20 years after U.S. invasion, Iraq is a freer place — but not a hopeful one
FALLUJAH, Iraq — A couple of streets away from the new buildings and noisy main road of the desert city of Fallujah, there was once a sports stadium. The goal posts are long gone, the stands rotted years ago.
Now every inch is covered with gravestones.
“This is the martyrs’ graveyard,” said Kamil Jassim Mohammed, 70, the cemetery’s custodian, who has looked after it since 2004, when graves were first dug for those killed as U.S. troops battled Iraqi militias. “I stopped counting how many people are buried here, but there are hundreds, thousands of martyrs.”
As Iraq marks the 20th anniversary Monday of the U.S.led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, an army of ghosts haunts the living. The dead and the maimed shadow everyone in this country — even those who want to leave the past behind.
The United States invaded Iraq as part of its “war on terror” announced by President George W. Bush after the alQaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Bush and members of his administration claimed that Saddam was manufacturing and concealing weapons of mass destruction, though no evidence to back up those accusations was ever found. Some U.S. officials also said Saddam had links to al-Qaida, a charge that intelligence agencies later rejected.
Today, Iraq is a very different place, and there are many lenses through which to see it. It is a far freer society than it was under Saddam and one of the more open countries in the Middle East, with multiple political parties and a largely free press.
Still, conversations with more than 50 Iraqis about the war’s anniversary offered an often troubling portrait of an oil-rich nation that should be doing well but where most people neither feel secure nor see their government as anything but a corruption machine.
Many Iraqis see a bleak economic future because, despite a wealth of natural resources, the country’s energy revenues have been spent primarily on the vast public sector, lost to corruption or wasted on grand projects left unfinished. Relatively little has gone into transforming public infrastructure or providing services as many Iraqis had hoped.
“The living conditions are not good. The electricity is still bad,” said Mohammed Hassan, a 37-year-old communications engineer and father of three who supervises the laying of internet lines in a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, Baghdad, for which he is paid $620 a month. “I have hardly enough to get to the end of the month, so I cannot see much of a future,” he added.
“It’s a pity. We always wanted to get rid of Saddam,” he said. “We know Iraq is rich, and we hoped it would get better. But we did not get what we were hoping for.”
Iraq remains indelibly scarred by a civil war, an insurgency and the almost constant upheaval that the invasion unleashed, which continued even after U.S. troops pulled out in 2011. Wave after wave of fighting gave way to political strife, and the country never fully stabilized. Two major cities — Mosul and Fallujah — have been largely destroyed, and damage is visible in almost every major town throughout central and northern Iraq.
It is hard to find anyone in this country who has not lost someone.
About 200,000 civilians died at the hands of U.S. forces, al-Qaida militants, Iraqi insurgents or the Islamic State terrorist group, according to Brown University’s Cost of War project. At least 45,000 members of the Iraqi military and police forces and at least 35,000 Iraqi insurgents also lost their lives, and tens of thousands more were left with life-altering injuries.
On the U.S. side, about 4,600 troops and 3,650 American contractors were killed in Iraq, and countless others bear physical and mental scars.
The Iraqi state’s weakness after the U.S. invasion made it fertile ground for powers in the region and beyond to cultivate their geopolitical ambitions. Among them were neighboring Iran and Turkey, along with the United States itself.
But Iran proved most adept at exploiting the power vacuum left by the removal of Saddam and at exerting influence inside Iraq for its own goals. Iran spurred the creation of a parallel military force that was long outside the control of the Iraqi government. These mostly Shiite militias have tens of thousands of fighters, including some who are loyal to Iran.
Abetting and expanding Iran’s influence in Iraq was hardly the intention of U.S. policymakers in 2003. Ryan Crocker, a former American ambassador to Iraq who was involved in the planning of the war, said he suggested to U.S. diplomats and military leaders that they might want to reach out to the Iranians.
“I said, ‘Shouldn’t we be figuring out how to talk to the Iranians about this and how to have them minimize their hostile involvement?’ ” he recalled.
He said his plea fell on deaf ears.
“I saw no evidence whatsoever at any point that anyone was really thinking about the depth and breadth of the Iranian factor,” he added.