Al-Qaeda was perceived to be an existential threat in Ba'athist Iraq and was hunted down, but the group found fertile recruitment ground in the country following the invasion. It used George Bush's characterisation of the so-called "war on terror" as a "crusade" as a rallying cry, inviting fighters across to world to join their fight. Al-Qaeda was almost non-existent in Iraq prior to 2003, but it became a powerful force following the invasion and increased its global recruitment rate substantially. It was the power vacuum created by the invasion that allowed people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to become powerful warlords almost overnight. [...]
The Lancet published a study that showed that, up until 2006, approximately 655,000 Iraqis had been killed as a direct result of the invasion. The British defence ministry's then-chief scientific adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, praised the study as "robust", lending even further credibility to the findings demonstrating the catastrophic loss of life suffered by Iraqis in the first three years following the invasion. [...]
All of these developments have a common ancestor - the Iraq war. The Middle East is more violent and unstable than it has ever been in living memory. Iran and Saudi Arabia are now engaged in a proxy war of grave regional implications that seems to have no end in sight. The United States is in retreat, as Russia and China assert themselves on the global stage and issue open challenges to the world's former unipolar power. And Europe is struggling with xenophobia born of a refugee crisis that primarily resulted from violence in the Middle East. The entire world has felt the effects of the Iraq war and, after a decade and a half of global chaos and instability, it is hard to characterise the invasion of Iraq as anything but the original sin of the 21st century.
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