Iraq war, 20 years on | An American anti-war protestor remembers as world moves on

In February 2003, a few weeks before the United States launched a full-scale invasion of Iraq, Alexander Phillips, an American then aged 18, participated in one of the anti-war protests which called upon the administration of President George W Bush against invading Saddam Hussein-led Iraq.

Alexander Phillips, with microphone, at an anti-war protest in Orange County, California, March 5, 2003 | Alexander Phillips

"We don't want a smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," the US declared, and went on to invade Iraq, citing the presence of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' in the country, and characterising the West Asian nation as a 'sanctuary for terrorism'.

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Many years later, no such weapons were found. "The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were no more than a bit of improvised sham, a con man's counterfeit goods," J.D. Maddox, an American intelligence officer who led the Iraq Survey Group that was assigned the task to search the supposed WMDs, wrote in 2020.

The Iraqi capital Baghdad fell to the US forces within two weeks of the invasion. Saddam Hussein was captured by US forces nine months later in December 2003.

In May 2003, the United States installed the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) government at a walled-off segment of Baghdad known as the Green Zone, setting up a capital-within-a-capital.

The new government was seen as insulated from the Iraqi people whose lives and livelihoods were at stake. While Americans and their few Iraqi allies enjoyed clean streets, air conditioning and even fast food chains, ordinary Iraqis were subject to looting and violence.

Three years later, after a trial widely seen as a sham, Hussein was hanged to death in January 2006.

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein argues with prosecutors while testifying during cross-examination at his trial in Baghdad's Green Zone, April 5, 2006. He was hanged on December 30, 2006 | Reuters image

A cycle of political uncertainty followed.

The detractors of Hussein's mostly Sunni Ba'ath Party became part of armed groups based on sectarian allegiances, a move that was to snowball into the terror unleashed by Abu Baqr-al Baghdadi's 'Islamic State of Iraq and Syria' years later.

"Iraq was a combustible nation full of sectarianism that had the potential to be worse than civil wars in Syria and Lebanon," said Julian McBride, an anthropologist who tells the stories of victims of war through art and research, and is the founder and director of non-profit Reflections on War (ROW) Initiative.

While anti-war protestors like Alexander Phillips knew that it was unlikely that their protests were going to stop the impending invasion, the political climate post-9/11 terror attack of 2001 in the United States made it even more difficult for such a possibility to emerge in the first place.

Phillips told WION that he and his fellow protestors saw 'a lot of middle fingers' from the passersby at San Diego in February 2003.

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"A lot of angry people were explaining to me that I was misguided. That in five years, Iraq would be a stable democracy," Phillips, 37, now an assistant professor of English at Ashoka University near New Delhi, told WION.

"We were going after war with the evidence that was flimsy at best. I think that it is too easy to say we were misled and that we were lied to," Phillips said, adding that the 'political and journalistic establishment seemed quite set on invading Iraq'.

Twenty years on, the assertions of the Bush administration have been proven false. Despite the commitment of over $60 billion in the US funds to reconstruction alone, Iraq remains fractured and vulnerable to violence.

"I would argue that anyone could have known this at the time. That case for going after the war was questionable at best. I understood this, as an 18-year-old. We could have all known this," Phillips added.

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