It was twenty years ago this month that the United States and Britain invaded Iraq. The Bush Administration claimed that Saddam Hussein’s regime represented a threat to world peace as he possessed weapons of mass destruction. We were constantly told there was “slam dunk” intelligence that proved the existence of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. Despite the efforts of the United Nations to conduct weapons inspections, the United States refused to wait. US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was gearing up the Pentagon for war.

We know what happened next. The invasion turned into an occupation and then an insurgency. Iraq has never recovered from the invasion. It descended into civil war, then the rise of ISIS and then Iran exerting more influence. It was predicted that it would be a disaster and it came to pass.

A dangerous precedent was set.

Vladimir Putin was watching all this from the Kremlin. If the United States could launch a pre emptive war against a perceived threat thousands of miles away, then why can’t he? If the United States could treat the UN with such contempt, why couldn’t he? He launched an attack on Ukraine using spurious grounds (Nazis, chemical weapons labs, endangered ethnic Russians) and he used his complaint media to pump out the justification. Putin never accepted a pro- Western Ukraine on his border, which he saw as a threat. Moscow was even more fearful of Ukraine joining Nato. His invasion last year was designed to conquer and then create a puppet state friendly to Moscow.

The United States has condemned the invasion, and has backed Ukraine with weapons and financial support. Russia has also been hit with a series of economic sanctions. An arrest warrant has been issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court. Putin could and his supporters can argue that this is rank hypocrisy. Why is he deemed a war criminal and not George W Bush or Barack Obama? The United States has intervened in both Libya and Iraq and destabilised both countries. Is that not a war crime?

The war in Iraq opened the door to a world of chaos. Any powerful nation could attack another, claiming that it was threatened had to prevent an attack. What could stop India one day attacking Pakistan, claiming it had evidence Pakistan posed a threat to its security? Israel may in the near future, launch a preventive strike against Iran, using the same rationale at George Bush in 2003 or Vladimir Putin in 2022.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 opened the door to a law of the jungle that we still coming to terms with today.