Except in a few neoconservative hideouts, the Iraq war is generally regarded as a mistake.
The war has cost over $800 billion so far, with more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers killed and around 32,000 wounded. Hard to argue that the United States has acquired security gains commensurate with that sacrifice.
So, why was the Iraq war a mistake and what lessons should be learned from it? The 10th anniversary of the initial invasion has occasioned considerable discussion of those questions. But most of the discussion is wide of the most important lesson to be learned.
The Iraq war was a mistake not because the Bush administration lied about the intelligence or because the press wasn’t skeptical enough about the claims being made about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq war wasn’t a mistake because there was inadequate planning for postwar reconstruction or insufficient military commitment and engagement by the U.S. after Saddam fell.
Certainly, it is fair to say that every important assumption the Bush administration made about the Iraq war turned out to be inaccurate.
Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction or an active program to produce them. The Bush administration assumed that it could just lop off the Baath leadership in Iraq and the civil government and society would continue to operate reasonably well. Instead chaos ensued and order and sound governance are still highly tenuous. Oil revenues haven’t paid for but a fraction of the cost of reconstruction, which remains patchy at best.
But here is the most important thing the Bush administration got wrong. The Bush administration claimed that, postwar, Iraq would become a shining example of democratic capitalism, serving to transform the region and be a U.S. ally helping to check the influence of Iran.
According to Transparency International, Iraq is the eighth most corrupt country in the world in which to do business. Its government remains largely paralyzed from sectarian and ethnic conflict. And it has no interest in being America’s front line against Iran. In fact, it wants friendly relations with Iran.
After Saddam’s minority Sunni dominance was wiped away, political power naturally flowed to the majority Shia. And the Shia naturally want cordial relations and an alliance with their co-religionists in Iran, given the hostile Sunni neighborhood in which they reside.
What’s important is that, while this in retrospect seems foreseeable, it was not foreseen. The Bush administration didn’t anticipate it. It wasn’t a major point made by critics of the decision to go to war.
The major lesson of the Iraq war is this: The United States cannot foresee the consequences of our actions with sufficient accuracy to be attempting to micromanage the geopolitics of the Middle East.
This is not a deficiency peculiar to the Bush administration or Republicans. President Barack Obama’s Muslim charm offensive was a dud. The Arab Spring caught his administration off guard and flat-footed.
Nor is it recent. President Clinton pushed prematurely for an Israeli-Palestinian comprehensive peace agreement and helped trigger the Second Intifada. George W. Bush told Palestinians they had to elect new leadership, so they choose Hamas.
Sometimes the time fuse on our unintended consequences is long. In 1953, the U.S. helped depose a democratically elected government in Iran and install an autocrat, the Shah, to run the country. That meant that, when the Shah was deposed in 1979, the revolution was reflexively anti-American. And now the anti-American ruling elite that took over wants a nuke.
The United States favored Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, then went to war against him twice.
It’s often said that the United States has no option but to be deeply engaged in the region’s geopolitics. Certainly that’s where the international terrorism that threatens us emanates. But effective counterterrorism can be selective and targeted. And Middle East oil, the other rationale usually cited, is far more important to Europe than the United States, particularly if we more aggressively developed domestic sources.
The larger U.S. role in attempting to micromanage the region’s geopolitics only even arguably makes sense if we can confidently intervene in ways that are productive rather than destructive. There’s a 60-year history that says we can’t, Iraq being just the most costly example.
