Today, Monday, March 20th, is the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War. It’s tough to believe; the Iraq War seems like a lifetime ago. 

For me, the start of the Iraq War brings back memories of the basement we lived in up in Canada. I was twelve going on thirteen. Our whole family gathered in front of the television the night the war started. Bush was speaking.

I remember the general sense of excitement building around the Iraq War in my seventh grade class. On some pre-teen level, even though I was Muslim and things were about to get very serious for us, the anticipation for the Iraq War had all the circus drama of a WWE wrestling match. There was Bush. There was Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, who was happy to join the invasion. Canada under Jean Chretien said no, and Chretien was hailed as a hero. (The French President, Jacques Chirac, also said no, and America howled in outrage, changing the name to Freedom Fries.) And the bad guy, of course, was mustached Saddam Hussein. 

Our family watched the speech. It was late on a school night. But there we sat—father, mother, grandmother, three Muslim boys—and watched as Bush appeared behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, wearing a red tie. 

Bush minced no words: 

“On my orders,” said the President of the United States solemnly, “coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign…”

The Iraq War had officially begun. Iraq was bombed in a campaign called “shock and awe.” Those who opposed the war, most people anyways, knew Saddam was an evil dictator. The question was to what extent he should be removed and democracy imposed at gunpoint.

Bush and Cheney’s argument—to the American public, and to the international community—was that Saddam was tied to the 9/11 attacks and al Qaeda, and he was producing weapons of mass destruction.

All of that turned out to be false. But twenty years later, what’s striking is just how bad it all was. The whole thing. After the 9/11 attacks, if Bush and his team had tried to make the worst possible foreign policy choices that would inflict maximal short-term and long-term damage on American lives, they picked well. The Iraq invasion was a cataclysmic, destructive, suicidal war.

It was the single worst foreign policy decision in the last half-century. And for young people who will live with the consequences of the Iraq War for the longest, it’s important to be honest. The Iraq War was not just horrendous—it was far worse than you think. 

1. It was all based on a lie 

The entire premise of Iraq was based on the lie that Saddam Hussein had a connection to al Qaeda and that he was building weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). According to a 2008 Pentagon study, Saddam had no connection to al Qaeda. Just one year after the U.S. and U.K. invaded Iraq, the CIA concluded in 2004 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He hadn’t even begun any program to build them.

The al Qaeda-Saddam connection was even more spurious. Saddam was a Ba’athist, a secular dictator. Bin Laden was a religious fundamentalist bent on jihad. The two were natural enemies. Yet, according to Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, President Bush asked him the day after 9/11 to “See if Saddam did this.”Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to look for evidence tying Saddam to the attacks.

The people around Bush, who had been around Reagan and Bush Sr., had their eyes on Iraq for over a decade. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz: they had wanted regime change for years. Cheney had expanded the power of the vice-presidency to historic proportions, essentially manipulating his boss. Cheney wanted Iraq, and after 9/11, he would get Iraq.

The lead-up to the Iraq War saw the largest anti-war rallies in human history, with some 14 million people protesting in almost 800 cities around the world. The US received UN Authorization, under Resolution 1441, but only the US (and UK) interpreted this as justifying the war. Despite all of the legal theories put forth by the Bush administration—it was preventative war, a preemptive war, an emergency situation—the U.S. Invasion of Iraq was widely considered illegal and a breach of the UN Charter.

The major media outlets also lied. They reported multiple falsehoods during the Iraq War, ventriloquizing the administration’s talking points. Many of their “sources,” like the con man Ahmed Chalabi, were dubious. Just one year into the war, the New York Times issued a stunning mea culpa and apologized for misleading its readers. 

“Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge," the Times wrote.

So, the first point: the whole Iraq War was based on lies. They lied about WMDs. They lied about the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. They lied about yellowcake and secret meetings. They lied about objectives, about funding, about intelligence, about implications, about casualties. They even lied about when the “Mission” would be “Accomplished.”

Not to worry. In 2002, just before the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld assured everyone it would be a brief war.

“Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that," Rumsfeld said.

2. It was a strategic failure 

This one is pretty clear. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States had one principal enemy: Osama Bin Laden. The whole world rallied around America. The countries the U.S. needed to put pressure on after 9/11 were not Iraq or Iran, but Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Iraq diverted attention and resources from Afghanistan, and became a magnet for global terrorism.

America overthrew Saddam, thereby removing Iran’s principal enemy in the region. Saddam’s removal, along with “de-Baathification” led by L. Paul Bremer, which disbanded the army and threw into unemployment hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers, created a huge vacuum in the region. A new terror group called al Qaeda in Mesopotamia moved in, and began launching suicide-terror bombings against civilians and U.S. soldiers.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, with its brutal, thuggish leader, eventually morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and then into the Islamic State. Iraq became a magnet for jihadists around the world. The Iraq War was the perfect storm that allowed ISIS to grow.

Twenty years later: Iraq remains unstable. Iran is stronger than ever and run by hardliners. China can be gleeful that America wasted so much military might and dollars on a pointless war. Russia can say What-About-Iraq? every time its own illegal invasion and attempted annexation is questioned.

The Iraq war strengthened America’s enemies, depleted America’s energies, and set the United States back in its long-term competition with China.

Speaking of China, guess which country is gobbling up large oil and investments in Iraq?

“China is just getting started,” the Chinese Ambassador to Iraq said last year. Beijing plans to “deeply entrench itself in a country and a region that the West, and especially the United States, has dominated.”

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3. It was hugely expensive 

Three months before the Iraq War began, the Bush administration’s top budget official estimated the war would cost $50-$60 billion.

Mitchell Daniels, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the New York Times in December 2002 that other estimates of $100 billion were too high.

By 2007, the U.S. was spending $10 billion per month in Iraq.

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Blimes, the lowest approximate cost of the Iraq War is $3 trillion. The actual number, when factoring in health care costs, veterans treatments, the cost of interest, will be much higher.

But the war was costly in other ways. Over 4,000 Americans died in Iraq. The number of Iraqis killed will never fully be accounted for, but one study put the Iraqi dead at 500,000. Brown University’s Costs of War Project puts the number of Iraqi civilians killed—by all combatants in the war—at between 275,000 and 306,000.

Once again, the true cost—the human cost, the family cost, the intergenerational cost—is too great to be quantified. For each Iraqi civilian killed, as with each U.S. soldier killed, whole families and neighborhoods and communities were torn asunder, driven to tragedy and grief and death because of the Iraq War.

The cost to minds, to families, and to future citizens—the young who will not know their fathers and mothers—these will never be known.

4. It took up a huge amount of policy space

Because the Iraq War was illegal and based on a lie, it required extra measures of duplicity to ensure public conformity. The direct costs were huge. But the opportunity costs were even greater.

The Iraq War monopolized all of America’s public policy energies. Iraq was what the media was focused on and what the awesome machinery of the U.S. government was focused on.

Time, resources, thinking, and money that should have been devoted to fighting climate change, tackling inequality, improving infrastructure at home, and planning to compete with China long-term, was instead all funneled into fighting an insurgency in Iraq and trying to create a democracy there.

In other words, if you’re a young person and see record-shattering temperatures and wonder why more wasn’t done on climate change; or see crumbling bridges and hollowed out communities and wonder why more wasn’t spent at home; or see the worst inequality since the Gilded Age and wonder how we got here—it’s because our leaders were too busy spending more than $3 trillion and precious hours on invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no direct risk to the United States.

5. It distorted long-term priorities 

China’s GDP in 2003 was $1.66 trillion. It is today over $17 trillion. The single greatest long-term rival for the United States is China. The competition is difficult to comprehend when one thinks about China’s 4,000 year civilizational history, its centralized control under Xi Jinping, its 1 billion people and state-enforced economic system.

Xi Jinping and China represent a new kind of competition: what we thought the Soviet Union was—i.e., an economic behemoth—is what China represents. Could the United States have better prepared for this emerging competition if it hadn’t gone to war in Iraq? If more China experts were hired in the U.S. government? If more attention and time was paid to long-term strategy, to sober analysis, and not to military blunders?

By all accounts, climate change is worsening. The food and energy crises are continuing. And the long-term economic competition with China is beginning several years too late.

James Baker, former secretary of state, said in 2016 that the number one foreign policy challenge for the United States was China. Baker was a Republican. The same statement, almost verbatim, was made to me by Jake Sullivan two years prior, when I was his student at Yale Law School. Jake is a Democrat, of course, and is currently National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden.

When it comes to climate change, China, and domestic renewal, America is playing catch-up. It will take extra effort, and additional years, to compensate for the wasted time and resources misspent on the Iraq War.

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6. It destroyed public trust

George W. Bush’s approval rating on the eve of the Iraq War was 71%. This was down from the historic 90% approval rating he had after 9/11. Americans of all stripes and parties rallied around their leader and their government when the nation was attacked.

And what did the Bush Administration do with this immense and unprecedented wellspring of faith and support? It invaded Iraq.

Bush left office in 2009 with the lowest approval rating ever, at a dismal 22%.

The Iraq War placed upon the American people, who are the ultimate electors of the American government, the burden of all the secret policies carried out in their name. The torture chambers of Abu Ghraib. The clandestine prisons and black-sites in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. The civilian deaths. In the words of U.S. Maj. General Antonio Taguba, the police and intel services had committed “sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses.”

Bush and Cheney weaponized patriotism—to the point where the-then Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, decided not to wear a flag pin on his lapel. True patriotism could not be reduced to a symbolic pin, Obama argued. True patriotism required more than slogans. (As Obama ascended, he put the pin back on.)

Today, trust in government is nearing an all-time low. Trust in government has always waxed and waned, but if you look at the numbers, it really takes a nosedive in the modern era after George W. Bush’s second term.

Younger people in America today are less trusting of each other than older Americans. They also have the lowest trust in public institutions. Not only are younger Americans less trustful of each other, they are less trusting of the military, religious leaders, police officers, business leaders, and other key institutions.

It makes sense when you think about it. Those born around the Iraq War grew up in the shadow of an illegal war launched for cynical reasons. Their earliest days and years involved politicians on television repeating lie after lie, newspapers repeating lie after lie, and discussions—perhaps confused, over the dinner table—among elders, also steeped in lies, and in fear.

If you grow up amid such war and chaos, it could only destabilize you, and make you distrust your world, your government, and yourself.

7. It destroyed the Middle East 

In 2002, the year before the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was isolated. Iran was governed by the moderate leader, Mohammad Khatami. In the early weeks after 9/11, Iran was actually secretly assisting U.S. efforts to hunt down al Qaeda operatives.

The response? Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, in which Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were said to form a maniacal triumvirate.

Iraqi society was decimated—9.2 million Iraqis are today displaced or refugees. The insurgency attracted new adherents to al Qaeda. Bashar al-Assad of Syria, next door, exploited the war by training and then sending jihadists to cause further chaos. Some of these jihadists would later become the leaders of ISIS. The war tore apart Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish communities, each seeking out protection from militias.

There has been a Sunni-Shia divide since the death of the Prophet Muhammad, yes, but the Iraq War deepened these fissures and then poured into them poison: forcing people to pick a side, forcing Muslims into their limited sectarian identities, forcing some innocents to take up arms, demanding submission to an illegal war.

The Iraq War shattered the Middle East. It will take generations for Iraqis, and Syrians, and other innocent people in the region to recover from the war and what came after. For the survivors, in America and in Iraq, the war had a radicalizing, polarizing effect.

“Tell me how this ends,” General David Petraeus famously said at the outset of the war. For many Iraqis, and others, the war never ended—and its consequences will endure for years into the future.

8. It led to Donald Trump

Any war exacerbates tensions at home, but the Iraq War contaminated the ideals of patriotism. The war pit American against American, and exploited divisions within the country.

The Iraq War created the sensation of Barack Obama. Anyone could point to Obama’s speech in 2002 opposing the war and calling it a “dumb war” while Hillary Clinton and most other Democrats supported Bush’s war. This gave Obama well-earned credibility when he ran for president, as the rest of the Democratic Party came to realize they had co-signed a disaster.

On the Republican side, the fallout from the Iraq War made Bush and Cheney so unpopular that Cheney could not run for president. A void opened in the Republican Party, which historically had chosen the “heir apparent”—Reagan, Bush Sr., Ford, Nixon.

The only thing the Republicans could do was try for a Hail Mary. John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, who then repeated every negative trope about Obama “palling around with terrorists.” Palin gave us the Tea Party, and the Tea Party gave way to Donald Trump.

An internal rebellion within the Republican Party usurped the leadership. In 2016, Jeb Bush was the favorite. The Party had literally learned nothing since the Iraq War. And then came along Donald Trump, who blended populism with mercantilism with racism into a potent cocktail, and fed it to a base starved for anything but war.

All of the consequences of the Iraq War listed here—the lies, the strategic failures, the distortion of long-term priorities, the consumption of public space, and the destruction of public trust—were also the causes that unleashed Donald Trump. The divisions and antagonisms created by the Iraq War turned America against itself, and it was the perfect opportunity for an opportunist like Trump to walk in and take the presidency. In many ways, there’s a direct line from March 20, 2003, when the Iraq War was launched, to the presidency of Donald Trump and our own chaotic, nihilistic era.

The full and true consequences of the Iraq War will not be known for some time. Twenty years is a blip in history, and many of the costs of that war will be cumulative. The least we can do is be honest in our retelling, and make amends where possible—at a minimum, never to repeat the horrors and blunders of such a foolhardy, dumb war again.