Ten Year Anniversary of the Iraq War

Ten Year Anniversary of the Iraq War

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. I did not support the invasion in 2003 because I lived in Belgium and barely knew anything about it. But I have supported since returning home, and after learning all I could about it (and while going to school I wrote a 56 page paper supporting the decision to invade; I cited more than 150 sources). In the end, here is my ten year, very quick, final analysis:

The arguments for either side can be classified as moral or strategic. The moral arguments against invading were perhaps the most widely discussed in the news and by pundits. I rarely found any of them compelling; they tended to be devoid of historic insight and scope (though they often pretended to be highly cognizant of history). Moral arguments for invading were more often compelling, yet less often heard. Strategic arguments were strong on both sides. The issues here are much more complex and when tied to US grand strategy the issues become quite vexing and difficult to clearly side with or against.

So, for my calculation, I sum up the two types of arguments and give them a score. The pro-invasion moral arguments get a score of 1, and the uncompelling anti-invasion moral arguments were zero. The pro-invasion strategic arguments are a 1; but the anti-invasion strategic arguments are also a 1. So, they cancel out, leaving me with only the positive 1 from the pro-invasion moral arguments, and so I continue to believe it was a good idea. It is too bad that in the real world decision makers cannot use my simplified system. It makes it so easy for me to pretend to analyze important events from a great distance.

From a ten year perspective, here are 2 insights I don’t think I've read in any news: The greatest intelligence failure on the US side had nothing to do with WMD. It was the failure to predict the scope of the insurgency which followed the toppling of the Baathist regime. There were really two wars: the US vs Iraq, which ended in 3 weeks of the initial invasion. Then, the US, allied with Iraq, vs the insurgents (as well as others who flooded into Iraq, such as al Qaeda). And that is the second insight: one of the main reasons al Qaeda degraded so much from 2006 to 2009 was that they all went to Iraq and then got destroyed by the US military. They came to Iraq to fight, and they lost and became a terrorist movement with franchises (AQAP, AQIM and Al Qaeda Iraq, the latter of which is now dismantled), rather than one big terrorist group. In other words, the Iraq War actually had a big part to play in defeating al Qaeda globally, putting it where it is today.

And of course, this mini-commentary of the ten year anniversary would be incomplete without mentioning that the biggest intelligence failure of Saddam was his belief that the US would not invade at all. Had he believed we were going to really invade, he might not have pushed us so far and deceived us so much, and he might still be there, destroying the lives of his people. Thank goodness he misread George W. Bush.