Iraqi Lawmakers Launch Campaign to Expel US Forces

Dozens of Iraqi lawmakers launched a campaign aiming to expel the US forces from Iraq.

The angry parliamentarians seek to pass a  law to expel the US forces which occupy patches of the Iraqi territories in the north, center and south.

A leader of a parliamentarian bloc called” Al Saadeqon”  led by Hassan Salem vows to collect signatures of fifty-three of his colleagues to support the environed legislation.

It is worth to mention that the US invaded Iraq 16 years ago on Tuesday.

The invasion was approved by Congress and had majority support among the American public, but is now considered one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in US history.

Former President George W. Bush's administration sold it on the pretext that Saddam Hussein had, or was trying to make, weapons of mass destruction (most notably nuclear weapons), and that Iraq's government had connections to various terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda.

While Hussein's links to terrorism and nuclear ambitions turned out to be untrue, the US occupied the country for nearly eight years before pulling out, creating a power vacuum that ISIS filled.

Two years later, the US military was back in the country — this time fighting a completely different enemy.

For more than a year after 9/11, the Bush administration made similar comments about Hussein's nuclear ambitions, and also his ties with terrorism.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Vice President Dick Cheney said in August 2002.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-invasion-iraq-anniversary-how-it-changed-middle-east-country-2018-3#the-iraqi-regime-has-plotted-to-develop-anthrax-and-nerve-gas-and-nuclear-weapons-for-over-a-decade-bush-said-during-the-2002-state-of-the-union-address-1

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice said on CNN in September 2002.

These statements, and others made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, turned out to be based on faulty intelligence.

Some disagreed with the Bush administration's intelligence assessments, including former Commander of US Central Command Gen. Anthony Zinni, and even argued that the administration lied about Hussein's nuclear ambitions and links to terrorism.