Why the invasion of Iraq was 'one of the most grievous errors in superpower history': report

Twenty years have passed since the Bush Administration launched a full-fledged invasion of Iraq, claiming that dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would use them against the United States and its allies if given a chance. Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. forces as "liberators" and that Iraq, post-Hussein, would become a blueprint for democracy in the Islamic world.

But the U.S. invasion of Iraq proved disastrous in many ways. The fictional weapons of mass destruction were never found, and Iraq fell into a state of chaos after Hussein was overthrown and executed — chaos that later helped the terrorist group ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) gain a foothold there. Hussein was a vicious dictator, but he was a secular dictator and a modernist who rejected the severe Islamist fundamentalism and Shariah law that al-Qaeda and the Taliban favored.

In an essay for the March 2023 issue of the libertarian Reason, journalist Brian Doherty looks back on the last 20 years of Iraqi history and examines some of the long-term damage that U.S. foreign policy inflicted on that country. The invasion, Doherty stresses, deprived Iraq of the "orderly operation of bourgeois society that constitutes the good life."

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"The invasion eliminated a brutal dictator, something many Iraqis were grateful for in itself," Doherty explains. "But it also, for years, eliminated even the distant vision of that good life.… As late as 2016, 93 percent of polled young Iraqis considered Americans their enemies for a war that Bush and his team framed as their liberation."

The Bush Administration used al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to justify the invasion, but Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Hussein and al Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden were not allies; in fact, al Qaeda viewed Hussein’s secularism as the work of an infidel. And Doherty points out that Bush and his allies wanted to oust Hussein long before 9/11.

"Even before September 11, Bush Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill would later report, one of the administration’s highest priorities was finding a way to topple Saddam," Doherty recalls. "In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, most any military act, no matter how severe or reckless, could be framed as an urgent fight against terrorism, even if not related to 9/11 itself. The prospect of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) — deploying them, selling them, maybe just handing them over to Osama bin Laden — was a bedtime story with terrifying potency for a rattled public…. The WMDs were not found. They were not there."

The neocon mega-hawks of the Bush Administration, Doherty notes, promised that invading Iraq would mean greater stability in the Middle East. But it brought just the opposite.

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"What the Bush Administration sold as a grim but necessary surgical strike for democracy and stability in the Middle East and the world has been revealed over the past two decades as one of the most grievous errors in superpower history," Doherty laments. "Mendacious in its beginnings, incompetent in its aftermath, and downright criminal in the death and civilizational wreckage it caused, the Iraq War was a catastrophe America has not yet properly reckoned with."

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Read Reason’s full report at this link.