Iraq in the Twenty-First Century

Regime Change and the Making of a Failed State

Tareq Y. Ismael, Jacqueline S. Ismael

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138831339
• eBook ISBN: 9781317567585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Much has been written about the events surrounding the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, especially about the intentions, principles, plans and course of action of US policy, but much less attention has been given to the consequences of US policy on Iraqi political and social development. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of US policy on the social and political development of Iraq in the twenty-first century. It shows how not just the institutions of the state were destroyed in 2003, leaving the way open for sectarianism, but also the country's cultural integrity, political coherence, and national-oriented economy. It outlines how Iraq has been economically impoverished, assessing the appalling situation which ordinary people, including women and children, have endured, not just as a result of the 2003 war, but also as a consequence of the 1991 war and the sanctions imposed in the following years. The book argues that the social, political, and cultural ruin that accompanied the Iraq war was an absolute catastrophe; that the policies which had such adverse effects were the foreseeable consequences of deliberate policy choices; and that those responsible continue to evade being made accountable.

1
Introduction

Iraqi ruination—the humanitarian costs of an imposed state

Over ten years have passed since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, and this solemn anniversary prompted little assessment of the consequences that were visited on the Iraqi people. Nor has there been any serious official consideration of responsibility for the fallout that continues to spread from the decision, exemplified by the spree of violence that caused thousands of deaths over the first half of 2014 (Griffis, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; UNAMI, 2014). At most, the violence and devastation that was visited upon Iraq following the Anglo-American invasion has been considered collateral damage—unintended consequences purportedly balanced by the “good intentions” that liberated Iraqis from the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein. Any causal connection between the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the violence that has ensued, has been dismissed. Coverage of Iraq in English-language media declined markedly prior to the US withdrawal (Ricchiardi, 2008), and coverage of the humanitarian impact of escalating violence on Iraqis following 2011 has been scant. To the extent that the costs of the Iraq war are assessed, they are examined in terms of American “sacrifice,” albeit cloaked in terms of “blood and money” and of the perceived impact to American credibility. This absence of an Iraqi perspective or recognition of Iraqi suffering was embodied in the discourse used to debate the Iraq war during the 2008 presidential election, surrounded that engaging the Obama Administration’s commitment to end the war, and, more recently, became evident when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) captured Mosul in June 2014. In 2008, Presidential candidate Barack Obama, a critic of the Iraq war, argued:

[I]t is important for us not to be held hostage by the Iraqi government in a policy that has not made us more safe [...] and is costing us dearly not only and most importantly in the lost lives of our troops, but also the amount of money that we are spending that is unsustainable and will prevent us from engaging in the kinds of investments in America that will make us more competitive and more safe.

(New York Times, 2008)

Nevertheless, by 2014, with American troops no longer stationed in Iraq and the war now a silent memory in the American public consciousness, President Obama did revisit the Iraq war and American responsibility therein. Prompted by Russian military intervention in the Ukraine which saw the “annexation” of the Crimea, Obama dismissed the notion that America’s lawless invasion of Iraq set a precedent for Russian irredentism (or, in any case, weakened America’s moral credibility in criticizing the Russian action), claiming that:

Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq War was a subject of vigorous debate not just around the world, but in the United States as well. I participated in that debate and I opposed our military intervention there. But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state that could make decisions about its own future.

(Obama, 2014a)

Indeed, President Obama did oppose military intervention in Iraq—as a Presidential candidate he proposed the withdrawal of US military forces, a policy he would bring to fruition in 2011. Iraqis, however, were not afforded such a respite from the violence and deprivation unleashed by Anglo-American policy. Nor did the retreat of US military forces signal the end of US influence over Iraq, as tens of thousands of private contractors remained behind as well as the largest US embassy in the world. As for the remainder of President Obama’s claims in this 2014 address—the purportedly “vigorous debate” surrounding the invasion, America’s willingness to “work within the international system,” and Iraq purportedly being a “fully sovereign state that could make decisions about its own future”—these, and many other claims, are the subject of critical review in this book. A less sanguine view of the Iraq war would be that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq represented “the single worst foreign policy decision in American history”—in the view of former State Department Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren, who spent a year in Iraq as a Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (Van Buren, 2013). While sympathetic to US war aims, Peter Monsoor, a retired US Army officer who served as executive officer to General David Petreaus, was nonetheless critical of the early years of the Anglo-American occupation. In explicating and critiquing US occupation efforts, he identifies the sources of failure in: (1) de-Ba‘thification, which heavily targeted Sunnis, “causing some to fear the loss of Sunni power and ultimately create[d] a political base for insurgency”; (2) disbanding the Iraqi Army, which left many of the soldiers “without jobs,” leaving many ostracized and driving them into the arms of the insurgency; and (3) empowering sectarian politics. Monsoor argued that the combination of these three factors intensified the detrimental effects on the future of Iraq and the region:

Rather than creating a governing body from the ground up, the Iraq Governing Council was filled with ex-patriots that had been out of the country during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The effect was to create a non-representative governing body that began replacing long term government administrators with their own political followers.

(Schuldt, 2014)

Indeed, the Iraq war was a disaster for the US in terms of blood and treasure, as well as loss of credibility. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Paul Pillar has argued that to this day the US “continue[s] to suffer from the domestic as well as the regional consequences of that misadventure” (Pillar, 2014). Yet, those who crafted and implemented this grand misadventure, as well as those who promoted and enabled it, have retained their audience and continue to advocate further aggressive interventions around the world. While widely acknowledged to have been a failure, advocates of US military intervention have not been chastened, as evidenced by NATO actions in Libya as well as expansion of the covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and across the Sahel. Calls for a similar robust military response to the conflict in Syria, the breakdown of order in Ukraine following the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, as well as the kidnapping of several hundred young women in Congo, all exhibited little humility or nuance regarding the application of military force for political ends. Moreover, that the same voices suffered little loss of prestige over US policy in the Middle East broadly, and Iraq in particular, raises questions over responsibility within US political culture and public discourse, leaving a global audience to question whether Iraqi deaths and suffering fail to register. In President Obama’s 2014 speech to the US military academy at West Point, Iraq would emerge as little more than an afterthought, with Obama mentioning the matter in passing only by way of his praising US soldiers for their military service as well as using the speech as a way of contrasting his foreign policy to that of his predecessor George W. Bush (Obama, 2014b). Hillary Clinton, the former US Senator, Secretary of State and much-speculated Presidential favorite for the 2016 election, would—in her 2014 memoir Hard Choices—similarly evade any moral responsibility towards the Iraq question. Clinton, as a US Senator, voted in favor of the 2002 Iraq war resolution, and continued to defend her vote during the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential primary when running against Obama. By 2014, however, she would disavow her vote, writing, “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple” (Rucker, 2014). Failing to take note of the consequences of US policy, the entrenchment and institutionalization of sectarianism, a return to authoritarian rule under Nûrî al-Mâlikî’s regime, the rise of competing authoritarian centers of power across the Iraqi landscape, the loss of state authority over large swaths of territory and the attendant decline in personal security, with militias consolidating urban spaces from 2013, revealed a lack of concern for Iraq in Washington. Outside US policy circles, discussion remained untethered, with English-language media attention sparse and analysis tying this perilous state of affairs to the US project of post-2003 state building unacknowledged. While this crescendo of appalling indicators was evident, if ignored, the takeover of Mosul by ISIS in June 2014 unleashed newfound vitality to a needed public debate. However, the framing of ISIS’s rise would be explained almost entirely as being in reaction to any and all factors aside from the Anglo-American construct. Moreover, in English-language media, Iraqi voices remained silent and the humanitarian impact neglected to a secondary concern behind the “threat” ISIS posed to Western “interests.” As a signal slander to Iraqis’ suffering over the last two decades, the voices of those responsible were afforded pride of place in media coverage. Former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head L. Paul Bremer (Bremer, 2014) former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (Blair, 2014) and the neoconservative and liberal internationalist coterie all pointed to the seeming ISIS-led destruction of a fictive US-crafted Iraqi state. That al-Mâlikî’s pernicious sectarianism, the failures of the broader Iraqi political class empowered through US occupation to manage the affairs of state or that regional disruptions all played a role is clear. However, the Iraqi state left behind following Anglo-American withdrawal was already imploding through the centrifugal forces empowered by the occupation. As this book makes plain, those forces were evident to observers, especially Iraqis, and signaled the outcome of the Anglo-American policy of unilateral war, regime change and the imposition of a new political order.

From “debating” the war to seeing its reality

Unlike the war’s planners and propagandists, for Iraqis, the legacy of the war is far more than an afterthought. For them, the war was a historical period that approached an extermination event: deaths in the hundreds of thousands, the displaced in the millions, and the specter of a decline into long-lasting “war of all against all” that threatens the existence of Iraqi nationhood itself. Such a lack of self-reflection for the consequences of US action does not augur well for the future direction of US policy across an increasingly strife-ridden mashriq. Moreover, it fails to acknowledge the calamitous humanitarian aftermath to the Anglo-American occupation that Iraqis are necessarily required to attend to every day. In spite of enormous petroleum wealth, Iraq’s development following the degradation of Ba‘thist rule and depredation of the neoliberal policies of Anglo-American occupation belies the challenges left silent in public discourse. This is not a product of a lack of appropriate data and analysis. Surveying reports by international organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), international NGOs such as Transparency International and Amnesty International, and indeed US and UK government agencies such as the US State Department, the now shuttered Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) or the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office provides sober reading. The World Bank ranks post-occupation Iraq as second-to-bottom only to Yemen within the region in its human development index and as the third-most corrupt nation in the region (ahead of Libya and Yemen), while Transparency International places it second behind only post-Gaddafi Libya. Metrics of government effectiveness, political stability and violence, rule of law, and non-public sector employment and economic development all appear dismal, with the al-Mâlikî government’s performance placing Iraq at or near the bottom of the global table. This is with a key distinction being made by the World Bank, that such measures see Iraq today as worse off than under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Further, the US State Department and Amnesty International identify Iraq’s state security forces as being habitual abusers of human rights, a point augmented with their expanded operations in Anbar across 2014, as noted by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Cordesman, 2014).

Not all US policymakers have avoided reflecting on their government’s policies vis-à-vis Iraq; Richard N. Haass (2009, p. 6)—now serving as the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, and at the time the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff—suggested that “had I known then what I know now, namely, that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that the intervention would be carried out with a marked absence of good judgment and competence, I would have been unalterably opposed.” While stripped of triumphalism, such a trivial expression of regret remains beholden to American exceptionalism, and continues to mute Iraqi narratives of the US–Iraqi experience. This is especially critical when recalling that US policy with regards Iraq did not begin with the horrendous 9/11 attacks on America. Iraqis had suffered through US support for the Ba‘thist regime and its war against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s, and especially during the “sanctions decade” that followed the 1991 Gulf War. Without apology or accountability from those who led the war effort, Iraqi losses are assumed, to borrow an odious and infamous phrase from earlier tolls levied on the Iraqi populace, to be “a price” that was “worth it” (Pilger, 2000). The mundane treatment of the Iraqi catastrophe and the crafting of a political narrative that absolves the US of responsibility must be contested. One of the few voices questioning the Western narrative, Hans von Sponeck, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq (1998–2000), who resigned in protest at the impact of such policies on Iraqis, has succinctly summed up the Iraq tragedy in a cri de coeur:

What we have done to you in the name of freedom and democracy has no parallel in history. We have trampled the truth concerning your suffering, we endeavoured to solicit allies through bribery and ruthlessly marginalized those who objected to our imperial intentions. Brute force became the substitute for the promise of 1945 “to save future generations from the scourge of war.” It was you who paid the price [...] There was indeed an axis of evil, an alliance of governments, think-tanks, media and corporations erecting a massive wall of disinformation. Iraq and Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, we told the world, were a lethal combination [...] Where were those weapons of mass destruction we assuredly would find? We suffered no guilt and made no apologies. Unfortunately for you, no plan was made for starting the healing. Victors are victors. Chaos suited us well [...] but we made certain that the oil administration was safe. Our concerns were not yours, quite to the contrary. We watched and encouraged your anger and hate. Yes, your dictator deserved it. However, the greed, yours and ours, raped our common heritage. Your museums are empty, your libraries burnt, your universities destroyed. Only your pride is still there [...] and our guilt. Will you ever forgive us?

(Sponeck, 2003)

Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Thomas Ricks (2006, p. 4) persuasively argues that we cannot view the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 as isolated events. Rather, a distinction is helpful in contextualizing violence against Iraq, which is that between physical violence and psychological violence. In applying this distinction to Iraq, we should view warfare against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 as two physical wars that bookended 12 years of relentless psychological warfare. The engagement of foreign power and policies directed against Iraq over the past two decades was ostensibly directed solely at the Ba‘thist regi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Iraqi ruination—the humanitarian costs of an imposed state
• Deconstruction and reconstruction of the state
• Whither Iraq? Beyond Saddam, sanctions and the occupation
• Killing the state and undermining the nation
• The sectarian state in Iraq and the new political class
• The hallmark of the new state Political corruption
• People in the quagmire
• Children of the occupation A decade after the invasion
• Iraqi women under occupation From tribalism to neo-feudalism
• Iraq in the twenty-first century Retrospect and prospect
• Epilogue Blowback from regime change
• Appendix 1 Declaration of the Shia of Iraq (2002)
• Appendix 2 Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period [TAL]
• Appendix 3 Iraqi Constitution (2005)
• Index