THE Iraq war has its origin in a lie: weapons of mass destruction that were not there. This we know. But what many don't know is the hubris that led to the lie. And what exactly is the hubris?
That the United States and Britain know Baghdad better than they know London and Washington. What's worse, the then US president George W. Bush and the then British prime minister Tony Blair thought they knew what the Iraqis wanted: Western-style democracy by invasion.
Twenty years on, a country lies in utter ruin. Hundreds of thousands of civilians perished in the invasion and what followed afterwards.
The Guardian, quoting the "Costs of War" project, says several times as many may have died in what it describes as "knock-on" effects. Americans and Britons must know this: thousands of soldiers died fighting in the fabricated war.
They owe it to these soldiers and the innocent Iraqis to hold Bush and Blair accountable.
Unsurprisingly, The Guardian, like most Western media, blames the Iraq war for ending the rules-based global order. But was there one before March 19, 2003, the day the war was begun with a "shock and awe" assault?
Sure, there was a unipolar order imposed on the world by the US through military might, with much help from its Western allies.
Unipolar order, yes; rules-based world order, no. The reason why the Iraq and Ukraine wars happened is because ours isn't a rules-based world order. It is a might-is-right world order.
International law is only there for the convenience of being quoted in law journals and at conferences. Or, as it has become clear in the very recent past, to be used as a tool of the Western powers in punishing their enemies. Harsh judgment, but true.
Consider the International Criminal Court (ICC)'s issuance of an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. No, we aren't lamenting the move.
Our stand has always been consistent: war criminals must be held accountable. But why pick and choose? Like the Ukraine invasion, the Iraq war wasn't sanctioned by the United Nations, the guardian of the rules-based global order.
Some will argue that the US Congress and British Parliament gave Bush and Blair the go-ahead. Let's not forget the go-ahead was purchased with a lie by the pair that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Both Bush and Blair knew there were none, but they wanted the war for their Anglo-American project of turning Iraq into a Western-style democracy.
If Putin has a case to answer, so do Bush and Blair. The rush to charge Putin and the refusal to do the same to Bush and Blair only points to one thing: international law is built on bigotry.
Law courts cannot have a reputational issue, but the ICC does. The perception in many countries around the world is that the ICC is being dictated to by the West, from the selection of the officers of the court to the cases the court gets to hear.
For them, The Hague gets to hear what London and Washington say it can. Not good for the ICC, and not good for international law. And certainly not good for the rules-based world order.