The United States invaded Iraq 20 years ago and the consequences remain to this day.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be equated with the US-led invasion of Iraq, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the conflict that toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Blair said Moscow's forces had invaded "a country that has a democratically elected president who, to my knowledge, has never started a regional conflict or committed any aggression against its neighbors."

The former British leader said Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, had brutalized his own people, engaged in two wars in violation of international law and used chemical weapons to kill 12,000 people in a single day.

"At least you could say we were removing a despot and trying to introduce democracy," Blair said.

The 69-year-old British politician conceded that Russian leader Vladimir Putin could try to use the Iraq invasion, which took place without a UN Security Council mandate, to justify his war of aggression. 

"But, you know, if he didn't use that excuse, he'd use another excuse," Blair said.

West lost moral high ground by invading Iraq:

Under Blair, Britain joined a coalition of countries —  led by then-US President George W, Bush — in attacking Iraq on March 20, 2003. They did so without a formal declaration of war or a UN mandate.

The invasion took place in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the US.

The goal of removing Saddam Hussein was soon achieved but Iraq quickly sank into a spiral of violence that lasted years and left hundreds of thousands of people dead.

The invasion also spurred some of the largest anti-war demonstrations in Britain.

Critics say the war was exposed as a reckless misadventure as no weapons of mass destruction, one of the British government's main justifications for the operation, were found in Iraq.

The power vacuum ultimately allowed the self-proclaimed "Islamic State" to take control of large parts of the country for a few years.

Critics also argue that the Iraq war also hampered the West's ability to stand up to Russian and Chinese autocracy credibly.

The shadow of the Iraq war lingers on:

The killing continues, two decades on.

In February alone, at least 52 civilians died in Iraq in shootings, bombings, or other attacks. The violence is an echo of the war in Iraq, which the United States launched in the overnight hours of March 19-20, 2003.

Iraq could do little against a "shock and awe" campaign carried out by a US-led "coalition of the willing" that included the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland.

Within three weeks, Saddam Hussein and his brutal dictatorship were gone. Three weeks thereafter, on May 1, a triumphant President George W. Bush announced "mission accomplished" from the deck of the aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln.

To that point, the US and its allies had dropped 29,166 bombs and rockets, according to the Pentagon. Large parts of Iraq's infrastructure lay in ruins. More than 7,000 civilians were killed, according to Iraq Body Count, a British NGO.

It was the end of major combat operations, but the beginning of a long and deadly slog. In all, at least 200,000 people — and perhaps as many as one million, depending on the estimate — have died. In 2006, the Lancet, a medical journal, came to a number of 650,000 "additional deaths."

US troops left in 2011, only to come back to help fight the so-called Islamic State, a brutal Islamist group that sprung up in the ruins of Hussein's Baathist regime. According to the German Defense Ministry, 120 Bundeswehr soldiers are stationed in Iraq today.

Winning the war, losing the peace:

The military adventurism was "one of the last sorts of hubristic expressions of Western belief that they could reshape a country and a regional order to suit their preferences," Dan Smith, the director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), said.

"If the mission was to free Iraq from terror, reconstruct the country and enhance security on all levels, it was an absolute failure," Javier Solana, a former NATO Secretary General, sad in 2018.

At the time of the invasion, Jürgen Habermas, a leading German philosopher, wrote in the national daily FAZ, that one consequence of the US decision to violate international law by going ahead with the war was giving "superpowers a disastrous example" to follow.

Original Story By | Matthias von Hein