Iraqi women expected much when America and its allies invaded Iraq 10 years ago. I remember being in meetings with newly formed women’s organizations where they would talk about how America was going to give them freedom and equality. Ten years later, women find themselves combating religious zealotry, more violence against women, limited legal protections and rights, increasing child marriage, and absence from the work force, to name a few challenges.

In another meeting of women activists 10 years later, women talk of lost of hope for a better future more than anything else. “We gained things and we lost things,” one woman corrects the others. “Politically, we may have secured 25 percent of the seats in parliament, but there is no political will for women’s full participation.” There is only one woman minister out of 29 ministries, and women have no leadership roles in universities or the legal and business sectors.

“During Saddam’s time I used to fear his sons, Uday and Qusay,” one woman says. “Now I fear everyone.” Asked how women are faring in Iraq today, she continues: “We could roam around and go wherever we wanted without worrying during Saddam’s time. Our fear was political. We couldn’t talk. We couldn’t express our views. We couldn’t forget the fear we had of Saddam’s son Uday. But that fear hs now spread to the streets. I can no longer walk there.”

Women are a bellwether for society as a whole. What happens to them is telling about the national direction. With that in mind, Iraqi women have a sad story to tell. The historic rise of religious and tribal parties, and their influence on the country, has almost defeated any sense of equality for women. A national law that regulates family status no longer protects women. Today that law is subject to varying interpretations, depending on the religious scholar or tribal leader who has the legal authority to rule his region. That authority trumps any other constitutional law, leaving most women more vulnerable than ever and with varying rights, depending on their sect, religion, or place of residence.

He was the first man to die for a mistake.

Marine 1st Lt. Therrell Shane Childers became the first American combat casualty of the war in Iraq ten years ago tomorrow, on March 21, 2003, shortly after his unit secured Pumping Station No. 2 at the Rumaila oil fields 20 miles north of the border with Kuwait. A pick-up truck loaded with Iraqi soldiers appeared seemingly out of nowhere and Childers was hit once in the stomach. It was the wartime equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Childers was 30 years old and the son of a career Navy man. He had wanted to be a Marine since he was five, when he saw the Marine guards at the embassy in Tehran while his father was stationed in Iran. The approaching Islamic revolution caused the family to be evacuated in 1978. His father, Joseph Childers, had been briefly held hostage the following February, in a scenario that would now be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie Argo.

A lot of articles will be written this week about our experience in the Iraq War from primarily a U.S.-centric point of view. My goal is different: to help convey the stories of ordinary Iraqis and how our voluntary war affected them, and still does, even as Washington and the American public have largely moved on. These vignettes, which will run across consecutive days this week, include: The Teamster (Bassam), The English Teacher (Abbas), The Highway Patrolman (Waleed), and The Last Grand Mufti (Hamza). I also describe my interaction outside Fallujah with former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a primary architect of our “shock and awe” war.

The final piece in the series is forward-looking. I interview an Iraqi, Ameer, from Baghdad, who worked at the American Embassy and now lives in the U.S. He supported the invasion and continues to believe it was the right decision, with some caveats.

One day let's hope Iraqis will write their own books about the Iraq War. When they do, their stories in their words should be required reading for all.

My youngest daughter was born in December 2001: a war baby. When my wife nursed little Beatrice in the middle of the night, she’d hear F-16s patrolling the Washington skies.

During the weeks before, anthrax attacks had killed five people and infected 17 others. What would come next?

In October, I attended a crowded briefing in the fourth-floor auditorium of the Executive Office Building, at which the Secret Service explained its plans to protect the White House against a biological attack. They weren’t very reassuring. Basically, we’d all be dead. Even more disturbing were the small-session briefings by staffers for the new Homeland Security adviser. They warned of simultaneous car bombings at strategic intersections, targeted assassinations of officials as they retrieved their morning papers from their stoops, and poisonous gases released in Metro stations.

Few days before the start of the Iraq War, I was summoned to the Pentagon, along with other senior editors for major U.S. news organizations. The message from Victoria Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s spokesperson, was severe and unequivocal: the bombing of Baghdad would soon begin and our correspondents on the scene would be in grave danger unless we pulled them out.

Leaving the meeting, I felt both manipulated and uncertain. The Pentagon surely had its own reasons for not wanting reporters on the scene. At the same time, how could we judge the real risks from our offices in Washington and New York? And was any story important enough to risk the death of one of our reporters? For Newsweek, the reporter in question was Melinda Liu, one of our most experienced foreign correspondents. Melinda had covered conflicts and coups around the world and had even been shot while on assignment for Newsweek in Manila. While we had pulled out another correspondent in the run-up to the war, we’d agreed to let Melinda ride it out. But now we faced a difficult choice.

As Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, I delivered the Pentagon’s message to Melinda. Not surprisingly, she was adamant about staying. She felt safe enough in the Palestine Hotel, which was removed from the government ministries and major military installations that were the primary U.S. targets. But the orders for her to leave Iraq were coming from on high. Donald Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Co., which at the time owned Newsweek, called me to say he hoped we were pulling Melinda out. It fell to Richard Smith, Newsweek’s chairman and editor in chief, to give the order. Melinda was furious. What had she been doing living under one of the world’s deadliest regimes for the past two months if not preparing to cover the war? She agreed to leave—but not before sitting down at her laptop and writing a letter of resignation.

The desert in Kuwait seemed such a wasteland. Goose farms near the Iraqi border yielded huge quantities of s--t, which gathered along the sides of the roads and in the yard of the house where we were squatting. When the sandstorms blew, so did the s--t, smearing the world with its stench. That patch of desert already felt abandoned to the war. There was no question that it would slide in of its own weight; it was just a question of when. The border—the constant pounding of tanks, the hovering helicopters, and the military police patrolling—was a trembling faultline.

As we traveled, larger groups of American soldiers appeared out of nowhere. The desert swarmed with the lumbering shapes of those convoys. When they were close, you could hear their rumbling and see the life inside of them, like some uncoupled train from a lost world, carrying its survivors into the future.

The sandy fields were filled with American tanks, and their turrets beaded on us as we passed, swiveling in unison and following us until we were out of sight again. We slept in our cars, in the lees of dunes, or on the open ground. At night, the far horizons glowed with bombing, and it became impossible to distinguish what manner of destruction was hurtling earthward—human-made or otherwise. Soon it just seemed to merge. The fighter planes flew over it all, racing in and out on bombing runs. Some nights I wanted to leave—just turn around and go home. One night I called a colleague and told him so. Come on back, he told me. But I couldn’t, really; I didn’t trust my own navigation skills. So I kept going. As we raced on to Baghdad, the world smelled tangy with diesel. Long hours passed when all I followed was the dust trail Luc’s truck left for me as track. Helicopters sometimes thundered by above us, the bodies inside impassive. I had no idea where I was. But the small lines of the GPS led us north. It was a vast landscape we were in, and we were the only things that seemed to be moving. The sound of the wind was furious, and I rolled my window up quickly.

“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure.”

—President George W. Bush, March 19, 2003

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of our second invasion of Iraq, and the questions that were never answered about our nearly nine-year occupation are no longer being asked. Americans, our allies, and the Iraqi people are still owed an honest answer from the leaders who created the war and kept us in it: why were we there?

It’s a cliché that every newly elected president takes office determined to rectify his predecessor’s mistakes. It’s less common for a newly reelected president to take office determined to rectify his own. But that’s exactly what Barack Obama will be doing this week when he visits Israel.

In his first term, Obama spoke frequently about Israel. What he didn’t do was speak frequently to Israelis. It’s not just that in his first year in office Obama visited Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt while never visiting the Jewish state. In his eagerness to improve America’s reputation in the Muslim world, he also gave his first formal presidential interview to the Arabic-language channel Al Arabiya. He didn’t sit down for an interview with an Israeli journalist, by contrast, until July 2010. For many Israelis, who in the words of veteran Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas had “become junkies of presidential sympathy and presidential love” during the Clinton and Bush years, Obama’s inattention confirmed the right’s warnings that Obama secretly disdained the Jewish state. Thus, when Obama greeted newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by demanding a settlement freeze, even some progressive-minded Israelis reacted with alarm. By August 2009, according to a Jerusalem Post poll, only 4 percent of Israeli Jews viewed Obama as more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian whereas 51 percent believed the reverse.

Which is why this week’s trip will involve, if nothing else, a lot of talking to the Israeli people. In addition to visiting Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, and the graves of Theodor Herzl and Yitzhak Rabin, Obama will give a public speech in Jerusalem at which the White House has requested the presence of at least 1,000 Israelis. The idea is that by wooing ordinary Israelis first, Obama will find a more receptive audience when he unveils another initiative for Mideast peace. Administration aides are well aware that Netanyahu surrendered his first prime ministership after resisting demands for territorial withdrawal by Bill Clinton, a president widely admired in Israel. And they know that Yair Lapid, Netanyahu’s chief political rival, has criticized him for mismanaging the Obama relationship. A charm offensive, in other words, may do more to push Israel’s government in the direction of two states than a hard line.

A lot of articles will be written this week about our experience in the Iraq war from primarily a U.S.-centric point of view. My goal is different: to help convey the stories of ordinary Iraqis and how our voluntary war affected them, and still does, even as Washington and the American public have largely moved on. These vignettes, which will run across consecutive days this week, include: The Teamster (Bassam), The English Teacher (Abbas), The Highway Patrolman (Waleed), and The Last Grand Mufti (Hamza). I also describe my interaction outside Fallujah with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a primary architect of our “shock and awe” war.

The final piece in the series is forward-looking. I interview an Iraqi, Ameer, from Baghdad who worked at the American Embassy and now lives in the U.S. He supported the invasion and continues to believe it was the right decision, with some caveats.

One day let's hope Iraqis will write their own books about the Iraq War. When they do, their stories in their words should be required reading for all.

First, my own little Iraq war story. I was an opponent of the war but was mistaken by not a few folks as a supporter, which happened because I wrote an essay for a book edited by George Packer called The Fight Is For Democracy. When George asked me to contribute to the volume, it wasn't clear to me that he was pro-war. I would guess that in his own mind George wasn't yet pro-war at that point. We never really talked about it directly. I just assumed he was against.

But Paul Berman was in the volume, and we all knew where Paul stood. Also Kenan Makiya. But then there was Todd Gitlin, who was against, and Susie Linfield of New York University, whose position I don't know to this day but whom I assume to have been against. So there was no "line" in the book.

But my essay lead off the collection, and it was about how American liberals needed to stand "Between Chomsky and Cheney" (my rather felicitous title, if I may say it, although Chomsky sure didn't think so!) and not get sucked into a reflexive leftist anti-imperialist posture when it came to terrorism.

I intended this as an endorsement of the Afghanistan war, which I backed, but not Iran. Indeed as I recall it, the bulk of the essay was taken up with telling readers about PNAC (remember it?), the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, and various other neocon lies. That was really the point of my essay: Liberals must not be reflexively against the use of American power in this post-9-11 world, but we also most definitely should not support its use when it is being sold to us through a series of obvious lies.

Ten years ago, it was almost impossible to turn on cable news without seeing a policy intellectual arguing for regime change in Iraq. Many of the wonks making the case for ousting Saddam Hussein were from a tribe in Washington known as the neoconservatives, and at least the broad outlines of the Iraq War owe some provenance to their ideas. Ten years after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, many neocons today do not regret toppling the Iraqi regime.

Here are some prominent advocates for launching the Iraq War, reflecting on it a decade later:

Richard Perle
2003: Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential advisory committee for the Pentagon.

2013: Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

A lot of articles will be written this week about our experience in the Iraq war from primarily a U.S.-centric point of view. My goal is different: to help convey the stories of ordinary Iraqis and how our voluntary war affected them, and still does, even as Washington and the American public have largely moved on. These vignettes, which will run across consecutive days this week, include: The Teamster (Bassam), The English Teacher (Abbas), The Highway Patrolman (Waleed), and The Last Grand Mufti (Hamza). I also describe my interaction outside Fallujah with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a primary architect of our “shock and awe” war.

The final piece in the series is forward-looking. I interview an Iraqi, Ameer, from Baghdad who worked at the American Embassy and now lives in the U.S. He supported the invasion and continues to believe it was the right decision, with some caveats.

One day let's hope Iraqis will write their own books about the Iraq War. When they do, their stories in their words should be required reading for all.

The Teamster