On March 29, 2003, just a few days after the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, El Vocero Hispano’s editorial read, “Iraq could be another Vietnam.” The facts proved us right.
Iraq was another Vietnam, shorter and with fewer victims maybe, but with the same capacity to hurt the American economy and with the same devastating effects in hundreds of Iraqis families. We weren’t alone in our prediction. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the World, from intellectuals to simple workers of all nations, agreed with us. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that destroying the political power of a country full of ethnic and religious groups, often antagonistic, would degenerate in chaos that no foreign nation could avoid.
It’s important to remember that months before the war, millions of people in Europe took to the streets to protest against then president George W. Bush’s clear intentions of invading old Mesopotamia.  The same protests took place in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Nelson Mandela refused to welcome Bush to South Africa in protest to his war ambitions and a human chain by people from all over the World was formed in Baghdad to avoid an attack.
Also, 97 percent of the members of the United Nations opposed the war and only a few countries, those whose governments were serviles to Washington’s instructions, backed the misguided initiative.
President Barack Obama’s message announcing the withdrawal from Iraq was encouraging to thousands of family members of soldiers who will be returning home. For the nation, it’s the announcement of the lifting of an economic burden that’s weighted down on the nation’s budget more than any other government's social program -even those than seem to raise conservatives' blood pressure so much.
The president was cordial and did not want to point fingers to those who are to blame for the waste of human lives as well as economic resources that Iraq was. That cordiality is more than those who organized the war -and today pitilessly fight against the government- will ever have.
The war in Iraq was sad and shameful in U.S. history. And history will make its authors responsible for all that shame one day.