TONY BURMAN
The rout of Ramadi reveals what Iraq has become for America: It’s the new Vietnam,
“If you break it, you own it,” warned U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to President George W. Bush just before the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.
Powell knew that the president had no clue what unpredictable forces he was about to unleash. Bush now knows. We all do.
As we witness the inexorable, slow-motion collapse of Iraq in the face of vicious Islamic State extremists, let’s remember Powell’s private caution to Bush: “You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You’ll own it all.”
This has been an awful week in the troubled history of Iraq. The stunning seizure last Sunday night of the pivotal provincial capital of Ramadi by Islamic State fighters took everyone by surprise.
Until last weekend, the United States and Iraqi view was that Islamic State rebels were on the defensive and that Iraq’s questionable military had learned to hold its ground. But at Ramadi, even though they outnumbered the rebels, Iraqi soldiers abandoned the city in the face of the ferocious attack. Many of the Islamic State fighters were equipped with American weapons captured earlier from fleeing Iraqi soldiers.
Once again, the debacle has called into question the country’s future as a unitary state. Not only is the Iraqi military’s will to win in doubt, but the Iraqi government is also showing itself to be divided and inept. As for the Americans, whose military intervention has been limited to largely ineffective airstrikes, their strategy to “defeat” the Islamic State is floundering.
However, it is not as if these Islamic State jihadists, who are now roaming freely in Iraq and Syria, were invented out of thin air. They have a history.
They are largely the remnants of the Al Qaeda movement operating for years in Iraq, as well as veterans from Saddam Hussein’s Baath party. Shortly after the Americans deposed Hussein, the U.S. foolishly disbanded Iraq’s Baath army. It was a move that put more than 200,000 angry young men out of work. Is it a surprise that many of them are now are working for the Islamic State?
The journey from 2003 until today is a complicated one, and it has largely been obscured in today’s political debates. But the PBS investigative program Frontline has prepared a brilliant one-hour documentary on this subject. It is called “The Rise of ISIS” and is easily available on the PBS website (pbs.org).
In the 1960s, the U.S. invasion of Vietnam resulted in thousands of casualties and created a bitter and divided America. In addition, its aftershocks haunted and influenced future U.S. actions worldwide for decades.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq is proving to have the same enduring power. As much as American politicians would want it otherwise, the impact of the Iraq War is still unfolding, and it has even entered the 2016 Republican primary race for president.
Earlier this month, former Florida governor Jeb Bush — brother of George W. — created a firestorm among Republicans. He said in a Fox TV interview that, knowing what he knows today, he still would have invaded Iraq. A day later, after fellow Republicans pointed out the idiocy of that remark, he changed his position.
In the days since, other Republican presidential aspirants have been prompted to do what was once unthinkable. They now all agree that the 2003 invasion was a big mistake. What is revealing is the alleged reason they cite: faulty intelligence that misled the U.S. government to invade.
That, of course, is nonsense. Any careful and honest study of that period shows that “false intelligence” is a phony excuse. We now know that the intention by the U.S. government to invade Iraq was long planned. The trio of George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld invented a connection between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001, even though none existed.
The American case was built on lies, not on faulty intelligence. Or, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it this week: “It was worse than a mistake, it was a crime.”
Until there is widespread acknowledgement and accountability of that truth, the nightmare in Iraq and Syria will only continue.