Iraq Again

There are experts in demolition and reconstruction. The United States government is very good at the first, but terribly bad at the second. Examples around the world abound, but none is as clear and evident as its intervention in Iraq.

The fragile argument for the need to contain Saddam Hussein’s regime was based on two fallacies: his alleged participation in, or support of, the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and the weapons of mass destruction myth.

The Islamic revolution in Iran; Saudi or Gulf multimillionaires financing fundamentalist groups, overtly or covertly; and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida’s growing destructive capacity were only the most obvious risks stacked against Washington. The decision to invade Iraq and take out Saddam was attractive because it was so simple: Get rid of a tyrant hostile to the U.S., establish democracy, show that freedom and prosperity go hand-in-hand with the advancement of Western values, and eliminate the fatal appeal that Islamic groups exercised on the societies of the region.

There is no space in this editorial to go into detail about the disastrous U.S. military occupation. Billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of deaths, injuries and displacements, and a divided and fractured nation were the result. But the U.S. took longer to complete its withdrawal of troops from Iraq in December 2011 than it did in having to become involved militarily in the ill-fated country once again.

The misgovernment of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who assumed power with full U.S. support in 2006, has led Iraq to the brink of catastrophe. Maliki’s authoritarian tendencies, his exclusion of two of the major ethnoreligious groups of Iraq — the Kurds and the Sunnis — fertilized the soil in which the threat of armed fundamentalism was already growing.

As all this was happening, Washington made another one of its many bad choices by supporting the budding uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. A bloody dictator, no doubt, Assad was also a symbol of stability in the region, a guarantee of undeclared peace with Israel, and the head of a regime that was completely intolerant of the opposition yet moderate, even secular.

The uprising against Assad turned into a civil war, with the not-so-secret support of the U.S. and many of its allies, and backed Assad up against a wall. I would never sympathize with his government, but in a region where often one must choose between the lesser of evils, he was — and is — among the least bad choices.

At the time, many warned of the arrival of Islamic radicals to the hectic battlefield that was Syria, and of the risk that, with their greater capacity for organization and simplistic and fanatic rhetoric, they might be an attractive option for marginalized youth.

What is today called ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) has its origin in the U.S. invasion and was part of al-Qaida in Iraq. ISIL grew and became more radicalized with the passage of time, to the extent that it outgrew and broke off from al-Qaida. It is today, by a long shot, the most organized and well-financed of the region’s extremist groups, with a significant military presence and a broad recruiting capability. In its hands, literally, is the future stability of Iraq and Syria.

Like al-Qaida back then, ISIL has benefited from the financing and support of governments and powerful families from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, as well as from acts and failures to act by successive U.S. administrations that never foresaw the consequences of their actions in the Middle East.

Today, as they are desperately trying to contain this new insurgency without having to reactivate U.S. presence in the battlefield, Obama’s advisers may be remembering the saying: Raise ravens and they’ll pluck your eyes out.*

*Translator’s Note: This Spanish proverb is a warning that well-intentioned endeavors often backfire.