The US Invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003. Since 2003, the United States took Iraq which was a dirt poor oppressive but secular authoritarian country where many religions were tolerated, and which posed no threat whatsoever to the United States; and turned Iraq into a much poorer basketcase of a country ruled by an authoritarian Islamist oligarchy in which non-Muslims are bombed and forced into exile on a regular basis. Saddam Hussein, a secular socialist who was a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorist organizations, was swept aside and the US paved the way for Al Qaeda which now has a presence in that country. The Iraq war was an abysmal and pointless disaster for everyone except the Western financiers and corporate merchants of death who were paid hundreds of billions to occupy and destroy Iraq on utterly false pretenses. There were no WMDs. And of course, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which had a lot to do with 9/11, and is arguably the most oppressive Islamist regime on earth is officially Best Friends Forever with the United States government.
One of the great things about the Mises Institute and its scholars is that it never wavered in its opposition to the Iraq War. As with most things, the Institute took no “official position” but unlike many conservative and libertarian organizations, it certainly didn’t publish any “policy papers” discussing the pros and cons of invading a foreign country for no reason, or sponsor any forums debating the destruction of the Bill of Rights in the name of “war on terror.” Nor did the MI care about making friends in Washington by supporting the latest crazed drive to war for the sake of some future imagined “strategic” victory. The modern libertarian tradition, from Cobden and Bright, to Sumner, to Mencken, to Chodorov, and to Rothbard is consistently anti-war, and of course, we continue that tradition.
In this great and concise video, Tom Woods and Scott Horton examine the myths that were propagated to drive the United States into that war. The US of course continues with similar lines of “argument” today for every new war and attempted war.
