving without nation building is a recipe for disaster, as evidenced by the historical cases where this occurred, be it in WWI which lead to Germany rising to power in a worse war of WWII, Vietnam when the U.S. withdrawals lead to the mass slaughter of millions of innocent Vietnamese people, the U.S. withdrawal from Iran which lead to the current fanatical Islamic regime to take over, or the British withdrawal from India in 1948 which lead to a Muslim invasion that killed approximately 2 million people and drove most of the Sikhs out of the territory. The reality is that when the most powerful entity in a region leaves that territory, even if we can agree that they should leave eventually, simply pulling out of a region suddenly before rebuilding it is never acceptable. When millions of Sikhs were pushed out by muslim invaders after the British withdrew from India, and millions more were killed, it was due to the fact India took a turn for the worst without a major power to stabilize the region. A partial withdrawal from Iraq itself lead to renewed hostilities from insurgents such as ISIS, both empowering them ideologically by making it appear as if we were retreating and mechanically by giving them time to rebuild. The simple reality is that whether you agree with the war or not, leaving before a stable power can replace the U.S.'s presence would only stand to make the situation worse, possibly for the entire world when global terrorist activities are considered. We are already too invested in the region to simply leave, and even if you disagree with the motives that started the war, the only correct, moral path forwards is already set in stone, that is to stay behind and rebuild, or commit to the situation. Claiming to view a war as immoral but then committing an act that would kill even more people obviously does not make logical or moral sense.
The second reality is in understanding why the war occurred at all. Many believe the problem existed the moment they became aware of it, obviously unclear that the war was going on before the U.S. invasion. The U.S. lead invasion of Iraq, involving multiple countries, occurred after Saddam Hussein had already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and planned on killing millions more. Approximately 4.5 million refugees and internally displaced individuals located within and around Iraq lacked food, water, and basic humanitarian supplies, and Saddam's stated mission objective was to kill the Kurdish people, and invade Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel. Amassing troops on the border of many of these countries, Saddam would have invaded these countries, which not only would have triggered a massive war in the middle east, but a war with powers that possessed weapons of mass destruction. In doing so, it easily could have triggered a chain reaction, whereby countries in the surrounding areas would join the conflict also using WMD's, potentially dragging in foreign powers such as U.S. or Russia in to the fray, leading to global conflict. Other than the strong alliances to external powers in the region, the use of WMD's would likely cause other countries to use them as well, leading to an event of mutually assured destruction where countries would begin attacking each other. While it was obvious that WMD's were found in Iraq, the mere threat of such an attack might provoke a nation to preemptively attack Iraq, thus leading to this cascading series of events. While WMD's were an overall small part of the justification of the war, in the media they took a predominant role, and despite being discovered this was widely not reported or even flat out denied in some cases. The humanitarian problems in Iraq, such as the release of prisoners, mass murder of innocent civilians, deliberate starvation of it's citizens and denial of humanitarian supplies to them, and brutal repression of his people, presented a substantial immediate threat to the local citizens, in addition to the threat he posed to the countries around him, western allies, and the world. For moral reasons, the war was necessary to overthrow Saddam, and save the lives of the people he was attempting to kill, given the nearly 500,000 innocent civilians already killed by Saddam.
The great tragedy of the Iraq War is that most of the civilians had died before the U.S. invaded, and without a U.S. invasion likely would have died far larger numbers, given that Saddam was intent on conquering various groups of individuals and had begun to destabilize his countries in numerous ways. After the U.S. intervention, the country of Iraq is far better off, with a better economy, standard of living, less violent deaths per year, and greater levels of freedoms for the average citizen. ISIS was created in Syria in 2014 and not in Iraq, however ISIS is responsible for less than 2% of the murders as the Saddam regime, making them a far smaller threat. The U.S. could not have avoided the Iraq War, because the Iraq War began before the U.S. had even invaded, beginning after the genocide of the Kurdish people and the attacks on Iraq's neighbors began. The simple reality is that a lack of a foreign intervention would not have prevented the massacres Saddam committed, mostly because most of them had already been done, and Saddam was intent on the deaths of innocent people. The invasion was designed to stop this, and was not a random act. Despite the somewhat awkward notion that the U.S. invaded and hundreds of thousands died, like in WWII these people were already being killed, and after several years the U.S. managed to thwart the enemy attacks. Simply associating the deaths with the invasion has made many people believe it was in fact the invasion's fault, which other than a lack of evidence, doesn't make logical sense. On top of the countless conspiracy theories surrounding the wars and the mindless hatred of soldier's, politicians, and fellow citizens alike, the most important element of the war, the reasons for the invasion were rarely discussed, with every argument made by the opposition simply a way to deflect from the key, important points.
Sources
1. United nations figures civilian casualties in the Iraq war- 500-1000 civilians
2. Wikileaks iraq war-log figures of 14,000 civilians, later reduced to 3,000
3.
