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It is an oddity of American political life that, more than seven years after the Bush administration launched its
illegal and disastrous war in Iraq that cost the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily, that major political players are still debating whether or not the war made our country and the world “safer and better off.” Nevertheless, it is important to dismantle the claims put forward by Rubio and Crist.
Rubio displays a hefty ignorance history by claiming that an Iraq under Saddam Hussein would’ve engaged in an arms war like that between India and Pakistan. Ever since the Gulf War, Iraq was under draconian sanctions that
reduced its military to levels where it was completely unable to threaten any of its neighbors — and, unfortunately, exacted
an enormous human cost on its civilian population. There could have been no arms race because Iraq did not have access to the materials to make them.
Rubio and Crist both claim that the world is a safer place thanks to the war in Iraq. The facts tell very a different story. In 2007, terrorism experts and research fellows at Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank conducted a survey of terrorism incidents worldwide since the Bush administration-led U.S. war in Iraq. Their study found that terrorism incidents worldwide increased by
seven times, or six hundred percent, since the Bush administration invaded Iraq.
More recently, researchers Robert Pape of the University of Chicago and James Feldman of Air Force Institute of Technology found that, “from 1980-2003, there were 350 suicide attacks in the world, only 15% of which were anti-American.” Yet after the Bush-led war in Iraq, “there have been
1,833 suicide attacks, 92% of which were anti-American.”
Whether is Iraq is “better off” is more of a subjective question, but the level of suffering borne by the Iraqi people suggests they are not. In 2004, a year after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and well-before the spike in levels of violence that started with the sectarian warfare in 2005, Iraqis were
58 times more likely to die a violent death than they were before the invasion. Sectarian tensions and a fragile political system led to Iraq
breaking the world’s record for the longest time without a government. Damage to the country’s infrastructure limits Iraqis to an
average of five hours of electricity a day, and a recent document dump by the whistleblower organization Wikileaks
has uncovered tens of thousands of previously unreported civilian deaths and the widespread use of torture and other brutal military techniques by the Iraqi government. All of this is without noting that
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives, entire generations of children have grown under occupation or in sectarian warfare, and
millions fled the country. All for the cost of
$4-$6 trillion dollars, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
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