The Modern Middle East (39 page)

By pointing to Iraq’s stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, and by alleging that Saddam Hussein harbored terrorists and was linked to Al-Qaeda, the Bush administration began to openly declare its objective to bring about a “regime change” in Baghdad. The United States was duty-bound, the president argued, to defend itself and its allies in the region from the menace of Saddam’s regime. By the time Saddam let UN weapons inspectors return and promised to disarm, the United States maintained, these measures were too little, too late. The Iraqi president was said to have sealed his own fate.

The geostrategic position of Iraq in the Persian Gulf and in the larger Middle East played a central role in its invasion and occupation by the United States. Since Iraq was located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and, as the Second Gulf War had demonstrated, within striking distance of Israel, U.S. military presence there was considered to have manifold military and diplomatic advantages. It removed a viable threat to Israel, extended the presence of American military forces north of the Arabian peninsula, and allowed the United States to keep both the Iranian and Syrian regimes in check. For a time it even seemed that the United States might use Iraq as a base to effect additional regime changes in Syria or Iran, or both.

Most importantly, the occupation of Iraq allowed the United States easy access to Iraqi oil. According to U.S. government estimates, Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven reserves of oil (112 billion barrels), behind Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, Iraq’s oil production costs are among the lowest in the world. The country also contains 112 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, one of the highest levels in the world.
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Members of the Bush administration gave numerous assurances that oil played no role in the decision to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that the United States would
have initiated such a massive and costly military campaign had Iraq been a resource-poor country. That both the American president and his vice president came from oil backgrounds themselves only reinforces such a suspicion.

Last, the Bush administration gave prominence to several highly influential pundits and policy makers, both inside and outside the formal structures of government, with pronounced conservative, often pro-Israeli views. President George W. Bush’s own ideological conservatism was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan and the 1980s, except that it was deeply imbued with religion. Not surprisingly, many of the more influential figures in the Bush administration had earlier served in the Reagan White House and injected the new cabinet with a degree of conservatism not found in either the Clinton or the first Bush presidency. Some of these “neoconservative” figures were Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, a vocal opponent of the Arab-Israeli peace process and closely allied with Israel’s Likud Party; Richard Perle, with the advisory Defense Policy Board, who urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to cancel the Oslo Accords and opposed further negotiations with the Palestinians; and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, who urged military action against Iraq only a few weeks after the September 11 attacks.
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Together, these and other key administration figures—such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, and vice president Dick Cheney—moved American foreign policy in a highly ideological direction. The invasion of Iraq was the crystallization of a vision of America’s role as a unilateral guardian of international peace and security.
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The United States and its principal ally, Britain, at first decided to effect regime change in Iraq through diplomatic means. In early November 2002, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1441, offered jointly by the United States and the United Kingdom, in which Iraq was given thirty days to prove that it was not “in material breach” of previous UN resolutions concerning disarmament and its chemical weapons program. Iraq was required to give a new UN inspection team “immediate, unimpeded, unconditional, and unrestricted access” to its weapons facilities. Otherwise, it would “face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations.”
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In his formal report to the United Nations the following February, the head of the inspection team, Hans Blix, reported that inspectors had found no “smoking guns” and that Iraq was in fact in compliance with UN 1441.
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France and Germany, meanwhile, launched an intense diplomatic campaign to prevent U.S. and British unilateral military action against Iraq without UN approval. Joined by Russia, in early March France
and Germany released a joint declaration promising to block another UN resolution authorizing military action against Iraq. When it became clear that a second UN resolution on the issue was unlikely, the United States and Britain decided to bypass the United Nations altogether. The invasion of Iraq commenced on March 20, 2003.

Figure 18.
Former president Saddam Hussein on trial. Corbis.

Once the invasion got under way, the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime took only days. In the buildup to the invasion, some 170,000 U.S. troops had been amassed near the Iraqi border in Kuwait, and once the war commenced the number of American military personnel rose to approximately 300,000. Britain, meanwhile, had a force of less than 30,000. British forces were given the charge of capturing the southern city of Basra while American troops made a dash through the desert for Baghdad. By April 3, the Americans were in control of the Baghdad Airport, and within a week they had captured most of the city. On April 9, 2003, in a historic scene, U.S. troops helped residents of Baghdad bring down a giant statue of Saddam located in one of the city’s main squares. The city of Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace and one of his main bases of support, fell to U.S. troops on April 14. At about the same time, British troops, who had encountered unexpectedly heavy resistance in the south, gained full control of Basra and the nearby town of Umm Qasr.

The disintegration of central authority plunged Iraq, especially Baghdad, into chaos as looting and lawlessness became routine. The United States appointed its own administrators to run the country on an interim basis, but it would be some time before law and order could be restored to a country with the size and predicament of Iraq. Saddam’s “republic of fear” might have collapsed, but its immediate aftermath was a nightmarish republic of anarchy, death, and destruction. Many Iraqis took the law into their own hands as they tried to settle old scores with former Baʿthist officials. Clean water and electricity became scarce as elements loyal to the Saddam regime blew up power generators, water mains, and major oil pipelines. Before long, the country was said to have also been infiltrated by Al-Qaeda fighters bent on harming American interests wherever and however possible. Although within weeks of Saddam’s overthrow President Bush triumphantly declared that major combat in Iraq was over, American commanders on the ground soon admitted to having a full-blown urban guerrilla war on their hands.

It quickly became apparent that the careful American planning for the invasion had not been extended to include the occupation period. Interagency squabbles and policy inconsistencies only added to the bewilderment of the U.S. policy makers in the postinvasion period.
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Ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, suffered from lack of security and a near-total absence of most basic necessities. Before long the country plunged into civil war, with pro-Saddam, Shiʿite, and Al-Qaeda militia groups fighting the American forces, the weak central government, and each other. The fighting continued to rage even after Saddam Hussein was discovered to be hiding in a spider hole and was captured in December 2003, and, more ominously, even after the alleged leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed by U.S. forces in June 2006. Saddam’s trial and subsequent execution in December 2006 also did little to calm Iraq’s tumult. By mid-2007, international aid agencies were estimating that two million Iraqis had fled the country and had become international refugees, principally in Jordan and Syria, while another 2.2 million had become internally displaced inside the country’s borders.
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According to the website IraqBodyCount.org, from the start of the war in 2003 until the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2011, a total of 116,548 civilian Iraqis were killed as a result of the ensuing violence.
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The U.S. occupation forces also suffered significant losses. According to the U.S. Defense Department, from March 2003 to March 2013, nearly 4,500 U.S. troops were killed in action and another almost 32,000 were wounded.
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Not surprisingly, the occupation of Iraq emerged as one of the major issues in the American presidential election of 2008, and the
incoming administration of President Barack Obama made good on his campaign promise of pulling U.S. combat troops out of Iraq, which commenced beginning in June 2009. The troop withdrawal was completed by December 2011, although a sizable attachment of U.S. military personnel remained behind. The government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki in Baghdad, meanwhile, had proven itself surprisingly resilient, and, although the country’s security situation had improved little, Iraq, in tatters, was left to fend for itself.

Figure 19.
British forces searching Iraqi women for weapons. Corbis.

What does the future have in store for the Middle East? Predicting Middle East politics is always risky. But a few trends are hard to miss. We have seen that over the past two decades the style and delivery of Middle East politics and policies may have changed but their essence and substance have not. Mutual distrust and tensions still govern the relationship of many of the region’s supposed allies; few if any Middle Eastern states have done enough to address popular grievances arising from economic and political limitations; and U.S. policy toward the region essentially continues to be what it was at the height of the Cold War, only modified to fit today’s realities. U.S. military action in Afghanistan and the invasion and occupation of Iraq have done little to strengthen the states of the region, undermine the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism, or reduce the levels of anti-Americanism. If anything, as public opinion polls indicate, they have had quite the
opposite effects. In fact, given the institutional weaknesses inherent in Middle Eastern states (discussed in chapter 8), and given the decline in the likelihood of future interstate wars as viable means of conflict resolution, the types of attacks perpetrated by multinational terror networks such as Al-Qaeda are likely to continue.
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Neither the underlying reasons for becoming a terrorist—or a “martyr”—nor the destructive means available to carry out future attacks have been eliminated. Barring extraordinary developments, the prospects for radical changes in the near future seem remote.