Many Americans still remember the Bush administration's bogus pre-invasion claims -- complete with visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities -- that Saddam Hussein had a thriving nuclear program in Iraq. But who remembers that, as part of the justification for the invasion it had decided would be its destiny, the administration also claimed a "mature and symbiotic" relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda? In other words, the invasion was to be justified in some fashion as a response to the attacks of 9/11 (which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with). Who remembers that, the year after American troops took Baghdad, evidence of the nuclear program having gone down the toilet, Vice President Dick Cheney, backed by George W. Bush, doubled down on the al-Qaeda claim?
"There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to," said the vice president on CNBC in June 2004. "The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials." Based on cherry-picked intelligence, such claims proved fraudulent, too, or as David Kay, the man assigned by the administration to hunt down that missing weaponry of mass destruction and those al-Qaeda links, put it politely, "evidence free." By then, however, 57% of Americans had been convinced that there was indeed some significant relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda, and 20% believed that Saddam was linked directly to the 9/11 attacks.
Be careful, as they say, what you wish for. More than a decade after its invasion and occupation, after Cheney made those fervent claims, no administration would have the slightest problem linking al-Qaeda to Iraq (or Syria, Yemen, or a number of other countries). A decade later, the evidence is in. Sunni Iraq, along with areas of neighboring Syria, one of the countries that was supposed to bow down before American might, now houses a rudimentary jihadist state, a creature birthed into the world in significant part thanks to the dreams and fantasies of the visionaries of the Bush administration. Across the Greater Middle East, jihadism and al-Qaeda wannabes of every sort are on the rise, while terror groups are destabilizing regions from Pakistan to northern Africa.
Creating an Arc of Instability
In the period before and after the invasion of Iraq, top Bush officials and their neocon supporters spoke with relish about taming an area stretching from northern Africa through the Middle East and deep into Central Asia that they termed an "arc of instability." In a February 2006 address to the American Legion focused on his Global War on Terror, for instance, President Bush typically said, "Slowly but surely, we're helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom. And as freedom reaches more people in this vital region, we'll have new allies in the war on terror, and new partners in the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and in the cause of peace."
By then that "arc," which in the period before 9/11 had been reasonably stable, was already aflame. Today, it is ablaze. Almost 13 years after the launching of the Global War on Terror and the first bombing runs in Afghanistan, 11 years after a global antiwar protest went unheard and the invasion of Iraq was launched, and three years after Americans gathered in front of the White House to cheer the death of Osama bin Laden, that arc has been destabilized in a stunning way.
As things recently went from bad to worse in Iraq, jihadist militants in Pakistan attacked Karachi International Airport, an assault that stunned the country and suggested that the reach of the Pakistani Taliban was growing. At the same time, after a six-month pause, the Obama administration resumed its CIA drone assassination campaign in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, a deeply unpopular program that has been a significant destabilizing factor in its own right. Meanwhile, in Yemen, where the U.S. has for years been conducting a special operations and drone war against a growing al-Qaeda wannabe outfit, unknown militants knocked out the electricity in Sanaa, the capital, for days. The Syrian bloodbath, of course, continues with estimates of 160,000 or more deaths in that multi-sided conflict, while in Libya, now an essentially ungovernable and chaotic land of jihadist and other militias and ambitious generals, tensions and fighting increased.
Think of this as George W. Bush's nightmare and Osama bin Laden's wet dream. On September 11, 2001, a relatively small, modestly funded organization with a knack for planning terror surprises every couple of years had a remarkable stroke of televised luck. From those falling towers, everything followed, thanks in large part to the acts of the fundamentalists of the Bush administration, whose top officials thought they had spotted their main chance, geopolitically speaking, in the carnage of the moment.
Almost 13 years later, there is a jihadist proto-state, a fantasy caliphate, in the heart of the Middle East. Now a dime a dozen in the region, jihadists of an al-Qaedan bent are armed to the teeth with cast-off American weaponry. In northern Africa, other jihadists are using weaponry from the former arsenals of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, looted in the aftermath of President Obama's can't-miss 2011 intervention in that country. The jihadists of ISIS now have hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the Mosul branch of the Iraqi central bank for funding and have advanced toward Baghdad. Even Osama bin Laden might not have assumed things would go quite so swimmingly.
The Guns of Folly
In the wake of Mosul's fall, ISIS advanced even more rapidly than the American army heading for Baghdad in the spring of 2003. In some Sunni-dominated cities and towns, the takeovers were remarkably bloodless. In Baiji, with a power plant that supplies electricity to Baghdad and Iraq's largest oil refinery (now under attack), the insurgents reportedly called the police and asked them to leave town -- and they complied. In Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq that the Kurds have long claimed as the natural capital for an independent Kurdistan, Iraqi troops quietly abandoned their weaponry and uniforms and left town, while armed Kurdish forces moved in, undoubtedly permanently.
All in all, it's been a debacle the likes of which we've seen only twice in our history. In China, when in 1949 Chiang Kai-shek's largely American armed and trained military disintegrated before the insurgent forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong and a quarter-century later, when a purely American military creation, the South Vietnamese army, collapsed in the face of an offensive by North Vietnamese troops and local rebel forces. In each case, the resulting defeat was psychologically unnerving in the United States and led to bitter, exceedingly strange, and long-lasting debates about who "lost" China and who "lost" Vietnam.
Early signs of an equally bizarre debate over the "loss" of Iraq are already appearing here. This should surprise no one, as the only thing left to pass around is blame. Senator John McCain, a fervent supporter of the 2003 invasion and occupation, launched the most recent round of the blame game. He pinned fault for the onrushing events on the Obama administration's decision to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq in 2011 (thanks to an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration) without leaving a significant presence behind. Citing himself as if he were someone else, he said, "Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right. Our failure to leave forces in Iraq is why Senator Graham and I predicted this would happen."
Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri was typical of the Republican politicians who began promoting this line. "It's a desperate situation," he said. "It's moving quickly. It appears to me that the chickens are coming home to roost for our policy of not leaving anybody there to be a stabilizing force." In a similar blast, the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote, "In withdrawing from Iraq in toto, Mr. Obama put his desire to have a talking point for his re-election campaign above America's strategic interests. Now we and the world are facing this reality: A civil war in Iraq and the birth of a terrorist haven that has the confidence, and is fast acquiring the means, to raise a banner for a new generation of jihadists, both in Iraq and beyond."
And so it goes. In this case, however, none of it may matter much. In a country visibly sick of our wars of this century in which even many elite figures find further intervention in Iraq distasteful, "Who lost Iraq?" may never gain the sort of traction the other two "lost" debates did.
In the meantime, however, the world of the Middle East is being turned upside down. Take the example of Iran. Once upon a time, Iraq was thought to be just a way station. As neocons of that moment liked to quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." As it happened, the neighborhood around Baghdad quickly grew so ugly and the Bush administration soon found itself so bogged down in unwinnable minority insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that it never put the U.S. military on that road to Tehran.
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