Why Iraq Still Matters

When the U.S. and dozens of allies invaded Iraq in 2003, it took just weeks to decimate Iraq’s army and occupy Baghdad, and a few months to capture Saddam Hussein. But it would take four more years of hard fighting, and a massive surge of U.S. forces in 2007, for the U.S. to achieve real victory — though few Americans today remember it as such.

President Obama came into office in 2009 promising “a responsible end to the war in Iraq.” It was hard to know what he meant, since the war was already over. His meaning became clearer in 2011, when, against the advice of military commanders and the discreet but urgent pleas of Iraqi officials, he recklessly pulled out all U.S. forces. Abandoning the Iraqi government to its own devices when it was still too weak to fend for itself seemed almost calculated to throw away what America had gained from the war, so that nobody could say the war had been worth it.

If that was Obama’s intent, it was a rare success among his Middle East policies: Iraq was soon overrun by the Islamic State in the Sunni north and west, as Iranian agents infiltrated Iraq’s Shiite militias and its government. And yet a decade after Obama nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, Iraq has not fallen to America’s defeated enemies as Afghanistan has. Through one crisis after another, Iraq still stands, America’s only democratic ally in the Arab world.

And that is good, because Iraq still matters.

America has gotten into a dangerously isolationist mood. “Globalism” has become a new all-purpose boogeyman. But the isolationist holiday from world affairs is destined to be a short one. The Middle East will be a decisive theater of the new cold war between the U.S. and China. If China succeeds in contesting America’s preeminence in the region, it will confirm its position as the world’s foremost superpower. A world in which countries prioritize their relations with communist China over their relations with democratic America will not be safe for democracy.

With China in the ascendant and Iran on the cusp of nuclear weapons, the dangers to vital U.S. interests are growing, not receding. America needs to maintain its position of preeminent power in the Middle East. And the key to that position is Iraq.

Most people think that because no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the invasion was a mistake. A full occupation may have been the wrong thing to do, but by 2003 a major military intervention of some kind was definitely necessary. Saddam’s was one of the most evil and destructive dictatorships in the world. He had provided safe haven and training for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups with global reach. He had already been caught trying to develop nuclear weapons and other WMD a decade earlier, after the Gulf War, and seemed to be doing it again.

In the age of WMD that can be delivered instantly, anywhere, and without warning, the failure of transparency will sometimes constitute an immediate threat, whether or not an attack is imminent. A development that, if allowed to proceed to fruition, would severely degrade one’s national security is an immediate threat. That is why President Kennedy threatened to sink Soviet ships suspected of carrying nuclear missiles on their way to Cuba in 1962, and it is why President Clinton nearly bombed North Korea’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in 1994. Neither situation presented the possibility of an imminent attack, but both were points of no return; thus each president rightly perceived an intolerable threat.

Similarly, under U.N. Security Council mandates, Saddam was required to prove to U.N. inspectors that he had no WMD, through a transparent accounting of his weapons systems. He failed to do so. Given the potential danger, what we needed was transparency. Even if the pre-war intelligence on WMD had not been wrong, there was no way it could have been more than speculative; that was the whole problem, and it was entirely Saddam’s fault. If military action was necessary to prove that military action was unnecessary, the dilemma Bush faced cannot be so easily dismissed.

Ignoring the dangers of WMD will not make them go away. In the years ahead, verifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear-nonproliferation treaty will be vital to world security. We should make it clear that it is also vital to the security of Iran. Without arms control backed by the credible threat of force, the nonproliferation regime will fail, and the 21st century could quickly become one of unimagined horrors. Between inaction and military occupation there is a wide middle ground for diplomacy characterized by what Winston Churchill called “martial vigor.” We don’t need to invade Iran to make the price of nukes prohibitive for the mullahs. But it will almost certainly require a credible threat of force. The closer Iran gets to nuclear weapons, the more transparency it will need to provide to assuage the legitimate security concerns of those countries whose destruction the regime is officially committed to. Hence, Iran is driving slowly but surely toward a military confrontation with the West.

The urgent priority of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East right now is to contain Iran. As with the containment of the Soviet Union, the strategy will require hemming in Iranian power on all sides until the internal contradictions and dysfunctions of the Islamic Revolution lead to its demise, hopefully in a democratic revolution. Iraq is central to every element of that strategy. Its long, shared border with Iran makes it indispensable to the geographic containment of the Islamic Republic. And the fact that Iraq and Iran are both majority-Shiite countries means that to some degree they have a shared polity, which explains why Iran has invested so heavily in its political position in Iraq. Simply put, Iraqi politics are a central battlefront in the confrontation with Iran.

In both the geographic and the political domain, Iraq’s centrality to the containment of Iran requires a strong American presence. Otherwise, Iran fills the vacuum, co-opting Iraq’s Shiite militias and extending Tehran’s power across the Fertile Crescent to Israel’s very borders. Then the U.S. loses the ability to influence events not just in Iraq but in the Middle East generally, from Syria to Kuwait and from Kurdistan to Jordan. Then even America’s most steadfast Arab allies hedge their bets. Witness the rapprochement, under Chinese auspices, of Saudi Arabia and Iran, two powers that have long been archenemies in the Muslim world.

What’s so infuriating about Obama’s criminal negligence in Iraq is that he inherited a situation in which the U.S. had just achieved complete victory over the Sunni terrorists and Shiite militias that drowned Iraq in blood after the fall of Saddam. By early 2007, there had been a tectonic shift of the Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda and toward an open alliance with the Americans. Iraqi security forces were large and increasingly capable, while the insurgents and militias, including the fearsome Shiite militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, found themselves increasingly isolated.

After the U.S. “surge” brought the combined total of U.S. and Iraqi forces to about 500,000, the new allies went on the offensive, utterly defeating the insurgency in just a few months. By 2009, Iraqi politics were dominated by a Shiite coalition that overtly favored an alliance with the United States. In the press, Shiite militias accused each other of being under Iranian control. All signs pointed to the gathering strength of the U.S.–Iraqi alliance. To borrow from the title of Bing West’s book about the Iraq War, U.S. forces had proven that they were “the strongest tribe.”

That position, achieved after years of grueling sacrifice and valiant struggle, was a priceless strategic asset that a more discerning president than Obama would have felt it his duty to preserve. The main reason we kept forces in Japan and Germany for decades after World War II was so that we wouldn’t have to fight there again. We now had to learn this the hard way in Iraq. Having been left to dangle in the wind, Iraqi security forces melted away as ISIS swept across much of northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria in 2014, leading to one of the largest refugee crises in world history and a campaign of genocide against the Yazidi tribes. Scarcely three years after pulling all U.S. forces out of Iraq, Obama was forced to send them back in.

Even then, he decided on a severely limited foot presence, electing instead to rely on airpower. The main “boots on the ground” in the effort were Iranian-backed militias and perhaps 30,000 Iranian troops, who were also the main source of targeting “intelligence.” Hence Obama essentially put the U.S. Air Force at the disposal of Iran, which used it both to flush ISIS out of its physical caliphate and to bolster its own position. In 2019, after the defeat of ISIS, Iranian-backed militias promptly started attacking U.S. forces. When those attacks resulted in the death of an American, President Trump ordered the targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That action was a high point, but its long-term utility remains to be seen, disconnected as it was from any obvious strategy of deterrence and containment.

Luckily, even after a decade in which the U.S. has afforded Iran every opportunity to expand its power there, Iraq continues to resist Iranian hegemony. In October 2022, Iraqis installed a new prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, at the head of perhaps the most openly pro-Iran coalition in the history of post-Saddam Iraq. With Iranian influence at its highest point, there are grave reasons to worry. But to the mullahs’ great disappointment, al-Sudani has defended the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, telling the Wall Street Journal that he thinks foreign forces are needed, and he refuses to set a timetable for their withdrawal.

Iraqis are deeply unhappy with government corruption. In November 2022 it was revealed that $2.5 billion had gone missing from the national treasury. Part of the problem is that the U.S. occupation created a consociational political structure in Iraq, distributing high offices and institutions among the major social and religious groups. As in Lebanon, the result has been a state that is too fractured to protect itself from the officials who systematically loot it or from the militias and political parties that openly contest its authority.

Unfortunately, the similarity to Lebanon does not end there. Both are democracies in which elections are generally free and fair, with broad press freedoms. But both are paralyzed by the presence of militias that prevent the state from establishing an effective monopoly on violence. The most virulent of these — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq — are both politically active, and loyal to Iran. Indeed, Kata’ib Hezbollah is directly subordinate to Iran’s Quds Force; its founder and leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was riding in the car with Soleimani when both were killed, along with several other militia leaders.

The assassination was an earthquake in Iraqi politics and reminded everyone that America is still the strongest tribe. But with only about 2,000 soldiers in an advisory and training capacity, U.S. force presence remains frightfully weak, vulnerable to harassment by missile and mortar attacks. Force levels are crucial because the weight of U.S. forces determines the orientation of the Shiite parties that rule Iraq. When America is strong, all the major parties seek protection under its umbrella. When it is weak, U.S. forces tend to serve Iranian purposes more than our own. The U.S. should plan on maintaining at least 10,000 troops in Iraq, with substantial mobile combat power, for the next several decades.

The good news is that, against all odds, Iraq remains fertile for a long-term alliance with the United States. Its messy democratic politics, though rife with corruption, have remained a beacon of hope for Iranians and others in the region who aspire to freedom. Ultimately, the Iranian threat can be removed only by a democratic revolution inside Iran. Indeed, the same may be said of the threats facing Israel, which will subside only when the region experiences the spread of successful market economies and democratic institutions. That’s why Iraq’s nascent democracy matters.

America has never succeeded at nation-building. But it has been wildly successful at helping its allies build their own democratic institutions, from Europe to the Pacific Rim. The success of the American model around the world has brought a golden age of security and prosperity to Americans at home. Americans risk all of that by turning away from the alliances that have been the bedrock of the American century.

I will never forget walking with a joint U.S.–Iraqi patrol, while embedded with Coalition forces, through a small town on the outskirts of Ramadi in the summer of 2007, just weeks after al-Qaeda had been swept from the Sunni heartland of Anbar Province. For the first time in more than three years, schools were open, and vendors were selling vegetables and wares at thatched-roof stalls lining the dusty desert roadway. As our patrol approached, one elderly man with onions for sale sat his grandchild on his knee and waved me over, evidently hoping that I would take a picture. As I pulled my camera up, he smiled and said, in his simple English, “Thank you, Coalition.”

I thought of the great sacrifices that had been necessary to get to that moment. Americans liberated a long-suffering people from a sadistic dictatorship. And while we can’t ignore the human toll, we shouldn’t ignore what was achieved, especially because the most lasting benefits are still to be secured.

Helping democracy succeed in Iraq will be as valuable as it has proven in South Korea, where America’s commitment and patience have created a flourishing democracy and one of America’s most powerful allies in the world. And that did not happen overnight. South Korea was a dictatorship for three decades before making its successful transition to democracy. Today it is a shining tribute to the sacrifices of our fallen in the Korean War and to the steadfastness of those who have stood watch over that hallowed ground since then.

Was the Iraq War a mistake? The answer depends more on what will happen in the years ahead than on what has gone before. Those who fought in Iraq did their part. Now it’s up to a new generation of Americans to ensure that their sacrifices were not in vain.