Twenty years ago, war was launched in Iraq to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which according to UN investigators did not exist. A few weeks later, the Iraqi army was defeated, and Saddam and his acolytes fled the country and went into hiding, which could have put a swift end to the war. A number of mistakes made by the United States however led to the rise of a powerful insurrection, amplified by Sunni religious fanatics who had come to Iraq to die fighting the jihad, but also by Shiite militias armed and trained by Iran. The latter wanted to keep the Americans busy, because it feared Iran would be next on their list, once Afghanistan and Iraq would fall, all the more so as president George W. Bush had included Teheran in the so-called “axis of evil”.
At the end of 2011 the Americans pulled out of Iraq. Inter-community tension started to build up in their wake, and a new threat rose to prominence: the Islamic State, which at one point had occupied western and northern Iraq, expanding as far as the outskirts of Baghdad. Washington was thus forced to get involved again in the Iraq War and to form a new coalition that would help Islamic militias fight back the Islamic State.
At the start of the conflict, the neo-Conservatives that dominated the Bush administration thought the United States would succeed in imposing a liberal democracy in Iraq and turn this country into a close ally of the USA and a model for the rest of the Middle East. Iraqi democracy is weak today, and the country has closer allies with Iran than the United States.
The disinformation narratives that justified the war: weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s connections to Al-Qaeda
The war had barely started when the Iraqi army launched a missile on Kuwait. Air raid sirens blared across the city. Everyone at the coalition forces media center where I had been stationed was directed to head to the hotel’s bomb shelters. Once there, most of us put on the gas masks. I had seen countless journalists carrying them around the city in green cloth bags slung carelessly on their shoulders. Never had it crossed my mind I should buy one too. As I stood in that shelter, all I could think about was how stupid it would be to die there simply because I hadn’t taken the Americans’ warnings seriously.
The missile – and many that followed – missed the city, and its load had at any rate been conventional. No missile ever launched by Iraq during the war had chemical or biological payloads. The Americans would search high and low without ever finding any WMD in Iraq.
The existence of an Iraqi arsenal of chemical or biological weapons was the first lie that justified the launch of the war. The second was that Iraq allegedly was tied to Al-Qaeda and could have provided this terrorist cell with weapons of mass destruction.
There was a grain of truth to the first lie: Saddam had indeed owned both chemical and biological weapons. The Iraqi army had massacred thousands of Kurds in a chemical attack on the town of Halabja, in March 1988. There had also been reports about Iraq testing its biological arsenal on Iranian PoWs, also in the 1980s.
By 2003, Iraq no longer had any chemical or biological weapons left in its silos – it had destroyed the last of them in the 90s, hoping this would therefore lift the harsh embargo that had left its economy in shambles. UN investigators had corroborated the elimination of Iraq’s WMD arsenal, and the evidence the Americans had produced, suggesting they still existed, was too remote, that even the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was visibly embarrassed when he presented it before the Security Council. It was later discovered that the Americans’ main source was an Iraqi politician, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been living in exile for dozens of years. Chalabi had simply lied to the Americans, and a year later, when Baghdad fell and he returned home, Chalabi would become hostile to the USA.
The Al-Qaeda story has some truth in it as well: Osama bin Laden himself had said in the 1990s that he wanted to get his hands on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. An Al-Qaeda military camp in Afghanistan had tested chemical weapons on dogs. In fact, Al-Qaeda terrorists had proved with the 9/11 attacks, when they turned four planes into weapons of mass destruction, that there were limits to what they were capable of, and that they were ready to launch attacks that would kill thousands, if not tens of thousands of civilians.
Al-Qaeda was however ideologically at odds with Saddam Hussein’s regime and regarded the Iraqi leader as its enemy. In fact, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the invasion risked spilling to Saudi Arabia, the leader of the terrorist organization, Osama bin Laden, offered to dispatch his so-called “Arab Afghans”, who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan alongside the Mujahedeen, to square up to the Iraqi army. The Baath Party had gone to great lengths to secularize Iraq by 1991, and much like other such regimes in the Muslim world, it was extremely hostile to Islamists. In search of new sources to legitimize his rule, Saddam had started focusing on Islam, but the fact that he had written “Allahu ‘akbar” on the national flag, had introduced a ban on public consumption of alcohol and had commissioned a copy of the Quran using his own blood as ink did not fool anyone, least of all Bin Laden’s band of extremists. An alliance between Iraq and Al-Qaeda was thus highly unlikely, and the “evidence” supporting this claim was even scarcer than that pointing to the existence of an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
The biggest mistakes of the war: from disbanding the Iraqi military to the American withdrawal of 2011
On May 16, 2003, Paul Bremer, the US diplomat put in charge of Iraq pending the setup of a national government, signed his first order, whereby all members of the Baath Party were removed from the administration. A week later, Bremer’s second order disbanded the secret services and the army. These were the first big mistakes in this war, which even some Americans find it hard to understand. For instance, Paul Bremer’s predecessor, Jay Garner, had wanted to keep the Iraqi army, and the head of the CIA station in Baghdad tried to talk Bremer into changing his mind.
Hundreds of thousands of people who had previously ruled Iraq and ensured its security, found themselves without a job. It is hard to estimate today, twenty years after the fact, the extent to which Baathists or the army would have collaborated with the new regime in Baghdad. What is clear, however, is that they became hostile to the new system, and many decided to join the resistance.
American support for Iraqi politicians in exile was another capital mistake. Some of these politicians, such as Ahmed Chalabi, were despised by the near bulk of Iraqi society. The representatives of Shiite parties and religious militias had close ties to Iran, which to this day uses them to exert its influence. They were distrusted by the Iraqi Sunnis, whom in turn they regarded with disdain. The Shiite religious parties and their militias would over the coming years infiltrate state institutions (particularly the Interior Ministry) and get involved in the Iraqi civil war (2006-2008), contributing to the marginalization and persecution of Sunni communities, particularly in the wake of the Americans’ withdrawal. The catastrophic effects of the policies and actions undertaken by Shiite parties and militias became transparent in 2014, when the entire Sunni region of Iraq was captured by the Islamic State. The jihadis had ten times less the manpower of Iraqi security forces, which besides were equipped with superior weapons. Still, the Iraqi army, made up predominantly of Shiites and seen as an occupation force by the Sunni population, was swiftly defeated by the Islamic State.
The final grave mistake committed by the Americans in Iraq was to withdraw in 2011. The move made sense – in theory: violence had deescalated substantially, the jihadis had suffered heavy losses, including a number of their leaders, and no longer posed such big a threat. The Iraqi democracy had gone through a few rounds of elections and showed signs of transitioning to a working system. Moreover, the American army had significantly cut back on its operations, which had been taken over by Iraqi security forces. The presence of American troops however ensured balance – they could always intervene if the Iraqi forces were overrun, and kept officials on their toes.
As soon as the Americans were gone, an arrest warrant was issued for the Sunni vice-president of Iraq, Tariq al-Hashimi. This was the turning point that marked the start of Nuri al-Maliki’s campaign against the Sunnis. The more they were alienated, the stronger the jihadis grew. Without fear of an American swift retaliation, the Islamic State of Iraq launched a series of attacks on Iraqi prisons, freeing hundreds of combatants who joined their ranks. At the same time, the Islamic State of Iraq also launched military operations in Syria, where the civil war had broken out. The situation in Iraq was on the point of becoming far worse than it had ever been since the war had started on March 20, 2003.
Iraq, twenty years since the war started: a half-failed state under Iran’s influence
The elimination of Iraq’s arsenal of WMDs was the main reason for starting the Iraq War, although there had been many others of a personal and ideological nature. A few months before, George W. Bush had said that Saddam Hussein “is the guy who tried to kill my dad”, referring to an older Iraqi plot to assassinate president George H.W. Bush in Kuwait. In political terms, as early as 1998 the US Congress had adopted the Iraq Liberation Act, whereby it declared that it should be the policy of the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power. Finally, the neo-Conservatives had a strong say in the decision-making process – they believed Iraq could become a liberal democracy and thus a friend of the United States.
Twenty years since the invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is a fledgling democracy. The country has gone through a number of election cycles, has changed successive parliaments and governments, and the system created after Saddam Hussein’s demise to represent the great communities of Iraq – the Shiite Prime Minister, the Sunni Parliament Speaker and the Kurdish president – works. There is also relative freedom of speech and of press, and the tyrant personality cult died with the destruction of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.
Yet Iraq is still far from becoming a liberal democracy. Saddam Hussein’s cult of the leader was replaced with worshiping older religious figures, such as Imam Hussein, or closer to modern days, such as the great Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or members of the Sadr family. You can speak out in Iraq today, but it can get you killed, which is exactly what happened to countless activists, protesters, dissidents or journalists. Iraq ranked 172 out of 180 countries listed in the Reporters without Borders Press Freedom Index for 2022, after ranking 163 the previous year. In the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Iraq ranks 124 out of 167 countries and was classified authoritarian.
Iraq is also the most corrupt country in the Middle East. In the 15 years alone since Saddam Hussein was ousted, some $320 billion was embezzled in Iraq, while according to some estimates this huge figure might be underestimated, total funds lost to graft actually standing at $500 billion. Despite the hearty revenues brought in by oil, Iraq is struggling with an economic crisis. Unemployed is through the roof and young people have no perspective for a better future. Public services are subpar whereas Infrastructure is neglected, old and overwhelmed. Starting 2015, Iraq has seen waves of protests demanding a political change, and when the anti-government movement grew too strong, the Shiite militias intervened in force, killing hundreds of protesters. These militias, trained and funded by Iran, are one of the top political forces of Iraq, disputing power with another Shiite group created around a religious figure, the populist Muqtada al-Sadr.
As regards relations with the United States, this is certainly not the friendly relationship the neo-Conservatives had hoped for twenty years ago. Relations are good at government level, because Baghdad eventually realized it needed the Americans to ensure the stability of the country. On the other hand, pro-Iranian militias have resumed attacks on American positions shortly after the defeat of the Islamic State, which actually contributed to Washington’s decision to take out the commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard., General Qasem Soleimani with a tactical airstrike. An influential commander of pro-Iranian militias, Abu Mahdi al-Muhendis, was also killed, his death causing public outrage, including in Parliament, which called for the USA’s immediate military withdrawal. Iran felt so powerful that it bombed American bases in Iraq, something which would have been unthinkable in 2003, when Teheran feared it could be next on America’s list.
The United States again announced their withdrawal from Iraq, at the end of 2021, giving in to the pressure of Shiite parties and their affiliated militias. This was not however a complete withdrawal: some 2,000 servicemen were kept in a number of bases. They are not taking part in operations (at least not officially), but they stand by, ready to respond in case of a major security crisis. After all, the threat of the Islamic State and other jihadist organizations is still there, and the extremists still impact life in Iraq, although their actions have been less frequent and publicized. And this is not the end of Iraq’s problems. Reconciliation with Sunni communities, which is all everyone has been talking about these twenty years, is still in the making. The Kurdish question remains unsolved for the time being. Although Masoud Barzani is out of the picture after his plans to capture Kirkuk and secure Kurdish independence failed, that doesn’t mean the Kurds won’t try to create their own state one day, as soon as they have the strength or the opportunity presents itself.
Forty grim years: most Iraqis have seen a lifetime of war
When the coalition forces first attacked on March 20, 2003, the Iraqi people had already been through twenty years of bloodshed. First, the violent war with Iran in the 80s, which had killed hundreds of thousands on each side. Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the Gulf War broke out, when the Iraqi army was defeated in a matter of weeks after sustained heavy losses. Saddam then picked up arms to quell the Shiite insurrections in the south. The 90s were marked by shortages and impoverishment due to the severe embargo imposed on Iraq in an attempt to force this country to relinquish its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Iraq has a young population, which means the vast majority of Iraqis were born and have lived through troubled times – wars, embargos, more wars and social unrest. The few that do remember the good old times, the times of peace, fast-paced economic development and prosperity owing to oil, make up an aging minority today. Not even the youngest Iraqis who’ve seen better days could say they may live to see them return, considering everything that’s happening today.
