Iraq: Mission Partly Accomplished

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 16, 2023

 

We’re too far removed from the Iraq War to assess with confidence what the world would have looked like had the U.S. not removed Saddam Hussein from power in 2003. But if we’re going to try, we might look for guidance to the region as it was in the years immediately preceding the war.

 

Following the ouster of Iraqi forces from neighboring Kuwait in 1991, the United States and the coalition of nations established a new status quo requiring the full-time commitment of forces to regular policing actions. The U.S., the U.K., and France policed two no-fly zones over Iraq, involving over 280,000 sorties over nine years. That commitment was reinforced by periodic applications of military force against Saddam’s regime.

 

In 1993, the United States executed retaliatory strikes on Iraqi targets in response to the exposure of a sophisticated Baghdad-led plot to kill former president George H. W. Bush. Three years later, the U.S. once again struck Iraqi targets, this time in response to an Iraqi land offensive against the Kurdish city of Erbil — the largest such offensive since the 1991 war — which violated a United Nations Security Council resolution. Operation Desert Fox in 1998 was a kinetic military response to Saddam’s refusal to allow inspectors searching for evidence of weapons of mass destruction access to sensitive sites.

 

The September 11 attacks focused the minds of American policy-makers who had once seen Saddam’s Iraq as a containable menace. Democrats have succeeded in their campaign to retroactively condition the American public to the notion that they never regarded Iraq as a terrorism incubator and, therefore, an unacceptable threat. But their pre–Iraq War records tell another story.

 

Clinton-era National Security Council member Kenneth Pollack described a spring 2002 meeting in which “nearly twenty former [United Nations Special Commission] inspectors” expressed the consensus view that Iraq was covertly enriching uranium. That reflected the consensus view among Western intelligence agencies that Iraq — a regime that paid salaries to the relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers and financed the training of al-Qaeda-linked operatives in North Africa — had an advanced WMD program.

 

“The risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face,” said Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright in 1998. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national-security adviser, agreed: “He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983,” he wrote at the time. Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats in good standing all issued statements supporting, to one degree or another, efforts to neutralize the threat posed by Iraq’s unconventional armaments and its support for terrorism.

 

If we assume that at least some of these Clinton-era Democrats would have served in high-level positions in an Al Gore administration, we can also reasonably surmise that a second Gulf War would have been possible, maybe even likely, in the wake of 9/11. Of course, it’s not the war per se that is now regarded almost universally as a mistake, but regime change in Baghdad. The costs of the coalition’s occupation and reconstruction of Iraq have been thoroughly examined. But the campaign’s benefits — tangible and intangible, for Iraqis, the West, and the U.S. — are less frequently explored.

 

In 2003, Iraq’s gross domestic product was just 10 percent of what it is today. Quality of life, consumer spending, literacy, and life expectancy have all improved. Iraq’s Kurds no longer live in constant fear of genocidal reprisals from Baghdad, nor do Iraq’s Marsh Arabs. The lawful deposal, trial, and execution of a murderous despot liberated the nation from his caprice, cruelty, and disregard for human dignity and life.

 

Maybe it’s not saying all that much, but with six free parliamentary elections under its belt, Iraq arguably represents the most successful exercise in American-led democracy promotion since the Second World War. The Anbar Awakening — a by-product of effective counterinsurgency operations, which put a premium on protecting Iraqi civilians, and of America’s partnership with local leaders — transformed a province that was Saddam Hussein’s base of Sunni support from being a place of resistance to the new government to being the home of stakeholders in it. Nor has the country become an Iranian satrap, as many feared it would in the period following the full withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. That happy outcome is due, in part, to the preservation of a U.S. military presence in Iraq at the invitation of the host government.

 

Those with a reflexive hostility toward American commitments abroad won’t recognize all that as a victory, but the conduct of American statecraft over the past 30 years demonstrates that the U.S. has permanent interests in the Persian Gulf. If we didn’t have those interests, America’s commitments to Iraq in the 1990s would have melted away along with the humanitarian crisis that deepened them (as occurred in post-Qaddafi Libya). Those interests are materially advanced by having Iraq as a partner.

 

As pre-2003 history demonstrates, Saddam Hussein would not be ignored. His expansionist ambitions and support for domestic and transnational terrorism regularly drew the United States into regional conflicts. The U.S. presence in a democratized Iraq provides America with forward positions that help it contain Iran — to say nothing of the terror-sponsoring instruments Iran wields, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (as the late Qasem Soleimani might attest). That presence closes off strategic links between Iran and its regional proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It also limits the number of regional allies available to America’s near-peer competitors, Russia and China, which have both made substantial investments in the cultivation of Middle Eastern partners.

 

Washington cannot and should not ignore Iraq’s many modern-day deficiencies. Indeed, more than a few of the country’s problems were worsened by America’s discomfort with the whole arrangement.

 

Iraq’s endemic corruption is recognized almost universally (by Iraqis, especially) as its foremost civic problem. The poor oversight of U.S.-provided financial aid exacerbated that condition. Inter-tribal relations inside the state are confounding and complicated, and papering them over contributes to episodes of extremist violence by state and non-state actors alike. America’s precipitous withdrawal in 2011 and return in 2014 — at a time and place not of its choosing, and only after a medieval mob cascaded over the Syrian border bent on extermination and subjugation — are indicative of Washington’s allergy to developing a strategic plan for a long-term relationship with Baghdad.

 

But the region is changing. Thanks to the rise of Iran and to the Abraham Accords, which emerged as a result of the Sunni Arab world’s realization that Tehran poses a greater immediate threat than Jerusalem, Iraq’s southern neighbors are forming a geostrategic bloc with one primary goal: to limit Iran’s ambitions. Recent headlines advertising a forthcoming rapprochement between the Saudis and Iran engineered by the triumphant Chinese illustrate the unacceptability of alternatives to the expansion of the Abraham Accords. Though the relationship between Iraq’s Shiite leaders and their sponsors in Tehran is increasingly schismatic, Shiite factions aligned with pro-Palestinian Sunni leaders have effectively closed off Iraq’s ascension into that bloc. But the inducements to join an anti-Iran coalition are strong, and helping guide Iraqi politics in that direction is imperative. Such a development would greatly advance America’s strategic interests in the region and the world.

 

We cannot go back in time and fix the mistakes America made in Iraq. But we cannot move forward if we languish in the self-defeating notion that America only made mistakes in Iraq. Americans should be proud of the sacrifices we made to liberate the country from one of the world’s worst dictators and be resolved to take maximum advantage of the new status quo our actions engineered. What other option is there?