What if the US simply assassinated Saddam, but no invasion?
As as been said, Saddam was in a box. By June 1999 UNSCOM knew there were no WMD, effective monitoring and sanctions were taking care of the rest.
Saddam was even doing well fighting al-Queda.
Not Jun '99. More like Dec 2002/Jan 2003. The inspections weren’t even happening after 1998.
It’s hard to see how Iraq could be notably worse off now, if Saddam or one of his sons or one of his old aides were in charge.
Pretty much this. I agree with John that the invasion was foolish on our part, but anyone who thinks things would be much better today had Saddam stayed in power for the majority of the Iraqis hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been going on in the region. I think that, had we not invaded, Iraq would be Syria today…but without all the nice warm and fuzzy actions of Assad.
Yes. Unequivocally, yes.
Fuck you, Bush.
Excellent points. The Arab Spring piece brings up looking at longer terms than the current 12 years as well. Even if Saddam was relatively stable and his internal brutality wasn’t over the top, in the long term we have to look at transitions. Transitions to democracy haven’t always gone that well for those of us that made it. Both civil and inter-nation wars have started after some of those transition went awry. Transitions within non-democratic governments can be marked by big spikes in violence and possibly civil war before returning to ordinary background oppression as normal.
We also have to consider that Saddam’s background level of violence in the period where he was contained by sanctions and no-fly zone was below his norm. In the 11 years before Iraq had predominantly been at war after invading neighbors (Iran and Kuwait.) In comparison to those years the late US involvement was relatively safe from violent death for the average Iraqi. If political will for containment ended, we have to at least include the possibility of Saddam starting a war that racks up high casualties too.
Leaving aside the ‘Fuck you, Bush’ aspect, which I doubt you are going to get much argument from by anyone in this thread, what do you base your ‘Yes. Unequivocally, yes’ assertion on?
I think Iraq would be better off. It’s rarely worth it to trade dictatorship for anarchy. Likewise we should’ve helped Russia prop up Assad during the Arab Spring, but our lack of intelligence or understanding of the forces in Syria combined with a naive foreign policy made that impossible.
If the U.S. had never invaded, likely Saddam’s bellicose behavior would not have improved. With Bush you would’ve seen a push for more sanctions if he had decided not to invade. Likely this would create a deterioration in behavior and relationships with the West not dissimilar to what we saw with Iran leading up to them agreeing to nuclear talks. Iraq was already under pretty heavy sanctions anyway.
So in a sense, the invasion has meant the return to global trade, the free flow of its oil and etc for Iraq. But it paid a heavy human capital in that, and it’s also lost territory to Islamic State in the process.
In the scenario where we never invade, likely when the Arab Spring comes, you see Saddam and Assad crush the rebellions outright and very quickly. So no Islamic State. Islamic State’s ability to take so much from Iraq and Syria in the early days was based on its access to a vast amount of American military equipment–present in the region because we sent billions in dollars of it to the Iraqi military, which rebuilt under our guidance includes nothing but insane sectarians who stole much of it for their favorite militia groups, or outright cowards only in it for a paycheck who flee at the first sign of trouble, and the fact that in Iraq it could face off against a pathetically weak military. This weapons cache is a big part of the reason Syria and Iraq are so much under the control of irregular armies at present.
It sounds like you’re attributing Iraq’s problems to poorly created borders that place different ethnic groups in proximity and conflict with one another, and saying that this diversity is “artificial” and possibly “unsustainable”.
Why is diversity good for Western countries but not for the Middle East?
Diversity is probably good for everyone, but it’s not always easy. While we can point to hiccups, it hasn’t been easy in a truly diverse country (this excludes the vast majority of the “West”) like America, but because we have a general respect for the rule of law, the outcome of elections, court rulings and etc we’ve made it to a pretty respectable place. You could still fill a thousand posts with all the ways in which we still have areas to improve on, and mind we did have a civil war that took 750,000 lives to even start to get where we are today.
I’d argue in some countries, for which there is no real reason to have the borders they have and in fact in which said borders were dictated to them by outside powers, the difficulties of diversity are so great as to make it not worthwhile. These are countries that do not have respect for the outcome of elections, court rulings, or the rule of law. These are countries where people will fight over and over, to the death, for “their sect” over another sect they have to share a country with. Some countries have been at various grades of perpetual war with each other for generations now because these societies lack the strong state structures that need to be in place for diversity to work. A state doesn’t have to be democratic to be diverse successfully, arguably the Ottoman Empire did a decent job of it for hundreds of years–but the State has to be strong. A weak State is incapable of stopping sectarian wars, and when such happen the State largely ceases to exist.
Why do you think that Assad and Saddam would have been able to crush the rebels quickly without a US invasion of Iraq?? Seems to me that in the case of Iraq that a weakened Saddam would have been in a similar position to Assad, maybe in a worse position. Just because we didn’t invade wouldn’t have changed the fundamental flaws in Iraq go away, and Saddam wouldn’t have magically become stronger or more in control. Assad has literally been throwing everything including the kitchen sink at his own rebels (including chemical and biological attacks, and his infamous barrel bombs as well as snipers and directly targeting civilian populations with napalm) and it’s done him fuck all good so far. I don’t see how any of that would change if the US doesn’t invade Iraq.
Thanks for the response. It sounds like you’re saying, however, (with your strong state/weak state distinction) that diversity reduces a polity’s cohesion and likelihood of survival, although this is generally a worthwhile tradeoff because diversity brings other (unspecified) benefits. Would this be a correct?
For what it’s worth, America and most other countries throughout history have been in a perpetual state of warfare.
I agree. Assad wasn’t doing well against the rebels before the so-called Islamic State entered the fray. And Saddam was emasculated (so to speak) by sanctions and the no-fly zone. Assuming those had stayed in place, SH would have been in no position to put down a rebellion. And we would NOT have sides with Russia to prop up Assad. Whether or not that would be the correct realpolitik thing to do, it’s a realpolitic non-starter for any US president.
- Assad wasn’t doing that bad early on, actually. He was killing a lot of his people without having taken a lot of casualties on his side. He quickly lost control of some area, but the forces against him frankly had no weapons. They weren’t being armed by anyone. It took a few months for the Saudis to start arming them and even to this day no real players have armed them. Things went to shit for Assad when the insurgents who had access to Iraqi weapons caches started to go over in force. Much of the core leadership of this group were former Iraqi military who were later part of the insurgency in Iraq against the U.S. occupation. Without said U.S. occupation many of the leaders and much of the weapons that have been used against Assad disappear.
Without that element I think it’s reasonable that Assad would’ve ground the insurgency down due to their lack of leadership, military hardware, and due to simply facing a much weaker opposition.
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Saddam’s Army was ill equipped to fight the United States in a direct confrontation, but I see no indication it would’ve collapsed to a force armed with smuggled in rifles and the occasional improvised explosive–which is about the limit of what he’d be facing if the U.S. had never invaded and he was dealing with an Arab Spring uprising. Note that whatever the Baathist Iraq Army’s failings against a superpower like the United States, Saddam’s control of the country was never seriously in doubt at any point in which he was in charge. Further, the officers of this army waged a fairly effective (if incapable of “winning”) insurgency against the U.S. military for 7 years, and after we left they basically rolled up large swathes of Syria and Iraq. Without our invasion these guys are the ones who would be mowing down the insurgents, instead of them being the ideological and operational core of their leadership.
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I agree no recent American President would’ve helped Assad directly, but a smart one would’ve found ways to keep forces of stability in power instead of forces of chaos.
I don’t think hindsight is required. There were plenty of people saying before the invasion that Iraq was basically the Yugoslavia of the Middle East, and if you took out the strong man, the center would not hold.
Iraq in 2002 versus Iraq in 2015.
So, you project that Iraq would have been the same in 2015 as 2002 but for the US invasion?? Um…ok then.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
- Assad wasn’t doing that bad early on, actually. He was killing a lot of his people without having taken a lot of casualties on his side. He quickly lost control of some area, but the forces against him frankly had no weapons. They weren’t being armed by anyone. It took a few months for the Saudis to start arming them and even to this day no real players have armed them. Things went to shit for Assad when the insurgents who had access to Iraqi weapons caches started to go over in force. Much of the core leadership of this group were former Iraqi military who were later part of the insurgency in Iraq against the U.S. occupation. Without said U.S. occupation many of the leaders and much of the weapons that have been used against Assad disappear.
Without that element I think it’s reasonable that Assad would’ve ground the insurgency down due to their lack of leadership, military hardware, and due to simply facing a much weaker opposition.
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He was doing well, I suppose, early on because this was basically a popular revolt. As Assad tightened the screws more and more people got involved and the revolt spread. I don’t think there is a lot of data showing that it was Iraqi’s coming in from a war torn Iraq that kick started the movement in Syria, but if you have such data I’d sure be interested in seeing it.
I disagree with this assessment. The pressure was building in Iraq as Saddam et al tried to keep a lid on it. When the Arab Spring started to happen it was pretty spontaneous throughout the region, and I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Iraq would have been immune. I also have seen nothing to indicate that Saddam and the Ba’athists could have kept a lid on the numerically superior Shi’ia or Kurds, or that those folks wouldn’t have been able to find weapons to fight back with if the US hadn’t invaded. The exact same factors that made the US occupation of Iraq such a cluster fuck were all there before we invaded, and Saddam had barely been keeping a lid on them. Several more years of sanctions, the example of Arab Spring in other countries, the dissatisfaction of the groups kept under the thumb of the Sunni, Saddam’s brutal treatment of those folks…all of this could and IMHO would have come together in much the same way they did in Syria and Libya.
I’m not seeing how it would have been smart for the US to try, even through indirect means, to prop up Assad. I doubt we’d have done anything substantially different, though we might have taken a harder line once the chemical and biological red line was crossed if we didn’t have the cluster fuck of Iraq hanging over our heads. I could see something similar to what was done in Libya happening in Syria without Iraq, though I doubt the outcome would have been substantially better than what’s happened in Libya (or has happened in Syria to date for that matter).
With Saddam Hussein as president and crippling sanctions, as was the case between the two Gulf Wars? No it was not great, but maybe better than now. Although the government is better than the one with Hussein at the helm. However in terms of safety, yes things were light years better. No terrorism.
I think Iraq would have maybe been better had Iraqis deposed Saddam Hussein 1991, after they rose up against him. We should have given them back up. Now things are more F-ed than had we helped Iraqis take out Saddam. So I say Iraq was better with it’s people deposing of President Hussein after the Gulf War.
Do you think the majority of Iraqi’s wanted Saddam gone because I don’t think I’ve seen that expressed never mind supported?
Fwiw, the idea of the ‘marsh arabs’ and/or the Kurds rising up to depose Saddam always seemed bogus to me … not as a military force supported by the USA but in terms of popular support.