The Iraq invasion: when US lost its all-powerful image

 The post-mortems started on the twentieth anniversary of George W Bush's decision to invade Iraq with British support and they look like continuing. The latest was Brian Clemons' analysis on Al-Jazeera last weekend, headlined "do we owe Iraq an apology?" Clemons agreed with his expert guests that the invasion was a mistake. There will be more from that programme later. 

First a quote from last Friday's Now Show. Steve Punt said that the Iraq war marked "the start of the fall in trust in experts" For once, he was wrong. It surely reinforced the standing of real  experts who quickly established that the two excuses for going to war, Saddam's supposed support for al-Qaida and development of nuclear and chemical weapons, were false. What it did do was to increase the mistrust of official government statements and the newspapers which backed them up. Sadly, the fake news, based largely on the word of a former Iraqi politician and others who stood to gain from régime change, was too easily accepted by the US public. As I recall, we were more sceptical over here, a view enhanced by expert David Kelly's leaking the findings of his UN inspection team that there no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Later, it was revealed that aerial and satellite surveillance had been giving the CIA the same information, that any WMD programmes had been abandoned by Saddam. Either this advice was not passed on to the president, or he had ignored it.) In the States, only a small group of journalists working for the Knight Ridder group got it right.

That Bottom Line programme gave as the main reason for the invasion that America "wanted a war". The destruction of the Twin Towers in 2011 had been a humiliation and, from the president downwards, the nation wished to show that the US was still top dog in the world. There were also those hawks in the administration and Congress who saw an easy victory in Iraq as a path to Iran, enemy no. 1 to America's allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. I recall picking out some other factors on CIX in January 2003:

The motives behind such adventures are almost always complex.

There really are people who believe that Saddam is behind al-Qa'ida
(demonstrably untrue) and that he plans to launch atomic and
biological weapons against the West (he is evil, but not fanatic).

These must be the major motives of the American people. However, I
am sure that Bush is also being lobbied, quietly, by other Middle
Eastern regimes - and not just in Jerusalem - to impose a greater
measure of control on Iraq.

There may even be an understanding with bin Laden or his successors
that al-Qa'ida will lay off America if Saddam is toppled and a more
overtly Islamic regime installed in Baghdad.

The desire by the oil majors to have a more stable industry, and a
natural desire by a son to show that he is as good as his father,
are strong contributory factors IMO.

Further, US industrial activity is low at present. There is nothing
like a war to give a boost to manufacturing and electronics.

I would now discount the bin Laden connection and the commercial considerations. However, the roots of the Iraq invasion do go back to George Bush Snr's Desert Shield and Desert Storm of 1990-91, or rather their unsatisfactory conclusion. Having achieved the liberation of Kuwait, the allied forces were unwilling to go on to Baghdad. There was no formal surrender by Iraq, but instead an armistice was signed by the leaders of the opposing armies. It has been suggested that if Saddam had been compelled publicly to sign a surrender document, his position as head of state would have been untenable and that a junta more favourable to the US would have taken over. A "no-fly" zone was established as part of the peace deal, but critically it excluded helicopters. Saddam later used attack helicopters decisively against a rebellion, one supported only verbally by Bush.

Saddam's decision to take over Kuwait was clearly a result of misreading signals from the US. UPI recalled during the aftermath of the invasion that Saddam had long been a CIA asset:

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Saddam was part of a six-man squad tasked with assassinating Qasim. That initial attempt was botched, but the CIA took care of Saddam and eventually he got the top job in Iraq. So much was he "our man" in the Middle East that Margaret Thatcher felt compelled to dismiss initial reports of Saddam's poison-gas massacre of Kurds at Halabja in 1988 as "Iranian propaganda".  So Saddam probably felt assured of US support when he took over Kuwait. He underestimated Kuwait's influence in the West, particularly the power of the Kuwait investment arm, which had large interests in the New York stock market.

There is now no longer a strong man in Baghdad nor a strong government. As a result, Iran's position is ironically strengthened. An easy victory in Iraq was supposed to open up the "path to Tehran". Instead, in spite of subverting Iraq's Republican Guard, victory was anything but easy and at least a quarter of a million Iraqis paid the price with their lives. A further hundred thousand died in the Shi'a-Sunni clashes which followed the toppling of Saddam.

So Iraqis are due an apology. Not only has their built and artistic heritage been despoiled or looted, their utilities - electricity and water - are barely functional and intra-religious conflict is still rife. Professor (former General) Andrew Bacevich opined on The Bottom Line that America had a history of abandoning nations after fighting over them, citing Vietnam. He also claimed: "Iraq gave us Donald Trump". The slogan "make America great again" would not have had as much traction if it had not been for Iraq.

On the wider stage, the Iraq invasion was an affront to the United Nations, who had proscribed the action. This first major breach of the United Nations charter no doubt encouraged later invaders.

There is a moral for our government, too. We should not be stooges for another power, as Blair was for Bush, but analyse critically the reasons for joining a war, as Wilson did over Vietnam. There is a danger that we will be dragged into a US-Israeli-Saudi attack on Iran, whose consequences would be even more dire than those of that invasion twenty years ago.