Perilous path of Iraq & ruin
Ateacher friend of mine has a useful exercise at the beginning of each year. She asks all the students to recount their first political memory. The exercise is less for them than for her. Because each year comes a terrific reminder of how fast time flies and how memories get forgotten.
One example is that there are perfectly sentient, walking, talking Americans who have absolutely no memory of 9/11. They have little appreciation of the feeling in this country after that day, and less understanding of why America acted as it did in the aftermath. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, some of this will be raked over again. I wish we could get it into some clearer perspective.
In hindsight it all seems so obvious. Iraq, like Afghanistan, proved to be a quagmire. Saddam Hussein turned out to have no weapons of mass destruction, despite the intelligence estimates of the US, UK, Germany and many other countries which said he did. As a result, many people now say that we got caught in two sets of quicksand and got out with nothing to show for it.
Era of mass panic
Yet at the time — as many readers will recall — none of this seemed clear. Not only had we lost 3,000 Americans, the World Trade Center, a portion of the Pentagon and more, but other things unnerved us. There was the Washington sniper. There were the anthrax scares. At one moment, after 9/11, it looked like the whole top tier of the US government had been exposed to a biological weapons attack. Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of the only regimes on earth which had showed the willingness to use chemical weapons — not least against its own people.
Twenty years ago nobody knew where the next attack might come from, or if there would be one. Now everyone can sit back free in the knowledge that no such attack happened again. Certainly not on the scale of 9/11. But we didn’t know that back then, and the lack of further attacks was not inevitable. They needed to be prevented. As a result America in those days seemed to me like a great giant woken from its slumber, intent on finding anyone who had even the most distant connection to the horrors of that day.
Because of the way in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were prosecuted, we can all now plot our own excuses through the mess. But the results are still being felt. Obviously in Iraq and Afghanistan. But also here at home.
The failure of the Iraq intervention put the public and a generation of new policymakers off the idea of foreign interventions. One of the reasons John McCain was on the back foot in 2008 was not just because he was a foreign policy person at a time of financial crisis, but because he was a foreign policy person at all. Talk of taking on Iran next was not a popular position in 2008 with Iraq in pieces.
By the time that the Syrian civil war broke out, there was even less desire for American forces to intervene. By the time of the Ukraine war, there was political unanimity on supporting Ukraine but zero public or political interest in getting militarily involved.
In fact, some of those most gung-ho about Iraq are now among the people most opposed to any American military interventions abroad. And to a great extent it is the American right which has done this switcheroo.
Twenty years ago it was the American left who dominated the anti-war movement. One of the questions they endlessly asked was who America thought it was to go around the world spreading its values. Didn’t they know how corrupt and awful America was?
Today this is an argument heard more commonly on the American right. It is American right-wingers who are saying in Congress and elsewhere that America is so rancidly corrupt at the institutional and societal level that we can do no good in the world.
It isn’t the only switch around. Consider the way in which the intelligence agencies are now perceived. Twenty years ago it was the domestic left who spat out the names of the CIA, FBI and NSA. Today — largely because of the behavior of these agencies in Iraq, but also later in the Trump years — it is conservatives who show the most open contempt for the intelligence community. Just a decade ago, it was the left that extolled the virtues of leakers or “whistleblowers” like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Today their most prominent supporters are on the American right. Twenty years ago the American left who made jibes at America’s military leadership. Today the jibes come from the anti-woke right.
To an extent that we probably haven’t yet realized, Iraq upended not just politics in Iraq but politics in America. It spread doubt and distrust about our institutions, our competency and our virtues as a nation.
Some rethinking was needed. Twenty years on there were many lessons to take from Iraq. But American retreat from the world should not be one of them.