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| "Shock and Awe" - Baghdad March 20, 2023 |
To begin, there is no question that Saddam Husayn was one of the world's most notorious war criminals and guilty of massive human rights abuses. It is estimated that Saddam killed 3 million Iraqis during his rule between 1968 and 2003. This is equal to 15% of Iraq's population, and doesn't take account of all the Iraqis killed due to Saddam's invasion of Iran in September 1980 and seizure of Kuwait in August 1990 which killed thousands of Iraqi troops and innocent civilians.
The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was an illegal operation. The United Nations dod not authorize the attack. The time in which to remove Saddam from power was in March 1991 when a majority of the Iraqi population rise up against Saddam.
The uprising (Intifada) in the Kurdish north and the Arab south at the time would have deposed Saddam had not the United States intervened to allow Iraqi helicopter gunships to take to the air and suppress the Intifada. Had Saddam's regime been toppled, while United States were in Iraq, would have prevented the brutal United Nations sanctions of 1991-2003. The sanctions destroyed the Iraqi education system and the professional middle classes. In short, the first mistake made by Bush the Elder was not to end Saddam's regime in 1991.
The 2003 invasion was based on a lie. The CIA and Bush administration knew that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Unfortunately, Saddam refused to admit Iraq had no WMD because he was afraid if he did Iran would consider Iraq as weak and be encouraged to invade and overthrow his regime.
The US occupation was initially directed by General Jay Garner, someone who had some knowledge of Iraq and the Arab world. However, he was considered to "pro-Arab" and soon repealed by an arrogant official, Paul Bremer, who had no experience in the Arab world and was ignorant to navigate complex situation of a country which had suffered 2 major wars and the mist severe sanctions regime ever imposed on a nation-state in the modern era.
Bremer who was appointed to head the new Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in 2003. As CPA Administrator, his first decisions began a long list of destructive policies. The dissolution of Iraq's 400,000 man strong conscript army (separate from Saddam's Republican Guards or Special Republican Guards) included large number of soldiers who were battle trained, having fought in the 8 year Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and Gulf War (1991), created the basis for the insurgency which Saddam had planned if US forces were successful in deposing him.
Now that large numbers of soldiers were unemployed, even if they received salaries for a period after having been released from military service, were available for mobilization against US forces. According to a study of the impact of the army's dissolution, the firing of 400,000 troops had a negative impact on an estimated 10 million Iraqis, taking into account the families which these soldiers salaries had supported.
By the fall of 2003, an insurgency was underway, even if Bush's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, continued to deny its existence. Not only did the insurgency include ex-Ba'thists but also former conscript army members who were paid to fight and kill American troops. Ominously, it also began to attract radical Islamists and members of al-Qa'ida who saw in Iraq an opportunity to take up arms against the United States.
The second consequential decision Bremer took was to fire all members of Iraq's Ba'th Party, not taking into account those who were forced to join to maintain their government employment (when included a large segment of the Iraqi population). This decision deprived Iraq of large numbers of critically needed professionals for the reconstruction of Iraq, whose economy and infrastructure had been destroyed in two wars of bombing of Iraq and the United Nations sanctions regime.
Beyond the CPA's forst 2 decisions, other problematic decision were being made in Washington, DC, primarily by Vice President Dick Cheney and members of the Defense Department, especially Assistant Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz and his assistant, Under Secretary of Policy Planning, Douglass Feith.
The Bush administration's cooperation with Iraqi exiles who had maintained close ties to the so-called Islamic Republic of Iran was. mind boggling. Had not George w Bush included the Tehran regime as one of three countries who comprised the "Axis of Evil" (the other 2 being Saddam's Iraq and North Korea). Why then would the United States invite someone like Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) to visit Paul Wolfowitz in Washington and become a post-2003 power broker in Iraq?
The Bush administration's policies also laid the foundation for the extensive corruption which plagues Iraq today. Because there was no banking system in 2003, cash in US dollars was flown into Iraq and distributed in large bundles to finance reconstruction projects. Under these circumstances, huge amount of funds disappeared. When the amount estimated about $16-18 billion could not be accounted for, George Bush finally agreed to appoint a Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGAR).
His choice for the position was a friend, Stuart Bowen, who he had know for years. Little did he know that Bowen woulds take his job very seriously. To Bush's chagrin, Bowen discovered massive corruption in both the awarding of contracts for reconstruction projects and further lost funds for many projects once completed.
Bowen also discovered that many projects were never in Iraq's interests but were intended instead to maximize the profits of American corporations such as Halliburton which they realized. Others were never completed. Key projects, such as repairing and expanding Iraq's decrepit electric grid, were avoided. Instead, projects such as a hospital with expensive medical equipment which was difficult to maintain and service which, in any event, was never completed. In short, the bold statements about rebuilding Iraq after the 2003 invasion bore little fruition.
Paul Bremer also contributed to undermining confidence in democracy in Iraq - one of the purported goal of the toppling of Saddam - by trying to fix the outcome of the first elections held in post-Saddam Iraq in January 2005. When Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani learned of Bremer's efforts, he intervened to prevent his machinations. Throughout Bremer'd tenure as CPA Administrator, al-Sistani refused to meet with him.
One of the Bush administration's last but more egregious decisions was to appoint the arch-sectarian Nuri al-Maliki as Iraqi prime minister in 2006. This decision would lead to al-Maliki's alienation of Iraq's Sunni Arab population which set the stage for the seizure of Mosul and much of North Central Iraqi in June 2014.
Ironically, the most effective American policy in Iraq was not initiated by the Pentagon but by middle rank officers in the field. What came to be known as the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) was based on a simple idea. Whenever there was an uptick in violence in an Iraqi town or urban quarter, middle range officers would take money in safes on their bases which had been confiscated from Ba'thists attempting to flee the country in 2003 and use it to put local residents to work in the areas experiencing conflict.
One US Army captain told me that he avoided using small bulldozers and employed shovels instead so that he could give the maximum number of men jobs sand a salary. Work included repairing sewer and water lines, refurbishing schools, building simple sports centers, and cleaning up the neighborhood.
The United States should have used Saddam's massive human rights abuses to mobilize an international coalition under United Nations auspices to remove Saddam from power and bring to trial in an international court. However, to single out Saddam would have laid the Bush administration open to the question of why other dictators the US supported were also not removed from power.
Ultimately, the removal of Saddam was not about establishing a true democracy in Iraq. It seemed instead to be mostly concerneed with intimidating neighboring Iran and Syria, and giving US energy corporations access to high quality Iraq oil. If there were the true reason for the invasion, they both present one of the worst failures of US foreign policy in modern American history.
