I was thinking about Iraq today, the Iraq of the 1990s and the Iraq of today. Back then Iraq was ruled by the ruthless Saddam Hussein and his sons and relations, mostly from Tikrit. The minority Sunnis held sway over the Shi’ite majority and imprisoned, tortured and killed their leaders, and used poison gas on their communities. Saddam in effect ran a private fiefdom which included the whole of Iraq. This was a country most of whose inhabitants lived in constant fear and terror.
Now look at present-day Iraq. It is far from perfect and has had a terrible problem dealing with its Sunni citizens. But the country is now ruled by the majority of its people. Its army, helped and trained by the Americans, is starting to win its battles against ISIS and reclaim the territory it lost both to ISIS and the Kurds. The country now enjoys, as is natural, excellent relations with its neighbour Iran. And to any Iraqi who remembers the long nightmare of the conflict between the two countries this has to be seen as a huge step forward.
The economy is slowly growing and while unemployment is still a problem the figures are nowhere near as grim as they were (40-60% in 2003 as compared to 16% in 2016).
In short Iraq is no longer ruled by a dictator and the majority of its people now have a government which represents them. Tell me, and it’s an honest question, why is US intervention in Iraq considered such a failure?
The million dead civilians, in a country that now has a population of 37 million, might have something to do with it.
A common objection is also the fact that the intervention was done pre-emptively and explicitly lacked U.N. support, setting our foreign policy back to that which was accepted in 1216 before the Magna Carta.
You’re thinking of the Peace of Westphalia. A few centuries later but still a few centuries in the past for us.
No way I’m going to rehash the Iraq war, but I’ll just note that the OP’s claim that “In short Iraq is no longer ruled by a dictator and the majority of its people now have a government which represents them” is laughable on the face of it since the Kurds just declared independence. And the only reason da-Esh was able to establish a stronghold in Iraq is because the Sunni Arabs do not think the government represents them.
The US invasion of Iraq was like curing a cancer through massive doses of chemotherapy. Sure, it killed the cancer - and 14 years later, the patient is now in better condition than before - but the intermediate cost was horrific, with the chemotherapy destroying all kinds of good cells and hair and whatnot.
The cancer could have been cured through other, easier and perhaps much less damaging ways.
Iraq’s current government is very friendly with Iran. The US knocked off a bad guy and put in a vacuum replaced by bad guys from Iran and (until recently) ISIS. As a democracy it is incredibly weak. I rate this a minor improvement.
Ethnic cleansing levels have dropped, possibly because no Shia have Sunni neighbors and no Sunni have Shia neighbors in Baghdad. This is Zap Brannigan/Killbot problem-solving.
The minor improvements resulted in the deaths of many people, in part because a horrible dictatorial vaguely communist strongman, who did in fact murder thousands of opponents, was also (shockingly) preventing the murder of even more people by at least two factions of religious terrorists.
If you arrest or otherwise remove a high-ranking criminal, you often see a large number of murders shortly afterward, as the crook’s followers duke it out with rivals both in and out of their organization in an attempt to fill the vacuum. However some people might not care too much about these deaths; for the most part it’s criminals killing criminals for the rights to sell drugs in a certain patch, use certain smuggling routes, etc. When there’s outrage, it’s often because an innocent person was killed in a drive-by targeting a rival crook. While tragic, the innocent person wasn’t being deliberately targeted, and the number of such deaths are usually low. The police and prosecutors don’t see such deaths as the inevitable result of arresting the mob boss.
It turns out that if you arrest or otherwise remove a dictator, the rivals fight over ruling the people, resulting in the deaths of innocent civilians. It’s a lot easier to kill innocent civilians, even accidentally, if you’re using tanks, artillery and rocket launchers than the hand guns and machine guns that might turn up in a mob war. It turns out if you blow up a lot of infrastructure, it can result in the deaths of innocent civilians. It turns out if you drop a lot of bombs on a country, it can result in the deaths of innocent civilians. It turns out if you wreck a government, you cripple the police force, which means more crime, and can result in the deaths of innocent civilians. (DeBaathification…) It turns out if the ruling faction is seen as being backed by outsiders, they get attacked by other factions, which won’t necessarily target party members or soldiers, but things like … post offices, which can result in the deaths of innocent civilians. (When Tito took over Yugoslavia, he would attack government facilities such as post offices, then set up his own. Now the locals had no choice but to pay Tito’s goons to deliver and receive mail.) It turns out if you knock off one faction leader, they could be replaced by another faction leader, who might even be worse, or at least be horrible toward a different group of victims… which can result in the deaths of innocent civilians.
No, those figures were intended to show the general rise of the economy since the chaos of the war. Actually under Saddam unemployment was generally low as dictators always find uses for idle hands, just as the Nazis put Germany to work again.
The fact that this is not asked in Arabic reminds me of those republican panels on women’s issues that’s full of old white guys. It’s easy to see a few things that are better and pat ourselves on the back from 7,000 miles away, but what would the Iraqis say?
“Hello, sir. Your GDP is now up to 2000 levels and you no longer have a dictator, was it worth losing half your family and friends, living through years of war and surviving the horror of ISIS?”
If Iraq goes through a 100 year renaissance where they become the most enlightened nation and the leader of the free world, then we’ll debate it. But so far it looks like all we did was kill a million people and make things absolutely horrific for 15 years or so. We shouldn’t be able to hide that shame behind a couple statistics that are slightly better.
Well, as others have pointed out, your blandly rosy picture of Iraq in 2017 is lacking some significant details. I’ll let them hash that out with you. Suffice it to say that there are relatively few in the country who would say things are markedly better, and they are almost certainly the Shi’ites who are now top dog and imposing their own will (with the help of Iran) on the Kurdish and Arab Sunni minorities.
I will focus instead upon a different point: a people can only be free when they truly wish to be free. Imposing “freedom” upon a people will only produce extended chaos if the people of that nation are not yet ready to embrace the trappings of being “free”. We see numerous examples of this all over the world, from former colonies in Africa (most of which are now brutal dictatorships) to “freed” former soviet republics, etc. That means that waging war to remove a dictator, on the theory that doing so will liberate the people and allow them to experience freedom, is rarely a successful endeavor.
And, indeed, that’s been the case in Iraq. As we prepared for war, many in the Administration asserted that the Iraqi people would, upon being liberated, immediately embrace Western-style democracy and liberty. There were those, like me, who argued that was unlikely, since the traditions to support such democratic behavior were not in place. Now, you have a bit of chaos that purports to be democratic, but in reality is anything but (see: Kurdish self-rule issues). Indeed, it’s doing so poorly at running itself that the so-called Islamic State was in many places hailed as a force of good, when it first arrived.
And, if we are going to go to war to “liberate” people who are suffering under repressive regimes, when do we take on Robert Mugabe? How about the Ayatollahs of Iran? The leader of North Korea? The regimes of various central African states, which engage in ethnic cleansing?
It’s a damned slippery slope if you start doing that. And it will probably avail you very little.
Not to mention it’s from 2015 and an extremely random source.
Actual estimates I’ve seen range from the Lancet’s 650,000 to numbers as high as 1.3 million. The actual number, though hard to calculate exactly because of poor record-keeping and refugees fleeing the country, is probably around 1 million. It’s almost certainly that much if you include deaths in Iraq from ISIS/the resulting civil war, which were a direct consequence of the war. I’m not especially interested in re-hashing this, but this article does a relatively good job explaining why the numbers are consistently under-reported by the media:
An intervention? Like Operation Barbarossa was actually a field trip.
Well, the illegal invasion of Iraq on entirely bogus pretexts (paging Colin Powell) was a success, militarily speaking.
The first catastrophic failure was the occupation, the attempts to install client leaderships, bring a MaccD to every street corner, etc.
The second catastrophic failure was to leave huge power vacuums, subsequent filled by al-Queda, ISIS and affiliates, armed with $billions of abandoned US hardware.
The third catastrophic failure has yet to take full form but will likely involve hundreds, and possibly now thousands, of well-trained (by ISIS) fighters returning to their countries of origin.
I should add the on going crisis of upwards of 3 million refugees - some likely floating lifeless in the Med as we speak - continues.
The Kurds did declare independence, and the fact that such a referendum was held illustrates that Iraq is more democratic than under Saddam Hussein. Also the Kurds’ gamble backfired, similar to what happened with the Catalans IN Spain.
The reason ISIS was able to gain a foothold in Iraq is because of some disaffected elements, but also because the military up and fled. There were several factors at stake. But for the most part, no one preferred ISIS to the Iraqi government, regardless if they were against it.
Now the Iraq war was initiated under false, or faulty pretenses. It destroyed the country and left at least a million dead. America’s foreign policy and credibility was set back.
Pre-invasion Iraq was a reasonably secular society. Saddam’s second in command was a Christian. That kind of thing is unlikely to happen today.
The main thing is that there are many nasty dictatorships around the world. We really don’t need to go in and destroy the country in order to save it, especially on the basis of lies. And especially when the cost was IIRC, somewhere over a trillion dollars.
Let me get this straight. To show how bad Saddam-era Iraq was, you quote a figure from post-invasion Iraq! IOW, your claim is not that Iraq is better off now than under Saddam, but better off now than under Rumsfeld.
2002, not 2003, is the date you want for Saddam’s Iraq (and even then, economic problems were caused by sanctions, not Saddam.) According to FRED, youth unemployment was lower in 2002 than in 2016. (I didn’t pick “youth” to cherry-pick — it’s just what Google turned up.)
(Of course, employment rate may not be a good proxy for well-being in an economy where production depends on oil wealth, not human labor.)
No kidding. It’s using the fact that the country has started to recover from the US’s attempt to commandeer it’s resources to justify the US’s attempt to commandeer its resources.
Oh? Which lie do you believe? The one about the weapons, the one about freeing the Iraqi people, or the one about fighting them over there so you didn’t have to do so over here, a.k.a. “Operation Human Shield”?