The current chaos in Iraq shows how limited American military power can be at times, and how big of a mistake the war really was.
There’s grim news coming out of Iraq this week when the brutal insurgent group called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham, or ISIS, succeeded in taking a number of towns and cities in northern and western Iraq and putting the Iraqi military into full on retreat. ISIS is a sort of insurgent group on steroids that is based in both Syria and Iraq and combines the aspects of an armed insurgency, international terrorist group, and revolutionary political organization that seeks nothing less than creating a pan Islamic state out of Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. In fact ISIS is so known for its violence and brutality against civilians it’s actually been disowned by al-Qaeda, which it can trace its roots back to in the earlier days of the Iraq War.
A number of Iraq War hawks have come out saying that this whole affair proves that President Obama’s decision to end the American presence in Iraq was a mistake. Kenneth Pollack, and instrumental intellectual behind selling the war, has taken to The Wall Street Journal editorial page to write about how this proves that we should have had a military presence in Iraq all along. While others like Ross Douthat and Dexter Filkin have argued that some better presidential management and a little more elbow grease everything would have been fine, “The trouble is, as the events of this week show, what the Americans left behind was an Iraqi state that was not able to stand on its own.”
I’d have to agree with Filkin on that point. Iraq is not a functional multicultural democracy, with a good economy, and a professional military that can defend the country. Instead it is a mess that is completely unable to do any of those things. Indeed Filkin gives away the game when he describes the impact of the American invasion:
When the Americans invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state—its military, its bureaucracy, its police force, and most everything else that might hold a country together. They spent the next nine years trying to build a state to replace the one they crushed. By 2011, by any reasonable measure, the Americans had made a lot of headway but were not finished with the job.
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You bet they weren’t finished with the job. But not because of anything President Obama did or didn’t do, instead they didn’t finish the job because the job was never going to be finished. That is to say the idea of the US being able to create fully functional social, political, and military institutions in a foreign country after destroying its existing ones was always a fools errand. The same way it was in Vietnam and during the Chinese Civil War.
And the evidence of this is clearly the failure itself. To quote former CPA administrator turned British MP Rory Stewart,”Nowhere in thirty years has there been such a concentration of foreign money, manpower, and determination as in Iraq. Nowhere has their failure been more dramatic.” How dramatic? Well Vox summed up everything you need to know about why these events happened in one sentence: “Iraqi officials told the Guardian that two divisions of Iraqi soldiers—roughly 30,000 men—simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters.” No amount of presidential “leadership”, predator drones, or training in light infantry tactics is going to fix the fact that the Iraqi Army ran away rather than do their duty and defend their country.
In short, all of that effort that “made a lot of headway” actually made little to none as the Iraqi military just failed the most basic test of any military: that it to not degenerate into a mob and run away at the first sign of battle. Indeed all the other massive failures that other experts cite, things like sectarianism and bungling by the central government, are all products of those same efforts that “made a lot of headway.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who many blame for this mess, didn’t fall from the sky the day Obama stepped into the White House. Instead he’s been a political player in Iraq since the invasion itself. Indeed he became Prime Minister in 2006!
Arguing that a little more of this or that was going to change everything is really a strange way of formulating policy. You start with your conclusion, “with enough effort we can make Iraq fine” and then work backwards from there. And if Iraq doesn’t turn out just fine? Well then obviously you didn’t try hard enough. Ta-Nehisi Coates once pointed out the absurdity of the circular logic that claims that we could win this war if we just tried a little harder:
War-mongering is self-justifying. If you bungle a war in Iraq, it does not mean you need to sit back and reflect on the bungling. It means you should make more war, lest Iraq become a base for your enemies. If Vladimir Putin violates Ukrainian sovereignty, it is evidence for a more muscular approach. If he doesn’t, than it is evidence that he fears American power.
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. We can help Iraq in lots of ways, but winning this war? That’s something the Iraqis have to do for themselves.
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The last time I checked, Iraq had not become our newest state. The CIA backed Saddam’s war with Iran, but no one cared as long as he was gassing Iranians or his own people. Just like they provided weapons to Bin Laden and the Afghan resistance to use against the Russian Army. And we got 9-11 in return.
So the U.S. government is now giving heavy weapons to ISIS in Syria to overthrow Assad, and is now considering intervening to help the Iraqi government fight ISIS in Iraq. Perhaps at some point, the bull should stop trying to help clean up the china shop?