The point of regime change in Iraq was presumably to create a state that was stable and legitimate, yet friendly to the United States. This was always going to be a formidable task but the way the war was prosecuted made success less likely. The outcome appears to be a failed state plagued by prolonged insurgency, verging on civil war, in which the main beneficiary appears to be pro-Iranian Shia groups. What went wrong and why?
Iraq was a fragile artificial state from its creation by Britain, with communal cleavages and instability built in. Only over several decades of struggle was a formula for stability found: a brutal strongman ruling through a semi-totalitarian party and relying on one of Iraqi's communities against the others. The US in effect deconstructed this state without having--or even planning for--a viable replacement for it.
Many argue that the particular way the Bush administration went about regime change much increased the chances of failure. According to Anthony Cordesman,1 the foremost American expert on Gulf security, the US made multiple "strategic mistakes." It only planned the war it wanted to fight--against the debilitated Iraq army--not the reconstruction needed in the aftermath of regime change. Washington expected a quick painless war in which its high tech military would quickly overwhelm Saddam's regime and substitute a new leadership from the Iraqi exiles it imported, atop a still-intact state bureaucracy. Rumsfeld brushed aside the recommendations of his generals that 400,000 troops would be needed for the occupation and forced them to accept a fraction of that. Atif Kubursi observes that US force configurations were not designed for the stabilization of Iraq which would have required a larger and more labor intensive policing presence; the smaller force of capital intensive （high tech and high firepower weaponry, air power）,was however sufficient to remove Saddam and make it impossible for the US to be militarily dislodged from Iraq. 2 George Packer in Assassins Gate reveals that the Pentagon eschewed post-war planning because, in exposing the difficulties the US would face, such planning might have obstructed the drive to war. He writes that 'The arrogance phase [of the US war] was going in undermanned, under-resourced, [expecting to] skim off the top layer of leadership, take control of a functioning state, and be out by six weeks and get the oil funds to pay for it.' 3 Inexplicably US proconsul Paul Bremer exacerbated a dire situation through his dissolution of the Iraqi army, creating at a stroke tens of thousands of experienced and armed fighters that would join the resistance; US forces had also failed to secure the multiple arms dumps positioned around Iraq. Having done this, the US, wanting to keep Iraq weak, failed for almost a year to start reconstructing an Iraqi security force while sectarian militias were allowed to fill the vacuum. The purge and de-Ba'thification of the bureaucracy and other state institutions deprived the state of experienced officials and creating massive disaffected unemployed. Pro-US exile groups turned out to have little support inside Iraq and those that did were Shiite groups with ties to Iran.
The original sin was the inability to understand that the invasion would not be welcomed as liberation but as an affront to Iraqi nationalism, hence to anticipate and plan for the neutralization of resistance. Anthony Shadid says it was never likely the US would be welcomed as a liberator since Iraqis combined national pride with a profound mistrust of the US and UK rooted in the colonial experience, the near-genocidal sanctions they had imposed on the country and America’s near total support for Israel.4 Cordesman writes that US officials were slow to react to insurgency because they could not face the fact that it was rooted in broad-based nationalism, was largely domestic （foreign fighters are a small proportion of insurgents） and enjoyed popular support concentrated in but not exclusive to Sunni areas. Toby Dodge and others show that the US actually created the insurgency and that might not have been inevitable had it acted differently in Iraq. 5 The breakdown of security, infrastructure, and public health, the mass unemployment inflicted by the dissolution of the army, purge of the bureaucracy and public sector layoffs, the death of perhaps 100,000 people, mostly civilians, in the first year of war and occupation6, the halving of GNP/capita compared to 2001, the imposition of a puppet government of mostly exiles without popular bases in Iraq, the flooding of the country with foreign mercenaries and contractors, the open avowal of the intention to occupy it for at least three years and to acquire permanent basing rights, and the attempt, in violation of the Geneva convention, to privatize and sell off Iraq's oil assets to Western buyers7 --all ensured that Iraqis would view the foreign armies as occupiers, not liberators. Falah Aljibury contends that it was the plan to sell off Iraq's oil which ultimately led to the insurgency; Cordesman argues that the biggest mistake which turned Iraqis against the occupation was its failure to make the security of Iraqis a priority.
The US responded to the growing resistance it encountered with tactics pioneered by Israel in occupied Palestine 8: bombing and firing on densely populated urban areas; demolishing homes, collective punishment of villages, herding of thousands into detention camps, food blockades of suspected insurgent areas, and the 'daily humiliations and occasional brutalities that come with the presence of an occupying army. Western polls in the year after the invasion showed that 82 percent of Iraqis opposed the occupation and 57 percent wanted foreign troops to leave immediately; US troops were widely seen as 'lacking in respect for the country's people, religion and traditions' and 'indiscriminate in their use of force when civilians are nearby.' Five percent or less of Iraqis believed the U.S. invaded 'to assist the Iraqi people,' destroy WMDs or establish democracy, while 43% said the aim was 'to rob Iraq's oil.' More than 50 percent said attacks on US troops were 'justified' or 'sometimes justified.' Over two years of occupation, Iraqi opinion only hardened against the occupation.
A US commander infamously declared: 'With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.' However this approach only enflamed resistance which mushroomed from about 5,000 Saddam loyalists using leftover Iraqi army equipment, into a disparate yet potent force of up to 20,000 equipped with explosives capable of knocking out even heavily armored military vehicles. America's inability to pacify the country shattered its aura of military invincibility, showing that asymmetric warfare can delay and possibly checkmate the strongest military power in the world. In 2005, attacks on coalition forces were 50 per day rising to as high as 130; in Baghdad there were 30 major attacks per week.
State reconstruction proceeded by trail and error, producing a very flawed outcome. The destruction of the secular Ba’thist centre left a vacuum in which sectarian/ethnic leadership took over. Extremist insurgents tried to provoke civil war as a way of preventing consolidation of what they saw as a collaborationist regime. But US policies of relying on the Kurds against the Arabs and the Shia against the Sunnis and of institutionalizing ethnic/sectarian politics in the ruling bodies it coopted created the conditions for this. Biddle argues that the Bush strategy of constructing security forces by relying on the Shia and Kurds inflamed civil war since the Sunnis perceived the "national" army as a sectarian force. The US preoccupation with elections and constitution-making in the absence of viable cross-sectarian political parties encouraged sectarian politics; sectarian groups voted in elections as blocs, creating what looked like permanent triumphant majorities and disaffected minorities9. The immense majority of analysts argued that the so-called “federalist” constitution, breaking up state authority into cantons and precipitating a struggle among them over oil resources, was a recipe for an descent to full scale civil war10.
Assuming that Iraqi oil would quickly flow and fund rapid re-construction, there was no planning for reconstruction aid. Widespread crime and insecurity made it reconstruction costly and difficult, most of the money went on security or enormous salaries for foreign officials, was spent outside Iraq, or was dissipated in vast waste, war profiteering and corruption. It is telling that while total US reconstruction aid to Japan 1946-52, was 15.2 billion in constant 2005 dollars Iraq got 28.9 in 2003-06 but experienced little reconstruction.
Why went wrong? Were the failures in Iraq honest mistakes? Cordesman points to institutional failures in the US government. Too much credence was given to neo-con ideologies who claimed democracy was the default alternative if only the dictator was removed and to self-interested exiles who grossly exaggerate popular support for “liberation” Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld deluded themselves by filtering out information that did not fit their preconceived ideological beliefs that the US would be welcomed and democracy easily imposed at gun point. But policy-makers delusions appear to have been wilful: they not only ignored the intelligence professionals who warned against these views but systematically by-passed the interagency processes designed to prevent arbitrary decisions. Then, after the conquest, US officials in Iraq, recruited for ideological affiliations, on short tours and lacking Arabic and cultural familiarity or expertise in reconstruction, stayed holed up in bunker zones isolated from Iraqis, leaving the neighbourhoods and provinces to fend for themselves.
Another problem was that the US sought to reach its goals on the cheap. Pentagon chiefs insisted on keeping troop commitments to a minimum and resisted planning for long term nation-building and anti-insurgency. They falsely expected Iraq's oil money would pay for reconstruction. They also expected to get wide international support and UN Security Council approval that would enable financial and military commitments to be widely shared. By contemptuously ignoring the international community in going to war, they afflicting the post-Saddam regime with an international as well as a domestic legitimacy deficit. Without international legitimacy, a real multinational force that might have had some legitimacy in Iraq could not be mounted and occupation by the conquerors precipitated and legitimised the insurgency. The US cannot internationalize Iraq without giving up control; but without internationalizing security, it must sustain the occupation that fuels insurgency.
But the root of the problem was that the so-called liberation of Iraq was simply a pretence or ideological self-justification for a war prosecuted on other grounds--to serve Israeli interests, to grab oil and to make an example of Iraq as a way of demonstrating US power. It is therefore not surprising that so little care was taking or resources invested to minimize the damage to Iraq and avoid state collapse; this, in turn made it inevitable that the US would face insurgency and US strategy to counter the insurgency helped precipitate the drift toward civil war.
John Gee writes: "When the history of 'what went
wrong in Iraq' comes to be written, there will be [those] that insist
upon seeing the US intervention as a noble enterprise that was derailed
by a combination of misguided policies and an insurgency of
unanticipated strength...[and] that a different set of post-occupation
policies...could have resulted in success. They will be wrong. The
basic problem is the occupation itself - but insensitivity to Iraqi
opinions, failure to meet desperate social and economic needs and
ill-considered policy initiatives that play well in neo-conservative
think-tanks in Washington but not in the real world, only made things
worse. Iraq is not the USA's to be partitioned, privatized or
remolded..."11
JIME Center. All rights reserved.