Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation  Katrina vanden Heuvel
Katrina vanden Heuvel  Politics, current affairs and riffs and
reflections on the news.   A US soldier in Iraq, March 22, 2003
A US soldier in Iraq, March 22, 2003 (AP Photo/John Moore)  This
Monday marks the eleventh anniversary of the US invasion of
Iraq—a solemn punctuation mark to the steadily increasing
violence that has gripped that country over the past two years.
Sectarian violence claimed more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013 alone,
and this year’s toll has already surpassed 2,000. Iraq today is
a broken and failing state: the war that many would prefer to
believe ended in 2011 continues unabated, with Iraqis continuing
to suffer, as much as ever, the fallout from this country’s
callous lies and avoidable mistakes. Despite Colin Powell’s
sanctimonious “Pottery Barn rule,” John Feffer wrote on his
Foreign Policy in Focus blog at TheNation.com last month, the
United States has made no effort to “own up to our
responsibility for breaking the country.”