IRAQ 20 March 2008 Fifth anniversary of US invasion of Iraq invites new protests and questions

The United States invaded Iraq five years ago on Mar 20 despite global protests and a lack of support. The fifth anniversary is a flashpoint for anti-US and anti-Iraq war protests around the world and for a spike in violence in Iraq. It invites new speculation about President George W. Bush's real motives for invading and new questions about whether the war can be won.

The US difficulties in Iraq are generally blamed on hubris, poor post-invasion planning and a lack of knowledge of Iraqi-Muslim culture.

Bush declared at the time that the objective was "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people." Few US allies were sold on the idea, and the resulting "coalition of the willing" left the United States carrying most of the burden of fighting the war.

Most estimates place the number of people around the world who took part in some 3000 anti-war protests at 36 million.

By Mar 2008 as many as 4000 US military personnel might have lost their lives, plus tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The anniversary could make it hard for the Bush administration to continue evading hard questions about Iraqi civilian deaths and the refugee situation the war has caused. A survey published in Sep 2007 by the Opinion Research Business organization in Britain put Iraqi civilians deaths at 1.2 million. Iraq Body Count, the UK-based group that tracks the Iraqi death toll, said it was between 73,390 and 79,999. And millions of Iraqis are known to have fled the fighting, and are now internally displaced or finding refuge in neighboring countries such as Jordan.

There are several reliable sources for the dollar cost of the war. Quoting figures from a survey for the American Friends Service Committee by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes, the Washington Post said the war costs US taxpayers US 720 million a day or US $500,000 a minute.

In the aftermath of the invasion there is considerable speculation about the administration's real motives. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based columnist in the Independent newspaper, concluded on Sep 22 that he suspected Bush doesn't know why Iraq was invaded, and that "it just seemed like a neat idea at the the time."