In its episode on 2023/3/20, the program "The Story Has a Rest" dealt with the situation of Iraq 20 years after the US invasion, which began on March 20, 2003, when Washington launched its military operation under the name "Freedom for Iraq", which was prepared with various justifications, and turned out to be false over time.

That invasion, whose effects lasted for years, left hundreds of thousands of human losses, trillions of dollars in material, and radical changes in the oil country, in the region, and even in the United States itself.

A documentary prepared by the program monitored figures and statistics showing what Iraq was like before the US invasion, and what it ended up, in addition to special statements by the former commander of US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, in which he answered many questions related to the war, but categorically refused to determine whether the decision to invade Iraq was right or not.

The US civilian governor of Iraq during the invasion, Paul Bremer, also acknowledged in his speech to the program that the biggest mistake he made was to delegate the implementation of the decision to de-Baathify the Baath Party (the party of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) to the interim Iraqi government at the time, to start the process of settling political scores against opponents, in addition to acknowledging the mistake of dissolving the Iraqi army.

Trying to justify the invasion, Bremer said Iraq was a very rich country, with its GDP when Saddam took power higher than Spain, and with the arrival of U.S. troops in 2003, it fell to Angola's GDP.

Iraqi politician Muthanna Harith al-Dhari replied that it was unfair to assess the situation of Iraq before and after the embargo, stressing that the failure of Iraq after the occupation should be considered at all levels.

Numbers speak

According to figures from official international institutions, before the 1990 United States embargo, Iraq experienced years of prosperity in various areas of life.

According to a 2014 UNICEF report on education, pre-1991 Iraq had the best educational systems in the region, and the illiteracy rate for the age group from 15 to 45 was less than 10%, and this continued until 1984, and the rate of government spending on education was 20% of the average total government budget, so that indicators continued to decline from 1991 to 2003.

On the economic level, a report prepared by the Congressional Research Service in 2003 indicates that Iraq in the eighties had the best economies in the Arab world, and the situation deteriorated after 1991.

The years of the blockade imposed by the United States lasted about 13 years, bringing with them forms of misery and suffering for the Iraqi people, after which he announced the start of the military war, which the commander of US forces in Iraq at the time, David Petroys, acknowledged that the intelligence report, which was one of the main motives for the war, and stated that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, represented a major intelligence failure.

Backfired

A 2013 study by the International Center for Transitional Justice indicates that immediately after his appointment as head of the Civil Administration in Iraq, Bremer made several decisions that caused accumulated crises and fissures, such as decisions to de-Baathify, disband the Iraqi army, and rush to establish an electoral system based on sectarian quotas.

The year 2005 was the year of chaos, as statistics adopted by a study by the Arab Democratic Center indicate that violence in Iraq claimed 30 deaths every day during 2003 and 2004, then began to rise by the end of 2005 to reach 50 deaths, and increased to more than 100 deaths per day by mid-2006.

As a result of the insecurity in Iraq, all forms of life in the country have been affected; at the level of education, for example, a study published by the Geneva Centre for Justice in 2013 indicates that 84% of educational institutions in Iraq have been destroyed or destroyed, and 467 lecturers and professors have been assassinated since 2003.

Human and economic losses

Official Pentagon statistics put the number of Americans killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 at 4500,200, while about <>,<> Iraqis were killed, according to the Iraq Victims Statistics Authority.

Material losses have reached $100 trillion and $2 billion, according to a study by Brown University, which believes the figure will reach $2.2050 trillion after <> due to the care of veterans and the injured.

In a new review presented by Oxford University Press in 2023, titled "20 Years After the Iraq War, Towards a New Regional Structure," the study argues that the Iraq war helped erode the myth of the absolute power of the West and opened up the Middle East as a competitive space for economic and strategic opportunity, part of a broad ongoing shift from unipolarity to greater multipolarity in the region and globally.

Change and hope for development

Speaking to the program, Iraqi writer and researcher Jassim Al-Musawi said that Iraq is witnessing spaces for positive change, and hopes for development, indicating that the current political system is better than any previous system, as it is - according to his opinion - commensurate with Iraq, despite some mistakes of the current system.

He believed that these mistakes are what led to the current financial and administrative corruption, but he believes that the matter is currently different, and that corruption has begun to recede and besiege significantly, and that change exists despite its slowness, and "there are real reviews and corrections in all fields and at various levels."

Iraqi writer and researcher Yahya al-Kubaisi believes that after the overthrow of Saddam's "dictatorial" regime, Iraq became an authority based on sectarianism, pointing out that the totalitarian laws produced by the pre-occupation regime are still in place.

"We are talking about the structure of a sectarian system and constitution, corruption has become part of the structure of the political system and the state, systematic fraud of elections, monopoly of power, and trying to market democratic forms that are far from content in which there is a kind of misinformation," he said.