Iraq

Members of the "The Iraq Campaign 2008" hold a large replica of the "Mission Accomplished" banner on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House in Washington, DC May 1, 2008, marking the fifth anniversary of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech after landing on board a US aircraft carrier, proclaiming the end of major combat operations in Iraq.  (Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS / AFP) (Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images) The disgraced former president's rhetorical victory lap that came before protracted bloodshed deserves all of its notoriety 20 years later. NORMAN SOLOMON Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush landed in a twin-engine Navy jet on an aircraft carrier, strode across the deck in a bulky flight suit and proceeded to give a televised vi...

The 20th of March this year marked the 20th anniversary of the start of Anglo-American imperialism’s war against Iraq.  Although there was mass opposition to this war, most of the print and electronic media, including the BBC, whipped up jingoistic hysteria against Iraq and in favour of the war.  20 years on there is hardly anyone who can be found to speak in favour of it.  Respectable bourgeois newspapers have published articles, written by respectable bourgeois journalists, condemning this war.  We just take one such article as an example.  It appeared in the Sunday Times of 19 March 2023. Under the half misleading title ‘Ever noticed how much less stable the world is now than in 2003? Well, Blair’s to blame’, the author, Mr Rod Liddle, has,...

Fyodor Lukyanov: 20 years after Bush declared ‘mission accomplished,’ it’s clear that Iraq was the graveyard of American ambition George W. Bush’s illegal invasion came at a time when the US was the only real global power, and high on its own self-confidence By Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club. FILE PHOTO: US Marines of Task Force Tarawa prepare their vehicles at Camp Shoup, near the Iraqi border, in Kuwait. ©  Joe Raedle / Getty Images Twenty years ago, in May 2003, then-US President George W. Bush landed on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf...

BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Marking the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, The New York Times ran a feature-length article titled, “20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?” The piece acknowledges some harsh realities about the war, while dodging questions about its legality and the imperial motivations that fueled it. This is par for the course for the paper of record, which has a decades-long history of sidestepping damning questions about the war. To provide some context, I should say that I’ve probably done more empirical research on the ways in which we think and talk about Iraq and the “War on Terror” than any other scholar studying media, public opinion, and war (see here, here, and&nbs...