Nine years ago, just before the invasion of Iraq by the United States and her allies, Dr. Michael Stenton wrote a prescient article in Chronicles looking forward to the likely Iraqi reaction and its consequences (“Our Yesterday and Your Today,” Views, February 2003).
Stenton’s article described the British experience in Mesopotamia almost a century ago when, during World War I, British forces wrenched what is now Iraq away from the collapsing Ottoman Empire. British imperial officials created a monarchy, installed one of their Hashemite friends, pushed out competing powers (especially the French), and left British oil interests safely entrenched. There was an insurgency that had some difficulty inflicting pain on “the occupier.” A parsimonious British military left most suppression of resistance to the RAF.
As a journalist with some experience of the region, I was puzzled in 2003 as I watched the world’s lone superpower rush to place itself into the jaws of an obvious trap. I raised my doubts with a British government minister and found the same mixture of ignorance and insouciance that seemed to govern policy in Washington, D.C. The U.S.-led invasion did not follow the British pattern, and while things are calmer than they were, Iraq has not yet settled down. A monarchy would have seemed quaint in 2003. But the reality of U.S. political choices for the new client state make adjectives like bold and unprecedented seem tame.
The United States overturned 500 years of Sunni supremacy in Mesopotamia and installed a Shia-dominated parliament, which opted for a weakly centrist constitution in which Kurdistan was nominally integrated but, in fact, almost independent. By spending almost a trillion dollars and smashing any resistance with overwhelming force, Washington obliged Iraq’s warring factions to bow to a settlement that neither they, nor the country’s neighbors, nor the skeptical and indeed quietly hostile Great Powers believed would be permanent.
True, nothing is more than transitory in politics, but the monarchy the British gave Iraq lasted until 1958, and the economy the colonial administration created gave Iraq’s Western-sponsored dictators the sinews for several impressive wars with their neighbors in the 1980’s and 90’s. Prophecies now—I write at the end of 2011—predict civil war, proxy interventions by Iran and Saudi Arabia, without even a “decent interval” to cover Washington’s mistakes.
It is still not possible to assess precisely why things happened as they did. We were told so many stories that it was unlikely any of them were true. And so it has turned out.
Was oil the motive? Iraq is still producing about one-third less oil—about 2.6 million barrels per day—than she did in 1990. Countries that refused to help the invasion have the lion’s share of the concessions.
Was Iraq the key to forcing other states in the region—like Iran and Saudi Arabia—to cry uncle and help strengthen the position of Israel? Israel was then undoubtedly Washington’s strategic ally in the Middle East, and eight years ago, so many of the U.S. government’s neoconservative political eminences were Jewish-Americans that their claims to be intervening in Israel’s interest seemed plausible to everyone except the Israelis. They were alarmed—rightly, as it turns out. Israel’s relationship with the United States is now in question for the first time in almost 40 years, even if no one in Washington will admit it.
Or was Iraq to be an object lesson to fractious Middle Eastern rulers—the lighting of a candle to democracy and pluralism that the huddled masses would follow? I fear this falls foul of the truism that if you wait long enough, all predictions are verified.
All the above look suspiciously like the usual red herrings. Laying them is a normal tool of statecraft. In Dr. Stenton’s mantra, states do not announce their policies. But false trails generally conceal real plans. Washington’s plans then are still obscure now, which is strange and certainly was not the case last time around in Iraq. Eight years after the British creation of modern Iraq in 1920, Britain’s imperial ambitions, inglorious as they may have been, had been eminently satisfied: oil, the routes to India, good colonial housekeeping—all secured for a generation.
Normally, eight years would be enough for at least hints of whatever Machiavellian scheme motivated policymakers to have leaked out of the Beltway. But there is nothing. Nevertheless, looking back over the last eight years, and pace one of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quips about an absence of evidence, we can draw two conclusions about the invasion.
First, there is no plausible creation myth. There wasn’t even a game plan, never mind a paradigm-transforming scheme to terrify the world. The intervention in Iraq looks from this distance like a piece of action research whose sequellae were in a significant sense uncalculated—because complaisance or cooperation with U.S. aims was taken for granted. At the time Mr. Rumsfeld worried about getting it all over with, as if the first bit were the difficult bit.
Second, the degree of hostility to anything the U.S. government subsequently tried to achieve in Iraq was both unexpected and unprecedented in strength—and came from so many quarters—that it was impossible to sustain a coherent line of policy. If there was a plan, it did not survive contact with the enemy.
Even in 1919-20, as Dr. Stenton reminded us, imperial policymakers hardly acted from steely-eyed certainty. Motives for the creation of Iraq primarily expressed imperial overexcitement: Motives sloshed around like water in a bucket. It would be strange if history had not repeated itself. But in 2003 there was an added motor of irresponsibility. Since the late 1990’s it had become clear to some observers (and certain senior elements in the U.S. government) that any future wars the United States fought would be costly but could not be financed as in Vietnam—by paying cash. Nor would Washington’s allies oblige again, as they had in the Gulf War of 1991. Instead, war would henceforth be paid for with borrowed money, with money that in the last resort need not be paid back. Mr. Cheney famously intoned that Ronald Reagan had shown him that deficits don’t matter. Like the bankers, politicians suffered that strange feeling of lightheadedness which comes from spending other people’s money.
U.S. political motives can perhaps be best judged by the language of the neocon political elite, which effectively seized the reins of policy after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Favoring an exaggerated business-school vocabulary of triumph and certainty, backed by a modus operandi of “shock and awe,” policymakers were buccaneers who threw other players off balance by taking strong action and setting agendas, creating new realities to which everyone else would have to adjust. Hence the preference for war, for speed, and for the supposedly unthinkable: Tactics and rhetoric were sold as strategy. But soundbites corrupt, and sloppy language makes for lazy thinking.
The neocons looked for easy targets in their project to preserve U.S. power by war. Reading across from the Balkans, the neocons hoped that other friendly powers would oblige targeted cultures (or nations or “civilizational blocs”) to reconcile themselves to whatever the United States put in place. The neocons were seduced by their concepts, felt that they were “creating reality here,” and found it hard to adjust when the world did not behave as their theories predicted.
The choice of Iraq as a target had several advantages. First, it was easy. There had even been a dress rehearsal. Unlike Sudan, there were simple ways in. Unlike Pakistan, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, a fact extensively verified by the most comprehensive U.N. arms-inspection program of all time.
Second, Iraq was in the Middle East, close enough to the jihadist core to look plausible but nonetheless, so it was thought, free of significant jihadist assets. Knocking over Iraq might overawe America’s sworn enemies, but it might also open doors to Iran, Saudi Arabia, even Israel—countries Washington needed to bring to heel.
Water—and oil—sloshed about this way and that, as lobbyists and pet projects from the penumbra of neocon think tanks and officeholders jostled for influence.
Reckless, and certain that virtue, as they saw it, would always triumph, the neocon elite seemed to devote little attention to careful planning for what would come after the invasion. And their public concentration on the need to disarm Saddam left them open to a counterattack on the very front where they least expected to be vulnerable.
The neocons were confident that they would lay their hands on the collection of plausible-looking engines of mass destruction that the dictator had been sold by the usual chancers and con men over the years. This museum of horrors would fool the press, despite Dr. Blix’s Parthian admonition that he would be watching very closely for any illegal substitutions. But nothing came to light—not an ounce of Red Mercury, no neglected crate of Supergun accelerators. America’s secret enemies had silenced those dogs with particular thoroughness.
As things went from bad to worse after the invasion, Mr. Rumsfeld complained to journalists—who no longer listened and were already compiling lists of “Rummy gaffes”—that “there is a covert conspiracy of Powers against the United States.” The thought came too late.
America’s casus belli found itself high and dry. There would be no legitimation. Washington would get no help from the United Nations, no benefit of any doubt. Iraq taught the United States that, despite a long list of camp followers, she no longer had any friends.
The penalty would be a lesson about power.
Even as the U.S.-led military seized Iraq it was reminded of what the other Great Powers thought of the enterprise. Several states tested new weapons against U.S. forces. At one point the entire GPS system faltered as signal disrupters, presumably of Russian manufacture, were focused on it. U.S. cruise missiles fell short, and the government ordered the Pentagon to terminate its bizarre relationship with the Russian “private company” Aviaconversiya, which was paid to “look for flaws” in new U.S. devices.
The problem was not the Iraqi military. In the first phase of the war, the Republican Guard and the Fedayeen Saddam, designed to lead resistance to the occupier, collapsed—probably bribed to do just that—but the dictator and his unsavory sons, Uday and Qusay, embarrassingly vanished. The arms caches that had been scattered across the country for Saddam’s stalwarts fell into the hands of sterner men. Iraqis who would not have fought for Saddam fired on the invaders. At first it was clumsy—“pray and spray”—but it wouldn’t stop.
The neocon military response was to stomp hard, especially when jihadist fanatics came pouring into Iraq eager to seek American targets. In November and December 2004, U.S. forces comprehensively wrecked Fallujah, an assault from which the city is still trying to recover.
But the political response of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was—and remains to this day—unexplained. The neocons had not planned for a difficult political transition. Always gamblers, they refused to bow to the logic of their isolation and overextension. They carried on as if all were going fine. Paul Wolfowitz, particularly reliant on mere rhetoric, had opined that the Iraqis would “welcome the overthrow of Saddam.” Iraqis would therefore “welcome the arrival of Coalition forces,” which was not at all the same thing. The neocons then convinced themselves that Iraqis would therefore “welcome the new constitution,” which would outlaw any public links with Tehran—or Qom, Iran’s holy Shi’ite city—and protect the de facto separation of the Kurdish Regional Government, the KRG.
This was foolish, and it turned out to be wrong. Metaphors twisted in American hands. Yet, “against all the usages of war and traditions of the service,” the Coalition administration went full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes.
Leaving a Shia constituent assembly to hammer out the details of the new order, the CPA carried out a purge of the old regime’s officials. The present prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, started his political career in the de-Ba’athification office. The Ba’ath Party, which Saddam’s chaotic rule had hollowed out anyway, scarcely merited treatment like the Nazi Party. Yet the coalition administration rooted out Ba’athists from the civil administration, the army, the police; and they purged anyone from scientists to doctors whose occupations had made a party card essential under Saddam. Army and police were in the end disbanded, leading to a collapse in employment and basic law and order.
Inevitably, the museums were looted, the hospitals ransacked, the middle class given fresh reasons to flee. In a more sinister twist, someone began assassinating intellectuals, teachers, professionals. It could have been Al Qaeda, but it looked eerily like the old Central American policy of squeezing out the centrists. An invasion trumpeted as “surgical” was getting messy already. U.S. and other Coalition troops found themselves on the front line, as there were no Iraqi intermediaries. Casualties, and losses of expensive military vehicles, mounted shockingly.
Pragmatic parts of the U.S. government found themselves excluded from influence. A faction at least of the CIA had brought with them to Baghdad Gen. Wafic al-Samarrai, a former head of Iraqi intelligence. He looked like the modern equivalent of the Hashemite monarch. Even those who felt he might be a bit heavy-handed applauded the principle of getting things back to normal and reform under way as soon as practicable. Early CPA pronouncements hinting at radical “democratic” change seemed mere posturing. A joke at the time was that U.S. constitutional experiments in Iraq would end with “the Ba’ath to the Ba’ath in three policy generations”—meaning months, not years.
Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA advisor to three presidents, found it hard to follow neocon logic, expostulating that they seemed bent on recreating the (expletive deleted) Persian Safavid Empire. The history of Mesopotamia, as the British had understood in 1920, suggested that without a Sunni strongman, Shia numerical dominance would probably spark a civil war and certainly, in the end, favor Iran.
Washington here was making the same mistake as the Soviets had in Afghanistan. Intervening on the side of the sensible faction of the local Communist Party, they imagined that sheer proximity would allow them to influence events. It did not. They traded genuine influence for the impossible goal of full control.
It is hard to follow the logic by which the Coalition administration persuaded itself that it would not come to any accommodation with Muqtada al-Sadr and his Shia Mahdi Army. A relentless propaganda campaign was waged against him—which continues to this day. His ceasefires were ignored, his good offices rejected.
The CPA decision deliberately ignored Al-Sadr’s massive and obvious political virtues. His faction had a tradition of resistance to the dictator, who had murdered Al-Sadr’s father in 1990. The Mahdi Army was the most nationalist of the Shia political groups, best able, thanks to the Al-Sadr family’s religious connections, to resist being called to Iranian political duty. True, the U.S. and other Coalition military found Al-Sadr uncongenial, unable to grasp the fact that Shia militias murdered Christians as much to make a political point as to stop the sale of alcohol, though the CPA was not much bothered about Christians.
The decision to cast the Mahdi Army into the political wilderness forced the Coalition administration to sift through alternative Shia leaders. One by one, starting with Ahmed Chalabi—who may have been the neocons’ secret weapon initially—they were rejected, all being deemed to be too close to Tehran. The music has stopped with the man who was, arguably, the weakest candidate. Nouri al-Maliki is now the “strongman of Iraq,” having lost an election but remained in power, still arresting opponents wholesale in 2011. Thanks to a leaked diplomatic cable, we now know that in 2007 the king of Saudi Arabia described Al-Maliki as “an Iranian agent.”
Weakness is always attractive in politics, and it is possible that Al-Sadr’s obvious political strength may have frightened the Coalition. After all, if Al-Maliki, like a collection of impossible South Vietnamese presidents before him, has captured U.S. policy, what might the Mahdi Army have done?
But practical thinking was little evident in Coalition behavior—and the results were predictable. By 2006, with political logic playing no part in their choice of political partners, the Coalition had stirred up such a hornet’s nest of opposition that the military situation in Iraq looked dangerous. By choosing the Shia as partners, the United States sparked a Sunni rebellion—doomed to fail, but nasty all the same. The country’s borders could not be secured, and foreign terrorists flooded in. At this point the Coalition hit its one piece of good luck. The foreigners, waving the Al Qaeda banner, were so haughty and vile that in the end they alienated their Iraqi hosts. On the other hand, the Shia factions who were favored had to deal with the spleen of those who were losing—and who naturally looked to Tehran, and were given aid.
The U.S. military saved the neocons from humiliation by fighting and winning the Battle of Baghdad. Eventually, the sheer brutality of the fighting led to reconsideration, and in 2007 both sides backed off. Great efforts have been made to frustrate attempts to assess the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. It must be well into six figures by now.
After 2007 the fighting ended, as if a tap had been turned off. But this was not a solution. The Shia factions had concluded that foreign troops would soon leave—their quarrels could be safely postponed. Muqtada al-Sadr disappeared, reappeared, announced unilateral ceasefires, disappeared again—obviously playing for time. The illusion of political control was followed by the apparition of peace.
The refusal of Iraqi political groups to accept meekly U.S. constitutional innovations and the sort of political negotiation for which the Russians had been criticized in Chechnya brought the neocons close to the very outcome of which they were most terrified—a repetition of the failure to save South Vietnam. Rescued by luck and David Petraeus, the neocons responded to this close call with public humiliation by losing interest.
Against this background, it is no surprise that some members of the sprawling U.S. government decided that the neocon extemporizations in Iraq deserved to be abandoned, thus undermining the administration’s ability to take their war policy—bouncing allies and opponents into fast and dangerous decisions—to fresh arenas.
Foreign governments had lost trust in Washington much earlier. In 2001 Tony Blair had made an insufficiently considered offer of assistance to Mr. Bush. Britain had then tried too hard to get U.N. approval for the invasion, failed, and turned up in 2003 with a serious expeditionary force. But in due course even Britain lost interest, so completely in fact that they threw away the U.K. military’s own reputation for counterinsurgency after the debacle in Basra. The Royal Navy has been chopped back savagely, and the Army is next: This is the legacy for the United Kingdom of the follies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The collapse of U.S. influence in the Middle East has been even more dramatic—and nowhere more so than with the rising regional power, Turkey, in which the United States had invested so much, both publicly and secretly. In 2001, Turkey was not even on the neocons’ list of known unknowns. They did not even dream that Ankara might be anything but a solid asset. Turkey was offered $36 billion in trade concessions to join the U.S. invasion. A refusal was inconceivable.
Turkey’s economic miracle had got going during the Iran-Iraq war, and by 2002 political change was moving fast. In 2003 the new Erdogan government dramatically rejected playing any part in the invasion. Turkey now has her own agenda in the Eastern Mediterranean: leading U.S. policy rather than following. Turkey cannot afford an independent and hostile Kurdistan: Turkish special forces troops are routinely infiltrated into the KRG, and the United States turns a blind eye to PKK attacks over the border into Turkey, because they also attack Iran. In 2010, some U.S. experts were talking about having “lost Turkey,” despite the fact that Turkey is now sparring again with Iran.
On the surface, Iran is still “contained” and may be sliding into civil war. But if the invasion of Iraq was “all about Iran,” as falsely wise neocons would darkly whisper in 2002, Iran has not been intimidated. Indeed, the heavy-handed threats—U.S. carrier-based aircraft were making dummy nuclear attacks on Iran in 2005—only emboldened Iran. Training Hezbollah fighters and sending Pasdaran officers with antiship missiles to Lebanon in 2004, Iran helped defeat the Israel Defense Forces two years later. China was impressed by Iran’s defiance, and oil contracts were signed. Spotting Chinese warships at Bandar Abbas has become something of an internet game.
Throughout the Middle East, U.S. enemies have looked upon the works of Washington and taken courage. Noisily dethroning a Sunni dictator, rooting out the last vestiges of Nasserite Arab nationalism in Iraq, and installing a U.S.-unfriendly parliament in Baghdad (which calls regularly for U.S. companies to be denied contracts) has taught a lesson to the “Arab Street”—just not the one intended.
True, the proximity of civil strife in Iraq—hundreds still die every month—has had the odd effect of inhibiting many Syrians from seeking the overthrow of President Assad and his minority Shia Alawite regime. But elsewhere in the region social networks have taken U.S. deeds—and propaganda—from Iraq and turned them against U.S. allies.
The casual expectations of the neocons that the “CNN effect” of tyrannicide in Iraq would help them get their way have been cleverly countered not just by Al Jazeera but by the much more pervasive and subtle offerings of Turkish television, where U.S. Special Forces are the doll-like opponents of Turkish Rambos, and soap operas preach anti-Western messages.
If Islamist parliamentary regimes impatient with Western commercial and political influence and viscerally hostile to Israel are to become what the French are already calling “the future in the Middle East,” this has all been accelerated by the invasion of Iraq. And Israel and Saudi Arabia have been forced together in a new strategic partnership, making both harder to influence—and making unpredictable events more likely.
This may be no more than yet another demonstration of the iron law of unintended consequences, but it is the lost opportunities that we will all regret. In 1920 Britain made a country out of broken bits of the Ottoman Empire. In the 21st century, Washington had a chance to drive back the ideology of jihad and recruit at least half the world against violence and extremism. Instead, we got Iraq.
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