20 years after the Iraq invasion
It’s been two decades since U.S. forces invaded Iraq. President George W. Bush ordered the invasion to neutralize what he said was the threat of weapons of mass destruction posed by dictator Saddam Hussein. Except Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. U.S. forces never found them. In all, 4,586 American service members died in the war, and 32,455 were wounded.
It was the largest military and national security blunder of anyone’s lifetime. “I knew the failure to find WMD would transform public perception of the war,” Bush wrote in his memoir. “While the world was undoubtedly safer with Saddam gone, the reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false. That was a massive blow to our credibility — my credibility — that would shake the confidence of the American people. No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.”
Bush had achieved two milestones prior to the invasion. The first was securing congressional approval for the use of military force in Iraq. Still, there was by no means unanimity in support of what was a war of choice.
The other was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations, in which Powell made the case for war. It turned out that some of the evidence he presented was, unbeknownst to him, false. Powell wrote that he was later mortified to learn the truth.
Making a mistake of such immense proportions was not a politically survivable event.
The aftereffects have rippled through U.S. politics ever since. They were a factor in Democratic presidential primaries for years to come, as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton had to defend their votes for the war to a skeptical party base.
Republicans in presidential politics remained hawkish for years after the war, but that changed with Donald Trump in 2016. Trump relished attacking rival candidate Jeb Bush, brother of George W. Bush. Trump repeatedly called the Iraq War a disaster. Criticizing the Iraq War was no longer a third rail of Republican politics.
A new poll from Ipsos and Axios asked all Americans some simple questions about the war. When asked if they agreed that the U.S. was right to invade Iraq, 36% agreed while 61% disagreed — a nearly 2-1 margin. Another question had to do with who turned out to be right about the war. Just 9% said people who totally supported the war turned out to be right, while 21% said people who supported it initially but came to oppose it were right. Another 26% said people who opposed it from the start were right; and 44% did not know. And by a 67-31 margin, those surveyed said they did not believe the war made America safer.
During the run-up to the Iraq War, and during the war itself, some in the Bush administration, and especially some of the most vociferous supporters outside the White House, attacked those who asked questions about the war, often saying that the critics’ words undermined the American cause and gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
Public opinion on the war has changed dramatically. Even some of its most aggressive defenders have confessed that they got things terribly wrong.
In the years after the invasion, some of the war’s most outspoken defenders went on to become virulently antiTrump and to leave the Republican Party. Now they are supporting President Joe Biden and advocating greater U.S. military aid to Ukraine. It’s a different war in a different time, and thankfully no American troops are fighting in
Making a mistake of such immense proportions was not a politically survivable event.
Ukraine. Still, some are attacking critics of aid to Ukraine, or even those who just want to limit the aid, as pro-Putin, much the way some criticized skeptics of the Iraq War as soft on terrorism or even anti-American. Indeed, some of the very same people who promoted the Iraq War and attacked the war’s critics are promoting U.S. aid to Ukraine and attacking critics of that aid.
Finally, the Senate is preparing to repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq — the vote that played such an important role in many political careers and in the general Iraq debate. Doing so now is a practically useless exercise, but it would mark an important point in the long conflict over the war in Iraq — even as echoes of that war are heard in the debate about Ukraine.