The Day We Lost the Iraq War

hnn: It is Iraq anniversary season, those four weeks of the year when assessments and opinions on what the Bush Administration wrought when it overthrew Saddam Hussein fill up the airwaves, Internet and newspapers. We'll be performing these annual assessments for years to come because the final result of the Bush action is still unknowable and because so much of the public debate has been led in a spirit of willful ignorance.

When it comes to the Iraq conflict "Fog of War" doesn't refer to the smoke and dust of the battlefield but rather to the hot air emanating from the mouths and pens of partisans and pundits, many of them living inside the confines of the Green Zone on the Potomac, virtually none of whom were in Iraq during the period of major combat operations and very few of whom have made the journey to that country subsequently. Their analysis is flawed by their lack of eyewitness experience of the conflict.

Given how little objectivity has been brought to bear on understanding Iraq by the official classes, I have come to realize that the accounts of those of us who reported this conflict really are the closest thing the world possesses to a "first draft of history." Three years on, based on my experience as an unembedded reporter covering "major combat operations" in northern Iraq, I have reached a conclusion: it didn't have to turn out the way it did. I base this conclusion on what I saw in Mosul, a city of around 1 and a half million people on April 11th 2003 and subsequently. Read more