National Post (National Edition)
Iraq war fades from Western memory
Coalition errors exacerbated deep divides
Nasiriyah, Ramadi, Fallujah. The names of towns where the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” fought important battles in a war that began 10 years ago this week have already faded from Western memory just as George W. Bush, who ordered the invasion of Iraq, has faded from public view.
The crack U.S. Marines I was embedded with were surprised and delighted by the rapturous welcome Iraqis gave them in 2003 as they celebrated finally being free of Saddam Hussein.
The first time I heard the U.S. war plan for Iraq might be in peril was actually before the initial ground invasion was over. On the outskirts of Baghdad a few hours before Saddam’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square, a tobacco-chewing U.S. commander with a southern drawl told me, “Winning the war was easy. Winning the peace is going to be the hard part.”
He wondered whether the U.S. had nearly enough troops to keep the Sunnis and Shiites from murdering each other. His doubts about whether the U.S. State Department had a plan to run the government or provide essential services such as electricity and water also proved prophetic.
A problem that was already evident at an early stage in the U.S.’s ill-starred occupation was in its haste to reach the capital, Washington ordered its troops to ignore huge weapons caches they kept discovering.
Beginning in 2004, I would awaken almost every morning in Baghdad to the sound and tremor of explosions from improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers wearing explosive vests fuelled by pieces of rockets, mortars and artillery shells from of all those untouched armouries.
Such attacks and the outrages perpetrated by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib prison that became public knowledge that same year caused support for the coalition’s presence in Iraq to collapse, opening the door for al-Qaeda to join the war.
More than 112,000 Iraqis have died violently, according to estimates by the human rights organization, Iraq Body Count, most in Shiite and Sunni attacks on each other. Nearly 5,000 coalition troops were killed. To finance the war and the occupation is said to have cost Washington more than US$1-trillion.
I supported the invasion, not because as the Bush administration falsely or mistakenly claimed, Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or the equally dubious claim he had ties to al-Qaeda. I thought to rid Iraq and the region of such a tyrannical thug was the right thing to do.
I contacted Iraqi friends last week to ask them what they now made of the war. The consensus was, despite all the death and suffering, it had been worth it because Saddam had been defeated and hanged.
But they made clear they thought the coalition made serious mistakes that gave al- Qaeda of Mesopotamia opportunities and exacerbated the deep divides that have long existed — between Shiites and Sunnis, and between Arabs and Kurds and Turkmen. Saddam, much like Tito in the Balkans, used violence and the threat of violence to suppress sectarian and ethnic passions for a while.
A surge in U.S. forces in 2007 engineered by General David Petraeus and a generously funded initiative to support the Sunni Awakening after the Sunni tribes had tired of al-Qaeda’s religious fervour saved the U.S. from a humiliating defeat and eventually provided the space U.S. President Barack Obama used to get the troops out.
Like the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq appears to be disintegrating today. Ignoring the Shiites who now run the country, Kurds in northern Iraq are trying to make an unexpected peace with Turkey. Shiites and Sunnis in the capital live on a knife edge. To try to avoid mayhem, they have barricaded themselves behind forests of the hideous concrete barriers that are one of the few enduring U.S. legacies.
With coalition forces no longer around to protect them, some Sunnis are once again turning to al-Qaeda for protection and to try to reclaim some of Iraq’s immense oil wealth that is beginning to flow to the Kurds and especially to the Shiites.
It is not possible to guess the eventual outcome of the mess that is Iraq. The clear winner for the moment is Iran, which loathes the West, because its Shiite cousins now dominate the government. The Sunnis, who fared better under their kinsman Saddam than the Shiites did, are back on their heels.
But frankly, who in the West cares any more? After all the blood and treasure expended by the U.S.-led coalition, Iraq’s future is of little interest to those who poked this viper’s nest 10 years ago. They have chosen to forget it ever happened.