We’ve heard it more than a few hundred times—truth is the first casualty of war— since the invasion of Afghanistan morphed into the invasion of Iraq.

What is the second casualty of war? If the invasion, destruction, and occupation of Iraq are any indication, it is likely that historians will label morality the second casualty.

The invasion of Iraq; the eroding of its civilian, military, and technology infrastructure; the wholesale looting of its museums, schools, and ministries; and the rampant unemployment (reaching 70 per cent) in the past 16 months have all been justified by the repeated allegations that the oil-rich republic was not only a threat to the region but to the United States and Europe as well.

Iraq was touted as a battleground for good and evil, with the gentle empires of the West taking on the disillusioned megalomaniac of the East (Saddam Hussein) who had shaken hands with the devil (al-Qaeda) and was planning wholesale terror around the world.

The evil dictator would use the weapons of mass destruction his scientists had created—everything from anthrax, ricin, smallpox, and nerve gas to nuclear and radiological weapons—to unleash this horrible onslaught.

The world audience held its breath as it was promised Armageddon.

Instead, it got a horrible distortion of the truth and Iraqis were re-introduced to the Stone Age.

And this is where morality retreats into the shadows of a war that should have never been over weapons that never were.

On July 9th, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a blistering report on the investigation into pre-war claims of Iraq’s capacity to wage war against its neighbors and develop weapons of mass destruction. At the heart of the investigation was the persistent claim that Iraq had established, maintained and nurtured ties with al-Qaeda and was ready to transfer its weapons expertise to the rogue terrorist organization.

The report bluntly stated that the intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, unwarranted, out-of-date, negligently analyzed and warped to fit the so-called bill of war, thereby exhibiting “a broken corporate culture and poor management”. Several senators said that had they known the truth they would have never voted for the authorization US President George Bush needed to invade Iraq.

“On Iraq, it appears to have been hallucinating,” The Economist said of the CIA (July 17, 2004).

Across the ocean, the Butler report, which examined the same pre-war intelligence claims, delivered a similar blow to London’s intelligence community.

On July 16, the Butler report asserted that Iraq “did not have significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment or developed plans for using them.” It chastised the methods of intelligence-gathering used by the British services and said that much of the data used to justify the war was unreliable.

Further south, Australia also faced an intelligence embarrassment. An investigative report into Australia’s pre-war claims prepared by Philip Flood—a seasoned Australian diplomat and former head of Office of National Assessments (Australia’s spy agency)—found that Australian intelligence had also failed in adequately sizing up Iraq’s illicit weapons

“It is significant that, using similar but not all the material available to the UK and the US, Australian assessments on Iraq’s capabilities were on the whole more cautious, and seem closer to the facts as we know them so far.”

Three countries that demanded the international community invade Iraq, three countries that aggressively pursued United Nations legitimacy for the invasion of Iraq and three countries that insisted time and again that Iraq was a global threat are also the three countries that have been faulted for their intelligence gathering.

A coincidence? Hardly. All three countries knew fully well that the intelligence on Iraq was flimsy at best, laughable at worst.

Take Richard Clarke, for example, the former counter-terrorism czar, who said that he was ordered to find a link between Iraq and the horrible events of 9/11. When Clarke found no such link, he was ordered to go back and return only when he found what the Bush White House was looking for.

Clarke’s statements seemed to echo those of Paul O’Neill, former Treasury Secretary.

In an issue of Time magazine, O’Neill debunked the weapons of mass destruction claims against Iraq: “In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction. ... I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence.”

When Bush addressed the UN General Assembly in September 2002 and cited intelligence information to justify a war on Iraq, the international community refused to blink. In fact, the UN Security Council was unable to authorize an invasion of Iraq. The US, UK, Spain, Italy, Australia and their arm-twisted allies (much of whom were former Soviet satellites bartering for US economic gratitude and NATO cash) went to war alone.

And the reasons for which they defied the will of the world have now clearly been shown to have been false.

An illegal war based on unfounded speculations and erroneous conclusions would only get worse as time wore on. Fast-forwarding past the growing resistance in Iraq in the summer of 2003, the failure of Saddam’s capture to discourage resistance, and the growing US military death toll (919 as of August 5), the single greatest blow to American moral standing and prestige in the world is that inflicted by the stories of atrocities, crimes, abuse, and torture committed by US troops against the Iraqi civilian population.

In late April, CBS aired pictures of female and male US soldiers torturing and abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, an area known for its history of torture and execution during Saddam Hussein’s 35-year reign.

According to Reuters, “The photos showed U.S. troops smiling, posing, laughing or giving the thumbs-up sign as naked, male Iraqi prisoners were stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts with one another.” Several pictures depicted a female US soldier, cigarette dangling from her mouth, pointing her fingers in a gun-like fashion at the penises of several naked, yet hooded Iraqi men. Other pictures showed US servicemen and women giving the thumbs-up.

The Washington Post would later show more horrific pictures of a US soldier—Lynndie England—giving the thumbs-up sign as she hovered over the corpse of an Iraqi man who it was later revealed had died during interrogation.

In May 2003, a photography shop assistant in England developed pictures which “allegedly showed an Iraqi, bound and gagged, hanging from a rope on a fork-lift truck,” the BBC said.

In July 2003, Amnesty International (AI) reported that Iraqis were being shot while in detainment and subjected to human rights abuses: “Detainees continue to report suffering extreme heat while housed in tents; insufficient water; inadequate washing facilities; open trenches for toilets; no change of clothes, even after two months’ detention.” However, US authorities refused to allow an AI delegation into the detention centers.

In May, Bush suggested that Abu Ghraib be razed, ostensibly to rid himself and his administration from the fallout of the torture and abuse committed by US forces inside the prison. Iraqis were outraged and refused.

In June, The Washington Post ran a picture of an Iraqi in an orange jumpsuit, terror apparent on his face as a US soldier nudged a dog towards him.

The Post claimed that a military intelligence interrogator had told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were “having a contest” to see how many detainees could be made to urinate on themselves out of fear of the dogs.

In July, the former head of the Abu Ghraib prison, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, made two startling revelations. The first—that interrogation methods were “taken out of her hands by higher-ranking officials, acting on orders from Washington”—seems to implicate a chain of command in abuse and torture.

The second seems to prove suspicions that Israelis were orchestrating the interrogation of Iraqis: “He was clearly from the Middle East and he said: ‘Well, I do some of the interrogation here and of course I speak Arabic, but I’m not an Arab. I’m from Israel,’” she told the BBC.

Then other human rights abuse charges against the US military started filtering through. In July, noted journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker told the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that he knew that the US government possessed tapes showing US soldiers sodomizing Iraqi teenage boys.

“The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war,” he said.

To list all the atrocities committed in Iraq would far overrun the scope of this article; indeed, a volume of many pages would not suffice. The US military admitted in mid-July that it is investigating some 94 cases of torture, abuse, and criminal misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. US senators have claimed that there are some 600 CDs full of pictures and videos allegedly of Iraqi prisoners being abused.

Whither America’s grand plan for the Middle East? Not only was this war fought on false, and perhaps deliberate, pretences, but it has resulted in many amoral injunctions against the Iraqi people.

After years of suffering and debilitation under a brutal and inhumane US-pedaled UN sanctions regime, one would have thought that Iraqis deserved better.

“America generally we consider a champion of liberty, justice, these things - so then for something such as this to happen, we regard as shocking,” said the exiled Tibetan leader to Britain’s The Guardian in June.

At the end of the Democratic National Convention, US Presidential hopeful John Kerry said that he would restore respect of America and American values around the world. That will prove a challenging, if not daunting task.

In Cairo in April, demonstrators chanted “America take your democracy and go to hell.”

In hell, there is no morality.