Two Wars, One Lesson

From Baghdad to Kabul, whoever topples a dictatorship doesn’t necessarily create a democracy.


Over seven years after the start of the war, the United States is withdrawing the last of its combat troops from Iraq. The outcome? That depends entirely on your perspective.

For the United States, the war wasn’t worth it. More than 4,000 soldiers killed, tens of thousands of them physically or mentally scarred, trillions of tax dollars squandered that would have been far better spent in America’s own educational and healthcare systems. The nation’s international reputation has suffered greatly, and Iraq’s neighbors can see nothing of the promised Middle Eastern model democracy. The United States would have been better off had it left Saddam Hussein in power and continued a policy of containment from the outside.

Iraqis, at least a majority of them, now have more advantages. Elites in the Sunni minority, who were in power under Saddam Hussein where they oppressed the majority Shiites and Kurds, presumably had it better before the invasion. The Shiites and Kurds enjoy a bit more freedom than they had earlier. Many of them now have access to such basic things as health care, education and running water. Whether these things will be seen over the long term as worth the loss of life nearly every family has suffered is something for the Iraqis themselves to determine, not the outside world.

The reality also includes the fact that the majority of civilian casualties resulted not from American bombs and gunfire, but as a result of Sunni death squads and attacks by Islamic extremists.

In the coming year, the withdrawal from Afghanistan is scheduled to begin. NATO and the United States have been there for nine years, and there’s little to show for it. What is obvious is the advantage the new elite in Afghanistan has accrued from the Western presence and the billions of dollars in reconstruction funds that they have diverted into their own pockets. Nevertheless, some disadvantaged areas have received infrastructure improvements such as bridges, schools and water wells. But what national advantages can Germany show that would justify the more than forty German soldiers killed in action and the billions of Euros in taxpayer money Afghanistan has received?

When the decision was made to go to war, Germany and Japan were put forth as examples of what would happen after the war. When the dictatorships had been toppled and “nation building” had run its course, Afghanistan and Iraq would be transformed into stable democracies. But that concept had already been tried with no convincing success in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Germany and Japan had criminal governments at the time of the World War II, but their societies weren’t dysfunctional as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those nations lack a tradition of a stable national identity. Their elites have no sense of responsibility for a unified nation. Loyalty belongs to the tribe. The West can’t build a nation where the elites refuse to take responsibility for the nation as a whole. One need not occupy a country in order to fight terrorist enclaves. Containment from the outside would probably have been the less bloody and cheaper solution.