On this day 20 years ago, the United States and Britain, along with a few other “allies”, invaded Iraq in a “shock and awe” operation that ostensibly aimed to achieve three objectives: to remove and destroy Iraq’s purported stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), to end the ‘brutal’ regime of then Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and to “liberate” the Iraqi people by ushering in democracy.
Instead, the invasion triggered a trail of destruction and chaos in Iraq and the Middle East that continues to ripple to this day. The invasion was, of course illegal as it lacked any basis in international law. Both the invasion, and the regime change that followed were neither done in self-defence against armed attack nor authorised by a UN Security Council resolution.
Moreover, as Mr Kofi Anan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations told the BBC unequivocally years later in 2004, “I have indicated that it is not in accordance with the UN Charter. From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it [the war] was illegal”. Of course, apologists of the war have continued to argue otherwise.
The consequences of the invasion, however, were clear and massive, not least its human toll. According to the Imperial War Museum, between 20,000 and 35,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed during the ground war, while 4,700 American soldiers died, and thousands more severely injured. Overall, an estimated 300,000 people were killed “from direct war violence in Iraq, while the reverberating effects of war continue to kill and sicken hundreds of thousands more”, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs last week. And often ranked as the single most devastating event in the Middle East since World War I, over five million persons were displaced from a war in which the US pumped an estimated $800 billion to service the combat needs of more than one million American and coalition troops who have served in Iraq since 2003.
Moreover, as the rhetoric of “liberation” gave way to the practical reality of American occupation, not least by the horrors of American soldiers’ abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Iraqis who had initially welcomed the Americans and even helped them destroy many statutes of Saddam, took to insurgencies of various hue. And the country descended into anarchy and a hotbed of terrorism that would reverberate across continents. Having disbanded the Iraqi army and intelligence forces, and purged the new government of Saddam’s Ba’athist party elements, the two most devastating actions of the US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that left Iraq bereft of internal cohesion and security, sectarian politics and strife ensued.
Previously little-known terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and later Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took over the country, unleashing a reign of senseless terror throughout the region and beyond. In this literally ungoverned climate, none of the publicly stated goals of the war was met, other than the killing of Saddam, despite the pretensions of elections and a new Shiite majority government led by former Prime Minister Nour-Al Maliki.
First, the WMD intelligence proved illusory as no WMD were found during or after the war. Worse, Saddam’s overthrow did not yield democracy, in Iraq or the wider Middle East, despite the repeated elections. It has not promoted stability either. What Iraq and the world got was that post-Saddam Iraq dissolved into chaos, which 20 years later, has not abated. The war also intensified anti-US attitudes, or even anti-Americanism overseas, particularly in the Middle East, but also in Western Europe, where polls showed strong opposition to the war.
But if the war seems to have been fought to (re)establish American standing as the world’s leading power, it largely succeeded. The war, in the short run, reasserted the US as an unchallengeable hegemon who defeated a regional power in Iraq. And it was the easy victory against Iraq that made it easier to go against Libya and Syria, leaving the quagmire we now have in those places. As data from the same Costs of War Project showed just last week, the death toll from Iraq, Libya and Syria—all Muslim majority countries—has exceeded 900,000 people, and an estimated $1.79 trillion.
The effects of these catastrophes have been felt far and near, including here in Nigeria, where the free flow of weapons from these conflicts, as well as ideological and strategic alliances have only made the home-grown Boko Haram situation so much worse. To date, the Nigerian government and governments in much of West Africa, are still grappling to contain the after-effects of the cascading events set off from far in the Middle East, with hardly any end in sight.
At Daily Trust, we cannot understand why the United States government would spend so much money only to unleash so much death and destruction. Yes, the US achieved regime change. But the Iraqi people have not enjoyed any form of peace and stability since. This clearly calls into question the real beneficiaries of the war, who are, of course, the thousands of US and Western private military contractors and the Western oil giants like ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Total, to whom the US State Department awarded no-bid concessions of Iraq’s oil wealth.
For these profiteers, Iraq has been an outstanding success. For everyone else, it is not. With America as the world’s largest defence spender by a wide margin, accounting for almost 60 per cent of total arms sales by the world’s 100 largest defence contractors, this has created Pentagon’s “revolving door” between the security establishment, Congress and Corporate America which feeds on the never-ending, often bloated war chest trough. But much of that spending is often more for profit and crony capitalism than for building democracy or an international order beneficial to all.
Happily, however, an international order based or direct or proxy wars is now being effectively challenged not only by a rising China, whatever its own defects or motives, but also by countries in the Middle East—neighbours united by race and culture but divided by American external interference and unnecessary sectarianism—take their destinies into their own hands and broker much-needed peace, as Iran and Saudi Arabia did only last week. With Iraq effectively a US colony in all but name, what with some 2,500 US combat forces still in station there, not enough to alarm the natives into resistance, but enough to keep Iraqi puppet governments in check, we hope that this new peace initiative based on self-awareness and alternatives to war will not only take hold but also spread to Yemen, Libya, Syria, Palestine, and beyond.
And, as Russia and US-led NATO tangle destructively over Ukraine, Daily Trust hopes that the most important lesson of the Iraq war would be learnt by all. This is the futility of superpowers to seek to control every nation on the planet and the thinking that war is fun and can be embarked upon under any crooked-up excuses. War is no fun. It unleashes suffering and deaths of men, women, and children. It destroys civilizations and creates economic and social woes. Iraqis have known these for 20 years, and know still today. The superpowers must stop invading other nations under one pretext or the other. War brings only ruin.
