March 21, 2008 4:20

Iraq War at 5

What is there to say on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war? It's been a mess ever since the U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad and the place collapsed in chaos and looting.

Apart from his sons and daughters, some cronies, Iraqi Sunni beneficiaries, die-hard Arab nationalists and some desperate Palestinians, nobody would ever have cried over the demise of Saddam Hussein. That was never the issue, but rather whether a war to overthrow Saddam would make Iraq and the Middle East better, or worse.

We can roughly count the human and material costs. In addition to more than 4,000 U.S. and allied troop deaths, tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. The situation on the ground is so chaotic, in fact, that the estimates range wildly, from more than 30,000 (Bush in 2005) to more than 655,000 (a Lancet study in 2006). I think the British group Iraq Body Count probably has the most realistic figure, some 80,000 to 90,000 as of today. Let's not forget there are about 4 million Iraqi refugees, including perhaps 2 million who fled outside Iraq's borders. There is also the incalculable human cost of the damage to Iraq's social fabric that the deaths and population movements imply. Of course, Saddam did a pretty good job of harming Iraqi society himself, but the invasion was supposed to make things better.

I'm not sure if anyone has reliably estimated--or could even do so-- the amount of material damage done to Iraq itself, in terms of destroyed infrastructure, unrealized oil wealth, etc. But the price paid by the American taxpayer alone is staggering--roughly $600 billion, perhaps $4 trillion before its all over. That's compared to the $50-60 million the Bush administration had indicated at the outset of the war, by the way. Economists could also take a stab at figuring out the impact of the war and related Middle East tensions on the skyrocketing price of oil, which is destabilizing the global economy. The current record highs of $100-plus a barrel are about four times the pre-invasion price.

Will all of this have been worth the dear price, if the war prevented another 9/11 and if we accept that democratic transformation in Iraq and the wider Middle East is a long term process for which the Iraq invasion was a necessary catalyst?

The U.S. government's own evidence now, of course, shows that Saddam did not pose the apocalyptic terrorist threat that the Bush administration claimed as the principal justification for the invasion. The Iraq Survey Group's October 2004 study for the CIA said that the Iraqi regime did not possess chemical and biological weapons and had only ambitions for a nuclear program. Another study for the Pentagon released two weeks ago found that there was no link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda group.

Five years on, I don't see any chance that Iraq will become a functioning democracy in any meaningful sense of the term in my lifetime. Whether the suicide-bombing toll goes down a little or back up a little, the country is badly fractured along ethnic and regional fault lines. That's a reality that will be endlessly manipulated and exploited by more powerful neighbors and outside parties. Five years later, Iraqis are living with well over 100,000 U.S. troops still all over their soil, invading Turkish troops now helping themselves in the north, and with Iranians who are busy using political, religious and intelligence operatives to draw Iraqi Shiites into Iran's web of influence. Iraq's problem is not unlike that of Lebanon; though the Lebanese state nominally never ceased to function, Lebanese factions plunged the country into a civil war in 1975 and one way or the other the Lebanese are still trying to sort out the shambles. Even today, 33 years after the 1975 descent into conflict, tensions are so high that many Lebanese are expecting a new civil war to start any time. Will Iraqi factions still be fighting it out 33 years from now? On the basis of where things stand now, you can't rule it out.

Nor is there any evidence that the Iraq war has been a catalyst for democratic change throughout the Middle East. The Bush administration's pro-democracy drive was a contributing factor yet hardly a decisive factor in the emergence of freedom activists in the years after 9/11. In any case, the administration itself lacked the courage of its convictions to do more than it did; it has already largely forgotten the democrats and retreated back into the friendly embrace of its Arab authoritarian allies. If anything, the Iraq war and the administration's mixed messages have helped make democracy a dirty word--made in U.S.A.-- for many Middle Easterners. There are many things that the world can do to help foster better systems of government as well as peace and prosperity in the Middle East, but invading Iraq is probably not turning out to have been one of them.

I'll leave you with the thoughts, for and against, then and now, of two Americans who have been immersed in this issue:

President Bush, who explains his move to invade Iraq in 2003 and defended his decision in a speech this week;

John Brady Kiesling, a career U.S. diplomat who quit the State Department to protest the war, who explained his reasoning in a resignation letter in 2003 and sticks by his views in a new Op-Ed with two other colleagues.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo