The Iraq War: A Geopolitical Catastrophe for American Power and Prestige

A U.S. Abrahms tank south of the city of Najaf in Iraq on March 23, 2003. (Scott Nelson/Getty Images)

Commentary

Twenty years ago, then-President George W. Bush sidetracked from putting down the Taliban in Afghanistan to launch the unnecessary and inadvisable invasion of Iraq. From a strategic standpoint it served little purpose in the War on Terror. Iraq became a focus of Islamist terrorism that became out of control following the invasion.

The war added over $2 trillion to the U.S. national debt and refocused resources and likely will cost $6.4 trillion with interest over the next two decades.

Iraqi Christians, who prospered in the country before the war to a degree not seen elsewhere in the Muslim world, have been subjected to genocide.

The invasion resulted in a diversion of resources and a disastrous lack of focus on winning in Afghanistan. Failure to solidify the victory against the Taliban set the stage for its return to power almost 20 years later.

Saddam Hussein kept Iran in check. Removing Saddam paved the way for Iranian regional hegemony and transformed Iraq into an Iranian puppet state dominated by pro-Iranian Shiite parties.

Historians will look back at the decision to invade Iraq 100 years from now and see it as the beginning of the end of American power. It will be looked at like so many wars that doomed once great empires to decline and oblivion.

Iraq was never a strategic threat to regional stability in the same manner as neighboring Iran after the U.N. coalition routed Saddam’s army during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, aka Operation Desert Storm.

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf made a salient point with regard to why the United States didn’t march on Baghdad in 1991 during an interview in the 1990s. He noted that the world wasn’t with the United States just as it hadn’t been during Vietnam.

“As a result we, first of all, lost the battle of world public opinion and eventually we lost the battle at home,” Schwarzkopf said. “In the Gulf War we had great international legitimacy in the form of eight United Nations resolutions, each one of which said kick Iraq out of Kuwait. [They] did not say one word about going into Iraq, taking Baghdad, [and] conquering the whole country.”

Schwarzkopf accurately predicted what ultimately happened a decade later when he stated that the United States and the UK would have gone there and ended up alone. He called being in Iraq like being a “dinosaur in a tar pit.” Today the United States has a small military presence in Iraq due to the threat posed by ISIS, which was largely made up of former members of Saddam’s regime, especially the Fedayeen Saddam.

A little over a decade later, the second Bush administration failed to obtain that support at the U.N. before invading. This helped undermine America’s soft power influence around the world.

Iraq was like Vietnam in that Americans didn’t know what they were fighting for. Sure, Saddam was a brutal dictator, but so were many across Africa and Asia. Millions had died in the Congo. The justification for the invasion that was given in the run-up to the invasion made no strategic sense.

It lacked a direct connection to 9/11, which was the reason the United States and its allies launched the “War on Terror” to begin with.

The Bush administration made critical errors in judgment, thinking it could just walk into Iraq and would be greeted as liberators like Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress claimed. Chalabi likely was an Iranian double agent who passed disinformation to the CIA and the Bush administration that led it to believe that American troops would be greeted as liberators.

“The people investigating this aren’t sure yet, but the investigation is under way, and the [Defense Intelligence Agency] are looking through its documents and realizing they’ve been had,” Patrick Lang, the former head of the Middle East desk at DIA told The Guardian newspaper in 2004. “If it turns out to be true, it was certainly a genius operation. [The Iranians] created an anti-Saddam opposition to get rid of him, and they got us to pay for it.”

That certainly was the line that Bush senior adviser Karl Rove took when I confronted him face-to-face at a power lunch held by the late Paul Weyrich, founder of the Free Congress Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and other conservative movement entities, in February 2003. Weyrich planted me in the audience to ask uncomfortable questions of Rove that he couldn’t ask himself, and he opposed the Iraq invasion. He thought that Iran would have been a more strategic target because it was the head of the snake of global Islamic terrorism.

I asked Rove if the administration was ready for an insurgency. Rove told me there wouldn’t be one.

“The Iraqis are a highly educated people, and they will greet us as liberators,” Rove said.

Some Iraqis did; however, the Baathists ensured that the United States would face a long, bloody insurgency that later gave rise to ISIS. Iran got into the action too by providing shaped charges that found their way into the improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

I suggested that the United States would never leave Iraq because they would be needed to keep the peace. Despite President Barack Obama’s best effort to withdraw from Iraq in 2011, he had to send back the troops four years later to confront ISIS.

I also told Rove that the government we would install would lack internal legitimacy because it would be viewed as an American puppet. That especially became true after Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority fired Ba’athist civil servants and dissolved the Iraqi military. Sure enough, that came true.

My most tragic prediction was that the Christians would be severely persecuted. Again, Rove said it wouldn’t have happened.

If my 26-year-old self without any formal training in the intelligence field could figure this out with a basic understanding of regional dynamics and Iraq, then why couldn’t the CIA or the Bush administration?

I wasn’t the only one.

Prior to his passing a decade ago, Newt Gingrich’s former press secretary Tony Blankley sat down with me in his Downtown Washington, DC office and told me that he had a private meeting with President George W. Bush in the run-up to the invasion. Blankley told me that he warned Bush that invading Iraq would be disastrous for the country. Bush came back at Blankley and said, “I am the decider.”

The Iraq War diminished America’s standing in the global community. It also paved the way for the Arab Spring revolutions that brought more death and destruction, and ultimately created a geopolitical vacuum that China is now filling. Invading Iraq also distracted the United States from keeping an eye on China’s rise and the growth of its desire and ability to displace America as the world’s dominant superpower.

More importantly, it undermined America’s confidence in itself and brought about the Obama and Biden administrations that turned their backs on American leadership. The world today is a more dangerous place because of the fateful decision to invade Iraq.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.