"In February 2003, Elliott Abrams, a US official convicted of lying to Congress over the Iran-Contra affair but pardoned by President George HW Bush, spoke to the media about the impending invasion of Iraq, ordered by Bush’s son.
Abrams claimed in his remarks about “humanitarian reconstruction” that six priorities had driven the planning. “The first is to try to minimise the displacement and the damage to the infrastructure and the disruption of services,” he said. “And the military campaign planning has had – has been tailored to try to do that, to try to minimise the impact on civilian populations.”
It didn’t turn out that way. Sixteen years after Bush launched his so-called “war on terror”, millions of people’s lives have been turned upside down, Isis has been allowed to fester and spread, and Iraq is a nation at risk of fracturing apart. Moreover, an untold number of innocent civilians have been killed – by disease, illness, in gruesome tortures performed by local and foreign insurgents, and by the US and UK-led military campaign that Abrams and others vowed would be surgical."