We are now approaching the tenth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, which occurred on March 19, 2003. There has been, to date, little press coverage of the occasion. This is hardly surprising. The recently concluded presidential campaign consumed the U.S. media for the better part of six months. And talks in Washington over the “fiscal cliff” — a combination of automatic spending cuts and tax increases that many claim will plunge our economy back into recession — has taken center stage. Abroad, other events — the intensifying civil war in Syria, the outbreak of violence in Gaza, the ongoing efforts by the United States and its allies to halt Iran’s nuclear program, the uproar (at least here and in Israel) over Palestinian recognition at the United Nations — have dominated the news. Not least, the last U.S. combat troops withdrew from Iraq in December 2011. U.S. service women and men continue to fight and die in the Muslim world; but they are fighting and dying in Afghanistan, not Iraq.
The late Gore Vidal used to call our country “The United States of Amnesia,” because of our tendency to forget the past when it is too unpleasant or inconvenient. But we should not let the anniversary of the Iraq War pass without serious soul-searching. The reasons are three-fold.
First, the war was, by any reasonable standard, a disaster, marked by deceptive justification, incompetent planning, and — at least at the beginning — a grossly overoptimistic view of our ability to bring order to Iraq. Even the much-vaunted surge of 2007, which helped reduce previously catastrophic levels of violence, failed utterly in its stated goal of fostering sectarian cooperation. The cost to the United States of our misadventure has been tragically high: nearly 4,500 dead, over 30,000 wounded, and a monetary price that will eventually run to several trillion dollars. These numbers do not, of course, count the Iraqi dead, most of them civilians, which could total several hundred thousand by some estimates. The chief strategic outcome of the invasion was, ironically, an increase in regional influence for Iran, which could now mend fences with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad
Second, the Iraqi war was unnecessary. Iraq had not attacked us; it was not, despite assertions to the contrary, deeply involved in anti-U.S. terrorist activities; it was, after 10 years of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, a poor, weak country surrounded by enemies. Admittedly, Saddam Hussein was an odious man, with a track record of oppression at home and aggression abroad. But, by the time we invaded, he was very much a cornered despot. Comparisons of him to Hitler — fairly common in the lead up to the war — were simply ridiculous. As repellent as Saddam was, he did not represent much of an international threat. When we invaded Iraq, the country’s entire GDP was a fraction of U.S. expenditures on defense alone.
Third and most importantly, the invasion of Iraq offers important lessons about how great powers make grave mistakes. It is hard now to recapture what can only be called the hysteria of the months leading up the attack on Iraq: the alarmist claims emanating from the Bush administration and echoed by a largely supine press, the savage attacks upon those, here and abroad, who opposed the war; the silence — or sometimes even support – emanating from a foreign policy establishment that should have known better.
With talk of intervening in Syria and attacking Iran bubbling in Washington, it is critically important that we learn the lessons of our invasion of Iraq. Those lessons are not pleasant ones. And many do not reflect well upon either our political culture or our foreign policy elites. But learn them we must.
I will be discussing some of those lessons at greater length in what I hope will be a series of blog posts between now and March.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.