1 year ago
44
You would feel a little less crazy today if it wasn't for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Maybe you would be reading the New York Times right now, comfortable in assuming that American mass media and politics—if not objective—could never lie to you from all directions, all at once. Maybe you'd have spent the 2010s without the slightest anxiety over "terrorism." ISIS who? Anti-Muslim sentiment could even have tapered off by 2013. Trump, a frontrunner? What ideas could he possibly have that other Republicans "are afraid to say”? And so on.
Today, we must sit with the fact that over one million humans were killed as a direct result of this invasion. One and a half million were displaced. $2 trillion that could have been used for human betterment was spent ruining one of the world's oldest civilizations. And for what, exactly?
To be clear, the two reasons Iraq entered the U.S. imagination to begin with, starting in the Cold War, are oil (the root of Iraq's importance), and US support for the occupation of Palestine (the original root of Iraqi and Arab animosity). But neither of these two facts explain why Bush Jr. decided to unilaterally invade Iraq in 2003, while his father in 1991 did not.
Declassified memos lay the truth bare: in 2003, American policymakers simply wanted to wage a war. One that was unilateral, performative, and destructive. To senior official Paul Pillar, invading Iraq demonstrated "the U.S. ability and willingness to use [military] power," deterring "would-be troublemakers from opposing [American] interests."
While the administration publicly emphasized a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, private memos suggested "deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq." One official told Ron Suskind: "A sudden blow for no reason is better than one for a good reason," as it fosters an image of brute world hegemony, unrestrained by expectations. U.S. policymakers needed to take human lives from a foreign country, on camera. If it wasn't Iraq, it would have been someplace else.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, America's unchallenged dominance gave rise to a new proselytizing spirit in Washington DC. "Neoconservatives" believed that US hegemony was beneficial for both the nation and the world," and that what held the world in balance was its fear of U.S. military might. This was often dog-whistled as "credibility"—as in, "a [military] success in Iraq would enhance US credibility" (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, two months before 9/11).
Out of all the "troublemakers" to make an example of, Iraq in 2003 had the ideal combination of feigned strength and de facto weakness.
Saddam Hussein fostered an image of strength partly for deterrence, partly for domestic consumption. He deliberately avoided weapons inspections (when there wasn't very much to hide) and baited Western powers into public disputes where he played the strong underdog. That's why after 9/11, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, in full knowledge that al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan, believed that "single-pronged attacks against the smallest state sponsor" alone would be "perceived as a sign of weakness"—but Iraq, on the other hand …
Rumsfeld obviously agreed—paraphrased by an official as arguing "we need to bomb something else to prove that we're … big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks."
Yes, they really talk like this.
Of course, the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions had actually rendered Iraq a paper tiger, with a downsized military, dwindling GDP, and almost no allies. On this basis, Iraq's fate was sealed: it paid the price for American "credibility."
There are no saints in international politics. The behavior of powerful states, especially those concerned with their regional or global hegemony, will always be shocking. But to me, as I read through the declassified documents and divergent public rationales, there is something particularly disturbing about the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Maybe it's because of how quickly the war was forgotten, the millions of victims never truly acknowledged, the perpetrators who, rather than facing trial, are still being elected. Maybe it's because I, as an Arab of Muslim descent, was raised in the shadow of that time, with its mass paranoia, finger-pointing, over-securitization, deceit and the brutal hypocrisy of liberals and conservatives alike.
Maybe it's that the chair of the Senate committee who pushed to invade Iraq will sleep in the White House tonight, a few blocks from me, in this quiet city where with each signing of a military authorization, you can't hear the screams 7,000 miles away. But more than anything, I think it's the way Americans somehow abstractly understand, but cannot admit in plain terms, that this was not just a war for the sake of oil.
It was a war for the sake of war.
