Lessons Learned From the War of Iraq

MADRID ) It's been exactly 15 years since the beginning of one of the most unfortunate episodes of the beginning 21: The Iraq war. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks, the French newspaper “Le Monde” made the famous announcement: “Nous sommes tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”), and even predicted that Russia would become America's chief ally. But the invasion of Iraq by US President George W. Bush in 2003, shattered those hopes.

Now we know that war, apart from causing many of the current troubles in the Middle East, marked the beginning of the end of the American hegemony of post-Cold War. We also know that, although sold as part of the “fight against terrorism”, the foundation for the invasion was laid long before 9/11.

As of January 1998, the subservative “Project for a New American Century (PNAC)” sent a letter to the then president, Bill Clinton, calling on Saddam Hussein. And after winning the 2000 presidential election, Bush declared Iraq one of the top security priorities. Not by chance, ten of the 25 signatories of the PNAC statement, including Dick Cheney as vice president and Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defence, approached in the administration.

Soon, the Bush administration was obsessed with promoting the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, despite lack of depletion evidence. In September 2002, Rumsfeld received a secret service report that has now been declassified, saying that “We do not know exactly how much we do not know, about the status of the weapons of mass destruction programme” in Iraq. It made no difference.

Likely, the Middle East would have been spared much suffering if the US had acted with more caution, as Hans Blix advised ʹ head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. In May 2003, while aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush gave a speech to a banner that wrote “Mission accomplished!” But if the mission had been to free Iraq of terror, rebuild the country and increased security at all levels, it had been an absolute failure.

It is generally acknowledged that the Iraq war caused much more problems than it resolved. The prominent American politicians who supported the invasion in 2003 including many Republicans now admit it was a mistake, as most Americans believe. But while the 2003 conquest was a deeply wrong policy, both in shape and in substance, the chaos consumed by Iraq and the rest of the region stems from other mistakes made by American policymakers, after Saddam had collapsed from power.

Above all, it was the policy of “de-Bathification” of the Bush administration, aimed at eliminating any element of Saddam Hussein's neo-Bathist regime. Iraq is a mostly Shiite country, but Saddam's political device was dominated by Sunnit, many of whom had acquired deep religious beliefs during a period of Islamism in the 1990s. After being averted from the reconstruction process, the Sunni were returned to military sectarianism.

De-Bathification also led to the breakup of the Iraqi Army. Thousands of military personnel, all of a sudden left without income and status, found hope in the salaphist Sunite uprising, led by Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was the predecessor of the Islamic State. The perpetrators were opposed not only to the U.S. invasion but also to those who took advantage of it - mostly rain.

Some ex-Bathists ended up in American detention centres, where abuse practices were widespread. While exiled to centres like Camp Bucca in southeastern Iraq, former Batatists and Salafis mixed, and the first military experience melted away with the ideological extremism of the second. At the time when I SIS declared “califatin” in 2014, 17 of its top 25 commanders, including its leader Abu Bakr al Baghdad, had spent time in American prisons between 2004 and 2011.

In the meantime, sectarianism was raging in Iraq's mostly Shiite government. In 2010, incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was re-elected, though the State Law Coalition had taken fewer seats than the moderate Iraqi National Movement, led by Ayad Allavi. Barack Obama's administration could have influenced to help Allavin establish a government, but instead it helped al Malik to retain power. The latter's policies became increasingly personalised, klentelistic and polarising, boosting the sausage jihadism, which had received several shocks prior to the 2010 elections.

The Obama administration's refusal to support Allavin preceded its withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Both episodes paved the way for the jihadist uprising, which was already moving to neighboring Syria. Less than three years later, the US was forced to return to Iraq; shortly thereafter, intervention in Syria began.

Now, after a long and tiring campaign, I The SIS has lost most of the territories it once held in Syria and Iraq. But the last 1 years have demonstrated that we cannot be satisfied. Extinction of Territories From I Claws SIS, does not eliminate the ideology on which it relies. In fact, I can radicalize it even more.

The hope now is that the Iraqi general elections in May will bring a government which is committed to rule by consensus, preserve stability, and protect the country's institutions. Similarly, the new government must draw close to Iraqi Kurds who see it from independence, and find a satisfactory way to integrate into the political process.

For the United States, one of the most important lessons of the past 15 years is that military interventions aimed at changing the regime almost always end up in disaster, especially when there is no reasonable plan for what happens next. Iraq's war showed that the cost of unilaterally ignoring diplomatic channels could be enormous.

We can hope that the Trump administration especially the new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will learn lessons as tensions in Iraq mount. Iran's rise in influence in the region stems from American mistakes in Iraq, starting to abandon diplomacy. A similar US approach to Iran will lead to one, or more, new generations of riots in the Middle East.

Taken from World.al Projekt Syndicate