Iraq at 10

 

March 20, 2003 – Another date that will live in infamy for our generation. I remember it well. I remember the months leading up to it as well. I had just turned 19 years old. It was my first year of college; I was a freshman in the political science department at Hofstra University.

To tell this story, one has to go back to the fall of 2001, where I was entering my senior year of High School. It was a normal September day. School started at 7:45 a.m. First period passed as normal: Mrs. Jarrell's AP English class. Second period I had with a special teacher: statistics with Mrs. Powers. I was friends with her son, Robbie, who was now in college in New York. As I walked towards the classroom, something was stirring in the halls. Mrs. Powers tried to get the class in order. We had just begun the lesson when someone came rushing into the room. They stopped, stunned, before rushing over to Mrs. Powers and whispering in her ear. She didn't say anything to us, but rushed out of the room. I wouldn't find out until third period what was going on. The date, of course, was September 11, 2001.

The coming weeks were full of many emotions: anger and fear among them. I was supportive of the War in Afghanistan when the country began gearing up, and remained supportive in the initial months. Flashing forward to the Fall of 2002, I knew something was different. There was all of the rhetoric and all of the claims, and I didn't believe any of them. However, to set the stage for what is to come, we must, as we so often do, look to the past.

Iraq, or the area that we now call Iraq, has 10,000 years of history. It is called the Cradle of Civilization for a reason. The earliest civilizations rose up in the area. Various tribes and civilizations fought over and controlled the area until Alexander came through with Maecedonians. After that a string of wide-ranging empires ruled the area until the fall of the Roman Empire; then once again warring tribes fought for control of imaginary lines in the sand.

In the 16^th century, the area fell under the control of the Ottoman Turks and their empire. Even with rule from far away Constantinople (Istanbul), Iraq was a battle zone between the rival regional empires and tribal alliances. Even the Iranians would insert influence for extended period. The Ottoman's divided their pashalik of Baghdad into Mosul Province, Baghdad Province, and Basra Province (sound familiar). One commonality arises from this brief study of history: without a strong, militaristic influence; an iron rule if you will; from a governing body, the tribes of the area were prone to infighting.

Ottoman rule ended after WWI. The Ottoman's had sided with the Central Powers, and although they, and the Vichy-French in Syria, held their own against the English in the Middle East, the Empire was dismantled. The Entente divided up the area, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand, as so many had before them. They did not taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds and the Assyrians to the north and the Sunni's to the south.  What followed was further infighting, especially focused on the Kurds in the North, interspersed with leaders propped up by the Western powers. The change began in 1963 when the Ba'athist party took power. Most membership was made up of the Sunn'i minority ethnic group, but what began were the strong arm tactics that would bring a sort of peace to the country. Even still, infighting continued. That of course, ended in 1979, when Saddam Hussein forced President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr to resign and became both President and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. What followed in the next two decades could be characterized either as a period of brutal oppression, or perhaps more aptly, exactly what the country needed to modernize.

Despite the economic toll the eight year long Iraq-Iran war would take, Hussein created a modern, forward thinking country. While his neighbors repressed women and remained ideological states, Hussein focused on bringing his country into the 20^th century. That all came to a halt with the invsion of Kuwait in 1991.

After being resoundly beaten by the Coalition forces, the United Nations bagan a series of embargoes that would cripple the country economically and lead to wide-spread hardship and desparation. Still Hussein stood defiantly against the West: allowing weapons inspectors to search on his terms and continuing to intimate that it was Iraq's right to have weapons programs. I had opportunity in 2006 to have a personal conversation with Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998. Although our conversation was wide-ranging, touching on the topic of Iraq, he made it clear to me, as he had to the public and media in 2002 and early 2003, that Iraq had no weapons program and, in fact, was incapable of supporting those programs. Nonetheless, in the Fall of 2002 and Spring of 2003, the US was on the march to war with Iraq.

That march to war began in 1991, after the close of Operation Desert Storm. From that conflict came what began as the Wolfowitz Doctrine and would later evolve into the Bush Doctrine. I encourage you to read more about it here (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html) Eventually, that policy would clarify into one of preemptive warfare. That would be one of the many reasons postulated as justification for the coming War.

In October 2002, about 75 senators were told in closed session that Iraq had the means of attacking the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. with biological or chemical weapons delivered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs.) This occurred just a few days before the U.S. Senate voted on the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq.  The Senate voted to approve the Joint Resolution with the support of large bipartisan majorities on 11 October 2002, providing the Bush administration with a legal basis for the U.S. invasion under U.S. law. On 5 February 2003, Colin Powell continued the charade by presenting further evidence, in his Iraqi presentation to the UN Security Council, that UAVs were ready to be launched against the United States. At the time, there was a vigorous dispute within the U.S. (and foreign) military and intelligence communities as to whether CIA conclusions about Iraqi UAVs were accurate. Other agencies suggested that Iraq did not possess any offensive UAV capability. Bush could not get the UN support that he wanted, but sought to pursue the war anyway. Meanwhile, most of the main-stream press, and Congress itself, went along for the ride, either cowered by an Administration that resorted to intimidation to get its way, or simply because they were too lazy to do their jobs.

On Feb. 26, 2003, President George W. Bush gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, spelling out what he saw as the link between freedom and security in the Middle East. “A liberated Iraq,” he said, “can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region” by serving “as a dramatic and inspiring example … for other nations in the region.”  The goal was to remove a dangerous dictator and his supposed stocks of weapons of mass destruction. It was also to create a functioning democracy and thereby inspire what Bush called a "global democracy revolution." Three weeks later, the United States and Coalition forces invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation.

 

As for the war itself, I'm sure we are all familiar. March 19, 2003 we all watched on CNN as “shock and awe” exploded all over Baghdad; and again the next night in even greater detail. That day the ground campaign began as well. While Vietnam may have been the first televised war, Operation Iraqi Freedom brought the war to American homes in a never before seen way: embedded reporters, real-time reports, and citizens following troop advances online. By May 1, 2003, President Bush was standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in front of a banner reading “Mission: Accomplished.” Then the real fight began: an eight year insurgency and American involvement that wouldn't end until December of 2011.

Here we stand 10 years later. The war in Afghanistan rages on in its 12 year; and although the US involvement in Iraq is for the most part over, some troops and civilians remain. The last American soldier to die in Iraq before the withdrawal was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on 14 November 2012. Now we have the opportunity to look backwards at this time period in our history. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. What do we see now, and what will historians say in the years and decades to come?

Soon after the invasion, it became obvious that the administration had no clear plan for Iraq’s rebuilding. The Bush/Wolfowitz doctrine explained that freedom was humanity’s natural state: democracy would spring forth naturally, like a geyser, once the dictator’s control was lifted. Yet when Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred, millennia old and described above, that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface. Yet, neither Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nor the top military leaders had much desire to wade into “nation-building,” a focal point of the Vietnam-era protests. Instead of reacting positively, accepting that having a long-term plan would have been superior but acknowledging that they didn’t have one, U.S. proconsul, L. Paul Bremer, issued his two infamous orders, abolishing the Iraqi military and blocking Ba’athist party members from holding government jobs. As a result, any semblance of order that remained broke down completely. 

In the vacuum emerged the “insurgency.” It was never a unified rebellion but rather a multiplicity of groups, harboring a multiplicity of resentments and ambitions, some of them against the interim government, some against the American occupiers, and some against one another. The fighting intensified and widened, the American commanders initially had little idea what to do about it. As Coalition forces focused on protecting themselves and the Western envoys, the country degenerated into civil war.  David Fromkin foresaw all this when he wrote A Peace to End All Peace a quarter-century ago. He noted that the then-impending havoc would go on for quite a while, likening the situation to that of Europe’s in the fifth century “when the collapse of the Roman Empire’s authority in the West threw its subjects into a crisis of civilization that obliged them to work out a new political system of their own.” He said further, “It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states … The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an age-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed.”  The very best that can be said is that two years later than its neighbors, not 10 years earlier than them, the Arab Spring arrived in Iraq. But the government the people are rising up isn’t the oppressive dictatorships of Libya or Syria, but against is the very one the U.S. installed.

Let’s look at the facts and figures. We were told we would be greeted as liberators, that the war would cost, at most, $50 to $60 billion and that the casualties would be minimal.  Brown University released a report entitled Costs of War about the Iraq War. The report only includes figures from direct war-related violence. It places total deaths of the war from during U.S. involvement at about 190,000 people. Seventy percent (70%) of the deaths (134,000) were civilians. U.S. losses totaled 4,488 military personnel and 3,400 security contractors. Coalition losses included 319 deaths. Allied Iraqi military and police suffered 10,819 deaths. Approximately 36,400 were Saddam loyalist forces or terrorist insurgents. Figures include 62 humanitarian workers and 231 journalists. Included, in whichever category is deemed most appropriate, are deaths like the following. Citing a new document (the Wikileaks release), the London Times reported: “an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter. The documents…reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians—at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country. Other studies have differing totals. The loss of blood and life is unimaginable.  These figures vary, depending on who you ask:

 Below are some US military figures from the General Accounting Office.

In addition to the human cost, an incredible amount of collateral damage has resulted. Evidence suggests that women's human rights and freedoms have dramatically been cut since the US-led invasion. Once the most Western leaning democracy in the Middle East, under the US occupation, Islamist militias have waged a systematic campaign of violence against women in their bid to remake Iraq as an Islamist state. There has been a sharp rise in gender-based violence within families. Newly adopted Shari’a laws, such as Article 41 of Iraq’s Constitution, have degraded women’s rights, making them more vulnerable to abuses. 

According to The Hague and Geneva Conventions, the US, as an occupying power, was responsible for the human rights and security of Iraqi civilians. But US forces failed to meet this responsibility. Other human rights issues, which may be more or less infamous include: Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse; Haditha killings of 24 civilians; white phosphorus use in Iraq; gang-rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl and the murder of her family in Mahmoudiyah; the torture and killing of prisoner of war, Iraqi Air Force commander, Abed Hamed Mowhoush; the killing of Baha Mousa; Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre, where 42 civillians were allegedly killed by coalition forces; controversy over whether disproportionate force was used during the assaults by Coalition and (mostly Shia and Kurdish) Iraqi government forces in Fallujah in 2004; the planting of weapons on noncombatant, unarmed Iraqis by three U.S. Marines after killing them (according to a report by The Nation, other similar acts have been witnessed by U.S. soldiers, and members of Iraq Veterans Against the War tell similar stories), and the Blackwater Baghdad shootings (and the legality of Blackwater in general). Human rights abuses, perhaps somewhat typical in war, have taken on a new meaning in a war that has no battle lines.

What about the finanacial impact? The financial cost of the war has been more than £4.55 billion ($9 billion) to the UK, and over $845 billion to the U.S. In March 2013, the total cost of the Iraq War was estimated to have been $1.7 trillion by the Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University . Critics have argued that the total cost of the war to the U.S. economy is estimated to be from $3 trillion to $6 trillion, including interest rates, by 2053.

But while the financial cost to the nation was substantial, the damage to our prestige, not to mention the destabilization the War brought to the region, may prove to be incalculable. Iran has now become a greater threat than Iraq could ever have been, perhaps fueled by the fear of US action against them. Also, the Iraqi insurgency surged in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal. The terror campaigns have been engaged by Iraqi groups against the central government and the warfare between various factions within Iraq. The events of post U.S. withdrawal violence succeeded the previous insurgency in Iraq (prior to 18 December 2011), raising concerns that the surging violence might slide into another civil war. Some 1,000 people were killed across Iraq within the first two months after U.S. withdrawal.

In the early stages of the Iraq invasion, more than nine in 10 Republicans and seven in 10 independents said the effort was worth the costs. Just half of Democrats said it was worthwhile. Today, support for the war is lower across the board. Among Republicans, 57 percent see the war as worth fighting; just 35 percent of independents and 27 percent of Democrats agree. 





In his latest effort to defend the war, Cheney declared to filmmaker R.J. Cutler that the Iraq War was justified because the U.S. eliminated a regime that might have at some future time posed a threat. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tweeted on the 10^th Anniversary:

Criticism abounds as we look back, and scholarly work will continue for decades. Both proponents and opponents of the invasion have also criticized the prosecution of the war effort along a number of other lines. Most significant of the criticisms are for the reasons pointed out above, but also the legality of the invasion, the adverse effect on U.S.-led global "war on terror"  Damage to U.S.' traditional alliances and influence in the region, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, endangerment and ethnic cleansing of religious and ethnic minorities by insurgents, and disruption of Iraqi oil production and related energy security concerns (the price of oil has quadrupled since 2002).

So where does that leave us? From my perspective, ten years later I feel just the same as I did in 2003. The war in Iraq was a mistake, cite any of the above information for reasons why. 

© Robert Cheek, 2013