14 Years after 9/11
14 years after 9/11 it’s been fascinating to watch the return of the neo-cons as their deranged thinking continues to dominate Republican foreign policy. Rand Paul was the only Republican who was willing to confront how catastrophic that approach has been for America, but the rest of the candidates are shameless. The revised history is now that Bush won the war and Obama squandered our victory in Iraq. The reality is that the Iraq War was the single greatest disaster in American foreign policy history. This harebrained policy choice, given birth in the jingoistic atmosphere after 9/11, was so wrong in so many ways, and permanently damaged American interests.
The Iraq War was conceived by Cheney and company on the day of 9/11 itself. They began to put into effect a goal of the neo-cons that had been floating around for years. In the late 1990's, the neo-conservatives starting agitating without success for regime change in Iraq, and organized through a group called the Project for a New American Century. Without a dramatic change in domestic politics, there was no way the US would go to war with Iraq. 9/11 created an atmosphere that made it possible. Taking out the Taliban was a bit too easy, and the country was still in a mood to "hit them back" in some vague way, a mood shared by many Democrats. But who to go after? The problem was that the main source of funding radicals was the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs who were American allies, so there was not much point in invading them. Bush and Cheney targeted Iraq, and justified it by first trying to somehow tie Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda and 9/11, which was a crock, and then claimed that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" that had to be eliminated. To leave Saddam in possession of those weapons created the likelihood he would one day furnish them to terrorists who would then attack the US, hence the need for a preemptive war.
Saddam persisted in being ambiguous on the issue, mainly to keep his arch-enemy, Iran, thinking he did have such weapons. Saddam did not believe Bush would really go to war, but in the runup to the war Saddam permitted UN weapons inspectors into the country. They found nothing, but Bush was not perturbed by that. Instead he claimed the intelligence was completely solid, and even trotted out Colin Powell to make a fool of himself at the UN Security Council with a paper thin case. Despite the opposition of most of the world, and the lack of UN approval, Bush decided on war.
The big lie at the heart of WMD was that Bush was lumping two things that were not really WMD with something that was, but which Iraq clearly had no ability to make. Chemical weapons are pretty useless and cannot destroy cities, and require airpower to reliably deliver to a large target, something no terrorist would have. Chemical weapons have been around for a hundred years, and while nasty, did not constitute a threat to the US to justify war.
Biological weapons do not exist. Neither the US nor the Soviets ever developed a usable weapon, and anthrax spores in the mail don't count. Biological weapons have to be easily transmitted, lethal, quick acting, unable to be treated, and not create a risk of infection to the instigator. No such weapons exist. The idea that some Iraqi scientists in RV's were cooking up vast batches of smallpox or some such thing is preposterous, and even if they did, it is useless as a weapon.
The only real WMD is nuclear, and Iraq had no nuclear reactor, no centrifuges, no sources of uranium, and no infrastructure needed to build a bomb. Even if they did such sites could easily have been bombed directly anyway and did not require invasion. In summary, there was no WMD, and any thinking person would have figured that out in two seconds.
Once the war took place, there was no real planning of how to reconstitute Iraq after the invasion. Iraq, as most Americans have come to know, is a very complex place. It is not like Egypt or Jordan which are much more homogeneous societies. Iraq had a Kurdish minority which wanted nothing to do with a central government out of Baghdad, a Shia majority that looked to Iran as its natural friend, and a ruling Sunni minority that felt entitled to keep power. To barge into that situation, depose Saddam, and turn it into an Arab Switzerland would have taken a geopolitical Houdini, which Bush certainly wasn't. Rumsfeld thought the army would be withdrawn in a few months after the war, and no one in the White House foresaw a massive eight-year occupation that would sap the American military and budget. The most basic planning, such as having a few battalions of military police ready to impose order in Baghdad after conquest was not done. The result was massive looting, the destruction of all the government ministries, and a sense of chaos that just accelerated over the years.
Bush likely didn’t even know the difference between Sunni and Shia when he invaded, which he learned at a painful cost. Overthrowing Saddam and creating democratic government meant overthrowing decades of Sunni domination and empowering the Shia, by obvious demographics. The neo-cons thought that secular US aligned figures like Ahmed Chalabi would lead the Shias after the war, but those guys had zero street credibility. Power flowed towards the main anti-Saddam groups that were in exile in Iran, and Nuri al-Maliki was a viciously sectarian pro-Iranian Prime Minister whose selection was signed off on by Bush. It was a disastrous choice. The whole concept of turning Iraq into a real democracy with balanced government, respect for human rights, and real political parties based on something other than crude sectarian desires, was a fantasy. Even the most learned Iraq scholars would have found it an impossible challenge, and the inept inattentive Bush had no chance of success.
But the occupation was bungled massively right from the start. The standing Iraqi army was completely disbanded on White House orders, thereby throwing the Sunni officer corps out of job and denying them pensions. This created a group of motivated anti-American militarily trained Sunnis who formed the core of the insurgency. Meanwhile, civilian Sunnis were also thrown out of their jobs in the government bureaucracy under the rubric of "de-Baathification". This policy was not limited to a handful of Saddam's top lieutenants, but extended to a vast part of the civil service, throwing ordinary people out of work and creating even more enemies. Abu Ghraib further embittered Iraqis.
The end result was a massive insurgency. Eventually 5000 American soldiers would be killed, another thousand contractors would die, tens of thousands wounded, and more came home with PTSD and other psychiatric issues. All these wasted and broken lives for nothing. Add to that a financial cost that pushed three trillion dollars when all the disability payments and VA benefits for life were added in. What a massive waste. Three trillion dollars could transform America in dramatic ways for the better.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi state was put together as a crudely sectarian highly centralized government wracked by incompetence and corruption with billions of oil dollars pilfered. The Kurds are part of Iraq in name only; they have their own military, and their own oil wells, and other than using Iraqi currency and passports, have cut themselves off from the state.
The chaos of Iraq attracted thousands of Jihadis to Iraq, many coming through Syria. Suicide bombings were common, and vicious terror groups such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq were formed out of the Sunni Iraqi community that had been secular Baathists in Saddam's days. Rather than making Iraqi lives better, the US occupation led to all-out civil war, with the death toll in the hundreds of thousands, and with millions of Iraqi refugees, many who ironically fled to Damascus in the prior decade.
Geopolitically, the new Iraq was a close ally of Iran, and supportive of Assad in Syria. Iran now had influence extending from its borders all the way to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Once the Syrian Civil War heated up around 2012, the flow of Jihadis reversed, with many entering northern Syria, dominated by Sunni Arabs who were closely linked to Sunni Arabs of northern/western Iraq. As Syria collapsed, and Assad circled the wagons around Damascus and the strip of urban territory running north and then to the coast, eastern Syria became a no-man’s land. This vacuum was filled by Jihadists based in Iraq, now going by the name of Daesh or ISIS. They were led by Sunni Arabs from Iraq, many of whom were part of Al-Qaeda in Iraq in prior years. There is no way that would have occurred if Saddam Hussein was still in Baghdad. ISIS has now dominated a stretch of territory going from Aleppo in Syria to Mosul in Iraq, and no one has been able to dislodge them. The Kurds could probably do it, but Turkey is totally against letting that happen. The Iraqi Army is a corrupted dysfunctional mess with billions of dollars of US equipment going to waste. The Shia militias will fight, but they tend to massacre Sunnis when they win, or at least do a bit of ethnic cleansing, so the US has pushed Baghdad to keep them on a short leash.
Now we have 10 million Syrian refugees, half of the prewar population. 7 million are internally displaced, another million or so are each in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. And of those, some tens of thousands are trying to reach Europe and restart their lives in Germany or France or Sweden if possible. The Syrian refugee issue has no end in sight till the civil war is ended, and with both sides equally matched and profoundly brutal, that is not happening soon.
This catastrophic mess in Iraq and Syria, and the ongoing ISIS propaganda, did more to encourage anti-Western sentiment than anything Bin Laden could have dreamed of. Thousands of Western Muslims, and perhaps a hundred or more Americans, have been radicalized, and fought in these lands. What harm may they do in the future?
Despite this pathetic record, the new GOP line is that everything was going swimmingly until Obama left Iraq. That is absurd on several levels. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that called for all US military forces to leave Iraq by December 2011 was negotiated by Bush, not Obama. Now the claim is that Obama should have tried really hard to get the Iraqis to allow 10,000 American soldiers to hang out in Baghdad. That would require them having legal immunity, which the Iraqi Parliament was never going to vote for. In addition, the American people did not want to leave soldiers in Iraq, they wanted them out of the country. Obama was elected in part on his promise to end the war. Finally, the whole idea makes no sense on its face. So what if 10,000 American soldiers were in Iraq confined to a base or a few bases around Baghdad? That wasn't going to make the phantom Iraqi Army fight back when ISIS grabbed the Sunni areas. And even though Obama pulled the soldiers out, the American Embassy in Iraq was huge, and there was still a big American presence in Baghdad. The whole notion rests on the unstated idea that Iraq would not really have an independent government, its policies would continue to be dictated by Washington, and that was not going to happen. It also suggests that American troops would go into major combat if needed to hold Iraq together, but the US had clearly no interest in further combat roles. The Iraqi Shia had seized power and they were going to wield it for their benefit, not hand it over in perpetuity to an occupying army. Whether Obama kept a few battalions locked on a base in Baghdad was not going to change the internal politics and social dynamics of the new Iraq. A few thousand American soldiers have now been back in Iraq for a year doing training and trying to help reconstitute the Iraqi army. What dramatic difference has that made?
Vietnam used to be the greatest American foreign policy blunder. In terms of blood it was costlier with 50,000 dead. But the effect on America's standing and foreign policy goals turned out to be minimal. The dominoes never fell in Southeast Asia. The repercussions never went outside Indochina. And it turned out the Vietnamese didn't like the Chinese much so it did not constitute some expansion of Chinese Communist power. Instead they fought a border war with each other a few years after the fall of Saigon.
In contrast, not only was Iraq a short-term disaster in terms of blood and treasure, it has been a long-term debacle of geopolitics in the Middle East. It has provided a huge boost to Iran's regional standing, while diminishing the US and its allies. It has created massive refugee problems and contributed to the breakup of Syria. It has allowed Jihadist groups to form and train where none had existed before. It besmirched the standing of the US by showing our leaders to be incompetent planners, and instigators of unjustified aggressive war. It created an ongoing source of radicalization of Western Muslim young males against the US and Western Europe. It has turned Iraq into a sectarian mess, in which every minority group has reason to fear for their existence. Ancient Iraqi Christian communities dating from the Roman Empire are emptying out, and the treatment of the small Yazidi sect by ISIS is appalling. Sunni and Shia, who have coexisted in Muslim lands for centuries, intermarried, and lived together are now part of some grand regional conflagration whose end is not in sight. There will be even more ethnic cleansing before it is done.
