A Mission Never Accomplished

When he invaded Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush believed that Americans would be praised as liberators and announced the end of the war, after a few weeks, in front of a sign that proclaimed to the world: “Mission Accomplished.” The president believed that the conflict was justified by Saddam Hussein’s ties to Islamic terrorism and by the existence of chemical and nuclear weapons, which the dictator could use against the “free world.” None of these claims was true. The links with al-Qaida were not true, weapons of mass destruction did not exist, Americans were “liberators” to only part of the country, and the war, when Bush finally left the White House, was not finished.

His successor did not commit these errors. When President Barack Obama was a senator, he opposed the conflict. When he became president he did his best to pacify the country by announcing that American forces would leave Iraq by the end of 2011, and then maintained that commitment. But the words with which, in the past few days, he hailed the departure of the last military contingent – we leave a country “stable and able to fend for itself” – are no less wrong than those with which his predecessor announced the end of the war. History will probably make some distinction between the errors of Bush and those of Obama. But the international community ignores the subtleties of historians and will simply note that the entire American operation in Iraq, from March 2003 to December 2011, has rendered the region less stable than it was on the eve of the conflict.

It is probable that neither Bush nor Obama has paid sufficient attention to the nature of the Iraqi state. The county is an artifact of international politics, an invention of Prime Minister Winston Churchill made for the oil-needs of the Royal Navy from an assemblage of ethnic and religious groups — Arab Sunnis, Arab Shiites, Kurds — in which only the first, so long as the summit of power was theirs, were truly interested in the creation of a unitary state. The Shiites had a strong religious relationship with Iran and often hated their Sunni fellow-citizens. The Kurds have brothers in Turkey, Iran and Syria, and have never stopped dreaming of the grand Kurdistan that the victors of 1918 had left a glimpse of at the end of the Great War. Some intelligent American diplomat proposed the idea of a federation, but it is not easy to draw borders where great natural resources exist and every division is likely to be at the expense of someone else. Today the Kurds are almost sovereign in their land and the Shiites control a good part of the power in Baghdad. But the Sunnis consider themselves dispossessed and their more radical formations have never stopped fighting, when necessary, on the side of the terrorists of al-Qaida.

The story of the Sunni vice president, who was pursued by an arrest warrant and fled to the Kurdish north of the country, is the ultimate manifestation of an old, mutual hostility. But it is also the Iraqi chapter of a war between Sunnis and Shiites that is fought simultaneously in Syria, in Yemen, in Bahrain and perhaps tomorrow in other countries of the Persian Gulf. If these are the results of a “war of liberation,” America’s European allies would do well to remember that liberty is not exported on the points of bayonets. In Libya, unfortunately, they forgot this.