On this day in 2003, the announcement was made that land operations were being undertaken against Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Ba'ath Party which had brutally ruled it for decades. In a little over a month, the Coalition forces overran Iraq and occupied the country. The invasion, while an unqualified military success, contained almost no planning for the political and economic aftermath. Almost immediately Iraq fell into anarchy and the forces of occupation had to struggle to maintain order. A rising insurgency, civil war, and unclear strategic goals, lead to a chaotic war that attempted to stabilize the country. Even so, this paved the way for the nihilistic death cult of ISIL to expand into a power vacuum. Overall, the strategic aims of the United States and it's allies failed spectacularly, and plunged the region into continued chaos with effects that are still felt to this day.
The war began on extremely dubious justification. We now know that ever since the day of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration was looking for a way to attack Iraq or somehow blame them for the exportation of terror around the world. Enter the extremely nebulous "Weapons of Mass Destruction" which were toted by the administration as the reason Iraq had to be invaded. They were never found. Instead, there was a post-facto justification for "spreading democracy" and rebuilding Iraq, despite the men who decided to invade Iraq having no intention to do anything of the sort.
Over the course of the intervention the US did topple a dictator, but had to spend blood and treasure on rebuilding the country because they had no plans to do so. The appointed governor/dictator Paul Bremer then proceeded to sow the seeds for a brutal little civil war and cock up creating a government quite badly. This allowed nearly a decade of violence to be played out with only a few bright spots until the withdrawal was negotiated and agreed to by the US, with all Coalition troops leaving by the end of 2011. Unfortunately, in linking the war to the wider war on terror the US had allowed terror cells and movements the ability to coalesce around Iraq and use it as a rallying cry. The Iraqi government then became embroiled in sectarian fights which led to the rise of ISIS, necessitating the US to deploy to Iraq once again.
Most damningly, throughout it all Iran steadily increased its own powerbase in the country and plays a large role in internal Iraqi politics to this day. Making an entire aspect of the ostensible reason for the US to be there pointless! It was a strategic failure from start to finish, costing hundreds of thousands of lives, most of them civilian.
In short, it was a baseless, brutal, nasty war that served no purpose.
Yet, against the odds, to this day there are people who will say it was the right decision. Everything from saying "well weapons of mass destruction could have existed" to "well we overthrew a dictator!" Which is all so much whitewashing. The consequences of the US's unsanctioned invasion of Iraq are with us to this day as it showed that power could flout international norms, and the wars we see from Ukraine to Armenia are now proof that countries are willing to use violence to settle their differences in a way we had assumed was not possible or desirable at the end of the Cold War. The casual flouting of the idea of a rules based international order will have consequences far down the road that we cannot yet conceive of.
I was young when the war started, but I have a vivid memory of watching the news one night and seeing the announcement that the invasion of Iraq had started. I turned to my father and said "Dad, am I watching history right now?"
"Yes, this is history," he said.
What I most vividly remember leading up to the war was the divisiveness, with many media pundits and commentators (and even our then Prime Minister, Jean Chretien) disagreeing with the US policy. The UN was telling people there were no weapons of mass destruction hiding under rocks anywhere, while the Bush Administration aggressively said they were. This was, of course, all lies based on either deliberately selected faulty intelligence or willful ignorance, but it took a long time to discover that.
I remember Jon Stewart lampooning most of discourse leading up to the invasion, and the backlash that he got. France in particular for spurning the American claims so much that there was a briefly known as freedom fries. Journalists who questioned the honesty of the decisions leading up to the war were branded as unpatriotic, while even the Dixie Chicks - as they were then known - received threats for being insufficiently patriotic.
Discourse was heavily divided, the evidence was lacking, and even as a youth I could see that, but the war went ahead anyways. Maybe I'm more cynical because I've looked back on those years and just finished reading some excellent books on the decision making processes, the rush to judgement, and the terrible mistakes made during the war. My mind was further hardened after a visit to the George W. Bush museum in Texas last year where I saw the ongoing effort to whitewash the war. However, even with hindsight, I am happy I was such a little radical as to oppose the war at a young age and still be a staunch critic of it now.
What makes me sad is all the blood, death, and destruction visited on countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, the losses of so many innocents, and the ongoing sectarian and regional violence it has enabled. This war leaves many scars and will have a long shadow cast over not only the Middle East, but the United States as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment