The Third Iraq War

Over 11 years ago, a few months after the United States ousted Saddam Hussein without difficulty, a journalist asked me what would happen if the weapons of mass destruction, the basis for which the Yankee invasion was mounted, did not appear. Still doubting somewhat that the weapons, which Hussein incontrovertibly had in the past, still existed, I answered, “If the arms do not appear, everything will be called into question.”

It has been so. Saddam had destroyed the weapons (although he did not openly admit it, perhaps in order to hold off Iran and his own people), and the political-ideological basis for intervention began increasingly to be questioned. In American public opinion a patent skepticism began to flower, and turned into weariness and boredom when Iraq turned into a hornets’ nest for the United States. Washington sank billions of dollars and suffered a considerable attrition of lives.

When the United States’ human costs were somewhat reduced — abundant deaths occurred in the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites — Obama put an end to the economic bleeding and ordered the withdrawal of its troops, which culminated in 2011. The American leaders have been asserting that Iraq was a reasonably stable country, thanks to the American contribution. This week’s occurrences have flatly demonstrated this is not so. The nation is presently divided in two with the jihadi movement ISIS, a radical offshoot of al-Qaida, controlling a portion of the territory surrounding Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and one of its economic engines, for days.

That some 800 ISIS militants have been able to take over a city in which there had been a garrison of some 12,000 soldiers defies all logic. It implies, on one hand, that the fundamentalist guerrillas have had some type of collusion with the area’s military class. It is inexplicable that various regiments took flight, abandoning precious equipment, uniforms of soldiers and generals, etc. On the other hand, more importantly, the costly formation of the Iraqi army ($250 billion in this sector?) carried out by the United States’ forces has not exactly been effective. A member of the passive Iraqi parliament has pointed out, “There has been complicity and negligence.”*

The failure is reason for multiple reflections. Washington sees that the 4,500 American deaths and the trillion dollars buried in Iraq since 2003 have not served much purpose if we take all sides into account. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki ought to realize that his sectarian policy of not integrating into his government the Sunni minority, which had governed with Hussein, is a good breeding ground for any insurrectionist movement. The West and the moderate countries of the region deduce with great uneasiness that the most radical version of al-Qaida is moving effortlessly between Syria, from where it departed, and Iraq, and intends to erase borders in its dream of creating a fundamentalist Islamic entity, easily arming itself to the teeth. The guerrillas have taken over the most important military base in Mosul, with the largest depository of weapons and, according to some versions, tens of millions of dollars in local currency, after having sacked the city’s banks.

The foray of ISIS has provoked various changes. Maliki, paradoxically, begs that the Americans return, at least by air. He wants the American planes and drones to strike the terrorists. The well-trained Kurdish forces have occupied various cities in order to contain ISIS. Baghdad compromises with this, something they previously repudiated. Nearly 500,000 people flee ahead of ISIS’ violent wave. Obama must ponder if his hesitation to cooperate with Maliki, whom he considers corrupt, inefficient and sectarian, can be maintained when faced with the possibility of the arrival of ISIS in the capital.