March 22 ,2012
Ten Years Ago Bush Destroyed Iraq and His Presidency
Ten years ago Bush launched the Iraq war, a poorly conceived adventure that turned into the greatest American foreign policy blunder since Vietnam. The costs of the war turned out to be huge. For America, 850 billion dollars in direct war costs, 6000 dead and 30,000 wounded, plus tens of thousands with psychiatric injuries to add to that are just the start.
Indirect war costs will add 2 trillion to that total including medical and disability benefits for the wounded, interest on the debt run up to fight the war, and replacement of the worn military equipment. For Iraq, it meant several hundred thousand dead in the chaos of the years after the invasion, and 2 million displaced either internally or fleeing the country. The US was not directly responsible for that carnage, but the complete mess made of the country by the terribly mismanaged occupation was the fault of the US.
Why did the US invade Iraq? There were many reasons, the first was the alleged weapons of mass destruction, which was an absurd fear but trumpeted by the Bush administration as a certainty. Never mind that there are no biological WMD anywhere in the world, that chemical weapons are of little value, and that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program of any sort, and such a thing cannot really be hidden.
But there were other reasons to invade Iraq. After 9/11 many in America wanted to “hit back” and taking out the Taliban with local militias and some smart bombs just wasn’t vengeance enough. Invading Iraq was a much louder way of telling the Muslim and Arab world who really was in charge. There was a large faction of the Republican party called the neo-conservatives who had been clamoring for ousting Saddam Hussein even in the 1990’s. They saw his continued rule as “unfinished business” from the First Gulf War, and wanted to get rid of him as a clear demonstration to the world of American pre-eminence. They organized as the “Project for the New American Century” and many of them were in the Bush administration when 9/11 gave them a pretext to convince America to invade Iraq.
Saddam had been contained for a decade with a no-fly zone and sanctions that cost the US a few billion dollars a year to maintain, and this seemed like a burden that would not end. There were also humanitarian arguments stating that Saddam had committed mass killings against Kurds in the 1980’s and Shia in the early 90’s when putting down rebellions. He was such a nasty dictator that overthrowing him would earn the praise of the Iraqis themselves.
Finally, there was the argument that 9/11 happened because Muslim and Arab countries were not democracies, and this needed to be changed by force. As the US was not going to overthrow an ally like Mubarak or the Saudi royals, the logical target was Saddam. Turn Iraq into a democracy was the thinking, and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world will slowly follow the example.
In reality, the Bush administration was grossly incompetent in running Iraq. While they won the initial war in a few weeks, they did not recognize that “democracy” was not so easy to set up. They also had no understanding that in a petro-state the main issue of politics was going to be division of the oil revenue, most of which would flow through the army officer corps and the government jobs controlled by the ministries. A democratic Iraq would mean that all this would end up in Shia hands, and the Sunnis would be the losers. Compound that huge issue with the disbanding of the prewar Iraqi army and the decision to expel anyone who had been in the Baath party from the government, and Bush basically did everything he could to create a Sunni insurgency that destroyed any chance of the US achieving its goals in Iraq.
After years of carnage and chaos, slowly the civil conflict in Iraq died down, mostly because the Sunnis had lost. The US finally withdrew at the end of 2011 having achieved very little of strategic importance at an immense cost to itself and immense suffering for the Iraqis. Getting rid of Saddam was a positive event, but everything after that was so badly handled as to raise the question whether it was worth the price.
It is ironic that Iraq is now ruled by politicians who spent the Saddam years in Teheran, and are closely allied with Iran and the Assad regime in Syria. Meanwhile, Bush's popularity plummeted in his second term, and he left the White House as one of the worst presidents of the last hundred years. Outside of Dick Cheney, no one even among serious conservatives now defends the Iraq war as a good decision. Its long-term impact may be that the US will never again invade another country knowing how difficult and costly occupation actually is.
