Iraq Opinion: Three Thoughts on the War --- Lies, Disaster, and the Unexpected Outcome

Yesterday Defense Management News asked me to write a summary of my thoughts about the Iraq War and what it brought.

Thanks to Joanna Paraszczuk for editing:

A reflection 10 years to the day that US warplanes launched the first phase of the war on Iraq: this was a conflict deliberately designed on deceptions and whose consequences are still proving disastrous - most of all for the Iraqi people.

Far from producing the anticipated result, at least for the Bush Administration, the invasion of Iraq led to the opposite; rather than demonstrating the "unipolar" nature of American power, Iraq has become an ongoing illustration of the limits of that power.

Today, as Iraq tries to recover from the past decade, events extending beyond its borders to the wider Middle East highlight the twist in the tale --- that the US, good or bad, is rarely centre stage. Quite often, it is waiting in the wings.

First came the lies or --- for those who prefer more cautious language --- the 'strategic deceptions'. It is not that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction never materialised after the invasion. It is that the US and British governments together manufactured the narrative that he had those weapons to justify the invasion.

In his speech of August 2002 launching the drive to war, US Vice President Dick Cheney did not say that Saddam 'might' have WMDs. He said that Saddam definitely had arsenals not just of biological and chemical weapons, but also aluminium tubes for a nuclear device.

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice spoke of a "mushroom cloud" as a likelihood, not as a dim prospect. President George Bush said flatly: "[The Iraqi regime] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons." Secretary of State Colin Powell, with script pushed on him by the administration, told the United Nations: "The facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction."

Meanwhile in Britain, on orders from the Prime Minister's office, intelligence services were converting the possibility of WMDs into the certainty of an imminent, threat. Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in the preface to the now-infamous 'September Dossier' that "the document discloses that [Saddam's] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them".

Put bluntly, the US government decided that, if Iraq's WMDs did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them, for the Bush administration had decided from January 2001 - a mere ten days after taking office - that there must be regime change in Iraq. This was not a question of getting rid of Saddam. In the words of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: "Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond it."

Just over a year later, even with US troops dying in Afghanistan in a failed attempt to capture Osama bin Laden, Cheney would tell Blair in London that it was time to shift focus to Iraq. A month after that, in April 2002, Bush and Blair would attempt on the launch of plans for regime change, if necessary by military action.

To fulfil that quest, the administration would carry out other deceptions, set up other premises. First, it would connect Iraq to the attacks of 11 September 2001, "capitalising on these opportunities", as Rice told her staff. President Bush would say, a month before the war, that this was a "campaign for human rights".

Then the consequences. The war brought disorder and chaos, a reality far removed from the hoped-for scenes of "liberation" in which grateful Iraqis greeted US troops with flowers - even though assistant secretary of defense Douglas Feith was to insist, a full two years after the invasion, that the Iraqis "had flowers in their minds".

A similar sense of temporary psychosis, an inability or refusal to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the fantasy of how the invasion should have been welcomed, is reflected in Rumsfeld's comments as Iraqis looted 48 hours after Saddam's departure. The looting, he insisted, was simply Iraqis' natural response to "freedom":  "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."

"They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things," Rumsfeld insisted. "And that's what's going to happen here."

The reality was quite different. The US and Britain had not exchanged one regime for another; they had replaced a regime with no effective authority at all. Having set aside detailed staff studies as complications, the Bush Administration watched over the collapse of production, the financial system, industry, the military, and the police in most areas of the country.

By the end of April, days before President Bush declared "mission accomplished" US troops were shooting unarmed Iraqis in Fallujah. By August, prominent Iraqi figures and United Nations staff were being bombed. By the end of the year, even with Saddam in custody, violence against the US and British "occupiers" was rising.

Some of the subsequent decline is well-known. The US oversight, losing at least $8bn in reconstruction funds, would be framed not by progress but by the images of abused prisoners; the search for political authority replaced by division and even American plans for assassinations. The vaunted image of Iraqis voting in national elections in January 2005 would soon fade, replaced by the shift from a war against occupation to an Iraqi-on-Iraqi civil war.

The scale, however, may not be known. "Hundreds of thousands" dead is a vague placeholder, standing in for a precise figure. The images upon images of bombings and shootings - some by Iraqis, others by the US military - stand in for the decimation and division of communities. The myth of a US "surge" in 2007-2008 which defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq --- is being replaced by a new narrative, in which AQI and its "associates" pose a threat to US interests not just in Iraq, but beyond.

But what of the original American objective, the new Iraqi example "for the region and beyond"? With each challenge to US power - not just military, but political, economic, and ideological - the Bush Administration's vision of the "unipolar era" receded. There were attempted revisions, such as Bush's proclamation of a "freedom agenda" in 2005, but they could not substitute for the US failure to impose authority. The administration had entered with the January 2001 vision of regime change; it exited with the December 2008 image of a journalist throwing both his shoes at a surprised President in Baghdad.

And this was not just a case of a failure which could be closed off, replaced by what Barack Obama declared, in his 1st inaugural speech, would be a reconciliation of American values and security. For many people in many countries, "values" and "security" did not necessarily rest with the Americans.

The "Arab Spring" from December 2010 would not be a reaction to Iraq, either an embrace of the elusive "democracy" that the US had proclaimed after Saddam or an axis of anti-American resistance. Instead, the "Arab Spring" would be an umbrella term for different movements, each seeking a way which was not tied to Washington's lead, each pursuing aspirations that could not be put into Rumsfeld's "the region and beyond".

Still, some Bush-era officials persist in a now more-than-temporary psychosis. John Bolton, Assistant Secretary of State in 2003, celebrated this 10th anniversary of a war "sending an unmistakable signal of power and determination throughout the Middle East and around the world. Despite all the criticism of what happened after Saddam's defeat, these facts are indisputable."

It is a telling reminder: for some, the delusion of power - a power defined by America and no one else - justifies the cost, the damage, the deaths.

For the rest of us, without forgetting the cost, the damage, the deaths - the challenges have moved far beyond Iraq 2003. They are far beyond that supposed American power