Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies

BOOK: Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies

"In this angry and passionate book, Peter Galbraith lays out the disastrous consequence of the Bush years. The next president will inherit the mess; let’s hope he absorbs the lessons of Galbraith’s work, and acts on them." — Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations

Called by New York Times columnist David Brooks the "smartest and most devastating" critic of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policies, Peter Galbraith was the earliest expert to describe Iraq’s breakup into religious and ethnic entities, a reality now commonly accepted.

The Iraq war was intended to make the United States more secure, bring democracy to the Middle East, intimidate Iran and Syria, help win the war on terror, consolidate American world leadership, and entrench the Republican Party for decades. Instead,

    * Bush handed Iran its greatest strategic triumph in four centuries
    * U.S. troops now fight to support an Iraqi government led by religious parties intent on creating an Iranian-style Islamic republic
    * As part of the surge, the United States created a Sunni militia led by the same Baathists the U.S. invaded Iraq to overthrow administration gave Iran and North Korea a free pass to advance their nuclear programs
    * Obsessed with Iraq’s nonexistent WMD, the Bush administration gave Iran and North Korea a free pass to advance their nuclear programs
    * Turkey, a key NANATO ally long considered a model pro-Western Muslim democracy, became one of the most anti-American countries in the world
    * U.S. prestige around the world reached an all-time low

Iraq: Galbraith challenges the assertion that the surge will lead to victory. By creating a Sunni army, the surge has, in fact, contributed to Iraq’s breakup and set the stage for an intensified civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. If the United States wishes to escape the Iraq quagmire, it must face up to the reality that the country has broken up and cannot be put back together.

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Iran: Having helped Iran’s allies take control in Baghdad, the Bush administration no longer has a viable military option to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Galbraith discusses how a president more pragmatic than Bush might get Iran to freeze its nuclear program as part of a package deal to upgrade relations between two countries equally threatened by Sunni extremism.

Turkey, Syria, and Israel: A war intended to make Israel more secure, undermine Syria’s Assad regime, and strengthen ties with Turkey has had the opposite result.

Nationalism: In the coming decades, other countries may follow Iraq’s example in fragmenting along ethnic and religious lines. Galbraith draws on his considerable experience in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia to predict where and what the United States might do about it.

The United States: George W. Bush substituted wishful thinking for strategy and as a result made America weaker. Galbraith provides some rules for a national strategy that will appeal equally to conservatives and liberals — indeed, to anyone who believes the United States needs an effective national security strategy.

About the Author
Peter W. Galbraith served as the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia. He is currently the Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He lives in Townshend, Vermont.

BOOK INTRODUCTION EXCERPT

George W. Bush launched and lost America’s Iraq War. Losing is just one way in which the Iraq War did not turn out as planned.

• A war intended to eliminate the threat from Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction ended up with Iran and North Korea much closer to having deployable nuclear weapons.
• A war intended to fight terror has helped the terrorists.
• A war intended to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq now has U.S. troops fighting for pro-Iranian Shiite theocrats and alongside unreformed Baathists.
• A war intended to undermine Iran’s ayatollahs has resulted in a historic victory for Iran. Iranian-backed political parties control Iraq’s government and armed forces, giving Iran a role in Iraq that it has not had in four centuries.
• A war intended to promoted democracy in the Middle East has set it back.
• A war intended to intimidate Syria and make Israel more secure has left Israel more threatened and Syria less isolated.
• A war intended to enhance America’s relations with moderate Islam has made Turkey among the most anti-American countries in the world.
• A war intended to showcase American power has highlighted the deficiencies of U.S. intelligence, the incompetence of American administration, and the limitations on the American military.
• A war intended to boost American global leadership has driven U.S. prestige to an all-time low.
• A war intended to consolidate Republican power in Washington for a generation cost the GOP control of both houses of Congress in 2006, and seems likely to help elect an antiwar Democrat president in 2008.
• A war intended to make America more secure has left the country weaker.

"The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons," President Bush told Congress in his first State of the Union speech, on January 29, 2002. America, he promised, will "deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction." And he warned, "America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security."

George W. Bush’s performance never matched his rhetoric. A year after that speech, he launched a war to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Meanwhile, North Korea — a country he said was in an "Axis of Evil" with Iraq and Iran — took advantage of Bush’s preoccupation with a phantom Iraqi threat and withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea went on to make eight nuclear weapons from plutonium that had previously been safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and then tested one in 2006. President Bush did nothing about North Korea for years before eventually concluding an agreement that required North Korea to dismantle its aging reactor but effectively allowed it to keep its nukes.

Iraq did not have a nuclear program but Iran does. From 1985 to 2003, Iran ran a clandestine program aimed at acquiring the technology to enrich uranium that could be used as the fissile material for a nuclear weapon. In 2003, Iran disclosed this clandestine program to the IAEA and agreed to freeze its uranium enrichment activities. George Bush’s Iraq War paved the way for Iran’s Shiite allies to take power in Iraq in 2005. With American troops bogged down in Iraq and its own strategic position incomparably stronger, Iran resumed enriching uranium in 2005 and has defied subsequent U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that it stop. George Bush designated Iran part of the Axis of Evil in 2002 and accused those who want to negotiate with Iran of appeasement. This tough language is a diversion from the fact that George W. Bush has done nothing diplomatically, militarily, or otherwise to slow down Iran’s nuclear program.

On George W. Bush’s watch, Pakistan was the world’s most dangerous nuclear proliferator. It provided nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, Iran, Libya, and, almost certainly, other states. Prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, its nuclear scientists even met with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. When its nuclear activities became public in 2004, George W. Bush meekly accepted the explanation of Pakistan’s dictator, Pervez Musharraf, that it was all a rogue operation run by Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan. Bush never complained when Musharraf pardoned the supposed rogue a day after he confessed to running a proliferation ring or when Pakistan stonewalled U.S. requests to interview Khan.

George W. Bush did not keep his promise to "do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security." As an unintended consequence of his Iraq War, the countries of Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan all became more dangerous threats to America’s security.

Saddam Hussein had no role in the 9/11 attacks, as everyone now agrees. President Bush, however, insists that the Iraq War is an integral part of the war on terror. He has a point. George W. Bush gave al-Qaeda its opening in Iraq. If Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, it is because George W. Bush made it so.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda was not in any part of Iraq controlled by Saddam Hussein. Al-Qaeda saw Saddam Hussein as a corrupt secular nationalist, precisely the kind of Arab leader it wanted to depose. Saddam Hussein had few virtues, but in this unique case the United States was well served by his ruthless approach to internal opponents.

On April 9, 2003, U.S. troops took Baghdad on the orders of a president whose administration had made no plans to provide security or to administer the country. Chaos was the predictable result. For at least six weeks after the invasion, lootershad access to every significant public institution, except for the Oil Ministry, which U.S. troops did guard. At the same time, the Bush administration fumbled from a plan to set up an interim Iraqi government (announced May 5) to a plan for a multiyear occupation (announced to the Iraqi leaders May 16). The confusion is directly attributable to a president who boasted he was the decider and yet never knew these were the sort of critical questions a president is supposed to decide. Chaos created an opening for Saddam’s Baathist cadres to regroup and for al-Qaeda and its allies to enter Iraq. Al-Qaeda and other Sunni fundamentalists discovered they could kill both Americans and Shiites in Iraq. The fighting derailed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s plans for a rapid drawdown of U.S. troops. The continued presence of large numbers of American troops drew new recruits to al-Qaeda and made it a symbol of Sunni resistance to the infidel in Iraq and elsewhere in the Sunni world. While American troops had armored vehicles and secure bases, ordinary Iraqi Shiites did not. Al-Qaeda specialized in mass bombings that killed large numbers of adherents to a branch of Islam they see as heretical. Eventually these attacks triggered a civil war. Iraq did become the central front in the war on terror with the additional complication that the terrorists appeared to be winning.

When he ordered U.S. forces into Iraq in 2003, President Bush proclaimed the freedom of the Iraqi people to be his goal. The administration even gave the military campaign the code name "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Almost immediately after ousting Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration began a major effort to remake Iraq into a free society. L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer III, the Bush appointee as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for Iraq, moved quickly to abolish the old regime’s repressive apparatus: the Iraqi Army, the security services, and the Baath party. He went on to impose a sweeping lifetime ban on senior Baathists in the public service, to write an interim constitution replete with guarantees of personal freedom, and to remake Iraq in line with an American conservative’s vision of a market-oriented free society. Five years later, President Bush’s speeches about Iraq were still laced with references to freedom and a free Iraq.

Democracy does not exist in Arab Iraq. Shiite religious parties rule Iraq’s south, where they have created their own theocratic dictatorships. The good ones resemble Iran; others are a Shiite version of Taliban rule in Afghanistan where women do not work, girls do not go to school, and any deviance in dress or conduct means death. In 2008, al-Qaeda lost control of many Sunni areas. The new rulers were the same Baathists who had ruled in 2003, and were no more democratic than they had ever been.

By 2008, the United States was not fighting for democracy or freedom in Iraq. President Bush was sending U.S. troops into battle in southern Iraq to help Shiite theocrats fight their Shiite rivals and in central Iraq to serve alongside Baathist militiamen.

The Iraq War was intended to transform Iraq from brutal dictatorship into the Arab world’s first real democracy. President Bush fully expected a democratic Iraq would be both a role model for other Middle Eastern countries and a subversive force against the region’s authoritarian rulers. Envisioning a replay of the 1989 Eastern European revolutions, where elections in Poland set in motion a process that swept away the Berlin Walland the Soviet Union, the Iraq War’s neoconservative architects imagined the quick collapse of Syria’s Baathist regime, the growing strength of prodemocracy forces in Iran, and ultimately the replacement of pro-American autocrats in Saudi Arabia and Egypt with pro-American democrats.

Iraq, however, did not become a democracy. Instead it split apart and descended into a brutal civil war. While the Bush administration boasts of the freedoms incorporated into Iraq’s constitution, prodemocracy reformers see that those freedoms exist only on paper. The constitution is a road map to partition, consolidating Kurdistan’s position as a de facto independent state and legalizing its separate government, laws, and army. Furthermore, the constitution leaves the door open for the Shiites and Sunnis to form their own regio…

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