The devastating failure of the war in Iraq

Twenty years ago, US President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq to liquidate Saddam Hussein's regime.

He did so with the excuse, which he presented to the United Nations Security Council, that the country had weapons of mass destruction.

The idea was to put an end to a bloody dictatorship as soon as possible and establish the first Arab democracy.

Six weeks later, Bush claimed that he had achieved his goal.

It was not so.

The war lasted for eight years, killing more than 500,000 Iraqis and displacing seven million people.

What happened during that catastrophic time, and what came after, is part of one of the darkest chronicles that continue to weigh on the history of the West.

The crimes and torture of the Abu Ghraib prison are an ignominy difficult to erase.

The tear caused by the alliances that the invading forces forged destroyed, on the other hand, the fragile coexistence between Sunnis and Shiites, fueling a sectarian conflict that was projected throughout the region like an expansive wave that was difficult to control.

Later, the Islamic State and its terror machine arose, striking like a furious and wounded beast in many parts of the world.

That area was hell, and may still be for those who lost everything.

A hell.

The word is not free.

A hell, and it annihilated millions of people, countries, governments, the faithful of different churches and the militants of different ideologies.

When remembering these days what happened then, it is quite easy to conclude that nothing could have been done worse.

But it is also convenient to distance ourselves and return to those dark days, who knows if with the will to understand to what extent and in what way things can go to hell.

Christopher Hitchens, one of the sharpest and most provocative political analysts of recent decades -he died in 2011-, strongly supported the goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, was very active in defending his arguments and also had He had to explain the painful path that it meant to side with a government like Bush's, which was massacred by that left from which he came and for which he had been a benchmark.

He even went so far as to justify at a Labor Party rally — "my last appearance as a man of the left" — that it was necessary to intervene militarily in Iraq.

He tells it in

his memoirs.

His description of Saddam Hussein's excesses makes your hair stand on end.

He knew them closely through his journalistic work, and thanks to his readings and what he learned from the Iraqis he had met.

At some point he speaks of the regime as a state machine that was modeled "after the precedents of National Socialism and Stalinism, not to mention Al Capone."

"The insult

it launches easily, and I do it myself sometimes, but I swear it's different when you see the actual phenomenon in action”, he points out.

Hitchens had seen the bowels of Hussein's dictatorship and considered that he urgently needed to do something.

He was fully involved.

When things got going, he says, he came to "know a little about the almost incredible incompetence and disloyalty of the CIA and the State Department."

It happened 20 years ago, Hussein was a monster, but it was all done utterly wrong.

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