Iraq, 3,196 Days Later

The wisdom accompanying the departure of the last American soldiers from Iraqi soil, on Sunday, December 18, after eight and a half years, says a lot about the will of the United States to turn the page after its biggest fiasco on the international stage in the last thirty years.

Rarely, indeed, is a great power so mistaken about a conflict, decided without preparation, in which it must lose a considerable part of its credibility.

On March 17, 2003, in a speech to the American nation, the President of the United States, George Bush, justified the invasion of Iraq that was about to be launched: “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised….It has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.”

History would show afterwards that the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, weakened by its defeat during the 1991 war in Kuwait and suffering from numerous international sanctions, did not have any weapons of mass destruction at its disposal. On the contrary, thanks to the chaos provoked by dismantling state infrastructures, al-Qaida was able to find an excessively favorable terrain for religious war in Iraq. After lying about Iraqi arms, America was morally discredited by the discovery of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, controlled by Americans, the images of which provoked the entire world’s indignation. This gave the impression of total collapse, as the American incapacity to put a country back on its feet (a country with considerable petroleum deposits) came to light.

At the glory-less hour of retreat, the geopolitical toll of this ideological war is more calamitous still: The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, condemned to death and executed on Dec. 30, 2006, revived the regional ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was suddenly rid of its worst enemy and, at the same time, of an impediment to its west that had been there throughout history. Tehran became, in the meantime, the principal adversary of the United States in the Middle East.

Thirty Infernal Years

Today, Iraq remains a country broken up between ethnic groups and religious denominations, still prey to violent inter-religious tensions. It is a country which has become the theater of an indirect confrontation between the competing ambitions of its main neighbors, which consist of Iran, but also Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The country has undergone, in the last 30 years, a long and deadly conflict with its Iranian cousin (1980 to 1988), a devastating air war following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait (January and February 1991), an interminable international embargo, from 1991 to 2003, that exhausted an already vulnerable population without significantly weakening the government and a chaotic American occupation of more than eight years that caused the departure of a good part of what remained of the elites.

One would like to hope that the Iraqis can definitively put these infernal years behind them.