Lookback: Iraq 2003
From day of infamy to one fleeting "feel good" moment.
From time to time I'd like to dredge up some old writing to see
how it holds up, and to reflect on what I've learned since. One
piece I often recall was the one I wrote when Bush started bombing
Baghdad in 2003. It was a landmark piece for me, a point when I
started focusing more on politics, with a distinctly egalitarian
and anti-war viewpoint that was actually pretty well settled for
me back in 1965-66. My views haven't changed much since then, but
my attention to the politics of war got a big boost on March 18,
2003 — following similar boosts on September 11, 2001, which
needs no introduction here, and September 28, 2000, which marked
the start of what I've long called the Shaul Moffaz Intifada (for
the Israeli security chief who ordered the massacre at the Al-Aqsa
mosque in Jerusalem; you can look it up as
Second Intifada, which was the beginning of Ariel Sharon's
Politicide). These three events fed the sense that those in
power could trust in violence to advance their causes, setting
Israel on a path to genocide in Gaza, and Trump and Netanyahu
to launching their war against Iran.
I started my "online notebook" on
February 13, 2001, with
no real ambitions. My first entry mentioned "a theological skirmish
with a correspondent today," and my second toyed with an album list.
Subsequent months mention music, movies, cooking, books, travel. I
was in New York on September 11, when Al Qaeda wrecked the World
Trade Center, and I didn't get back to Wichita where I could write
again on October 27. At that point, I wrote a couple of
brief entries on events
as I remembered them. I didn't start writing more about the war
until
December 3, when I wrote
this:
In this, the US leadership has managed to reverse the plain truth of
the 9/11 attacks, which is that the victims had no relationship to any
plausible complaint about the US or how the US power has damaged any
other part of the world, and that the terrorists had shown themselves
to be utterly immoral in their slaughter of innocents. Hertzberg is
right that no one disagrees with this judgment of the
terrorists. Where he misses the boat is in not realizing that the same
logic that lets the US leaders justify their bombing in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and other quarters of the Islamic world, is the selfsame logic
that leads terrorists, with their relatively crude weapons, to target
US innocents. And while in the US people like Hertzberg are grinning
over laundered news about US military success in Afghanistan, the even
more hardened government/terrorist factions in Israel have viciously
expanded their own power tryst.
The bottom line is that the logic of terrorism and repression, the
indifference and contempt for the lives and liberties of innocents, is
the common denominator for terrorists and repressive powers
alike. They need each other to justify themselves, in effect they are
each other. But why on earth do we need either of them?
I never for a moment bought the notion that going to war in
Afghanistan was the right thing to do, or for that matter was in
any way justified. Bush could have chosen to deal with 9/11 as
a simple crime, and pursued justice through diplomatic means. Had
he done so, hardly anyone would have second-guessed him. But he
was heavily invested in the idea of America as global hegemon,
and saw the 9/11 attacks as an affront to American power —
one that could only be redressed by a show of power. Besides, he
wanted a rematch with Iraq, and he saw Afghanistan as a stepping
stone to Iraq and whatever other grudges the US harbored (like
Iran and North Korea). Few Americans quarreled with his decision
to go to war, either, which was a reflection of how little they
had learned from the Cold War years.
While there were reports shortly after 9/11 that Bush was pushing
to find an excuse to go to war against Iraq, few people noticed until
the fall of 2002, when the Bush administration launched its public
campaign to invade Iraq. However, I noticed this isolated leak:
The main headline in yesterday's paper announced that Bush has decided
to go to war against Iraq: that the US would commit 200,000 ground troops,
and that Cheney was out of his foxhole and touring the Middle East to
tell whoever needs to know what the US is going to do. Today there was
not a single mention of it, no follow-up, no comments. Of course, part
of the reason has to be that the farm bill passed, which is obviously
much more important out here in Kansas, not to mention the sports page
dedicated to the American who came in 2nd in some skiing event (gee,
wonder who won?). I don't know which is more striking: the casualness
with which one nation decides to destroy another, or the indifference
of the people presumably represented by the first party.
I didn't make a serious effort to track Bush's path to war from
this early leak to the actual outbreak in March 2003, so my notebook
isn't much use in tracking that history. What little I wrote was
more concerned with how people on the left who should have known
better were falling for Bush's propaganda. For example, on
December 9 I commented
on a piece by George Packer called "The Liberal Quandry Over Iraq."
The liberals in question were pro-war (David Rieff, Leon Wieseltier,
Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, and Christopher Hitchens), and I found
much to critique. On
December 14 I tried playing
devil's advocate and "construct a better argument in favor of the US
invading Iraq in order to depose Saddam Hussein," before explaining
why the "better argument" was still a bad one. I wrote more on
December 28, based on a
Dissent questionnaire. Again, I'm not focusing on Bush and
his war promotion, but on confused people, nominally left of center,
who should know better. I concluded there:
If forced to choose between the leftists and the pacifists, I'd
take the pacifists any day. For one thing they have principles that
one can practice immediately and build on in everyday life, while
the anti-pacifist left can only struggle for power, becoming what
they first hated and losing their bearings.
There are more entries in January and February, but nothing major
until my big one as the war formally started in March. I've added
some annotation disguised as footnotes:
Yesterday, March 17, 2003, is another date that will live in infamy.
On this date, U.S. President George W. Bush rejected the efforts and
council of the United Nations, and the expressed concerns of overwhelming
numbers of people throughout the U.S. and all around the world, and
committed the U.S. to attack, invade, and occupy Iraq, to prosecute or
kill Iraq's government leaders, and to install a new government
favorable to U.S. interests.
That Bush has given Iraq's Saddam Hussein 48 hours to surrender in
order to spare Iraq inestimable destruction is clearly intended to
shift blame for this war to Saddam. While this particular ploy may
have been intended cynically, we must be clear that this war would
not be looming were it not for numerous acts that Saddam and Iraq
have committed, including aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait,
use of poison gas both against Iran and against the Kurdish minority
within Iraq, and long-term efforts to obtain horrific weapons. We
should also be clear that after a broad U.N. coalition drove Iraq out
of Kuwait and brokered a cease-fire that left Saddam in power, his
government failed to show good faith in implementing the disarmament
specified in the cease-fire and U.N. mandates. Even now, Saddam's
character is put to severe test, where he has within his power one
last chance to put his country's welfare about his own. If he fails
to do so, we must conclude not only that he is a long-standing war
criminal, but that he is the essential cause for this war.[1]
However, the proximate cause for this war lies squarely with the Bush
administration, aided and abetted by the so-called "coalition of the
willing." They are the ones who rejected concerted efforts by Iraq
and the U.N. to complete and verify Iraq's mandated disarmament, who
pushed the new agenda of regime change, and who locked this agenda
into a final ultimatum. In pushing for regime change, Bush continued
and escalated policies of previous U.S. presidents, especially Bill
Clinton, during whose administration the U.S. worked deliberately to
sabotage the inspections process, to promote Iraqi opposition to
Saddam Hussein, to prolong sanctions which inflicted great hardships
on the Iraqi people, to engender much ill will. Especially complicit
in this war is the Republican-led U.S. Congress, which passed a law
in 1998 directing that U.S. policy toward Iraq work toward regime
change, and Democrat President Bill Clinton, who signed that law,
and who repeatedly ordered air strikes against Iraq. But the actual
push to war, the setting of the time table and the issuing of the
ultimatum, was squarely the responsibility of George W. Bush. In
this act, which he was completely free not to do, Bush has placed
his name high on the list of notable war criminals of the last
century.
As I write this, we cannot even remotely predict how this war will
play out, how many people will die or have their lives tragically
transfigured, how much property will be destroyed, how much damage
will be done to the environment, what the long-term effects of this
war will be on the economy and civilization, both regionally and
throughout the world. In launching his war, Bush is marching blithely
into the unknown, and dragging the world with him. It is generally
believed that U.S. military might is such that it will quickly
be able to subdue resistance from Iraq's depleted and mostly disarmed
military, and that the U.S. will quickly dispose of Saddam Hussein
and his top people. However, it is widely speculated that over the
course of U.S. occupation there will be continuing resistance and
guerrilla warfare to burden the expense of occupation, in the hope
of sending an exasperated occupation army packing. It is expected
that the fury over the war will lead to new acts of terrorism directed
against U.S. citizens and interests elsewhere in the world, possibly
including the U.S. homeland. It is already the case that Bush's
insistence on going to war, along with many other aspects of his
foreign policy, has soured relations between the U.S. and a great
many nations and people of the world, including many traditional
allies, and that this situation will get progressively worse the
longer and nastier the war and occupation goes on.
There is, I think, one hope to minimize the damage that inevitably
comes with this war. This is for the Iraqi people, at least those
who survive the initial onslaught, to roll over and play dead, to
not oppose or resist invasion and occupation, and to play on the
U.S.'s much bruited "good intentions" -- the dubious argument that
the U.S. is invading Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people. To do this
they must not only not resist, they must collaborate to prevent
others from resisting.[2] Moreover, they must adopt the highest principles
of their occupiers: embrace democracy and respect the civil rights of
minorities. They should in fact go further: to denounce war, to refuse
to support a military, to depend on the U.N. for secure borders, and
not to engage in any hostile foreign relations. The reasons for this
are twofold: in the long-run, these are all good things to do; in
the short-run, they remove any real excuse for the U.S. to continue
its occupation, and will hasten the exit of U.S. forces.[3]
It is, of course, possible that the U.S.'s "good intentions" are
cynical and fraudulent. Over the last fifty years, the U.S. has
a very poor record of promoting democracy, and has a very aggressive
record of promoting U.S. business interests. (And in this regard,
Bush has proven to run the most right-wing administration in U.S.
history.) Many of the same people who in the U.S. government promoted
war on Iraq clearly have further names on their lists of enemies --
Syria, Iran, even Saudi Arabia -- and a number of fantastic scenarios
have been talked up. But the aggressive projection of U.S. military
force depends on having enemies that can only be kept at bay by such
force. An Iraq, with no Saddam Hussein, with no military, with no
way to threaten its neighbors, with its own people organized into
a stable, respectful democracy, provides no excuse for occupation.
If those conditions prevail, which is within the power of the Iraqi
people to make happen, even the Bush administration would have to
pull out.
There are, of course, other things that will be necessary to overcome
the inevitable damage of this war. Presumably the war and occupation
will at least get rid of one set of war criminals: Saddam Hussein and
his crew. The other set of war criminals, the Bush administration in
particular, need to be voted out of office. The consequences of Bush's
foreign policy, even if they luck out and yield a democratic Iraq,
bear extraordinary costs and engender international distrust at the
same time Bush's tax policy bankrupts the U.S. government and
undermines the U.S. dollar while Bush's domestic policies lay workers
off and degrade the environment. But also the world community needs
to come to grips with conflicts in ways that look beyond self-interest
to provide systematic means to peacefully resolve conflicts that might
otherwise turn into injustice and war. That Saddam Hussein was allowed
to turn into a monster, the essential cause of Bush's Iraq war, was
the consequence of a great many failures along the way -- serious
mistakes on the part of nations, including the U.S., who promoted him
politically, who armed him, who encouraged him to wage war with Iran,
and so forth. The U.S. must recognize that it cannot alone solve
conflicts such as these; the many nations of the world must in turn
step up to the responsibility.
I believe that this is in fact the way the world is, unfortunately
too slowly, moving: despite the immense amount of terrorism and war
of the past few years, people all around the world are, in their
hearts, actually moving to a much firmer realization of the need for
peace, order, respect, fairness, and opportunity for all. The worldwide
reaction of shock and horror at the toppling of the World Trade Center
was one expression of this; the worldwide protest against Bush's Iraq
war was another. The only way to have peace is to be peaceable.[4]
[1] Rereading this, and other posts from the same period, I think I
went too far in indicting Saddam Hussein. Not that, in some ideal court
of justice, he wasn't guilty of all this and much more, but few if any
of his "crimes" factored into Bush's decision to invade. From Bush's
personal perspective, Iraq was a blot on his father's legacy, and a
personal challenge to succeed where his father had failed. From the
standpoint of the other neocons, this was about demonstrating American
power as forcefully as possible. One should remember that Iraq was
encouraged to invade Iran by Persian Gulf states, and ultimately by
support of American arms, and that Iraq turned on Kuwait only after
a shakedown. To indict Hussein as the "essential" cause of the war
overlooks a lot of disreputable and malicious action by the US and
other parties. It could also be taken as justifying the war, but I
hope I was clear enough in the next paragraph that no one came away
with that idea.
[2] This hope was, of course, doomed to failure. Still, it is
surprising the extent to which this actually happened: most Iraqi
soldiers abandoned their units, and civilians (warily more often
than eagerly) welcome their "liberators." While resistance may
have been inevitable, Americans provoked it in many ways: by
permitting (or simply being incapable of restraining) internecine
violence by Shias and Kurds against Baathists (or more generally
Sunnis); by dismantling the Baathist state and civil order; and
by just being arrogant, trigger-happy assholes.
[3]: The US never allowed any of these things to happen, nor did
Bush and his people do anything to make them possible. Rather, they
moved almost immediately to impose an occupation government that
opened the country up to foreign exploitations, while offering Iraqis
nothing of note. The Paul Bremer administration destroyed any chance
of a peaceful postwar transition to self-government. When the Bremer
government proved untenable, it was replaced with a Quisling puppet
regime, and eventually with highly-rigged elections to populate a
government that was bitterly divided and lacked any real autonomy.
My next line about "cynical and fraudulent" proved not only true but
an understatement.
[4]: Again, way too optimistic. It's taken a while, but the US has
finally moved on to Iran, although Trump is still far short of occupying
Tehran, and unlikely ever to. But the war mentality persists, and has if
anything grown more deeply rooted, even though they have nothing good
to show for all their efforts. The mental rut is way too deep for them
to escape (or maybe their minds and feelings are just too shallow).
I wrote more in following days. On
March 19, I explained some
of my idealistic notions that Iraqis should practice pacifism by
referring to John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of
World War II. Some war hawks had recently been stressing how
successful the US occupation of Japan and Germany had been. Dower
wrote several pieces stressing not only that Iraq isn't analogous,
but that America has changed profoundly since WWII. It was obvious
to me that Iraqis would have a much harder time blaming themselves
for the disaster of war and occupation than WWII-era Japanese or
Germans did. But also the US was much less innocent in the start
of this war. I also admitted:
There is little reason to be optimistic at this stage. We know for
certain that there will be resistance. We know that Saddam Hussein and
his party do not believe in or practice peace. We know that jihadists
like Osama Bin Laden do not believe in or practice peace. We also know
that when faced with danger, military forces all the world over, all
throughout history, kill and destroy unnecessarily, often
deliberately, sometimes just inadvertently, which feeds a vicious
cycle of resistance and retribution. We also know that alien
occupation armies misunderstand things, communicate poorly, grow
impatient and resentful, get spooked easily, and often with little
provocation resort to force, sometimes viciously. Even if we accept
the proposition that the U.S. has nothing but good intentions toward
the Iraqi people, remaining peaceable is going to be a tall order. So
while it's what I prescribe, it's not what I expect to happen.
The next couple days, I mentioned the war in passing, noting its
"progress" and expressing my misgivings. Already on
March 25 I admitted:
The war grinds on. The fantasy that expected the Iraqis to roll out
the red carpet for their American liberators has been dashed. Nobody
expects that Iraq will be able to repulse the U.S. invasion, but the
level and form of resistance pretty much guarantees that eventually
the U.S. will leave Iraq without having accomplished anything more
notable than the perverse satisfaction of serving up Saddam's head on
some platter.
As I said earlier, the level of resistance will be telling. If you
want a rule of thumb for neocolonialist wars of occupation, it's that
once you can't tell your friends from your enemies in the native
population, you're fucked. . . .
So, let's face it, the U.S. war against Iraq is a colossal
failure. The only question remaining is how long it will take the
U.S. to give up and get out, and how much destruction the U.S. will
leave in its wake. So remember this: This war did not have to
happen. No one who has died, been injured, been captured, been
terrorized by this war had to suffer. This only happened because of
one mad tyrant: George W. Bush. Even today, if sanity were to suddenly
overcome him, all he'd have to do is cease fire and order the troops
home. Every day, every minute that he does not do this just adds to
the grossness of his crime.
It occurs to me that I should pull all of the Iraq entries out and
put them into a single, chronological file. As you now know, the US
occupation extended the Iraqi government sent the US packing in 2011.
After that, ISIS took over Mosul and most of northwest Iraq, leaving
the Baghdad government little alternative but to bring the Americans
back in, and extending the war into Syria. That intervention lasted
over seven years (2014-2021), but even now there are over 2,500 US
troops left in Iraq.
But for purposes here, I want to limit myself to one more post.
I should have been more explicit about what happened on April 9.
That was the day when the huge statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos
Square was pulled down, symbolizing the capture of Baghdad:
There was a period back in the Afghanistan war when the Northern
Alliance started reeling off a quick series of victories — not
so much that they were defeating the Taliban in confrontations as that
the Taliban was high-tailing it out of the cities, allowing Herat,
Kabul, and Kandahar to fall in quick succession. The hawks then made
haste to trumpet their victory and to dump on anyone who had doubted
the US in this war. Back then, I referred to those few weeks as "the
feel good days of the war." Well, we had something like that in Iraq,
too, except that use of the plural now seems unwarranted. So mark it
on your calendar, Wednesday, April 9, 2003, was the feel good day of
the Iraq war. The collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime has proceeded
apace, but there seems to be much less to feel good about. One big
thing was the killing of the bigwig shia collaborators that the US
started to promote, combined with the unwillingness of other shia
bigwigs to collaborate. One of the problems with this is that it
suggests that the US, as always, is looking for religious leaders to
control the people — which in turn threatens to roll back the
one thing Saddam had going for his regime, which was that it was
strongly secular. The fact is, you want to introduce something
resembling liberal democracy in Iraq, you have to promote
secularism. (Of course, given the contempt that Bush has for liberal
democracy in the US, it's hard to believe that he really wants
that.)
Bigger still is the whole looting thing, as well as mob reprisals
against Baath leaders, which threaten to turn into the much predicted
Iraqi-on-Iraqi warfare. The looting itself basically means that what
infrastructure the US somehow managed not to destroy will be taken
down by Iraqi mobs. The likelihood that those mobs are anything other
than just isolated hoodlums is small, but collectively the damage that
they inflict is likely to be huge. And given how unlikely it is that
the US, its allies, and the rest of the world who were so blatantly
disregarded in this whole affair, are to actually pay for anything
resembling real reconstruction, this is just digging an ever deeper
hole. While right now, given that their is still armed (if not
necessarily organized) resistance to the US, it's hard to see how the
US could keep order even if it wants to (which is to say the least a
mixed proposition), but failure to do so is already setting the US up
as responsible for the looting, and adding to the already huge
responsibility that the US bears for the current and future misery of
the Iraqi people. And when the US does start to enforce order, what is
bound to happen? More dead Iraqis. And who's responsible for that? The
US. If this had just happened out of the blue, I might be a bit
sympathetic, but this is exactly what we had predicted as the
inevitable given the US course of action.
So happy last Wednesday. That's very likely to be the last one for
a long time now.
Indeed, it all got much worse after that. According to the
Wikipedia article on
2003 invasion of Iraq, the war lasted 1 month + 11 days,
ending on May 1 with Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech.
(I didn't even post on the speech. By then, the situation was
deteriorating, but Bush was getting a lot of press pressure
to declare victory and an "end of major military operations.")
During this phase, 139 American forces were killed, as well as
11-45 thousand Iraqis. But by the time in 2011 when American
troops finally left, the death count stood at 4,492. There
are
various counts and estimates of Iraqi deaths, ranging from 186,901
minimum by the Iraq Body Count project to over one million. More
were killed in the 2013-17 ISIL war.
Back in the heady early days of the Iraq War, hawks were boasting
about moving on to Damascus and Tehran next. The US found itself
bombing Syria as a result of the ISIL War, on behalf of Iraq. Only
in 2025 was Trump able to start bombing Iran in the
Twelve-Day War of June 13-24, followed by renewed bombing
starting February 28, 2026, in a conflict that is still far from
settled.
Trump and his advisers do seem to have learned one lesson from
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: that the US is simply not capable of
occupying and managing foreign countries, especially one as large
and well-organized as Iran. On the other hand, three American
presidents periodically bombed Iraq over 12 years (1991-2003)
before Bush decided that the only way he could actually achieve
his goal of toppling Iraq's regime was a full-scale invasion. The
prospects of Trump toppling Iran without "boots on the ground" are
no better, and probably much worse. With no "win" even remotely
imaginable, what point can the war possibly serve? It's coming
off as an exercise in performative cruelty, or would be if Iran
had no power to hit back. But they've already "hit back" at US
bases and allies much more effectively than Iraq or Afghanistan
(or Venezuela) ever could. The notion that he could bomb with
impunity, as the US had repeatedly done in Iraq and Afghanistan,
has already been disproven. His cycling through bombing lulls
and apocalyptic threats show he has no plan, but also can't
admit his cluelessness.
Still, while Trump is unlikely to repeat all of the
miscalculations that Bush made in Iraq, he has already made many
that could have been avoided had he learned the most basic lessons
of Bush's wars:
Trump, like Bush, made no serious effort to try diplomacy
before resorting to force. This boxed him into finally having to
use force to save face. Of course, he did this willingly because
he has great faith in force, and a view of power that interprets
any concession as humiliating. The main point above is that Bush
chose his war consciously, and could all by himself have avoided
that choice. As such, he bears complete personal responsibility.
Same for Trump. Even if we agree that Netanyahu tricked him, Trump
could have said no. That he didn't makes him responsible. In resorting to force, Trump (like Bush) gave no consideration
to it not working, let alone backfiring. He had little if any notion
of what might go wrong, or even of how others might view his acts.
He had no concept of consequences, or perhaps he just figured that
nothing bad could ever happen to him: his ignorance is exceeded only
by his carelessness. My favorite line above is "Bush is marching
blithely into the unknown, and dragging the world with him." Trump
did the same, on a larger playing field, with much more at risk.
It's amusing, and ridiculous, to hear Trump recite the lengths
of various other wars, as if any amount of time can correct for
the horrible mistakes he has made. Like Bush, he will long be
remembered as the guy who chose war when he didn't have to, to
solve a problem that didn't exist, with a solution that couldn't
possibly work. Unlike Bush, he never even tried to sell us on
his fantasy. Asking permission would only have detracted from
his sense of omnipotence as president.
For me, this cult of power has long been central. That was the
lesson I took from the Vietnam War, prosecuted by the generation
of Americans who emerged victorious from WWII, convinced they had
saved the world from fascism, their heads so swelled they threw
off their founders warnings about the peril of a standing army and
follies of going "abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Since
then, politicians of both parties have fought a rear-guard battle
to salvage the feelings that first drove them to war, to reclaim
the sense of power and righteousness they held after liberating
the Nazi death camps and obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For all of my 75 years, they have tried to justify and sanctify
their obscene acts and rationalizations (a conceit John Lennon
skewered with "but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can
see"). Trump's only innovation is that he is shameless: he feels
no pain or remorse, pretends to no greater good, and pursues nothing
beyond his own profit and imagined glory. Give him no credit if he
finally frees us from our illusions. They should have been clear,
as they were to me, long ago.
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