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The Iraq war started 10 years ago.

Here’s what we know now:

• The American government planned the Iraq war long before 9/11.   Former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office. And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.”  And see this and this.  Indeed, neoconservatives planned regime change in Iraq – and throughout the Middle East and North Africa – 20 years ago.

• Everyone knew that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (update here)

• The Iraq war was – in fact – for oil

• U.S. officials are guilty of war crimes for using 9/11 as a false justification for the Iraq war.  Indeed, the entire torture program was implemented in an attempt to justify the Iraq war

• American officials considered lettering Saddam should down a U.S. or UN plane, in order to provide a false justification for war

• Saddam allegedly offered to leave Iraq if the U.S. would call off the war … but we refused

• The American military used depleted uranium in Iraq – which can causes cancer and birth defects for decades (see this, this, this, this, this and this).

• The Pentagon sent in one of the main US creators of the death squads in El Salvador to set up paramilitary death squads and torture centers in Iraq

• Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated in 2008 that the Iraq war could cost America up to $5 trillion dollars.   But a new study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies says the Iraq war costs could exceed $6 trillion, when interest payments are taken into account.  And top economists say that war is bad for the economy

• National security experts – including both hawks and doves – agree that waging war against Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries has weakened national security and increases terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this

• Iraqis are worse off now than before the Iraq war. Christians are more widely persecuted than under Saddam

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