Can you even remember when the U.S. went to war with Iraq in 2003, when President George W. Bush announced that, “at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger”? And that “grave danger” was weapons of mass destruction supposedly in the possession of the government of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein that, of course, didn’t exist. In the process of (not) finding those (nonexistent) weapons and (not) winning that war, my country did, however, manage to kill an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians, while suffering 4,500 American military deaths in the process.
