Americans Did Liberate Iraq. They Just Failed to Protect It.
The only weapon of mass destruction was Saddam.
The world shares much blame for Iraq’s darkest decades. A new report that condemns former Prime Minister Tony Blair is only the start. Launched on June 15, 2009, the Chilcot Inquiry is Britain’s second and almost certainly most comprehensive review of the UK’s conduct in the run-up to, invasion and occupation of Iraq. To many observers, including a British politician who claimed to have reviewed the 2.6 million word document in a single morning, Sir John Chilcot has already condemned one man to eternal damnation.
Summaries of the report so far have particular focus on intelligence failures, the exaggerated case for war and poor preparedness for the aftermath. For Americans, this will be all too familiar after the Duelfer report and the Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq. To others in the West, it is far more simple: Bush and Blair lied, people died.
As an Iraqi, I welcomed the liberation of my country, but was against the occupation, mismanagement and corruption that followed. It is painful to think, for example, of how the United States thought that a rapidly assembled new Iraqi force of thirty thousand men could have secured Iraq’s vast borders from the jihadists that have caused interminable chaos.
But at the end of the day, Saddam's removal was morally and politically right—all else is debatable. What is fascinating in the initial aftermath of this report is how few Iraqi voices are being heard. Some Western commentators, baying for political blood, and perhaps a Hague tribunal for Bush, Blair and company, might be surprised that many Iraqis are not so interested in the weapon of mass destruction debate. Some coverage of Iraqi opinion seems selective—one article listed a collection of bloggers and journalists with Baathist sympathies.
For those of us who fled one of the worst post–World War II tyrants the world has ever seen, the biggest weapon of mass destruction in Iraq was Saddam himself as he turned my country into a field of mass graves. Therefore it is interesting to cast so much blame on those who sought to remove him. Britons, and perhaps those in the United States who cast all blame on Bush, risk losing sight of Iraq’s wider tragedy with the West: successive governments around the world gave him their full support, even as it was clear he was trampling standards of international decency.
How so many world leaders supported the tyrant even when it was clear he was committing genocide is a disturbing question. This is before we even consider the considerable Arab state support, as well as Russian and French support, that persisted after the Kuwait invasion. Interest in inviting Saddam’s Iraq back into the international community remained until the end, as Russia, France and China set sights on trade deals with Saddam, including lucrative PSA oil contracts. But there will probably be little mention of this in current commentary.
Before we remember this support, we must first accept that removing Saddam was in many ways justifiable. He had clearly committed genocide, the halting of which has been a pillar of post Holocaust international relations, under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. When confronted with the figure of two hundred thousand murdered Kurds during the Anfal campaign, Baathist general Ali Hasan al-Majid laughed, “It can’t have been more than one hundred thousand.” How does the community of nations coexist with such a regime? After the 1991 war in Kuwait, and the immense violence of the 1991 uprising which saw at least one hundred thousand Shi’a Iraqis murdered in little over two weeks, the UN warned Saddam that genocide had to stop, in UNSCR 688.
Saddam had, very clearly used weapons of mass destruction, most heinously on the five thousand Kurds at Hallabja, a seemingly distant crime with the horrors of ISIS today. But Hallabja was only the beginning of his chemical ambitions; we now know he planned to fire VX chemical weapons into Tehran, but the 1988 ceasefire beat him to it. Hundreds of thousands could have died. Anyone hawkish enough in Washington who thinks this might have benefited the U.S. should consider he also made the same threat against Israel, a sentiment that made many Arabs turn a blind eye to his offences. Not only did he almost completely destroy Kuwait, intentionally unleashing one of the worst environmental disasters in history when four million barrels of oil were pumped into the Persian Gulf, he also threatened to invade again in 1994. As if almost bringing total destruction upon Iraq was not enough, Saddam actually considered restarting the war he waged after battling Iran, a war which claimed over a million lives and broke Iraq. This was a man with few limits, who is still fondly remembered in many parts of the Middle East.
Regardless of the weapons of mass destruction blunders however, it is in over two hundred mass graves in Iraq where we will never hear an Iraqi verdict on Chilcot. Focusing blame for Iraq’s crisis on Blair or Bush risks the assumption that Saddam was a pillar of stability, as Donald Trump recently argued. But of course, Iraq’s tragedy begins decades before 2003, and the blame to allocate goes far and wide.
To begin with, following the Ba’ath Party dictatorship that arrived to power in 1968, early support for a regime that was controlled by Saddam’s vice presidency (since the early 1970s) until he assumed full power in 1979, came from France and Russia. This was after the Baathists had publicly hung nine Iraqi Jews in early 1969 in Baghdad, which should have been a clear sign of Baathist intentions to come. For France and Russia however, oil deals had to come before these concerns. A few years later, it was starting to become clear that Saddam and his cronies were launching ethnic cleansing of Kurds and sectarian oppression against Shi’as, most visibly during the 1977 Najaf uprising.
But international support was only just gaining pace, going into overdrive following the dictator's invasion of Iran in 1980. Over the ensuing decade, an international consensus that included every single member of the UNSC, much of Europe, the Soviet Union and almost every single Arab country, bolstered the worst Arab dictator known in the twentieth century. Arms and financial support from the United States, Britain, France and Russia enabled Saddam’s Iraq not only to endure, but to continue his wars and oppression that paved the way for sanctions and the near destruction of Iraq. This culminated in an uprising in 1991, clearly encouraged by a U.S. government that knew there would be no intervention, that resulted in at least a hundred thousand Shi’a Iraqis killed. Through the 1990s, Iraq descended into further chaos as plots and rebellions occurred in Ramadi, Nasiriyah and Basra right up until 1999. To assume Saddam could have been left alone and would not cause further trouble is naive.
Does this exonerate Blair and Bush? Resolutely no. As mentioned, postwar planning was at best haphazard, torn between Rumsfeld wanting to get out and Bremer wanting to rebuild on U.S. terms. Far too many Iraqi technocrats were sidelined, with no apparent system in place to stop semiliterate idealogues becoming senior officials. Meanwhile, events such as Abu Ghraib cemented what had already become a total shambles. On the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was cheerfully hopeful that ten thousand troops could police and rebuild an area populated by two million people, Basra, that had already been destroyed by Saddam’s abandonment and sanctions. Iraq is still paying an incalculable price for these mistakes, from borders left open, to the proliferation of militias and the near abandonment of the public sector, which has set the Iraqi economy back decades.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the United States appears to have relied excessively on Depleted Uranium ammunition against the Republican Guard and insurgents. There were already concerns about DU before 2003, but the weight of evidence now supports that it is responsible for a surge in horrific birth defects across Iraq.
So yes, these leaders should be held to account, as well as their closest ideologues who followed them. But if we hold these men accountable, where was the justice following the Volcker report, that detailed how Saddam successfully used oil revenues to circumvent sanctions and split the UN Security Council, with considerable success, and even as Iraqis starved? The UN takes significant responsibility for this shameful episode. Companies have been fined for corruption involving Oil-for-Food program, but politicians shrugged off the report, even as it became clear how Kofi Annan’s son benefited from OFF funds. How can the West, and the UN, atone for what amounts to a catalogue of disaster in Iraq going back decades?
Atonement should be in the forefront of politicians’ minds at the donor conference for Iraq on July 20 when the United States and a number of European countries will gather to raise funds to rebuild areas liberated from ISIS. What we are looking at now, after decades of failed policies, should go beyond funds to rebuild shattered cities and beyond the current war on ISIS. After sanctions, a cruel and fumbled UN led policy, the blundered post war planning and before then, widespread international support for Saddam, it is time for the international community to think in terms of compensation. Iraq desperately needs help in rebuilding human capacity if it is to have any chance to avoid yet another crisis after ISIS. The United States should immediately send specialist help to assist the clear up of areas contaminated with DU. The wider international community can take far more Iraqi students in higher education and civil service training courses, given that $7 billion has already been spent on the war on ISIS, seven times the amount spent on aid. By comparison, funds for capacity building are paltry.