Cheney, Bush, and the crime against Iraq
The cathedral of amnesia
In the Washington National Cathedral, America’s political elite gathered to sanctify Dick Cheney’s legacy. Presidents, vice presidents, and celebrities lined up to hail him. His family sang his praises. The pews were packed with dignitaries, their faces sombre, their words reverent. However, beneath those solemn hymns and polished eulogies, there was silence on Iraq, silence about the millions of lives shattered by the War Cheney helped unleash.
It wasn’t a funeral, it was an erasure.
The ceremony was designed to consecrate a legacy, to transform a contentious political figure into a venerated statesman. But what the Cathedral offered was not remembrance-it was amnesia. The assembled mourners spoke of service and sacrifice, of dedication and duty. What they did not speak of was the greatest foreign policy disaster in modern American history, a catastrophe that Cheney orchestrated with calculated precision.
The lie that lit the fuse
Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair peddled the fiction of weapons of mass destruction. They knew the evidence was thin, the intelligence dubious. They knew the CIA had doubts, that inspectors had found nothing, and that experts had urged caution. But they needed a war, and so they manufactured one.
They lied to the American people, lied to Congress, and lied to the world. And upon that lie, they invaded a sovereign nation.
The case for war was based on selective intelligence, distorted facts, and deliberate exaggerations. Aluminium tubes became proof of nuclear ambitions. Dubious sources became ironclad evidence. Dissenting voices were marginalized or silenced. As former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix remarked, “Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to anyone. The invasion was a tragic mistake based on fabricated evidence.” The drumbeat for war drowned out reason, and when the invasion came, it came with the full weight of American military might behind a hollow justification.
In fact, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. What was found, however, was carnage.
Price in blood
The numbers are staggering, almost incomprehensible in their scale: Over one million Iraqis are dead. Men, women, children—entire families erased. Millions more displaced, their homes reduced to rubble, their lives uprooted, scattered across the Middle East and beyond. A country that once had functioning institutions, universities, and hospitals was handed to Iran and torn apart by sectarianism, destabilising the region for decades. Iraq was dragged back half a century, its infrastructure gutted, its society poisoned by violence that continues to this day.
Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who resigned in protest before the invasion, warned that the war would “strengthen the hand of al-Qaeda and foster the conditions for terrorism rather than eliminate it.” His words proved prophetic.
This was not liberation. This was not democracy promotion. This was annihilation. The war created the conditions for ISIS to emerge from the chaos. It shattered the regional balance of power. It sent shockwaves through the Muslim world that are still reverberating. The human cost is incalculable, not just in deaths, but in trauma, in displacement, in generations scarred by violence they did nothing to provoke.
Suits and crimes
Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are treated as statesmen by the corporate media, but history will judge them as criminals. They have committed what the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”—a war of aggression. They have destroyed a nation, and they did so knowingly, wilfully, with full awareness of the likely consequences.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who led coalition forces in Iraq, later described the war as “a nightmare with no end in sight,” saying that the planning was marked by “staggering incompetence and dereliction of duty.”
But instead of a trial at The Hague, they receive tributes. Instead of accountability, there is applause, book deals, and presidential libraries. Instead of prison cells, there are comfortable retirements, their reputations slowly rehabilitated by a political establishment eager to forgive and forget.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa captured the regional fury when he declared that the invasion “threatened to turn the entire region into a ball of fire.” For millions of Iraqis and their neighbours, that prediction became reality.
This is the moral rot at the heart of American power: the powerful bury their crimes under ceremony, wrapping their sins in the flag and calling it patriotism.
The $3 trillion war
Joseph Stiglitz of Harvard University, in The Three Trillion Dollar War, laid bare the staggering costs-not just in dollars but in credibility, stability, and human lives. The financial burden fell to American taxpayers. The opportunity costs were huge: what could those trillions have built? What diseases could have been cured, what infrastructure rebuilt, what education funded?
America paid in treasure and in the trust of the world. Iraq paid in blood. And still, nobody is held accountable. The architects of the War faced no consequences, suffered no penalties, endured no reckoning.
Where do Iraqis go for justice?
Iraqis ask one simple, devastating question: Where is our justice? The graves in Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul, none of them has an answer. Displaced persons in refugee camps from Jordan to Germany do not have any answers. The orphans and widows have no answers. The international courts maintain their silence, unable or unwilling to pursue those with responsibility.
The architects of this war walk free, un-washing their hands, as time and selective memory polish their reputations. Cheney’s funeral was a stark reminder that, in America, power insulates you from consequences, justice denied to the weak and reserved for the strong, and that denial is the final insult to those who suffered most.
The verdict of history
We must refuse to let history sanitize Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Neither were patriots defending America. They were liars who destroyed a nation for reasons that remain murky—whether oil, geopolitical dominance, stupidity, or simple hubris.
Their names should be etched not in marble cathedrals, but in the annals of infamy alongside other architects of unnecessary wars and mass suffering.
Iraqis deserve justice, the world deserves truth, the dead deserve to be remembered, and history needs to remember Cheney and Bush, not as leaders, but as war criminals who dodged the accountability they deserved.
The cathedral may offer amnesia. But we must insist on memory.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.