The Fifth Year of War

David Aikman

David Aikman muses on the US war in Iraq.

A major landmark in American foreign policy was passed this week: the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq. As the US enters its fifth year of fighting in Iraq, many observers have noted that America has been at war there longer than it fought in World War I, World War II, or Korea. Americans, it is fair to say, do not like fighting wars, and especially in peace-time. On this topic, more below.

The original reasons given by the administration for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 were to locate and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime. Much has been made of the fact that, after US forces had conquered Baghdad and subdued most of the remainder of the country, no weapons of mass destruction were found. This fact has been used to support assertions that President Bush lied to the American people by using the WMD argument to initiate hostilities against Iraq.

In fact, the majority of the international community at the time of the invasion, including the UN, believed that Iraq did indeed have weapons of mass destruction and had been putting obstacles in the way of international inspections teams that wanted to investigate them. More important, Iraq clearly had possessed WMDs because the Iraqi government had used poison gas against both the Kurdish community inside the country and its Iranian adversaries outside in the 1980s. What happened to the WMDs between the time of their use in the 1980s decade and the invasion of 2003? There is no clear answer, though it is probable that some of the still-remaining WMD arsenal was shipped out of Iraq just before the invasion, possibly to Syria.

The second objective of the invasion, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, was indeed accomplished. Saddam himself was a fugitive for a time, then captured by the Americans, turned over to the Iraqis, and tried and executed by them. Others among his vicious henchmen have also been executed. Yet the replacement of his unusually brutal dictatorship by a democratic Iraqi government has proved a much harder task. The deep sectarian rifts in Iraqi society among the Shiite Arab majority (about 60 percent of the population), Sunni Arabs, and Kurds, had been papered over during Saddam’s era by the totalitarian nature of Saddam’s political control of the country. When the Shiites briefly rose against that regime after the 1991 Gulf War, they were suppressed ruthlessly.

In trying to be the midwife of Iraqi democracy aborning, the US authorities in Iraq made plenty of mistakes. One such mistake was the policy insisted upon by the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by a former State Department official, Paul L. Bremer, of purging Iraq’s administrative establishment of Baath Party members and of ensuring that the Iraqi army, which had largely fallen apart after the invasion, remained disbanded. Another was the failure of the American troops in the country to control Iraq’s borders effectively, particularly the one with Syria, through which many Islamic fighters from other Arab states came to join the insurgency. 

A third mistake was a far more fundamental error of failing to predict the dimensions of a probable post-invasion insurgency, and thus failure to anticipate, quite probably, how many American and allied troops would be needed to oversee Iraq’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Fourth, a seeming tone-deafness to the complexity of Iraq’s religious mix on the part of the State Department ensured two things: One was that the beleaguered Assyrian Christian community got virtually no benefit from Iraq’s liberation by a supposedly Christian country. Another was the apparently slow perception of how intense were animosities between the Shiite Muslim community and Iraq’s Sunnis.

Whatever the mistakes of the US in overseeing post-invasion Iraq, the Iraqis did not help themselves. Though Iraqis in impressive numbers turned out to vote—despite threats from insurgents—in favor of a new constitution in October 2005, when the first post-Saddam national elections were held in December of that year, election results more accurately reflected the deep internal ethnic and religious divisions of the country than mere political differences among the parties. As a result, the continuing violence has assumed more of an internecine sectarian cast—death squads of Sunni and Shiite gunmen committing murder inside each other’s communities—than attacks aimed solely at the Americans and their allies. A further complicating factor is Sunni Islamic extremists, often supported by Islamists outside of the country, seeking to impose by force a Sunni Islamic state in Iraq, alongside Shiite Islamic extremists, sometimes supported by Iran, seeking to impose an Iran-allied Islamic state.

The costs of the war for Iraqis have been heavy. Conservative estimates are that between 30,000 and 35,000 Iraqis—civilians and security officials—have died in violence since the March 2003 invasion. A recent poll of Baghdadi citizens also revealed that 77 percent knew someone who had been a victim of the city’s apparently never-ceasing violence.

For Americans, the price in military casualties—not to mention civilian contractors and other officials—has been worrying, but hardly catastrophic: approximately 3,200 as of March 2007. Though this is certainly of no consolation to the American families who have lost family members in Iraq, the figure comes nowhere near the losses in America’s shorter wars this past century: World War I (battle deaths: 53,402), World War II (battle deaths: 291,557), or Korea (battle deaths: 33,741).

There have been some large anti-war protests across the US (though nowhere near as large as the Vietnam War-era protests), but clearly, Americans do not “feel” at war. There is no domestic rationing of any commodity; there are no national mobilizations; the number of troops in Iraq at any one time (approximately 140,000 throughout most of the post-2003 period) is smaller than the population of many American small towns; no major battles are constantly taking place. There does not even seem to be a widespread feeling in the US that America itself could be affected by events in Iraq. People continue to watch vacuous TV shows, travel on foreign vacations, fill up their cars with as much gas as they want, and in general go about their business very much as though the country were totally at peace.

True, Americans seem well aware that Islamofascist extremist groups would like to see America totally destroyed, but even the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan seems to take back-seat not only to the war in Iraq but to most other events affecting Americans. The most disturbing aspect of the Iraq War for most Americans is the steady drip-drip of daily American combat deaths—four in this IED (Improvised Explosive Device) explosion, five in that—for no discernible strategic result, either militarily or politically.

Historians of a future epoch may indeed interpret the Iraq War as America’s standing in the gap for Western civilization against the onslaught of Islamic fascism, just as historians now tend to agree that President Truman’s decision to come to the aid of Greece and Turkey in the early days of the Cold War was decisive in turning the tide of Moscow’s efforts to undermine Europe in particular and the West in general. President Bush recently invited to luncheon at the White House a British writer, Andrew Roberts, whose book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples posits the view that the Anglo-American alliance of the past century-plus has done more decisive good in defeating evil challenges to world peace and freedom (from Soviet Communism, German Nazism, and Japanese militarism) than any other historic alliances of nations. The president sees the Iraq war conflict very much in similar epochal terms—a struggle of good versus evil, a tipping point in global security and global history. President Bush also believes that victory in an identifiable sense is still achievable in Iraq. Even Americans who oppose the war must hope, in their heart of hearts, that he is right.  

Senior Fellow David Aikman is a journalist and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, War and Peace, Fri 23 Mar 2007