May 04, 2018
Fifteen Years Later in Iraq
Fifteen years ago George W. Bush started the invasion of Iraq in what turned out to be a terrible miscalculation of US foreign policy. Enough time has now passed to render some historical judgment on his adventure in Mesopotamia.
Bush started the war in the 18 months after the 9/11 attack, a time when America was stunned and scared, and where Bush had tremendous political capital to do whatever he wanted in the name of fighting terrorism. Democrats were cowed, and only a brave few were willing to say no to Bush’s rush to war. The American people were still very angry about 9/11, and the easy toppling of the Taliban and scattering of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan just didn’t seem like enough of a response to the destruction of that day. For many Americans, the chance to strike at a major Arab opponent, regardless of the fact that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, brought a certain sense of retribution. Bush and his team played into that by deliberately trying to tie Saddam to the 9/11 attacks.
But the primary justification that Bush gave for the war was to dismantle Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”, which in theory included nuclear, biological, and chemical. Saddam had used chemical weapons in his war with Iran in the 1980’s and against the Iraqi Kurds, but there was no evidence that he had any capacity to develop biological weapons (in fact, no one has ever developed a useful biological weapon).
Saddam had a robust nuclear weapons development program in the 1980’s, but it was thoroughly dismantled by UN inspectors after the First Gulf War. Saddam however maintained a degree of ambiguity as to whether he was trying to rebuild his chemical and nuclear weapons programs, and he played cat and mouse with the UN inspectors, even throwing them out of the country after 1998. This ambiguity gave Bush the wiggle room to declare that Saddam was in fact in possession of these weapons, or soon would be, and this amounted to an intolerable situation that demanded a US invasion. He got the Congress to authorize this act with the approval of many Democrats including then Senator Hillary Clinton. The UN never authorized the invasion, but Bush attacked anyway, and quickly conquered Iraq.
While the war was won easily with minimal US and Iraqi casualties, the aftermath turned into a disaster. Bush had little understanding of Iraq’s makeup or history. He thought that the people would all greet US troops as liberators, and that turning Iraq into the first Arab democracy would be very easy. This ignored several key facts.
First, Iraq was majority Shia Muslim, but its politics had been dominated by Sunnis going back five hundred years during the Ottoman days. To turn Iraq into a democracy would mean that the Sunnis would lose power and the Shia would gain it, totally upending Iraqi society. Second, the Kurds, who lived in northern Iraq, really wanted to be independent, and not to be part of Iraq. They would go along with that idea on the surface, but would not fully reintegrate into the Iraqi state. Finally, Iraq was a petro-state, with oil income its main economic activity. Oil was under control of the government, which meant whoever controlled the government controlled how oil wealth would get distributed. Running the government meant billions of dollars flowing in patronage to your own supporters and community through the government payroll, and denying that to others.
Bush also made two huge mistakes that touched off the terrible Sunni insurgency that plagued US troops trying to pacify the country. First, he fired everyone in government jobs that had a connection to the Baath political party of Saddam. In reality this meant dismissing tens of thousands of Sunnis from their jobs, leaving the government without qualified people and profoundly alienating the Sunnis. Secondly, Bush ordered the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, which sent hundreds of thousands of young men with weapons training to the unemployment line, and thousands of Sunni officers who were embittered at the loss of pay and pensions. These disaffected Sunnis provided the backbone of the Sunni revolt. The result was a raging insurgency and civil war between Sunnis and Shias that almost tore the country apart.
By 2008 Iraq began to calm down as the US committed more troops and Sunnis began to see the insurgency as failing to achieve their goals. Extremist Sunni groups, such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq led by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, also alienated Sunnis with their brutality and indiscriminate slaughter. By 2011 Obama removed the last US forces, and Iraq seemed to steady under the Shia-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki. But Al-Maliki was a terrible leader, who consistently served the Shias only and left Sunnis feeling marginalized and isolated. When another group of Sunni extremists based in a Syria torn apart by civil war pushed across the border and into Sunni Iraq, they found a population that welcomed them. Islamic State, or ISIS, rapidly took over Sunni Iraq in 2014, including cities like Fallouja, Tikrit, and Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. The Iraqi army was found to exist on paper only, with soldiers running away and melting into the landscape.
It took Iraq over three years to rebuild its military capacity, and the US has had to send troops in support back into Iraq, but ISIS was finally defeated. For the first time in 15 years, it appears that the killing in Iraq has stopped. After 15 years of a bitter religious conflict, the Iraqis are tired of fighting and are turned off by religion. The current Iraqi government is more inclusive and less sectarian than Al-Maliki was. Iraqi opinion is turning against political parties that appeal to sectarian interests. And Iraq’s Sunnis have finally realized there is no future in extremist Islamic groups, who only made life miserable for them when ISIS was in charge.
For the first time since Saddam Hussein came to power in 1968, the people of Iraq have a chance to define their own future. Can the Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds come together to build a functioning society that is politically stable and economically successful? The opportunity is there, but it will take hard work and a spirit of generosity by the powerful and compromise by all.
The cost of destroying Saddam’s power was too high to justify the invasion. It was a mistake that inflicted death and injury on tens of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The occupation was badly mismanaged, contributing to the mayhem. But 15 years later, the Iraqis finally have a chance to build a democratic and peaceful society.
