Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces -- Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam's brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.
Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. "Democracy" there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority -- long accustomed to power -- into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq's did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed" The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Furthermore, the invasion played directly into Osama bin Laden's hands, fueling his narrative of an American "war on Islam." In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq's neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.
That David Petraeus's surge "worked" is perhaps the greatest myth of all. It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington. By then, the Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the capacity for carnage.
That post-surge "calm" was, however, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war. No fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a coherent national whole. Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior to the invasion), never would be eradicated. Its leadership, further radicalized in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an opportunity to win back Sunni fealty.
Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S. military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on peaceful Sunni protests. He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to death in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances. Maliki's ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.
Islamists, including AQI, also took advantage of events in Syria. Autocrat Bashar al-Assad's brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the opening they needed. Of course, the revolt there might never have occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region. In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some of Saddam's cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned to the newly established "Islamic State" (ISIS) for protection.
Mission (Un)Accomplished!
It's hardly controversial these days to point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos. Toppling Saddam's brutal regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a century. However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that burned down the old order.
As it turned out, no matter the efforts of the globe's greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to Iraq. It rarely does. Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing to accept such realities. Think of that as the twenty-first-century American Achilles' heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S. power. Policy in these years might best be summarized as: "we" have to do something, and military force is the best -- perhaps the only -- feasible option.
Has it worked? Is anybody, including Americans, safer? Few in power even bother to ask such questions. But the data is there. The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 compared with 11,774 attacks in 2015. That's right: at best , America's 15-year "war on terror" failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its actions helped make matters 30 times worse.
Recall the Hippocratic oath: "First do no harm." And remember Osama bin Laden's stated goal on 9/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the heart of the Middle East. Mission accomplished!
In today's world of "alternative facts," it's proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data and so avoid thorny questions. Recent events and contemporary political discourse even suggest that the country's political elites now inhabit a post-factual environment; in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.
It couldn't be more obvious that Washington's officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term -- "isolationism" -- masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.
As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they -- and their troops -- have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier's tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
A realistic look at America's recent past in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest two unsatisfying but vital conclusions. First, false lessons and misbegotten collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today's regional mess. As a result, it's long past time to reassess recent history and challenge long-held suppositions. Second, policymakers badly overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires. In all of this, the agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept aside.
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