Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: 15th anniversary of US War on Iraq (video)

Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan (democracynow.org, March 22, 2018); Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Seth Auberon, Sheldon S. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

15 years after US invasion of Iraq, amnesia and distortion obscure record of war crimes

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink.org and author of the book Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

In his first foreign trip abroad as president, Trump traveled this weekend to Saudi Arabia, where he signed a series of arms deals totaling $110 billion of weapons transfers.

This comes in addition to more than $115 billion offered in arms deals to Saudi Arabia by Pres. Obama during his time in office.

The deal also includes precision-guided munitions, which the Obama administration had stopped selling Saudi Arabia out of fear they would be used to bomb civilians amid the ongoing Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen.

Since 2015, 10,000 people have been killed in the ongoing fighting, which has also decimated the country’s health, water, sewage, and sanitation systems. The arms deal includes tanks, artillery, ships, helicopters, a missile defense system, and cybersecurity technology. More

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The U.S. War on Iraq: 15 Years and Counting…

Fifteen years have passed since Pres. George W. Bush, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, and a coterie of neoconservatives, enabled by mainstream media cheerleaders, launched the U.S. invasion of Iraq with a murderous bombardment of Baghdad they branded “shock and awe.”

Far from delivering the promised freedom and democracy and exposing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, this illegal war killed, wounded, and displaced millions of civilians.

More than 4,500 U.S. service members were killed, seven of them as recently as last week.

Death and destruction on this scale would be more than enough to crush any society; yet, the Iraqi people have persevered, countering war with determination and hope.

“We have to name it as a criminal war,” Zahra Ali told the “Democracy Now!” news hour, “the destruction of Iraq as a functioning state and society.” A French-Iraqi sociologist, she was raised in Paris because her Iraqi parents fled Saddam Hussein as political exiles. “The post-2003 Iraqi regime has proven to be very anti-democratic,” she added.

Matt Howard enlisted in the Marines before Sept. 11, 2001. “I watched the invasion from Okinawa, Japan, where I was stationed at the time, and had a gnawing sense of dread that we were making a decision we could never step back from,” he said on “Democracy Now!”

Deployed twice to Iraq, in 2004 and 2005, by 2008 he was back in the U.S., opposed to war. He joined Iraq Veterans Against the War [IVAW], and now is co-director of the group, which recently changed its name to About Face. More

Reformer or war criminal? Saudi crown prince welcomed in U.S. as Trump touts weapons deals