National Review Online
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Ten years ago this week, the United States launched the
Iraq War. A decade later, thanks to the mismanagement of the Bush
administration, the indifference of the Obama administration, and the inherent
difficulties of Iraqi society, it is clear that we expended great blood and
treasure for an unsatisfactory outcome.
Saddam Hussein and his regime of torture and mass murder
are gone. He started a war by invading a neighbor and sought dominion over the
global oil supply. He was an ongoing threat to the region and in flagrant
violation of his international commitments. If he no longer had weapons of mass
destruction, it wasn’t for lack of trying. He was undermining the strictures
that kept him from restarting his weapons programs. Even the harshest critics
of the war are loath to admit that their alternative would have left Saddam
atop Iraq.
The war was popular at the beginning, supported by the
public, by Democrats in Congress, and by many of the liberal and conservative
commentators who eventually turned against it.
The notion that Bush “lied” about Saddam’s weapons is
itself a dastardly lie. That Saddam had WMD was a matter of bipartisan and
international consensus. His presumed possession of these weapons was widely
considered intolerable in the context of the September 11 attacks, which taught
a bitter lesson in allowing threats to fester. Bush launched the war for good
reason, and in its initial phase, it was a rapid and undeniable triumph.
Then things went wrong. We didn’t know enough about the
country we had taken over. We underestimated the devastation that had been
wrought in Iraqi institutions and civil society by Saddam’s rule. We couldn’t
get our act together as bureaucracies crossed signals and pursued rival
agendas. We faced a determined Sunni insurgency. With insufficient troops using
ill-advised tactics, we couldn’t impose order. The country spun out of control
and into a sectarian war that threatened to rip it apart and to give al-Qaeda
in Iraq an operating base in the heart of the Arab world.
With the war slipping away, President Bush ordered the
surge, an infusion of additional troops to clear and hold territory in keeping
with classic counterinsurgency doctrine. Bush acted against the fierce
opposition of Democrats and with only the lukewarm support of his own party
(with the honorable exception of John McCain, whose advocacy for the surge was
his finest moment). Critics predicted the surge’s inevitable failure and the
direst consequences. Instead, we dealt al-Qaeda a significant defeat. We won
over the Sunni tribes and suppressed the Iranian-backed Shia militias. Violence
dropped dramatically. We afforded the Iraqi government enough stability to
establish its authority and legitimacy.
This was the situation that Bush handed over to Obama.
Shamefully, his successor had no interest in building on it or even maintaining
it. The administration failed to secure an agreement with the Iraqis to
maintain a U.S. troop presence. As soon as we left, Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki let loose his worst instincts. He has ruled as an authoritarian and
Shia sectarian and has allied himself with Iran. In our absence, al-Qaeda in
Iraq has begun to make a comeback.
At the end of the day, of course, Maliki is no Saddam
Hussein. Iraq won’t be developing weapons of mass destruction anytime soon and
it is not a direct threat to its neighbors. But any hope that Iraq, still
wracked by political violence, would become a shining example to the rest of
the Middle East was lost long ago. The Iraqi elections were inspiring exercises.
A few years ago they even seemed to herald the advent of a nonsectarian
politics. Yet the promise of those elections, and of Iraq’s new democratic
structures, hasn’t been fulfilled. Key political players in Iraq have lacked a
commitment to the rule of law and pluralism, and have been egged on and
supplied by mischievous neighbors who had more staying power than we did.
The story in Iraq isn’t over. It didn’t end with our
departure, and what we do still matters. The Obama abdication in Iraq, though,
has continued. We should be using every remaining financial and diplomatic
lever we have to try to force Maliki to give up his campaign against the Sunnis
and to maintain some distance from Iran. Instead, the administration is content
to take Maliki as it finds him, even as he allows Tehran to funnel aid to the
Assad regime in Syria, which we want to see fall.
Throughout the near-decade of war in Iraq, there was one
constant: the heroism and selflessness of our troops, who paid the highest
price for the mistakes of their superiors. They gave their lives and their
limbs. They were the tip of the spear of the most proficient and humane
fighting force that the world has ever known. We wish the results so far in
Iraq were more worthy of their sacrifice.
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