The Iraq Wars
Iraq is the ancient Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, where cities like Sumer, Babylon, Nineveh, and Ur thrived, where great empires like the Assyrians and Babylonians dominated the Middle East and as far south as Egypt and as far west as Cyprus. It includes the Muslim Shia, Sunnis, Kurds, the Christian Assyrians, and many other ancient religions, including Jews, Orthodox Christians, Yazidis and Zoroastrians. It is oil rich and water rich (the Tigris and the Euphrates). It is holy land for both the Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Baghdad had been a great center of Islamic learning and culture. Under Turkish rule, Iraq steadily declined. After the First World War, Mesopotamia became a British protectorate, then had its own King, Faisal I, and achieved independence in 1932. The Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown in 1958, and the socialist Baath Party took power in a coup d’etat in 1968. They nationalized the oil industry and redistributed land. Iraq enjoyed phenomenal economic growth during the period from 1958 to 1980, and the benefits of growth were extended widely in improved health, education and social programs. Saddam Hussein rose to the pinnacle of power in the Baath Party governing Iraq in 1979. His base of support was among the Sunni Arabs. The Shia Arabs in Southern Iraq and the Sunni Kurds in Northern Iraq were opposed to Hussein.
On Hussein’s orders, Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 shortly after the Islamic Revolution, and the two countries fought to a bloody stalemate over the next eight years. The Gulf Arab countries, Russia, European countries and to a limited degree the US supported Iraq. Syria, North Korea, Libya and to a limited degree the US (arms for hostages and aid to the Nicaraguan contras) supported Iran. Iraq wanted control over the Shatt al Arab, the crucial waterway between the two countries for their oil tankers. Hussein wanted to be the dominant Arab power in the Middle Eastern region. Iraq was controlled by the Sunni Arabs and was secular and socialist. Iran (the ancient Persia) was a newly emergent, Shia theocracy with revolutionary ambitions throughout the Middle East. The war destroyed Iraq’s economy; it was bankrupt afterwards, but it had created a huge army and well-armed military. Iraq used chemical weapons extensively against the Iranian Army, Iranian citizens and Iraqi-Kurdish civilians who were opposed to Hussein.
After that stalemate, there were two more Iraq Wars that involved US Presidents George Bush the elder and the younger.
In the first, Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, its tiny oil-rich neighbor. Iraq was broke and bankrupt from its war with Iran and wanted Kuwait to forgive its debts and reduce its oil drilling so that Iraqi oil would be more profitable. The Kuwaitis refused so Saddam ordered the invasion. The US led by President George Bush the elder assembled a broad and diverse coalition under the aegis of the UN and quickly drove the Iraqis out. That is exactly how the UN should work. President Bush chose not to use the moment to go all the way to Baghdad and remove Hussein. After the war, the Kurds in the North and the Shia in the South revolted, and Saddam slaughtered them, and the US Coalition did not intervene to protect them. However, the US subsequently imposed no fly zones to protect the Kurds and the Shia from Saddam’s Air Force. The Iraqi economy cratered during the two decades of Saddam’s misrule, and the benefits of the oil economy were distributed to the military and Saddam’s wars.
The second Iraq War was a misbegotten adventure of President George Bush the 2nd. The US had been attacked by Al Qaeda on 9/11. It caught the Bush Administration by complete surprise. They lashed out at Afghanistan then at Iraq.
Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, and its leaders wanted to overthrow the Arab governments in the Middle East and replace them with a pan-Arab theologically based Caliphate. Most all were Sunni Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Iraq was secular, and socialist, run by a dictator notorious for massacres of the Kurds in the North and the Shia in the South. It had nothing to do with 9/11.
For opaque reasons, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld decided to invade Iraq claiming it was developing nuclear weapons that would threaten the US, the Middle East and Europe. Iraq not only had had nothing to do with 9/11, but it was not sponsoring terrorist attacks against the US. Nevertheless, the Bush Administration tried to link the nation’s justified outrage about 9/11 to their choice to invade Iraq. There were two problems: the first is that the evidence about nuclear weaponry on Iraq was sketchy, non-existent, or straight out manufactured to justify the war; the second is that the Bush Administration was clueless about how to run Iraq after Saddam was ousted. Essentially, they lied to the American people to start the war; then they ignited a regional/global conflagration by mishandling the occupation. They ignored what was happening in Afghanistan because they had their hands full with what had broken loose in Iraq.
The UK of Tony Blair was supporting the Bush Administration. Most other allied nations such as the French and Germans and Canadians were not buying it. The Congress was gun-shy about the prospect of another terrorist attack after 9/11, and unfortunately it was easily intimidated and bamboozled. Saddam Hussein was his own worst enemy as usual in leading many to conclude that he was trying to hide a nuclear program, that no one could find because it did not exist; he was bluffing.
Why did they do it? The Bush Administration brought to power a group of neo-conservatives who coalesced around the ideas of removing Saddam Hussein, to generate change in the Middle East – the locus of too many wars and great instability in the oil markets. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/world/middleeast/iraq-war-reason.html It brought to power people with deep ties to the US oil industry; the Middle East had most of the world’s oil and was perceived as a volatile tinderbox. It’s still unclear what their precise motives were for invading Iraq and removing Saddam. I think it was the oil, not that they wanted to directly take the oil away from Iraqis, but that they wanted to make the region safe for the petro-states producing the energy that fuels the global economy, and they probably also wanted to open up Iraq’s oil industry to participation by US oil companies.
They intentionally conflated their proposed attack on Iraq, with the issues of Islamic terrorism. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack, and the Iranian revolution and the taking of American hostages, that was too easy to do with the American public. The reality however was: 1) Al Qaeda was an enemy seeking the overthrow of the secular rulers of Iraq and Syria, and 2) Iraq and Iran were also mortal enemies, having just fought a bloody war for eight years. Another motivating factor could have been Israeli security. Iraq was not a front-line state with Israel, but it now had a very large, modern, well-armed military, and it had been threatening Israel for many years with Saddam’s bluster.
The US very quickly ousted Saddam, but then it had to run the country, and it made a series of consequential mistakes. As the Bush appointed administrator, Paul Bremer made initial huge mistake, firing all the Baathists, the only ones with experience running the government and the military. He created a Sunni insurgency with lots of skills and experience where there did not need to be one. They also mishandled their relationships with the Shia community as well, so they soon faced two separate insurgencies, one of which was backed by Iran.
The US organized Iraqi elections, but the results of the elections did not (or have not yet) created a unified nation because the Kurds want to be independent, and the Shias and Sunnis each want to run the country to the exclusion of the other. Thus, we ended up with election results which were won by the more populous Shia parties who had for too long been suppressed by the Sunnis and not by leaders who had broad appeal to all three groups.
A bloody sectarian Civil War broke out between the Shias and the Sunnis; then it became a three-way political conflict as the Kurds wanted autonomy or independence. Faced with a weak, poorly functioning central government in Iraq and a chaotic civil war next door in Syria, the ISIS terrorists led by Zarqawi, then Baghdadi took over much of Iraq and Syria. They were stopped on the road to Baghdad only by an unlikely combination of Kurdish peshmerga, the Iranians, the US, the Iraqi Army, the Russians (in Syria), and the Syrian Democratic Forces (in Syria).
Iran has now become a dominant force in Iraqi politics through its surrogate parties and affiliated militias. Peaceful protesters about the government’s failures to improve living conditions are being killed for protesting. https://www.usip.org/iraq-timeline-2003-war The Iraqi people have suffered vastly over the past 40 years of war: first, from Hussein’s misadventures and then from the Bush Administration’s terrible miscalculations and poor performance. The Iraqi economy, however, is now starting to recover after these terrible losses over the course of three wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iraq