Experts decry US double standards in global politics as 2023 marks 20 years of Iraq war

The US war on Iraq in the pretext of Weapons of Mass Destruction has once again come under scanner in the backdrop of the Ukraine war. Experts have questioned US “double speak” as 2023 marks 20-years since Washington launched its war against then Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, under the pretext of Baghdad developing WMDs.

“For 20 years, the war itself has been seen as a watershed moment on multiple fronts, the biggest mistake of the Bush-Cheney administration, a conflict that undercut the War on Terror itself, and one that immensely diluted an already fragile American presence in the Middle East (West Asia). Even as the US tries to normalise the events of the time, and as Washington’s strategic interests in Iraq evolve, the legacy of the war continues to weigh heavy on the US foreign policy,” wrote Kabir Taneja (ORF) in his recent piece “The legacy of the Iraq War for the US”

“Almost no good came out of the American invasion of Iraq, despite some who continue to argue that while the war was launched on false intel and pretext, it still did more good than harm…The war itself, to this day, continues to galvanise support for Islamist movements across the world, and continues to be one of the most effective props to both radicalise and recruit.”


Taneja argued, the Iraq war was possibly the worst political decision making in the West in the recent past. “Some of these apprehensions are visible today on how the Global South positions itself around the Ukraine war, and a lot of these apprehensions come from experiencing centuries of colonialism, and lack of genuine and equitable partnership by global powers in contemporary history…The Iraq war remains a quintessential example of the adage that in international affairs, history is a great teacher only if it has willing students.”

The double standards in international politics have been heavily criticised. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Raisina Dialogue criticized US interventions in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria he earned a big round of applause from the Indian audience. Parallels with Iraq have been drawn by many Indian interlocutors, pointing out that no one then decided to impose sanctions on the US.

A book titled ‘Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books, 2007)’ by Stephen Kinzer, argues that regime changes have been an integral part of US foreign policy for over a century – starting with the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. According to the book there are three periods of America’s regime-change century – the imperial period; the Cold War period; and the third period which witnessed US troops in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.