Iraq 20 years on: the failed promise of democracy
Image Credit/ The U.S. National Archives
On the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, Harry-Wynne Williams reflects on the catastrophic costs of Western intervention, and its failed promise of democracy.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, an event that many will recall and one which had so many consequences, most of them unintended. I recall it clearly, as it was a period immediately before the birth of my first child. We were hunkered down at home, awaiting his arrival while the rolling TV news built a frenzy of anticipation that climaxed in the ‘shock and awe’ of the aerial bombardment of Baghdad, ahead of the ground invasion. The event turned out to have further significance for me, as I would end up visiting Iraq many times in the years that followed. I did so as a journalist, as a Reservist army officer, and then as a contractor, running communication campaigns designed to help the Iraqis deal with those consequences and find their way through the chaos to better circumstances.
Ahead of the invasion, a million people had marched in London and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had resigned, but Tony Blair’s government persisted in standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the US, participating in the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Blair’s case was that Saddam’s Iraq was a rogue state, armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) such as it had used before against neighbours and its own people. Even at the time many, including me, felt that the ‘intelligence-based’ case was weak and that a kind of bombastic hubris was driving the US-led coalition into this regime-changing mission. This feeling was intensified by what seemed such a spurious case by the Attorney General that the invasion was legal, based on technicalities around UN resolutions.
Of course, all those doubts were proved to be well-founded. There were no stockpiled WMDs – Saddam was bluffing. The hubris that drove the illegal invasion soon met a different reality from that which influential American journalist Irving Kristol had referred to when he described ‘Neo-Cons’, who were ‘Liberals who have been mugged by reality’. In hindsight, or for those too young to have experienced it, it’s hard to comprehend how such egregious groupthink developed, but this anniversary reminds us how interventionist the US and UK governments had become.
As does last week’s episode of The Rest Is Politics podcast, featuring a captivating, tense debate between Alastair Campbell, who led on UK government communications making the case for the invasion, and Rory Stewart, who served in Iraq as an advisor and as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Deputy Governor of Maysan Province, where I later served.
Both recalled the previous post-Cold War military interventions, notably not devoted to regime change – the 1990-91 Gulf War, (where George HW Bush had resisted the temptation to chase Saddam’s forces all the way back to Baghdad and topple him), John Major’s 1991 military relief and protection operation for Iraq’s displaced Kurds, Clinton and Blair’s interventions in Bosnia in 1995, their limited strikes on Iraq in 1998 when Saddam kicked the UN’s weapons inspectors out, Kosovo in 1999 and the Australian operation in East Timor in the same year. All had led to a sense of confidence that military power could achieve strategic ends in upholding international law and human rights or enabling humanitarian interventions. None of them triggered insurgencies or civil war. This accrued confidence was expressed in Blair’s April 1999 Chicago speech, where he set out a doctrine for humanitarian intervention, where sovereign borders might be crossed if the need justified it. The UK’s Sierra Leone intervention followed as a case in point.
Post 9/11, that confidence had a more belligerent edge in rooting out threats and doing away with previous strategies of containment. Initial success in Afghanistan in attacking Al Qaeda, and uprooting the Taliban in the process, maintained the sense of confidence in the US and allied hard power. Then came the Iraq project and, for Blair, a revised ‘calculus of threat’. Stewart nailed it for me by describing in the Bush and Blair teams an almost ‘manic depressive’ combination of a heightened sense of threat and an ‘extreme optimism’ about our ability to prevail in taking on rogue states. That mindset paid very little attention to the complexities of individual states, but in the mind of those such as leading Neo-Con Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Secretary for Defense 2001-2005, removing Saddam Hussein would spark a chain reaction of democracy across the Middle East, from Iraq through Iran, Syria and beyond.
Yet this wasn’t the primary case made for intervention – it was all about WMDs, based on ‘intelligence’. Again, for those interested, it’s worth hearing Campbell insist that the intelligence was comprehensive and tested as dossiers were prepared, while Stewart points out just how skewed the intelligence gathering was towards finding intelligence to support the assumption that Saddam did have WMDs, rather than to test that assumption. The infamous claim, picked up in a Sun headline, ‘BRITS 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM’, referring to UK troops in Cyprus, was allegedly based on a claim heard in a taxi from a paid agent. While Campbell and Stewart can agree that the belief that Saddam had WMDs was genuine and widely held in ‘the intelligence community’, it was a catastrophic failure of intelligence and it was, as I so strongly suspected at the time, used tactically by Blair and Campbell to make their most compelling case for action. It was a failure that carried an unbearable cost in hundreds of thousands of lives and was a doomed 3 trillion dollar venture.
The related case, emphasised more in the US than the UK, that invading would allow the allies to root out Al Qaeda at source before Saddam could collaborate with them, also had dire unintended consequences. As the coalition battled with Al Qaeda in Iraq and jailed those who were not killed in their ‘kill or capture’ missions, it was in Camp Bucca where future ISIS ‘caliph’ Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi met some of Saddam’s former top brass and ISIS came into being, with devastating effects after the withdrawal of US combat troops.
To return to the idea of bestowing democracy on former dictatorships, this was where some of my own experience was so eye-opening and sometimes heart-breaking. Whatever my views about the invasion, I became increasingly involved in Iraq because I came to see the good faith and sense of possibility that so many Iraqis showed in a democratic process - one that I tried to help promote. They had the courage to vote in relative numbers that put to shame many established democratic countries like our own. Yet the results, in a system intended to be representative and balanced but prone to encouraging impasse, nepotism, and corruption, have been to produce a string of dysfunctional administrations. Amid such chaos and, during the worst periods, full-scale civil war, insurgency, and multiple foreign interferences, Iraq’s democracy and rule of law has often resembled a bad joke. This despite the heroic efforts of many Iraqis and those who have worked with them. Saddam’s reign was truly horrific, but for many, the chaos and killing that followed has been far worse.
More widely, the true cost of this misadventure has come to be seen by many as the pivotal moment where the US and the UK lost all moral authority to promote democracy and the rule of law as the superior system that all should aspire to. We have seen the effects across the Middle East, as the very opposite chain reaction to that intended happened in Syria and Iran, while authoritarianism dug in after the ill-fated Arab Spring.
Ultimately, even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be traced back to it, via an unravelling of the international order and a loss of Western public support for intervention. We can only hope that the Western alliance’s response via NATO serves to revive and reassert that international order and shared set of values.
By Harry Wynne-Williams, Director at Audley
Image credit/The U.S. National Archives