What was achieved in Iraq?

At best it was started because of extremely bad intelligence and at worst on the back of a big fat and cynical lie. Now, seven and a half years later, as American combat troops are claimed to be returning home, the question remains: what was actually achieved by the war in Iraq, which cost more than 100 000 lives – mostly civilian – and at least some $751 billion?

The other question that goes hand in hand with the first is: what now? Have the chances for peace and stability in the region improved and left the US and its allies in neighbouring Afghanistan and the broader region in a strategically better position than before?

With his announcement about the “withdrawal” of American troops on 31 August President Barack Obama seems to have delivered on one of his election promises – well, at least sort of. But that would seem to be one of the very few promises concerning the war in Iraq that comes close to some sort of realisation.

How difficult it is to make a true assessment of the adventure that was/is Iraq is illustrated by the fact that one immediately has to add some qualifications to the intro-paragraph of this article:

• An article in The Washington Post of 5 September this year puts the total cost as at least $3 trillion;
• The war in Iraq is far from over and it is highly unlikely that the 50 000 troops that  are, for now, staying behind in an “advise and assist” role will not get involved in direct combat at all. In fact there have already been reports that some of them, especially the 4 500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations; and
• Iraqi army chief staff General Babaker Zebari told the AFP news agency that his country’s forces would require US support for another decade while US officials are also planning to employ thousands of private contractors to take up security duties formerly performed by troops.

When then US president George W Bush in March 2003 announced that American troops were invading Iraq the rationale for him and his only partner in this adventure, Tony Blair of Britain, was that Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein was associated with the 9/11 attacks on the US and planning further attacks with long-range weapons of mass destruction. It has since turned out that this was, at best, an intelligence debacle with no evidence ever presented that such ability ever existed in Iraq.

It all of course started well before Bush’s formal 2003 declaration of war against Iraq when then president Bill Clinton in 1998 launched Operation Desert Fox, which saw a three-day extensive bombing of that country’s military and civilian infrastructure to punish Hussein for refusing to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors.

At the time it was claimed that the operation had “successfully degraded Iraq’s ability to manufacture and use weapons of mass destruction.” There was never evidence that such an ability, if it ever existed, had recovered by the time that the invasion in 2003 started.

Under the circumstances countries like Germany, France, Russia and Japan resisted being drawn in and stayed well clear of the war . They just did not believe the claims about weapons of mass destruction.

What is true, however, is that the 1998 attack and the sanctions by the West turned the Iraq economy into one of siege which destroyed its middle class and turned Hussein into the world’s sixth richest ruler. He developed into the world’s worst, most cruel dictator towards the end of the 20th century.

But there were also regular plots within the country against his person and many analysts claim that while western actions had shored him up, an eventual coup was on the cards. Then Bush and Blair struck with the aim of arresting Hussein and delivering him to an international justice system and to establishing a stable prospering democratic Iraq with freedom and security for all.

Only two days after President Obama made his announcement from the Oval Office, former US Secretary of State at the time of going to war in Iraq, Colin  Powell, said in an interview with Japan’s Mainichi Daily News that he believes the Iraq war could have been averted and that he regretted the false intelligence that led to the claim that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction which underpinned the invasion. “It was the intelligence that was wrong.  I did not make up this information … It was information that our intelligence community stood behind.”

The scorecard

There is no arguing that the invasion has delivered on the first objective of removing Saddam Hussein from power and subjecting him to international justice proceedings.

Even based on superficial analysis the results on the second leg of the stated aim are at best pretty much mixed. Indeed the people of Iraq can vote but large-scale corruption and intimidation accompany elections. Political parties are so fragmented in that deeply divided society that months after its latest election there is still no viable governing coalition in place.

And that is just about where the positive side of things ends. In the column for negative the following can be entered:

• Two million Iraqis, including just about every one of the Christian faith, now live as refugees outside their country, which has lost its secular government;
• Another two million Iraqis have been internally displaced while women have lost the advance in rights they had made;
• Religious tolerance in the country was dealt a fatal blow and young Islamic men, who went to Iraq to fight the US invaders might also be leaving for other parts of the world – and now as more militant battle-hardened soldiers;
• The destruction of infrastructure has left  most Iraqis in a much worse position than they were in before.
• The production of oil, Iraq’s most important product, is still below its pre-invasion level;
• On a strategic level the establishment of a stable, pro-western regime in the region as a geopolitical counterweight to the regional ambitions of Iran has not been achieved; and
• The Iraq withdrawal is also seen as a complicating factor for the efforts in Afghanistan, where President Obama wants the withdrawal to start in a year’s time. The Taliban are expected to keep up the pressure on the  regime of President Hamid Karzai from their sanctuaries in Pakistan. Once the US and its allies leave they might try to strike a political deal with Karzai.

But then, with the first crude oil due to be pumped from northern Afghanistan wells soon, it remains to be seen if the US will follow through on disentanglement from that country.