A Bad End to a Bad War

Almost nine years after it began, the American invasion of Iraq ends this week. This war has been a disaster.

The last soldiers to leave Iraq, those in the 1st Cavalry Division of the 3rd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, leave behind them a country in a sorry state. It will be years before Iraq finds stability again, and it will no doubt take many more before America’s image in the region is truly restored.

Nobody will mourn Saddam Hussein, one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants of the Near East. The man, toppled by the U.S. invasion in 2003, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, plunging them into years of civil war and foreign occupation. Here and there in Iraq, tens of thousands of bodies lie in mass graves, buried there during the terror and violence of Saddam’s era.

But the Iraqis did not liberate themselves from this tyranny. The United States did not involve them in the invasion: There were no brigades of free Iraqis accompanying the American troops when they entered Baghdad in April 2003. It was a foreign force which invaded the country, and it was American proconsuls hidden in bunkers who proceeded to govern, depriving Iraq of a whole section of its own history.

It was all lies right from the very start of this tragedy. The motives cited by George W. Bush for embarking on this adventure: Iraq had nothing to do either with al-Qaida or the 9/11 attacks. The Hussein regime, bled dry after years of embargoes, held no weapons of mass destruction. Just as crazy was the Promethean delusion that America could export “Jeffersonian democracy” to the banks of the Tigris in Humvees.

Bush’s war led to the deaths of around 100,000 Iraqis and 4,500 American soldiers. Iraq has become slightly more democratic. However, the country is more divided than ever between the three ethnic and religious factions. It is governed by a pro-Iranian party put into power by the Shiite majority, which marginalizes the Sunni minority, while the Iraqi Kurds live in a state of quasi-independence. Violence is endemic. One out of four Iraqis lives in poverty. The middle class has fled abroad. The status of women has regressed. Oil production is still below pre-war levels.

The war has cost the United States $750 billion, but Bush did not want to finance it with a special tax and instead, dug America deeper into debt. He provoked a destabilization of American public finances that was not unrelated to the financial crisis of 2008.

Finally, this war took away necessary resources from the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan, and is thus largely responsible for the deadlock in that conflict.

What an enormous waste.