Guardian:
From the streets of Baghdad, I saw a clear line to the bloodshed in Gaza
Owen Jones
The west faced no reckoning for the death and destruction it wreaked in Iraq. That made the war crimes we’re now witnessing inevitable
Tue 26 Aug 2025 19.00 AEST
“You destroyed Iraq.” I had to wait for my companion, the Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, to translate these words, but the thunderous look on this middle-aged man’s face already told its own story. We were standing on Haifa Street, one of Baghdad’s main thoroughfares, which runs along the west bank of the Tigris, and he had just been told I was British. “They promised that Iraq would be a heaven,” he said of the US-UK occupation. He then told a familiar tale: of being kidnapped by the sectarian militia, who flourished after the 2003 US-led invasion, and being tortured so badly that he could barely walk.
We had come to Haifa Street to retrace Abdul-Ahad’s steps on a gruesome day 21 years ago. With its alleyways and tall buildings, this two-mile-long road proved ideal for urban warfare and snipers, and soon became known as Death Street. Early on a Sunday morning in September 2004, Abdul-Ahad rushed from his hotel room after learning of an explosion. A crowd had gathered in the aftermath, civilians among them. Then two US helicopters fired missiles, scattering bodies and dismembered limbs. As he took photographs, men died before his eyes, while survivors begged him to “show the world the American democracy”.
We encountered the angry middle-aged man while searching for a concrete shed that Abdul-Ahad had sheltered behind. As we spoke, his anger cooled. I have always found Iraqis to be warm by disposition, separating their anger at the west from its citizens. But their anger is justified. On the map of history, a bloody road leads from Haifa Street to Gaza City. The west’s failure to have a reckoning over the Iraq catastrophe made Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people possible.
A war of aggression, deemed illegal at the time by the then UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, plunged Iraq into murderous chaos. At a conservative count, 300,000 Iraqis suffered violent deaths, according to the painstaking research of Iraq Body Count, about two-thirds of whom were civilians. Some were killed directly by occupation forces. Abdul-Ahad notes that the massacre he witnessed was commonplace. This particular horror achieved more prominence because he, a Guardian journalist, happened to be there. Consider another: the Haditha massacre in 2005, when US marines massacred 24 civilians, the youngest of whom was three years old. All murder charges against them were dropped.
Remember My Lai?
You may have found yourself asking: how could a crime as transparently obscene as Gaza be possible? Israel has slaughtered Palestinians it labelled “human animals” by the tens of thousands, and plunged Gaza into what UN-backed experts describe as an “entirely man-made” famine. Thanks to social media, atrocities are broadcast to the world daily. Yet the US alone spent nearly $18bn on military aid to Israel in the first year of genocide, while western nations offer handwringing rather than meaningful sanctions.
But the Iraq war proved that Arab life is cheap indeed. Only a reckoning could have given it value. As well as by occupation bombs and bullets, many more civilians were killed by sectarian militias and jihadis. You might wonder why the west should take responsibility for their crimes, but Abdul-Ahad’s masterpiece, A Stranger In Your Own City, explored how the occupiers institutionalised sectarianism. They brought exiled politicians who claimed legitimacy as representatives of Shias and Sunnis, dividing communities. The mistreatment of the Sunni minority proved fundamental to the rise of Islamic State and all the mayhem that spawned.
The lack of a reckoning has proved calamitous. We did have the damning findings of Britain’s Chilcot inquiry in 2016, which found Tony Blair “chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted” and that he had deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. But Iraq is for ever etched in western memory as a blunder, rather than a crime.
Blair’s post-prime ministerial career flourished and he made millions from despotic states such as Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan. Media outlets treat him with deference, as an elder statesman. George W Bush is now feted by US liberals as a “decent” Republican compared with Donald Trump, presumably because he doesn’t send mean tweets. Trump is unquestionably more of a threat to US democracy, but Bush slaughtered far more abroad. Meanwhile, the journalists who cheered on this bloodbath suffered no consequences to their careers and reputations.
That the three major western wars of the 21st century – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya – all ended in catastrophe has barely been processed. According to a study by Brown University, more than 4.5 million people died from direct and indirect causes in these and other conflicts including Syria. In a rational world, this would prompt a major crisis, with politicians jailed and journalistic cheerleaders fired in disgrace. That did not happen. If it had, would Israel’s genocide in Gaza have been possible? This historic crime has been enabled by western military, political and diplomatic support. If most western media had not defended or whitewashed Israel’s atrocities, it would have been impossible for governments to facilitate this genocidal rampage.
Iraq has not forgotten. Its capital now seems peaceful, a skyline of cranes testament to a construction boom – “Luxury in the heart of Baghdad” boasts one development – albeit some of it driven by corruption and causing local people to be priced out. But the sectarian militia are embedded in the state, menacing their critics. Dotted throughout the city, alongside adverts for Sprite and mobile phones, are billboards commemorating the victims of war. “They were martyred by the treacherous American bombing,” reads one outside my hotel.
The west has always stripped its victims’ lives of meaning. This dehumanisation was a necessary precondition for subjugating them, whether by the conquistadors in the Americas, the Belgians in Congo or the British in India. Given there was no reckoning for these crimes, some might ask why Gaza will prove the exception. They should consider that the west has spent the 21st century in a death spiral of decline, whether your measurements are military, economic or moral standing.
A livestreamed genocide means too many have seen, heard and read too much. This time, unlike the killing fields of Iraq, there must be a reckoning with the politicians and media outlets complicit in the erasure of Gaza from the world map, and the slaughter, maiming and starvation of its people. As our recent history shows, if accountability does not arrive, then we make future crimes not just possible, but inevitable.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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