Strategic Consequences of the Iraq War

“Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason.”                    

It would seem hard to argue that the war in Vietnam was not America’s worst foreign policy mistake in the post-WWII era.  It ended in a complete defeat with our enemy, North Vietnam, and its Soviet and Chinese allies, ousting the United States (complete with humiliating helicopter departures) and occupying the South.  It cost over 50,000 American lives and an unknowable number of Vietnamese, perhaps over a million in both North and South.  Relations with major allies were stressed and damaged.  At home, it tore the United States apart along generational and class lines, and permanently undermined public trust in government.  It cost Lyndon Johnson re-election, distracted the US from domestic reforms, and led to the Nixon presidency.  The prestige and morale of the US military were deeply compromised, and the military spent a decade rebuilding itself.  The huge cost of the war, financed by increased borrowing, hurt the US economy and contributed to the stagflation of the 1970s.  

Hard to argue.  But Ross Douthat, the moderately conservative New York Times columnist, thinks the Iraq War was worse.  At first glance this seems like an odd position.  American casualties were far lower, and Iraq today, though unstable and racked by corruption and violence, is intact and in many respects a US ally.  Far from being pushed out, the United States retains a small military presence to train the Iraqi military and assist in the fight against ISIS.  Domestically, the war quickly became unpopular but Bush was re-elected in 2004; with fighting done not by draftees but volunteers, Iraq never roused the same intense public opposition as did Vietnam.   

But Douthat points to the larger strategic context to make his case.  After Vietnam, where the goal was to stop the spread of communism and prevent Vietnam from becoming a Soviet and Chinese ally, the US eventually rebounded while the USSR and the global communist movement collapsed.  The United States emerged in the 1990s as the sole superpower.  Vietnam and China went to war in 1979 and remain bitter enemies.  Relations with major allies healed.  

America’s strategic goals in Iraq, however, were never realized.  Even today it is difficult to say exactly what the US hoped to accomplish, largely in my opinion because the underlying cause was emotional, a primal desire to respond to the attack on 9/11, to show ‘strength’ and ‘determination’.  Other reasons were given but this was the driving force.  

However, we can try to judge the war in light of three strategic goals that stand out, based on statements by US leaders and key war supporters:  1) end the threat to the US and the region from Iraq’s pursuit of WMD; 2) reduce the terrorist threat to the US, by ensuring that Iraq did not assist al-Qaida and other radical groups; and 3) create a democratic, flourishing Iraq to hem in Iran and be a catalyst for change in the Middle East.  Obviously the first goal was not attained, since Iraq had no serious WMD programs and was hemmed in by draconian international sanctions.  As for the other two, in most respects the invasion undermined their achievement.  And there were other serious strategic setbacks that were either ignored or not anticipated.  Today, 20 years later, we are still living with the consequences.  

Here is my own brief summary of what I see as the major strategic results, many of which are mentioned by Douthat.

Strengthened Iran.  For long-term US interests, perhaps no goal was more important than weakening Iran by putting a strong, pro-US democracy next door.  However, the opposite happened. The invasion removed Iran’s biggest threat in the region and gave Tehran immense leverage inside Iraq.  Iran was initially frightened at the US intervention, but the botched and lengthy reconstruction put US troops and civilians within range of Iranian proxies, in Iran’s backyard, where they were attractive targets. The violence and disorder of post-invasion Iraq helped discredit democracy and give Iran’s rulers an easy argument against liberalization and Westernization.  And the example of forceful regime change strengthened the perceived need to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent.  

Strengthened anti-US Islamic militants.  Just before the invasion, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman was asked what Osama bin-Ladin’s likely reaction would be.  Hoffman said “It’s his dream come true.”  The American attack confirmed all of al-Qaida’s warnings about US aggressive intentions in the region and US disdain for Islam and Arabs.  Abu Gharaib and US detention practices destroyed trust in the US throughout the Muslim world. 

Terrorists conduct high-profile attacks largely in hopes of producing a disproportionate response that will radicalize moderates and bring in new recruits.  The 9/11 attack achieved all this and more. 

The lengthy US presence in the heart of the Muslim world catalyzed a new generation of jihadists, more brutal and extreme than before:  first Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), then its follow-on, ISIS.  These new terrorist formations made large parts of Iraq deadly battlegrounds, incited sectarian civil war, sparked deadly attacks around the world, and eventually spread into Syria, Jordan, and beyond.  Today ISIS, despite US and Kurdish success at pushing it out of Mosul and other occupied territory, remains a dangerous presence not only in the Middle East but in Afghanistan and Africa.        

It is tragic and bitter that in fact Saddam had little contact with al-Qaida and no interest in helping Islamic militants, who were his mortal enemies.  The claims to the contrary within the US, used as a major rationale for the invasion, were largely manufactured by the Pentagon and other war supporters.   

Distracted US from Afghanistan.  At the time of the Iraq invasion, the US was of course already heavily engaged in Afghanistan.  After the extremely successful overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 there was at this point no serious resistance and the overall US presence was small.  Washington seems to have concluded that Afghanistan could safely be put on the back burner.  But US military and civilians in Afghanistan warned that a consistent and well-resourced effort was essential for stability and to prevent the growth of an insurgency—the Taliban were down but not out, retrenching across the border in Pakistan.  These warnings were largely ignored by policymakers determined to argue that invading Iraq would be cost-free.  As Iraq ramped up, resources and attention at the White House, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, shifted away from Afghanistan.

Largely as a result, in the years after the Iraq invasion the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated.  There is no way to prove that the tragic outcome in Afghanistan in 2021 would otherwise have been avoided.  But there is no doubt that there was a pattern of neglect during a critical period during which the Taliban re-emerged as a serious insurgent threat.  By the time Obama took office, the so-called “good war” in Afghanistan had become a crisis.  And unlike in Iraq, where a last-ditch “surge” of troops and resources in 2007-08 succeeded in averting a civil war, a similar effort in Afghanistan turned out to be too little, too late.  

Alienation of Moscow and Beijing.   We might forget that after 9/11, Russia and China were strong supporters of US counter-terrorist initiatives.  Putin gave his OK to a massive US logistic network for Afghanistan that went through Central Asian states seen historically as Russia’s sphere of influence.  Neither Moscow nor Beijing wanted al-Qaida to entrench itself in Afghanistan and were happy the US was taking the lead to rout it from the region.  

But Iraq changed this calculus.  It was seen as an act of US imperialism, not a necessary anti-terrorist step.  The stated rationales for US action were viewed as excuses to insert the US into the Middle East and gain control over oil resources.  The use of massive force in the name of regime change, done unilaterally and without UN approval, frightened Russia and China, who saw it as a proof-of-concept which might be directed at them or their allies.  In their eyes the US had become an unpredictable ‘rogue state.’ 

In both Moscow and Beijing it became easy to think that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. If the US superpower felt entitled to do what it wanted, where it wanted, why shouldn’t we?  There is a line from Iraq (and from Clinton’s intervention in the Balkans, and Obama’s in Libya) that runs towards Putin’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, towards China’s build-up in the South China Sea and threats to Japan and Taiwan.    

Further, as the US floundered, the initial fear turned into a kind of contempt.  The US, for all its power, didn’t seem to know what to do or how to achieve victory.  It was expending its energy and resources and credibility on a secondary target.  Its military was being harassed and beaten by ragged insurgents with no modern weapons.  The US was seen as both out of control, and a paper tiger.  It was not invincible.  Here again we see how Iraq reinforced hubris in Russia, China, and other US adversaries.  This conviction of US decline was reinforced by the 2008-09 financial crisis—which some economists attribute in large part to the war—and the growing political and social divisions inside the US that the war in Iraq helped stimulate.

Distracted US from Big Power Threats.  The flip side of greater focus on the US in Russia and China, was the loss of focus in the US.  Trillions of dollars that might have gone to strengthening US capabilities in Europe and Asia instead went down the drain in Iraq.  The time and attention of key leaders, perhaps the scarcest of strategic resources, went disproportionately to Iraq.  Obama tried desperately to “re-balance” towards China, but Iraq, ISIS, and the Taliban constantly pulled his administration away. 

Russia and China, of course, were ecstatic that the US was squandering its money and attention and reputation, leaving them a much freer hand.  They had no incentive to help a distracted US overcome its self-inflicted wounds.  According to a Western historian who specializes in studies of intelligence, “The strategy that China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), its principal civilian intelligence service, took toward the United States after 9/11 followed a Chinese saying, ge an guan huo, which roughly translates as ‘watch the fires burn from the safety of the opposite river bank, which allows you to avoid entering the battle until your enemy is exhausted’”.

Frayed and weakened US standing in the world.  The Iraq intervention was opposed by many major US allies, including key states in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, who warned the US that toppling Saddam would strengthen Iran.  Many thought it violated basic tenets of international law, the UN charter, and global norms against aggression and forcible change of governments.  Others saw it as poorly executed, likely to fail and bog down the United States and its supporters in a lengthy conflict with no clear endpoint.  Germany and France, joined by Russia, broke publicly and forcefully with the US over the decision to invade. 

The Bush administration’s post 9/11 strategic doctrine seemed designed to justify unilateral action against any state the US deemed a potential threat.  The US was seen as willing to go it alone, without regard for countervailing views, even from its friends.  As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The unwillingness today of many states in the developing world to join the US in helping Ukraine and condemning Russia is in part a result of this experience.  In many capitals US appeals to international law, norms of non-aggression, and violations of human rights, ring hollow.  The invasion badly damaged a key source of US strength in international affairs, our claim to act not just in our own national interest but in the interest of international order and universal principles.   

Image of US strength and competence.  Iraq dealt a terrible blow to the reputation of the American national security establishment. The intelligence community in particular has never recovered from its strong claims about Iraq’s WMD programs.  Rightly or wrongly, it is also blamed for misjudging the strength of the resistance.  The US military, despite heroic efforts and sacrifices, made fundamental errors in failing to anticipate the kind of conflict it was waging, being consistently behind the curve in adapting to changes in the war, and moving slowly to train and equip Iraqi forces to take its place.  

At the top, the war was pushed and designed by leaders thought to represent the very acme of national security insight:  two-time Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice-President (and former Secretary of Defense) Cheney, Secretary of State (and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, and a host of other luminaries.  But rather than engaging in an honest evaluation of the risks, or putting together a campaign plan that reflected the views and experience of military professionals, this new incarnation of the Best and Brightest indulged its fears and followed its own private agendas.  In key areas they actively and deliberately misled their own government and the American public by cavalierly downplaying the costs and exaggerating the threat.  Glib analogies were made to successful US efforts at rebuilding Japan and Germany after World War II. 

Many experts advised that the US intervention force should be much larger and should anticipate the need to administer a collapsed state for a considerable time.  This advice was treated with contempt, especially by Rumsfeld, who was obsessed with showing the world that the military could win with a small, precise force able to get in and get out fast.

War proponents were opposed to ‘nation-building’ and refused to plan for it.  Neither military or civilian agencies possessed the language and cultural skills needed to cope with a broken society, especially when American administrators decided early on to disband the Iraqi Army and fire most Ba’ath Party members.  These decisions created a large, alienated, and furious opposition that morphed quickly into armed resistance.

Undermining domestic trust.  When the intervention quickly resulted in a growing insurgency and a failed state, an angry population, no WMD, and huge expenditures with no end in sight, public support understandably faded.  Abu-Gharaib raised questions about military discipline and our ability to conduct a messy low-level conflict while adhering to acceptable standards of human rights.  The elected leaders who had championed the war were discredited.  The cynicism and distrust that had taken root with Vietnam deepened. 

George Bush was re-elected in 2004 before the full picture had come into focus.  The partial success of the so-called ‘surge’ in 2007 salvaged some of his reputation, but he left office with many historians judging him among the worst Presidents in American history. (Luckily for Bush, the advent of Donald Trump has allowed him to appear decent and competent by comparison). The Republican Party, once a reliable supporter of US strength in the service of international order, is now split with an ascendant wing, led by Donald Trump—who campaigned by attacking the war and its supporters—highly critical of US engagement and alliances.    

Unlike Vietnam, public anger did not spill over into broad attacks on the military.  Americans generally supported ‘the troops’, if not their leaders.  The military was therefore not broken by Iraq in the way it was in Vietnam, but still endured huge costs in deaths, injuries, trauma, and morale as soldiers cycled through multiple tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.    

Ongoing Impact on Foreign Policy.  Iraq continues to affect US willingness to engage in the Middle East and around the world.  No American decisionmaker wants to repeat Iraq by committing US forces in a ‘war of choice,’ and there is particular reluctance to intervene in the Middle East.  This reluctance is one reason Russia has been able to become a major player in Syria and the region. 

Major parts of the American public, on both left and right, are now instinctively suspicious of American national security elites.  They do not accept their claims to understand US interests or how to advance them overseas.  

Is Ukraine a Possible Turning Point?  Douthat suggests that US actions in support of Ukraine could repair some of the damage.  US intelligence was praised for its accurate advance knowledge of Russian plans and for revealing them to the world (though in some quarters these claims were quickly dismissed, because of the intelligence failure in Iraq). Unlike Iraq, Ukraine vs. Russia is seen by most Americans and our major allies as a ‘good war’ with clear objectives in defense of a worthy ally.  So far US support has been effective in enabling Ukraine to stand up to Russia.  NATO is back in business, led by the US; the countries most alienated by Iraq, France and Germany, are on board though questions remain about their willingness to stay the course.   

So, when I add it all up, I think Mr. Douthat has a point. In any case, when you can seriously argue whether something is ‘even worse’ than Vietnam, that’s pretty bad.

Thoughts on Hand-Off

It is with all this in mind that I recently read chunks of a new book, Hand-Off:  The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama, a compilation edited by former Bush National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.  It consists of declassified transition memos written by Bush administration national security officials in 2008-09, designed to help the incoming Obama administration.  In each case a post-script has been added to analyze how well the original memo stands up. 

(Full disclosure:  I was on the National Security Council staff at this time and made comments on the Iraq memo, though I was not the principal author). 

Iraq.  Unsurprisingly, the memo on Iraq, written by Brett McGurk, does not dwell on the decision to invade or the difficult first years of occupation. It focuses on the positive results of the 2007 ‘surge’ and the prospects for improving stability, withdrawing US troops, and negotiating new agreements with the Iraq government.  

What about the retrospective commentary, written by Meghan O’Sullivan (Senior Director at the National Security Council for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004-07)? Here there are some questionable ideas.  

The underlying narrative is that Bush handed Obama an Iraq on the path to success, and Obama blew it. O’Sullivan gives Obama credit for at first continuing Bush policies, but ultimately faults him for withdrawing US troops in 2011. This resulted from Iraq Prime Minister Maliki’s refusal to accede to the US demand that US troops be given immunity from Iraqi law, seen by Iraqis as an unacceptable infringement on their sovereignty. The essay, moreover, fails to point out that one reason Obama was not enthusiastic about keeping troops in Iraq is that at this same time he was greatly expanding US forces in Afghanistan to deal with deteriorating security, caused in large part by the Bush administration’s Iraq focus.

Obama is also blamed for ‘allowing’ Maliki to remain in office after controversial Iraqi elections in 2010.  However, it is not clear how the US would have determined the outcome without being accused of unacceptable interference in Iraq’s internal affairs.  America was of course suspected of pulling the strings on all Iraqi political decisions, and had to bend over backwards to try and show that Iraqis were genuinely independent.

It is fair to say that Maliki was persuaded to let the US ‘surge’ succeed 2007-08 only because Bush spent a huge amount of time and energy personally managing him. This was something that Obama and his team, focused on a global economic crisis and Afghanistan, were unwilling to do.  Left to his own devices, Maliki—a stubborn Shia sectarian—quickly indulged his suspicions and reneged on commitments to anti-terrorist Sunni allies who had worked closely with the US.  This contributed to the rise of ISIS and the eventual need to return some US forces to Iraq in 2014.

O’Sullivan asserts in defense of the original decision to invade that “From President Bush’s perspective, the military invasion of Iraq in March 2003 came only after all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and where the alternative was to let Saddam Hussein defy the international community, the United Nations, and the United States without consequences—and to allow Saddam to continue to threaten the United States and the region.”  This ignores the reality that from the end of the First Gulf War in 1991 until 2003 Iraq was subject to withering economic sanctions (blamed for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths from malnutrition and lack of medicines) and intense UN inspections to prevent the development of WMD and long-range missiles.  Extensive no-fly zones in the north and south prevented Iraqi forces from threatening the Kurds and major Shia cities.  Much of the damage done by US air attacks in 1991 was never repaired, and the country’s oil sector and basic infrastructure was close to collapse.  In short, the regime was under tremendous stress, and there was no prospect of Saddam being able to credibly threaten his neighbors, much less the US. 

O’Sullivan is further off-base in describing the post-invasion chaos.  She says “An unanticipated collapse of order and Iraqi institutions prevented the United States from being able to transition sovereignty to Iraqi political leaders, as had been done in Afghanistan.”  Far from unanticipated, a host of experts on Iraq and post-authoritarian transitions—including US intelligence analysts—warned about these exact consequences.  They also warned, accurately, that the Iraqi leaders that some in the US counted on to take charge, notably the notorious Ahmad Chalabi, were unreliable exiles with little support inside Iraq.

The discussion of “Lessons Learned” is a mixed bag.  There is acknowledgement that post-conflict stability and reconstruction are difficult tasks and that “significant efforts to rebuild countries should only be undertaken when truly vital US interests are at stake.”  Likewise with democratization:  “No society is incapable of democracy.  But the various layers of institutions, norms, and practices required for a sustainable democracy take considerable time to construct and remain perilously fragile long after they are initially established.”  

It is not explained, however, why these fairly obvious realities were not taken into account from the start.  In large part, I would argue, this is because pro-war advocates deliberately stoked fear while glossing over costs and difficulties that might have slowed the drive for war.  And President Bush had a strong personal conviction about the desire of all peoples for freedom that made him prone to optimism about democratization.                                   

O’Sullivan draws a more useful lesson that US foreign policy is “overmilitarized” and that civilian capabilities need to be better funded and integrated into military planning.  This is something the US should keep in mind as we supply Ukraine with weapons.  Ukraine’s ability to resist and become a stable democracy depend on strengthening its government institutions, civil society, and economy.  

Other Costs.  Does Hand-Off acknowledge the many other costs of the war such as the strains in our alliances, deterioration of relations with Russia and China, and distraction from Afghanistan?  Only in passing, judging from the essays on Afghanistan, Russia, China and Europe.

The Afghanistan discussion admits in several places that Iraq distracted policymakers and constrained US actions, though it is not clear how central this was to the deterioration of security.  While the section on “Lessons Learned” is well-done, it would have been useful to include an explicit recognition that it is irresponsible to take on two complex counter-insurgency/nation-building challenges at once.   

The Russia essay points to the many reasons that Russia in the post-Iraq period became increasingly aggressive and hostile to the West, culminating in its 2008 invasion of Georgia, 2014 annexation of Crimea, and 2015 intervention in Syria.  The role of Iraq is acknowledged but not discussed in any depth.  The tectonic shift is there only in the background:  “While the President’s strategy of personal diplomacy met with early success, disagreements with Putin following the Iraq War made this strategy more difficult.  Emboldened by rising oil prices and Russia’s rapidly growing economy, Putin quickly aligned himself with French and German leaders to oppose US “unilateralism” and establish a “multi-polar” world.” 

The memo on Europe admits that “The invasion…initially divided the United States from key European allies, especially France and Germany, and inflamed European publics.”  It says that cooperation on the Bush “Freedom Agenda” in Europe was ‘complicated’ by these disagreements, which were however supposedly largely overcome in the second Bush term.  By this time, however, the Iraq War had helped harden Putin’s opposition to NATO expansion.     Obama was received ecstatically by Europeans in 2009 largely because of his opposition to the war.

The analysis of China points out that, like Russia, China’s leaders initially saw terrorism cooperation after 9/11 as a potential turning point in relations: “President Jiang Zemin…told his advisors that the common fight against terrorism could cement his relations with President Bush in the same way that Deng Xiaoping’s common cause with his US counterparts against the Soviet Union improved relations in the 1980s.”  As with Russia, this honeymoon was short-lived as leaders concluded that the Iraq invasion showed the US ‘war on terror’ was a cloak for the expansion of US power.  China’s decisive turn against the US under Xi has many causes, but the Iraq War is certainly one that should have been discussed more extensively.

The Core Lesson.  So what is the real lesson here? Ultimately Hand-Off fails to come to grips with what I think is most important, the fatal mistake of making decisions based on fear and anger. These emotions can be valuable catalysts to action, but they distort one’s ability to calculate risks and costs.  After 9/11 American leaders wanted desperately to ‘do something’, and did not see the relatively quick and easy ouster of the Taliban as sufficient.  This was not enough to properly demonstrate America’s righteous anger.  For many Americans, it was hard to accept that the US could be hurt by a rag-tag group of militants half-way around the world.  Someone more powerful must be to blame, some major state actor, and Iraq filled the bill.

Fear and anger overlapped with the over-confidence that had built up in large parts of the American foreign policy community since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  That the United States was now the ‘indispensable nation’, that it stood alone as the arbiter of international order, that American-style democracy and free markets were the inevitable wave of the future; these and similar ideas had become deeply ingrained.  No other nation came close to matching US military capabilities.  Neoconservatives on the right, and neoliberals on the left, largely agreed that America had the power to do whatever it wanted without serious consequences.       

When fear and anger take center stage, there are always players in the wings ready to take advantage.  ‘Never let a crisis go to waste’ was the unspoken motto of neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz— and paleocons like Dick Cheney—who had long wanted to oust Saddam as a way to remake the Middle East and demonstrate US power.  The 9/11 attacks were seized upon as the opportunity to market an agenda that had little to do with fighting terrorism.  This was done by relentlessly appealing to our fears.  George Bush, inexperienced in foreign policy, scared of what might come next, in need of a coherent strategy, was easy prey.

These reinforcing factors combined to warp all the major actors: the White House, intelligence agencies, the military, Congress, the press, and the public.  All moved in the same direction, towards interpreting Saddam as the key threat that must be destroyed, towards overestimating American knowledge and power, and towards underestimating the risks and costs, until we had collectively lost touch with reality. 

Useful analysis:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-invasion-of-iraq-20-years-later-intelligence-matters/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/how-donald-rumsfeld-deserves-be-remembered/619334/