Last month, US forces left Iraq eight years and seven months after President George W. Bush prematurely declared ‘Mission Accomplished,’ following the invasion in March 2003
The shock-and-awe operation that lasted 44 days from 19 March to 1 May was a dazzling display of American blockbuster combat, an unforgiving assault on the largest army in the region. The ostensible casus belli had been officially declared to be Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. None were found and successive reports showed that none were there.
George W. Bush’s war in Iraq led to the loss of almost 4,500 American troops, cost almost a trillion US dollars and sent home 33,000 wounded soldiers. In addition, the war killed about 162,000 Iraqi people, the majority of whom were civilians. Iraq Body Count (IBC), one of the few organisations to keep a meticulous record of fatalities in the devastated country – the US Army said “it was not its job” to count civilian dead – said that almost 80% of deaths were civilians, including about 9,000 Iraqi police officers.
Accurate figures for fatalities were always hard to come by during the war as there was little effective government during the worst of the sectarian slaughter, with the most horrific scenes of violence being in Baghdad, hit by suicide bombings, stalked by death squads and re-shaped by sectarian ethnic cleansing that has permanently changed the demographic balance of population in the city. Residents there were two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed than in any other areas of the country.
And yet, despite the bloodshed and the cost in treasure, the Americans have left a country still threatened by Iran-backed insurgents and al-Qaeda. Contrary to claims by the Iraqi government that the situation was steadily improving, the country is as dangerous now as it was a couple of years ago. The trends indicate that conflict in Iraq will continue to kill civilians at a steady rate for years to come. Indeed, Iraq risks sliding back into dictatorship and war. A combustible peace, threatening to explode into civil war, now exists.
Warnings existed, including from the White House itself, that violence would quickly erupt behind withdrawing US troops as insurgents sought to challenge the government and competing factions jostled for power. Few, however, expected the first and gravest threat to Iraq’s new future to come from the government itself – itself the product of American political engineering carried out in the troop surge in 2007. A political settlement had been forged between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, giving each group its own position within a power-sharing government. Preventing Shia hegemony was seen as crucial to ending the Sunni insurgency and keeping the oil-rich Kurdish north from breaking away.
Less attention was paid to the fragility of the arrangement than to the question of whether Iraqi troops were equipped to keep the peace after the Americans departed. Within days, peace collapsed as the Shia Prime Minister threw off his American-imposed restraints in what was clearly a long-planned attack, and turned on his Sunni Vice-President, ordering his arrest on terrorism charges. His flight to the Kurdish north has completed the circle and pulled the third faction into the fight. The scene seems set for an increasingly authoritarian Shia Prime Minister, backed by Iran, to give substance to the Sunnis’ darkest fears about Shia hegemony, which will only serve to give fresh impetus to new recruits in an awakened insurgency.
Worse, the current political crisis in Iraq threatens to become a regional one because the entire Arab world is in a period of flux with Syria, a long-time ally of Shia Iran, slipping towards chaos, sectarianism and civil war. The two sectarian upheavals in Iraq and Syria could well merge into each other. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where, with the Arab Spring toppling authoritarian and secular regimes throughout the Middle East and North Africa and replacing them with Sunni Islamist leaders, Iraq could again become a battlefield, this time one fought over by the Sunni powers to the north and south of Iraq and Iranian-led Shias to the east. With Turkey, a Sunni regional power with a moderate Islamist government, vying for leadership of the Arab Spring countries this may lead to a conflict between Turkey and Iran on Iraqi soil.
President Obama never supported the US invasion of Iraq, yet found himself tied to a time-table for ending an operation agreed by George W. Bush with the Baghdad government. His efforts to extend the US military presence were rejected by the Iraqi Prime Minister last year.
George W. Bush’s legacy lies mired deep in the blood of thousands of Iraqis, Americans and others – including British lives, for Prime Minister Tony Blair was also a willing acolyte in this ill-judged and unnecessary war. There is now little to show for a venture that was supposed to create a new Middle East and establish a US strategic ally in this oil-rich region (Iraq itself holds reserves of about 140 billion barrels, the fourth largest in the world). History will judge that Bush’s rash and ill-thought out intervention in 2003 toppled a regime that was anti-Iranian and replaced it with one that is pro-Iranian. Iran is now the indisputable regional power.
The folly of the Bush policy – encouraged by the combined, and still unrepentant, neo-conservative counsels of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld – haunts America to this day. Americans are, by and large, exhausted by the Iraq war which has inflicted a most painful trauma. As Iraq staggers forward into an uncertain future, the only consolation to Americans will be that it can take no more American lives with it. But the prize, for which so much American and Iraqi blood was shed, of a functioning, democratic and non-sectarian state has eluded the United States.
Iraq now appears to be moving inexorably in the opposite direction towards a sectarian autocracy that carries with it the likelihood of devastating civil war and threatens to suck in its neighbours in a region that provides the world with almost all its oil. The widespread impact now on the most incendiary region in the world is a cause for grave concern. The arrogance of the George W. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy has been exposed as the abject failure many predicted it would be.
Martin Scicluna is the Director General of Malta’s only independent think-tank, The Today Public Policy Institute. He writes here in his personal capacity