By Anas Altikriti

LONDON

Earlier this month, the Mercer Index for the Quality of Living ranked Baghdad as the worst city bar none to live in throughout the entire world, beating the likes of Damascus, Mogadishu and Haiti’s chaos riddled capital Port-au-Prince.

This is Baghdad’s 5th year winning the infamous accolade, in stark contrast with a past image that tells of immense beauty, knowledge, culture, science and advancement.

As these words are being penned, explosions are being heard in a number of Iraq’s major towns and cities, such as Mosul, where major air strikes target one of the busiest central districts of the city, striking at its university and faculty buildings. However, despite this major calamity to the residents and the occupants of the besieged second-largest Iraqi city, it tragically remains a mere detail within the construct of a major disaster that can be traced to precisely 13 years ago.

When the international coalition, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, began its attack on Iraq on March 20, 2003 under the pretext of ridding the country of alleged weapons of mass destruction, a cycle of events was triggered which, until this very day, continue to wreak havoc, death and destruction upon the beleaguered Iraqi people and arguably the people of the region as a whole.

Not only did the subsequent months and years see Iraq, a once progressive nation on many levels despite being ruled by a tyrannical Bathist regime, descend into unimaginable and uncontrollable chaos and failure, it also saw the rise of previously unknown terrorism and sectarianism which impacted the region and the world far beyond its borders, and continues to do so until this very day.

Even the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to admit in an interview on an U.S. network last October that the decision to go to war in Iraq might have led to the rise of Daesh.

A constitution ill-drafted in record time to appease the sceptics and confront the growing criticism of the entire venture, laid the foundations for the broken, corrupt, divided and unworkable political system that has become the hallmark of Iraq and the bane of every single Iraqi ever since. Along with a shoddy, badly equipped, poorly trained, unprofessional and largely sectarian driven armed forces, even the most ardent adversaries and enemies of the former regime could not help but speak of how much better off the country and the people were under the former dictator.

With more than four million Iraqis displaced, either within or outside Iraq, dozens of towns and cities falling under the control of Daesh, dozens killed weekly as a result of terrorism and state-sponsored violence, endemic and systematic corruption eating at what remains of a ransacked economy, a society utterly fragmented and broken with the prospect for national unity on par with an impossible fantasy, sectarian Shia militias roaming the streets of Iraq and committing heinous crimes with absolute impunity and more, Iraq today resembles the worst post-apocalyptic scenario imaginable.

Worryingly though, it appears that little has been learned and for the sake of avoiding any future libel, officials in both Washington D.C. and London, continue to defend the essential idea of waging the war, but put down the subsequent failures to a case of “mismanagement.” But to put down the crime that was committed and the resulting disasters as merely an administrative error, would be to compound offense upon humiliation. Horrifyingly, it also means that the likelihood of a similar act of callousness is never an impossible scenario.

Yet, while the list of failures, catastrophes and calamities suffered by the Iraqi people is long, it might be the impact of the invasion and occupation of Iraq on the region and how events unfolded throughout the Middle East that might signify the real implications of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

With Syria long descending into horrific crisis, the region being fragmented along sectarian and ethnic lines amid unprecedented violence and terrorist groups evolving from gang warfare to territory holders, it is a credible argument that all this started with the decision to bypass international legitimacy and invade Iraq.

What followed was a perpetuation of sectarian policies, built on the premise created by a fabricated war narrative which falsely asserted that Iraq’s problems lied in the fact that minority Sunnis ruled the majority Shia. It is quite interesting how the West often resorts to religion in order to wish away the results of its own mistakes.

So the viciously secular Bathist regime under Saddam Hussein was conveniently labeled sectarian, rather than a product of failed western policies in a region where it holds substantial strategic interests. Once the invaders-cum-occupiers began using the sectarian card, there was no turning back.

Subsequently, Iran was granted tacit permission to extend its reach, political and ideological, deep into the Arab region from Iraq all the way to the shores of the Mediterranean and southward toward the nether regions of the Arabian Peninsula, heightening tensions and widening previously obscure chasms. The anti-revolution trend, which began with the military coup in Egypt in July 2013, caused a reversal in the drive for democracy and a cementing of authoritarianism throughout the region, based on the threatening warning issued by tyrannical regimes to their own people; “Do you want what happened to Iraq?!”

The cycle that has befallen the entire region seems inevitable and unbreakable. Invasion, leading to occupation, resulting in an armed resistance, breeding extremist and terrorist groups, cementing the authority of despotic regimes, establishing the premise for crackdowns on legitimate activists and dissent under the pretext of fighting terrorism, giving further credibility to the terrorist groups, subsequently allowing for foreign intervention. And so on.

With the demographical transformation of many of Iraq’s major regions and the impossibility for most Arab Sunnis to return to their homes that have been occupied, ransacked and burned down either by the thugs of Daesh or the thugs of Shia militias, and the systematic spilling in of hundreds of thousands of people from Iran into Iraq carrying no official documents or papers indicating who they are, it is impossible to see how Iraq can return to a mutually acceptable point of normalcy.

With the continuing demise of the economy due to the collapse in global oil prices and the inability of Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi to see through his undertaking of sweeping reforms amid the stand of militias and former politicians whom he cannot match for power and brute force, the future is all around extremely grim.

A country obliterated, and a nation decimated. But the price of the Bush/Blair war in 2003 is certain to be paid by many more parties, some further afield than the region left in flames.