It was quite logical that after ISIS emerged in Iraq and Syria in 2014 that the U.S. would take on the mission of helping to destroy ISIS in Iraq.I wrote in 2015 after the Battle of Tikrit that I hoped winning this war would have good effects in Iraq, and so it seems to have been. Nothing unifies people like a common enemy.
Washington felt guilty having removed all combat troops from Iraq before it was really stabilized and ISIS had brutally murdered American journalists. But rather than do it all ourselves, we partnered with the Iraqi Army and amplified its power and ground forces with our advisers and air power.
That approach led not only to the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, it also produced some unanticipated positive effects in Iraqi politics. The ISIS war became a kind of national war of liberation for Iraqis that brought moderate Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds closer together — and gave them dignity that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had unintentionally stolen. And this paved the way for more stable and sustainable power-sharing among Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites in Iraq.
Iraq today remains a very frail democracy — with huge challenges in employment, energy, corruption and governing. But “Iraq today is a different country,” noted Linda Robinson in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Winning the Peace in Iraq: Don’t Give Up on Baghdad’s Fragile Democracy. “Few Americans understand the remarkable success” that has been achieved in bringing Iraq back from the depth of the ISIS war.
This doesn’t mean that the original Iraq invasion was worth it or that we would do it again. But it does mean we found the right way to help Iraqis help themselves. It is now up to them to make the most of it.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Iraq after the ISIS War
Interesting comment from Tom Friedman:
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This doesn’t mean that the original Iraq invasion was worth it or that we would do it again. But it does mean we found the right way to help Iraqis help themselves. It is now up to them to make the most of it.
We "found the right way to help Iraqis help themselves" all the way back in 1945, with the seven year long postwar occupation and reconstruction of Japan.
What we ALWAYS should have done in the aftermath of our initial victory over Saddam was start pouring mass amounts of resources into rebuilding Iraq as soon as possible. We needed to commit ourselves for the long haul from the very start, and have a comprehensive plan to see it all through to the very end. We needed to stick around and not just patrol the streets with guns, but also actively rebuild the Iraqi nation from the ground up, as we did for both Germany and Japan. We needed to do everything necessary to ensure that stability and prosperity were restored and would remain in place once we finally ended our occupation.
And we KNEW that. It was a critically important lesson we learned a long time ago from the aftermath of the first World War, when the world left Germany in shambles, and in doing so created the instability that would directly lead to the global catastrophe of the second World War.
We never should have been in Iraq to begin with, but once there we had a clear duty to finish the job properly - if not for moral reasons, then at the very least out of rational self interest. But the leaders who took us into that war were not only staggeringly immoral, they were also wildly incompetant. It was a war declared by stupid and greedy men, for stupid and greedy reasons, with a totally avoidable catastrophic aftermath caused by rampant stupidity and greed.
This is the danger of democracy. This is what happens when a society works to promote stupidity and greed in the populace, producing voters who are stupid and greedy, who elect leaders who are stupid and greedy. Trillions of dollars wasted on an idiot war and bungled occupation, while untold numbers of innocent Iraqis, Syrians, Kurds, etc, pay for our stupidity with their lives.
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