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Analysis | The War in Iraq Has Become a Chronic American Disease
The Bush administration’s plan to spread the gospel of democracy to the Middle East was ultimately defeated. The failed U.S. invasion of Iraq thus formulated its foreign policy and can be seen in its approach to the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. After two decades, the lessons learned from the war in Iraq have not yet ended
An American soldier watches the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, April 2003. The U.S. government talked pompously about nation-building, but in practice, it was about building a new regimeCredit: GORAN TOMASEVIC/Reuters
Mar 17, 2023
Three months after the start of the war in Iraq in June 2003, the temperatures in Baghdad rose to 38 degrees Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit). A bunch of sweaty American soldiers, their guns carelessly slung over their shoulders, were standing next to a laundromat making small talk. A minute later, another soldier came out of the laundromat with a pile of coat hangers on which their washed and ironed uniforms were hung, with each soldier taking their own back.
I approached the soldiers and asked them whether they were scared to stand in the middle of the road. It was still the “quiet period” in Iraq. The mass terror attacks would only begin in another few weeks, but robberies, arson and protests against the American occupation pointed to where things were headed. The soldiers stared at me and asked me where I came from. No conversation came from it and they told me to leave. “All of Baghdad is a closed military zone,” they said. “Get out of here or we’ll arrest you.”
“Dumb soldiers,” I thought to myself. Here stands an authentic representative of a professional occupying power who wants to share his rich experience, offer them recommendations, explain how to run a proper occupation and why you shouldn’t risk using the services of local laundromats, restaurants or garages. As newly minted occupiers who had come to liberate Iraq from its dictator, no one had told them anything. They invented the occupation. Laundry and restaurant meals and afterward democracy, if at all.
Later I met with Simon, an FBI representative in Baghdad. "Meeting" may be a bit misleading under the circumstances. The cab I was riding in, with the Shi'ite driver, entered the Green Zone – the area where Saddam Hussein's palace and government offices were located, and eventually became the foreign occupiers' headquarters. An American soldier was directing traffic and ordered us to turn right. Ali, the cab driver, was still not yet familiar with the military's directional signals and thought to he was told to continue straight. "[Turn]Right," I told him.
Footage of Saddam Hussein after he was captured by American soldiers, December 2003.Credit: HANDOUT/Reuters
"Saddam Hussein fell, we are independent, and no one will tell me where to go," Ali said in celebration of his independence. "This soldier is also independent to shoot you whenever he wants," I responded. It's an occupation. Ali came to his senses and hurried to leave. Independence will wait. Minutes later, a military jeep followed us and ordered us to stop. To Israelis, this practice has been familiar since 1967. We got out of the cab, and were left to wait facing a wall under the sun as they frisked us and thoroughly searched the vehicle.
Simon arrived. The conversation that followed was pleasant and we were given a bottle of water. However, in order to question Ali and another Kurd who had joined us, we had to wait another two hours until an “authorized” Arabic translator arrived.
The “authorized” translator was a Lebanese construction contractor who had won a contract from the U.S. Army and along the way was also providing translation services. When the interrogation was over, he turned to me and without knowing where I came from asked how I got into Iraq.
“Through Turkey and from there to Kurdistan and on to Baghdad,” I answered.
“Kurdistan? Really?” he said with evident fascination.
Then he asked me the question that creates understanding, builds friendships and resolves conflicts: “Say, do you know people in Kurdistan who can get me construction projects?”
“Of course,” I answered and we exchanged phone numbers. The interpreter told Simon that “we are fine” and we could be released.
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U.S. DefenseSecretary Donald Rumsfeld with soldiers in Baghdad, April 2003Credit: POOL/Reuters
Iraq back then was a land of unlimited opportunity. The U.S. government talked pompously about nation-building, but in practice, it was about building a new regime. Contractors made money without doing anything, American security guards came in huge numbers to earn three times the pay they could make at home. Government officials – both Iraqi and American – laid the groundwork for their financial enrichment. President Bush was content with the new “democracy” he was building in the Middle East – the second after the “democracy” that he had been building in Afghanistan the year before.
Twenty years later, after thousands of deaths (4,500 of them U.S. troops) and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted in a bottomless pit between the Tigris and Euphrates, the lessons to be learned of that war are not yet over. What was supposed to be a short spring jaunt that would generate huge profits for the U.S. from the giant oil fields of Iraq, undo the lessons taught by the Vietnam War on the limits of power, and above all, free America from the trauma of 9/11.
However, the invasion that began on March 20, 2003 had itself turned into a trauma. It was a war based on lies. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction and apart from a number of aging missiles with chemical warheads, no evidence was ever found of nuclear or biological weapons. Even the attempt to link Saddam with Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda came to naught. The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit news organization, counted 935 lies spread by Bush and White House officials regarding the war in Iraq.
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The U.S. media was also enlisted for the war effort, including The New York Times, which was forced in 2004 to publish an apology for misleading its readers. The culture of lies and “fake news” that underwent a spectacular process of refinement during the Trump years, excelled no less during the Bush era. Already in September 2002, the government established an Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the Pentagon headed by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith whose job was to deliver raw intelligence to the president that bypassed CIA analysis and other intelligence agencies that was critical of the administration’s justifications for the war. A similar office, by the way, was established in 2006 to deal with intelligence on Iran.
Former senior CIA analyst Larry Johnson later said in an interview with The Sunday Herald that the OSP had been “dangerous for U.S. national security and a threat to world peace,” adding that it “lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam.”
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Bush against the "Mission Accomplished" sign aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln off the coast of San Diego on May 1, 2003.
Bush against the "Mission Accomplished" sign aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln off the coast of San Diego on May 1, 2003.Credit: Larry
Downing/Reuters
The trauma of the Vietnam War has not faded, but rather took on a new life during and after the protracted war in Iraq. It can be seen in its influence of U.S. policy not only in the Middle East but also during the current war in Ukraine and the Obama administration's indifference to the Assad's slaughter of his own citizens. Obama's refusal to send troops to stop the civil war or punish Assad for using chemical weapons cannot be laid solely on fears that Iran would freeze nuclear talks.
The idea that American forces would once again be mired in a Middle Eastern swamp, immersed in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, had its roots in the Iraq debacle that began in March 2003. The same went for the civil wars in Yemen and Libya.
The U.S. struggle that has accompanied the war in Ukraine – the decision not to send troops and limit its assistance to weapons and financial aid, arises from a real fear of sparking a world war or at least from a conflict between NATO and Russian forces. Nevertheless, the question of whether the U.S. would have followed the same policy if it had not been scarred by its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be dismissed.
Without divine promise
The United States staged a military coup in Iraq. It was supposed to be the flagship of American efforts to “sell Western democracy” to the Middle East. American hubris even went so far as to talk about an “expanded Middle East” where democratic revolutions would take place in Islamic countries, not only in Arab countries.
“Democracies don’t fight democracies,” was the theory that Bush adopted after being sold on it by Natan Sharansky. However, the revolution in Iraq did not bring much democracy, but rather a long and bloody occupation. While elections are being held, the violent sectarian conflicts and its place on the top of global indices of corrupt states testifies to how much the war was not only built on lies and obsessions, but on an inexplicable ignorance of Iraq’s demographics and history.
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Members of the ruling council established in Baghdad, July 2003.Credit: REUTERS PHOTOGRAPHER/Reuters
In such a "democracy," it was necessary to determine from the start who were the good guys and who were the bad, who is with us and who is against us. The world of familiar concepts is completely turned upside down. The Shiites were the “good guys,” since they were the ones who had suffered under Saddam and helped to bring him down and held the jobs in the civil service and the army after the American army purged it of Saddam loyalists. The Sunnis, of course, were Bin Ladenists, the bad guys, who needed to be hunted down and killed. And the Kurds were the most faithful group.
The fact that America’s Arab allies – the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Emiratis – are also Sunnis, did nothing to disrupt U.S. preconceptions, just as the Shi'ites’ close affinity to Iran raised no question marks. The absurdity is that the effort to divide the Iraqi population into enemies and friends contradicted the fundamental concept that “they’re all Arabs” and therefore all of them, practically and potentially, are the enemy.
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Participants in the funeral procession of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Quds Force, in Baghdad in January 2020.
Participants in the funeral procession of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Quds Force, in Baghdad in January 2020.Credit: Nasser Nasser /AP
Without any organized plan for what to do after the initial invasion, the U.S. began administrating Iraq which, along the way, took a series of steps that cost human lives and money that ended in a resounding political failure. Thus, Iraq came under the aegis of Iran. Despite the its enormous oil resources, it has to purchase gas, electricity and water from its neighbor to the east. Shi'ite militias operated by Iran dictate the composition of the Iraqi government and budget allocations, and constitute a security threat to neighboring countries.
However, in contrast to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the U.S. never had a national, messianic or historical claims on Iraq that aimed to turn it into an American colony. When it decided to withdraw its forces, it did not have to deal with settlers and settlements or public opinion opposed to abandoning an American national asset. In Iraq, the U.S. did not hand over sacred American land sworn to it by a divine promise, so it was easy for it to pack up its equipment and soldiers and leave Iraq to the Iraqis. After 56 years of occupation, Israel is sure that it will be more successful.
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