Iraq War: Blinded By Hindsight
I posted an old 2011 blog of mine for the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. If you haven’t read it, I updated the post to include a reply that an Airborne Ranger sent me back in 2011 after reading it, which I thought was relevant to the conversation. I also put together a sourcebook of sorts on the Iraq War for those that are interested in going down that rabbit hole and want some materials (docs, books, lectures, etc.) that are more engaging for those who haven’t yet deep-dived into the Iraq War.
I had stated in that initial post that I was not going to dig deeper into this subject, but I found myself collecting a lot of quotes / excerpts that have made me think about where we are when it comes to the Iraq War today (which is unfortunately not much different from where we were at twenty years ago). Certainly, I don’t think a truly honest story of this war will be told until we get some historians that are several generations removed from the stubborn, ideological intransigence of today’s society. Still, I felt like it would be worth sharing some of these differing perspectives, and reflecting on them with some of my own views. I will admit that this is a subject I find more difficult to tackle than others, particularly when it comes to the more personal stuff I talk about at the end.
POSTERITY
MARSIN ALSHAMARY: We all agree that Saddam Hussein was one of the most brutal dictators in history, and there is no one who longs for him or misses him who really has Iraq’s interests at heart. But that being said, two wrongs don’t make a right… But I just don’t like to compare the two. I’m a very forward looking person… Mainly because most Iraqis don’t remember the 2003 war. Our population is very young… For those who were even around for the Ba’athist era, they were children, and really their formative years were that 2005 to 2010 era, which was rife with sectarian violence. And what this has created is a generation of Iraqis who have, rightfully so, a high expectation of what a democracy looks like.
You actually see this is a common theme across the world. When you have a youth generation that has no memory of authoritarianism, they tend to have very high expectations of what democracy should look like… So there is an appetite for democracy in Iraq, but there is a strong association – that I think is shared elsewhere in the Middle East – about democracy being incompatible with economic prosperity… There is also an issue in Iraq that is a bit unique, in that the instability, the poor governance, the poor services after 2003, has generated what can only be described as “authoritarian nostalgia” among Iraqi youth who, having never lived under Saddam, have a very specific idea of what life was like there… So they tend to focus on the fact that the army was strong, that the borders were secure, that the country was respected.
[At the same time,] I think the youth are a source of great optimism in Iraq, because first of all they display an anti-sectarianism that is virtually absent in other generations… If you talk to the average young person in Iraq, their primary concerns are corruption … a lack of services … and they’re concerned to a lesser degree with the issues that catch more attention in the West – like security or stability. Because it’s been seven years since the defeat of ISIS, and we have achieved some stability that we haven’t seen before… So this is the first time we’ve actually had some time to breathe… I certainly think that we could have been in a much better place today, but we could also have been in a much worse place than where we are.
THOMAS JEFFERSON: A first attempt to recover the right of self-government may fail, so may a second, a third, etc. But as a younger, and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment becomes more and more intuitive, and a fourth, or fifth, or some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed… To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow and years of desolation pass over. Yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation. For what inheritance, so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?
GEORGE W. BUSH: History? We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.1
Perhaps it is a tad odd to link these views by Marsin Alshamary with Thomas Jefferson’s views on the French Revolution (especially since I’ve always been rather critical of Jefferson’s casual acceptance of “rivers of blood” from the safety of his home in Monticello), but I couldn’t help thinking about that Jefferson quote when I listened to Iraqis speak today. Because as much as I criticize Jefferson’s vision of the world, I sometimes worry that he might be right on this score. That perhaps there really is no way for real change to be affected without “rivers of blood and years of desolation.” At least, not when your starting point is where Iraq was at under Saddam Hussein.
In America, we can affect change through reform because our society is quite prosperous and free, and it allows for that kind of change within its institutions (without the need for rivers of blood). But in the Middle East, especially in a country under Saddam Hussein (or Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad), you have no choice but to resort to violence. These guys don’t go quietly into the night.
The hope now is that we are now getting closer and closer to a point when Iraqis can start relying on reform rather than violence. Just as the fear here at home is that we are gradually seeing more Americans lean into violence rather than reform. It’s a reminder that “stories” can move people just as much as dictators, wars, and occupations can. Sectarianism can be Shia vs Sunni, or it can be left vs right.
Revolution is war, and war is revolution. The Arab Spring was a revolution from the inside-out, but the Iraq War was a revolution from the outside-in. Even today, most Iraqis will admit that they never would have gotten out from under Saddam without foreign intervention. Of course, that is no excuse for that intervention being conducted so incompetently, selfishly, and recklessly (and there is almost universal agreement now that any American intervention in Iraq should have happened in 1991 not 2003).
I still contend the French Revolution was just as much of a disaster as the Iraq War was, but France probably never would have eventually become free without it. And perhaps Iraq (or Libya or Syria) is in the same position. After all, it took well over a century for the French to get there themselves. Only time will tell, but I wholly reject anyone who chooses to use this hope for a free Iraq in the future as a way to vindicate the invasion or excuse the mistakes our country made.
THE CASE FOR WAR
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: People say that “the case for war” that we made was “weapons of mass destruction.” Now, what I’d argue is that it was part of the case for war. [Saddam’s] record was part of the case for war. The fact that he constantly defied the U.N. and got away with it was part of the case for war. But 9/11, as I say, did change that sort of sense that “containment” could no longer work.2 It was too big a risk… I would agree with you, that in the American system there was a division going on. We [the British] were witness to it… There was a strand within the Americans, without a doubt, that was kind of “war come what may.” I’m not convinced Bush was there.
RICHARD TOYE: I think what was going through [Tony] Blair’s mind was his belief that the world had fundamentally changed as a consequence of 9/11… So the kind of enthusiasm with which the British government went to war in Iraq in 2003 was really part of this project which Blair was pushing much more broadly from the time of intervention in Sierra Leone in 1998, through Kosovo in 1999, and through Afghanistan. Which was, in some respects, unusual in British foreign policy… Because it was conceived not necessarily as something that was being done exclusively for British interests … but it was conceived – or however, you may say it was misconceived – as a kind of idealistic intervention which was supposed to change the world… He put front-and-center in trying to sell this to the public the notion that Saddam had WMD. Yet, what I think was really important in his mind was the belief that it was legitimate to get rid of Saddam Hussein even if he didn’t have WMD.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The fact remains that the Bush and Blair administrations decided it was easier to scare the voters than to try and persuade them, and simpler to stress the language of “threat” than the discourse of human rights.
I noticed in some of these 20th anniversary talks that some of the anti-war people are now pushing a narrative that there was actual proof that Saddam did not have any WMD before we invaded. I want to be clear, that is flatly untrue. The fact is, there was no firm proof at all on whether Saddam had WMD or not. Both those for and against the WMD claims were operating on assumptions, because there was only circumstantial evidence on both sides of this argument.
Furthermore, I would have to argue that in terms of circumstantial evidence, the case for believing Saddam had WMD was far more substantiated than the case against WMD. I know most people today don’t want to hear that, but understanding that will go a long way to helping you understand why this disastrous decision was made. And also, why it’s so important for all of us to question our assumptions even when things seem so clear and obvious.
I think a big reason that this fact gets lost in hindsight is because the Bush administration grasped at straws to try and make it seem they did have firm proof, but eventually all of that “firm proof” turned out to be absolute garbage. This of course leads to the endless debate about whether the Bush administration lied or just “saw what they wanted to see.” I’m not even sure myself. If they were not lying, then that means they suffered from a shocking level of hubris. If they did lie, I tend to believe their mindset was, “Look, we are framing a guy we know to be guilty. So it may not be ‘ethical,’ but it is still justice.”
Some historians don’t like counterfactuals, but I think they are very helpful for understanding history (even if they are merely “thought experiments”). There is absolutely a plausible scenario where we would have found WMD in Iraq and that the war – while still ugly – would not have been as disastrous as it was. What would have happened then? Would all the anti-war people have bent the knee and apologized for all their hyperbolic ranting? (Not likely.) Or would they have continued to find some other reason to say that America and its war machine was responsible for all of the world’s woes? (Very likely.)
And on the flip-side, what would have happened to American hubris at that point? I mean, our hubris was high enough after 9/11 to make us turn our backs on Afghanistan and then invade Iraq without a fucking plan. What kind of other dumb shit would we have gotten up to if circumstances has allowed us to think those were the “right” decisions?
As I wrote in my Iraq War “sourcebook,” the debate about WMD and the “road to war” is the most endlessly debated part of the Iraq War, yet it’s the chapter I actually find the least interesting. It’s far too convoluted, and it’s also the one part everyone made up their minds about a long time ago. The convoluted nature of the evidence is also why everyone thinks they have plenty of “proof” to vindicate whatever their perspective on it is. But yes, it is a very important part of the story, but it is not likely to be one that anyone will ever give us a satisfactory answer to anytime soon.
NOTHING IS INEVITABLE
WALEED NESYIF: Simple things are what we were asking for: dignity, water, electricity, and a hope of a job. Not even a job. Just a hope that you’ll get a job. These things, had they happened, Iraqis would not have reacted in the way they did.
EMMA SKY: [Iraqis were thinking:] “This is the country that put a man on the moon, imagine what it’s going to do for us.” So there were these very high expectations. Now in the beginning, I think the coalition over-promised and under-delivered. And so when anything went wrong, Iraqis assumed it was a conspiracy. So when the electricity went down, they believed it was because America was stealing it. Not because insurgents had blown up the pipelines, blown up the wires. So there was always this misunderstanding which led to the promulgation of more and more conspiracy theories.
RASHA AL-AQEEDI: I know when the regime was gone, I felt that I could breathe a little bit. That I could say I was finally free. There was a sense of liberation. However, that was kind of contradicted with the sight of army tanks in the streets, of a foreign invasion. But I don't want to deny that moment of joy for any [Iraqis] who did not mind the tanks and felt that the freedom was more important… When we found out that, okay, the U.S. army is not shooting on sight, not killing everyone it sees – I think there was a sense of calm. Because that was our perception of an “invasion.” We always thought about Israel and Palestine … so that was our fear – that this might happen to Iraq. When that didn't happen, and we were able to go back to school … there was cautious optimism that maybe things are not so bad… But it was when the violence started, when people were kidnapped … it felt like chaos immediately.
ERIC KOCHER: My fourth and fifth tours were totally different than what you see in Generation Kill… I kind of look back at my first multiple tours and it’s like, “Wow, if I knew what I know now — we could have done such a better job back then.”
For me, this will always be the biggest question about the mission in Iraq: Was our failure there inevitable? Most academic historians will caution people against making “inevitably” arguments in history. However, there are certainly moments when you look at the sheer enormity of what we were trying to do in Iraq and say to yourself, “There was no way that was ever going to work.”
And even though it’s an argument that a lot of anti-war people make, I’ve realized that it really just lets the U.S. government off the hook. I mean, if there was literally nothing we could have done to succeed in Iraq, then that means we are not at fault for anything that happened after taking out Saddam. Hell, we could now just blame it all on the Iraqis.
Part of why I don’t believe the “inevitability” arguments any longer (even though I think I did for a time) is that people are now making the case for “inevitability” with Afghanistan too, and you have to be truly oblivious to think Afghanistan was doomed to failure from the very beginning. The Afghanistan and Iraq situations were night-and-day different.3 And although the mistakes made by the U.S. were not the exact same in both countries, they were equally disastrous for both countries. And I think we actually owe it to the Iraqi people to wonder “what if”? Maybe we should at least humor the idea that we failed the Iraqis, and not that they were just a bunch of hopeless savages in a savage land that were never capable of anything better.
SMART PEOPLE
EMMA SKY: Iraqis went into the 2010 national elections with great optimism that the civil war was behind them. And a new bloc came together called Iraqiya and it campaigned on a platform of Iraq for all Iraq, and no to sectarianism. Iraqis were sick to death of sectarianism… And this bloc, Iraqiya, went on to win the most seats in the election. It won 91 seats, as opposed to [Prime Minister] Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law bloc, which won 89 seats. And Nouri al-Malkik just couldn’t believe the election results … and he sat in his seat and said, “Nope, I’m not moving.” … And there were differences in the U.S. system over what to do… President Obama had appointed Vice President Biden to be his pointman on Iraq. He didn’t want to be closely engaged. So Vice President Biden came out, he listened to the general’s view, he listened to the ambassador’s view, and in the end he decided, “Look, Nouri al-Maliki is our guy. He’s an Iraqi nationalist. He’ll let us keep a contingent of troops in Iraq after the security agreement expires. And keeping Maliki in place is the surest way of having a government of Iraq formed ahead of the U.S. midterm elections that November.” So, it was Joe Biden who decided to ignore the election results in Iraq.
JOEL RAYBURN: The decisions of 2003 to 2006 on the U.S. side, those weren’t made by stupid people. Those decisions were made by highly intelligent, highly experienced people. And they were made mostly in a sense of consensus… That was true not just of 2003 [the Bush administration], but of 2009 to 2011 [the Obama administration] and after. The decisions of 2009 to 2011, which culminated in the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, look pretty stupid today. Just as the decision to invade – if you don’t examine the context and so on – looks pretty stupid today… So, it’s insufficient to say, “Well, those decisions were made by dumb people. We’re not dumb people. So we’re not at risk of making those kind of dumb decisions.” The bigger takeaway, which should be more scary, is that highly intelligent people made what seemed like the best decisions to them at the time, and almost brought the U.S. to strategic defeat on multiple occasions.
MARSIN ALSHAMARY: One question that puzzles me to this day … there’s so much political science information about how ethnic conflict comes about. About how long civil war lasts. About how easily things evolve. And it truly astounds me that there was so little insight at the time into how easily things can go back[ward] in a mult-ethnic society, in which huge swaths of the population had been repressed. And just the lack of foresight in that way is something that I grapple with today. And I’m putting this out honestly – I don’t have the answer. I just have this big question mark: Why was something that was so obvious to a first-year grad student in political science not obvious to the entire American foreign policy establishment?
CIA INTELLIGENCE REPORT (JAN 2003): Iraq would be unlikely to split apart, but a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society, with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so.
I think a large part of why all the conspiracies about the Iraq War continue to persist (the primary ones being the war for oil, the war for the military-industrial complex, the war for the Israeli lobby, the war for the corporate interests – Halliburton, Carlyle Group, etc.) is because no one wants to believe that officials who behaved so fucking stupidily could possibly be as smart and rational (and maybe even as moral) as themselves. No one wants to believe that all this pain and trauma was caused simply because human beings are fallible. It’s much easier for them to view this catastrophe in the same terms that George W. Bush did: good vs evil.
I think we should also now acknowledge that the Obama administration’s policies were just as disastrous for Iraq as the Bush administration’s were – and both administrations continue to blissfully deny any culpability on their part to this day. Just as the Trump administration’s policies were just as disastrous for Afghanistan as the Biden administration’s were – and those two are still playing the blame game with each other as well. The fact is that (especially in foreign policy), you’re usually damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That’s why it’s just as easy for the armchair quarterbacks to feel holier-than-thou, as it is for the decision-makers to callously proclaim, “Not my fault.”
It’s interesting to note that the “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracies also never really gained much momentum until after the Iraq War. Not that no one was ever making such claims, but no average American ever took them seriously until the outcome of the Iraq War made the Bush administration seem so “shady.” The Iraq War was enough of a fuck-up that even some normal-ass people started to think, “Well… maybe.”
SECTARIANISM
ABDULRAQQAZ AL-SAIEDI: I remember in 2003 when I worked for The New York Times, when I interviewed people in Iraq and we asked them, “Are you Sunni or Shia?” – they’d get offended. They said, “No. There’s no difference. I don’t want to answer this question. I’m a Muslim, okay.” And then they said, “You in the western media are trying to divide us.” Even me, they accused me, because I worked for The New York Times in Iraq. Later on, it was a brutal sectarian conflict. Even there was ethnic cleansing… So the invasion definitely revived the division among Sunni and Shia. We had the sectarian[ism] for centuries, but not among the society.
RENAD MANSOUR: Are you Sunni or Shia? Arab or Kurd? From another minority identity group? These were the questions asked by many journalists, policymakers, and scholars as they began in 2003 to explore the dynamics of the new Iraq. It seemed to them a foregone conclusion that these identities represented the country’s main historical fault lines. Sectarian and ethnic fault lines were less a social phenomenon than an intentional construction, built into the system by Iraq’s new leaders from Shia Islamist and Kurdish nationalist parties. Returning to Baghdad after decades away, these political leaders found no organic political constituency inside Iraq. They had to cultivate new followings and represent people about whom they knew very little. Victimhood became their currency… For many Iraqis, the real fault line over the past twenty years has been not sect versus sect, but the elite against the people, who became the greatest victims.
MARSIN ALSHAMARY: When it comes to the issue of sectarianism, it’s such a thorny topic, and I can go on forever about it… I saw one of the questions in the Q&A ask whether sectarianism was in a way engineered after 2003 by the consociational system or whether it existed before that. I think it’s quite dangerous to say that sectarianism didn’t exist before 2003. Because that erases the experience of a lot of Iraqis who are victims of sectarian violence. I think what Saddam Hussein did differently was he both acted in a sectarian way, but claimed that he was not sectarian. I think it’s hard for non-Iraqis to understand this – he made such a show of sectarianism being a taboo, while at the same time expressing very sectarian beliefs and actions… So, I think it’s quite dangerous to have this revisionist history of the Ba’athist era [as non-sectarian] ... but obviously, the system that was imposed post-2003 did entrench sectarianism in a way that was different than Iraqis were accustomed to… It conceived of Iraq as needing to reconcile between these three distinct groups [Sunni, Shia, Kurd], and in a way ignored Iraq’s cross-cutting cleavages that could have maybe produced parties that didn’t exist on sectarian or identity based lines.
I’m more comfortable letting the Iraqi commentators weigh in on Iraq’s sectarianism, than I am trying to parse it out myself. That being said, I am among those who have found themselves wondering today just how much blame the Americans truly deserve for what happened in Iraq. After all, Saddam intentionally fostered a lot of these cleavages before we ever got there, and it wasn’t us who promoted the sectarian civil war in Iraq during 2005-2006. That was the Iranian-backed Shia militias and the Sunni militants in Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq (who was actively trying to start a civil war by attacking the Shia and their holy sites). And we can now compare Iraq with what happened in Libya and Syria, where both nations ended up in a remarkably similar state of affairs with little (Libya) or no (Syria) help from us.
Yes, at the start of the war, we in the West were far more obsessed with Iraq’s “sectarian differences” than they were, and I think they were right to criticize us for that. But if we cut to just a couple years later, the Iraqis themselves had started singing a very different tune. The hard question that remains for me is: Did some Americans actually manage to foresee something in Iraqi society that the Iraqis did not want to believe about themselves? Something that outside actors (Iran and Al-Qaeda), and even inside actors (sectarian Iraqi politicians), were able to exploit? Or did the West’s tendency to view Iraq in sectarian terms end up leading that nation toward a self-fulfilling prophecy once we took control of the country?
LEGACY
MICHAEL MORRELL: I spend a great deal of time on college campuses, and I can’t tell you how often students question whether America’s role in the world has been for good or not. And, for those students who say no, they point first to the Iraq War and second to the 2008 financial crisis. These two events have led many Americans to question the competency and credibility of their own government.
QUINTA JURECIC: I was a relatively small child while all this was happening... I do think from my perspective the war … it pushed us into a greater skepticism of government power and of what the government was saying, particularly when it came to foreign policy. And also toward an anti-interventionist position. I really do think that it is striking how if you look at the political discourse now that is acceptable – largely on the left, but also we see it more and more on the right, thanks to Trump’s influence on the Republican Party – it has just swung so wildly away from the more interventionist mindset of 2003… It’s been striking to me how Ukraine is a mirror of this in some ways. And what I mean by that is that I think a lot of people on the left began with an instinctively skeptical posture… And I actually do think that you have seen on the left an increase in acceptance of the war in Ukraine as it has gone on. As it has become clear that what Russia is doing is really – I think I’m comfortable calling it an imperialist, colonialist project and war of aggression, and certainly engaging in crimes against humanity – but it took a really long time to get a lot of people there because of that hangover from Iraq.
JOEL RAYBURN: The United States became way too gun-shy of acting as a result of the 2003 war. And it’s because of the overlearning of the idea that George W. Bush decided to remove the Saddam regime and then everything exploded like a nuclear explosion across the Middle East. Well, I’m sorry, that’s not the proper lesson to learn. You still have your national interest. You still have your strategic objectives… For example, Bashar al-Assad has wound up killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians, and the reason there wasn’t a more robust intervention to stop him from doing that – and I don’t even mean to remove him – just to stop him from doing that and try to stabilize the situation in Syria, was because of deep anxiety that the slightest move in that direction would result in a repeat of the consequences of 2003. Y’know, we don’t exert our power when we should these days. Finally, I think we’re getting past that a little bit with the Ukraine situation – or a lot with the Ukraine situation – but there’s been a hell of a lot of mistakes in the intervening twenty years.
BEN RHODES: One of the things I’ve noticed is that in the last year, there’s something I’m a little uncomfortable with … some people seem a little too excited that this war [in Ukraine] is happening… If you look at some of the people who have come out of the woodwork who are the biggest supporters of arming the Ukrainians with every weapon in our arsenal, they’re the same people who were saying that Iraq would be a democracy. And I get a little uncomfortable – obviously, it doesn’t affect how I feel about the Ukrainians – but [I ask myself] is something bad happening here? In that: “War is good again”?
SIMONA FOLTYN: In general, Iraqis don’t see the U.S. as a force for good. They see it as a country that implements double-standards, that acts based on its own interests, and that the whole rhetoric around spreading human rights and democracy is just a pretext to further its own interests. And I think that view has been around for a really long time. So I think the [Iraqi] people see what is going on in Ukraine through a very different lens because they themselves have been invaded, and for them it’s like, “Well, I mean, this is the same thing that America did in Iraq in a way.” And yes, it’s wrong, but they do find it very strange that America is condemning Russia’s invasion and completely ignoring the fact that they did the same thing in the past.
TOM NICHOLS: There is a person in your focus group I kind of admired, because she’s like you on this, she said, “Look, I don’t know a lot about this stuff [foreign policy].” The rest of those people in these focus groups are like, “Well, of course, it’s just because we’re exporting heroin to get money for black-ops.” Somebody did say that! … When The Washington Post did that book on the secret history of Afghanistan, my head kind of exploded. Because as I was reading all this stuff I was like, “If you had been reading a newspaper for ten years, you already knew almost all of this stuff.” What [the public is] really rebelling against is not more information, it’s information that is boring. Let me tell you what I always tell everybody: Government, and even foreign policy, is boring. It’s dull. And people have gotten used to the idea that nothing should be boring.
I do worry sometimes that there is merit to the comparison between the invasion of Ukraine and our invasion of Iraq. (Hell, even this guy seems to think so.) I mean, I definitely agree that there’s no equivalence between Bush and Putin. You can legitimately say that Russia’s foreign policy is “imperialism” and “neocolonialism,” which is not the case for the United States (no it’s not). Russia has also willfully and intentionally engaged in human rights abuses against people they know to be innocent, with no other intent than that of subjugating the population. The U.S. never did this either (no we didn’t), even though human rights abuses certainly did happen.
Still, back in my military days I would often state that in situations of war, perception is everything. Perception matters even more than the reality on the ground. People base their actions solely off of what they perceive to be the truth. If they perceive that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, then they will either storm the capitol or make apologies for the people that did.
If the Bush administration perceives that Saddam is a threat to the United States, then they will invade Iraq. If the American people perceive that the evidence of WMD is solid, then they will support that decision. If the Iraqis perceive the Americans are there to “occupy” them, then they will join the insurgency. If young jihadis perceive we invaded Iraq as phase one of a “Zionist-Crusader alliance” to conquer the entire Muslim world, then suicide bombers will flood the zone.
If Putin perceives that NATO is a gathering storm on his western flank, he will invade Ukraine. If the Ukrainians perceive that Russia is trying to subjugate their land and erase their national identity, they will resist them to the bitter end. It really doesn’t matter if one of these perceptions is true and the other one is bullshit (assuming Putin actually believes everything he is saying).
The fact is that both Bush and Putin perceived a threat to their nation that was not actually there, and in response they launched an invasion that they expected to be a cake-walk and instead got way more than they bargained for. But again, Putin has purposely prosecuted his war as a cruel and ruthless war of conquest, whereas Bush at least tried to fight an idealistic war where we could still imagine ourselves as the “good guys” (black site prisons and “enhanced interrogation techniques” notwithstanding). It’s two very different scenarios, but there is some merit to looking at the similarities. After all, if the perception in the non-western world (and even among some Americans) is that there really is no difference between Iraq and Ukraine – that still has serious real-world effects today.
Perception is everything, and the key to a more accurate perception is empathy. If the anti-war left cannot empathize with the pro-war right (or vice versa), then the conversation was over before it even began. If the Americans cannot empathize with the Iraqis, then the war was over before it even began.
Because the Iraq War was a war of liberation and nation-building (or at least it should have been). It was not a war of conquest. In a war of conquest like Ukraine, empathy is not needed. The aggressor is simply trying to conquer, and the defender is simply trying to survive. That is why it can feel like “war is good again” with this fight in Ukraine. Because it has made war simple again. It’s much more akin to World War II. Where everything truly was about good vs evil, and right vs wrong. And even though many people, including Bush, tried to frame Iraq in that same way, they never understood that such a framework disappeared the second Saddam was removed from power. From that point on, we were fighting a totally different kind of war. One where perception was everything.
THE HUMAN SIDE
MOHAMMED DULAIMI: At the beginning of the war, with all the confusion that was happening, it was the first time in my life I made a lie, and I lied to a child. There was a shooting on the highway in Fallujah that resulted in many deaths of civilians… One of the cars was a pickup truck. Father was in driver seat. He was killed. The mother was in passenger seat. She was killed. And the kid – I think he was 10 years old. They took him out of the car. They laid him on the side. His back was to the car. He cannot see his mom and dad. And his injury was severe, and he refused to go to hospital. He said, I don't want to live if my father and mother have died. He was holding my hand in such a force. It was amazing for me how a 10-year-old can do that. And he said, please, I don't want to be an orphan. If they are dead, let me die. And that was my first lie in my life… He said, swear by God they're alive. And I did… It changed my life in so many ways.
ELLIOT ACKERMAN: “I can't take it anymore,” one of the Marines tells me. We're four days into the battle. His squad leader said he needed to talk to me. He said, “I keep thinking about my daughter. Every time I go into a house, I think about her.” He is crying, and the other Marines are watching. And I know that fear is contagious. “Do you want me to get you out of here?” I ask. He keeps muttering that he can't take it. Twenty minutes later, I'm loading him into an Amtrak that will drive him out of Fallujah alongside wounded Marines. He and Pratt, another Marine in the platoon, are married to a set of sisters. Pratt says he'll never speak to him again.
WILL SELBER: Then the woman came out of the building, wailing. She was hysterical, speaking rapidly. I yelled for an interpreter, and one quickly scurried to our patrol’s back. He struggled to understand her because he didn’t speak Iraqi Arabic fluently, a common problem for American forces even three years after the invasion. He picked up that the woman’s husband had been kidnapped the day before, but the details were hard to decipher. As I waited impatiently for my interpreter to do his work with pen and paper in hand, a federal policeman hurried forward to join me. The woman's face and demeanor changed immediately as soon as he arrived. Her eyes met mine, and in an instant, she scurried away. I knew instantly that the federal police were responsible for her husband's kidnapping. Somewhere in a Shia mosque, her husband was probably being tortured to death. Someone would find his body on the side of the road in a few days, handcuffed, blindfolded, and with a hole in his forehead from a drill bit. A technique we referred to as “the full option.” … At night, when I’m alone and the demons come, I see that woman’s face in Dora. It haunts me. I remember her look of disgust and I am ashamed.
The human stories are really the ones that linger with you. It was true of Iraq, and it’s equally true of Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, et al. That’s why the stories I mentioned in my 2011 piece stick in my head every bit as much as the rocket attack that hit Tent City in 2004 while I was sleeping. That was the attack where a rocket struck two rows up from my tent and hit Airman Brian Kolfage, causing him to lose both legs and one of his arms. At the time, he was the most severely injured servicemember in Iraq to survive his wounds.
I remember seeing Kolfage’s co-workers loading him on a C-17 late at night as I was coming into the ATOC. I even had a short email exchange with him in 2006 when he responded to a blog I wrote about the attack. I was also friends in San Antonio with one of the people who worked at BAMC and helped Kolfage with his physical therapy and recovery, and I admired Kolfage’s resilience from afar as he rebuilt his life.
A decade later, I found out Kolfage had turned into a right-wing commentator working for The Blaze, whose Facebook page was littered with anti-Obama conspiracies and comments from fans that were sprinkled with a rather liberal use of the n-word (Kolfage himself was not using the n-word, but he also paid no mind to his fans that did). He had also since ditched his fiance that had stuck by his side after his injury, and married a girl that he first started hitting on when she was just a 16 year old hostess at a Chili’s (with a boyfriend) back in 2002 – which I’m pretty sure was while he was still with his first fiance.
Kolfage would later be indicted, along with Steve Bannon, for defrauding the donors to their “We Build The Wall” charity. Ordinary Americans donated money to this charity to be used for building Trump’s border wall, but instead Kolfage and Bannon funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into their own personal accounts. President Trump pardoned Bannon just before leaving office but did not pardon Kolfage. Kolfage pled guilty last year and is still awaiting sentencing along with two other co-defendants.
(Above is a picture Kolfage posted on Instagram of him and his wife.)
I also remember helping fly out a 14 year old Iraqi boy named Jasim Ramadon while I was in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld personally granted Jasim asylum for helping the Marines dismantle an insurgent network in Husaybah. His father was a Saddam loyalist and army officer who forced Jasim to join his men in ambushes on the Americans. Jasim stated he would just shoot in the air and never wanted to be a part of it. His father forced him to participate and was physically abusive to him, so one day Jasim turned himself into some Marines at a checkpoint. The Marines then discovered that Jasim was willing and able to identify all the key members of the insurgent network that they had been fighting against (including his own father).
A careless U.S. Army interrogator inadvertently let it slip to one captured insurgent that Jasim was their source, and when that insurgent managed to get released, he and some others went to Jasim’s home and killed his mother. With nowhere else to go, the Marine unit “adopted” Jasim (and nicknamed him “Steve-O”) and petitioned the Bush administration to grant him asylum. First Sergeant Daniel Hendrex took him into his own home in Colorado until he could be adopted by an Iraqi family. Jasim even appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show when he first arrived in the states.
(Above is a picture of Jasim and myself.)
I looked Jasim up several years later too and found out he had been sentenced to 28 years to life in 2014 for a brutal rape in Colorado Springs. I found this transcript from an appeal in the case that made me wonder if maybe he was being forced to take the heat for the other guys involved. But I also learned that he had already had problems with domestic violence and anger issues before this incident, so… I don’t know. The last thing I saw regarding the case was an appeal Jasim filed back in 2020 asking the court to re-review the evidence in his case, and the appeal was denied. The right-wing fringe sites at the time were publicizing the case as an example of why you can never trust a Muslim – not even a “hero” Muslim. By the way, once Jasim’s sentence is finished, he will be deported back to Iraq.
Other moments are more lighthearted. I remember that it was a requirement that I make out a will before going to Iraq, so I had some fun with it and asked that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” be played at my funeral (I have also told that story in my stand-up act). It became a funny anecdote among my friends and my wife at the time.
But one night, shortly before I was set to deploy, me and my lady were in bed together and a car drove by blasting the song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” so loudly that it echoed in the walls of our apartment. She started crying and pulled me in tight. I asked her what was wrong and she said it was a bad omen. That something bad was going to happen to me. I thought it was super sweet, but I couldn’t help laughing at her.
“You realize you’re crying at Cyndi Lauper, right?” I told her, “Look, it’s a hit song that gets played on the radio all the time. If I had put a Belinda Carlisle b-side in my will that you can only get on European vinyl, and that song was blasting out of a car at 1am – then you could be certain I was a dead man.”
My time in the military ended with Murphey’s suicide at the start of 2006. I escorted his body home to his family’s ranch in Nevada. I always remember when the plane first landed in Las Vegas, the pilot announced that the passengers should remain in their seats so that me and the Lieutenant could get off the plane first to carry out our duties on the tarmac. As we got up and collected our bags, it was dead quiet on the plane, until someone slowly started clapping, and then the whole plane started to join in and applaud us.
It made me feel nauseous. I knew that the passengers assumed Murphey was a soldier who had died in combat, and not just some troubled kid who simply didn’t make it. I could see that the Lieutenant knew how it was making me feel. He hurried to keep up as I moved quickly down the aisle, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone and get off the plane as fast as I could.
I remember one time I was hanging out with a Marine (a combat veteran) and when we got on the subject of PTSD he said, “Y’know, the truth is, some people just can’t hack it. That’s all it is.” I understand how shitty that sounds, and I certainly think it’s the wrong way to look at it, but I also understood what he meant. After all, I am one of those people he’s referring to who wouldn’t have been able to hack it. Being in that environment didn’t significantly bother him, but it would have profoundly bothered me.
I was reading through some of my correspondence from the old days, and a friend of mine (who completely disagreed with my stance on the war) said in one email, “You are by far the most empathetic person I know… I am very empathetic but you are a goddamn martyr.”
I joined the Air Force in May of 2002, before I knew there was going to be an Iraq War. I didn’t think the War on Terror was going to be an actual war, so I just went for the “Chair Force” and tried to find a job I would actually enjoy. But I know that if someone had told me in 2002 that there would be a war in Iraq a year later, I would have been one of those dumb kids who would rush off to join the infantry so they wouldn’t miss the “big show.” Then I would have got sent to Iraq, and I would not have been able to accept the way I would have inevitably had to harass and arrest the locals in that situation. If I had been manning roadblocks, or had to go into Fallujah or Najaf, it is very likely I would have killed a civilian at some point (or maybe even a legitimate insurgent that I still empathized with). And if that had happened – dude, forgeddaboutit – I would have absolutely Murphey’d myself within a year of coming home. There is not a doubt in my mind…
I remember just a few months after getting out of the Air Force, I was visiting my friend Kate and we were talking about how during my last year in the military I was trying to volunteer for convoy duty (long story short: circumstances prevented it from actually coming to pass). Part of me was willing to acknowledge that I had been lucky not to go back, but I could not deny that I felt then (and still feel today) horribly guilty and ashamed. Kate then turned to me and said, “Well, even if only for my own selfish reasons, I’m really glad you never got to go back to Iraq. You’re fucked up enough as it is.”
Interesting note, if you watch the clip I linked to: Hillary Clinton told Bob Woodward that this quote shows Bush is a “fatalist,” and that a fatalist cannot be president. Because you can’t talk like that and be president. She said Washington would never talk like that, nor would Jefferson (and then she also added Bill Clinton’s name to the list). The funny thing is that Washington scholars frequently use the word “fatalist” to describe George Washington, and I could totally see Washington saying something like this. Probably not Jefferson, but that’s only because Jefferson would be utterly certain history would remember him fondly. But it just goes to show what I’ve always said: History is not about facts, it is about interpretation of facts. That Bush said these words is a fact (and he has repeated them on many occasions). As far as what future generations will think Bush meant by those words – we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.
Many of those against the 2003 invasion (to include Obama in his well-known 2002 speech) argued that “containment” (which included the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq during the 1990s) was working just fine against Saddam and therefore an invasion was not necessary. For those of us in the “human rights interventionist” camp, this philosophy was both callous and selfish. It essentially required letting the Iraqi people bear the brunt of Saddam’s vicious regime so we in the West wouldn’t have to. I likened it to locking the Iraqi people in a room with a rabid wolf inside and then saying, “Well, at least now that wolf can’t hurt anyone.” It is interesting that there were so many anti-war people who were as strongly against the sanctions regime just as us “human rights interventionists” were, but they unequivocally blamed the United States for the deprivation it caused the Iraqis. Whereas, those of us who were not so violently against the American “establishment” understood that it was Saddam’s fault that the Iraqis were suffering, not ours. But what I never understood about the people who claimed the U.S. and the U.N. were “starving the Iraqi people” with sanctions – what policy did they want instead? If they were against intervention, and they were against the sanctions, then the only other plausible option was to just let Saddam be Saddam and go back to the status quo of the 1980s. Was that actually what they wanted?
I have a controversial take here (which I argue should not be controversial at all): I contend that the invasion in Afghanistan after 9/11 is the most justified military action in all of American history. Again, hindsight being blinded by the present, many Americans cannot fathom this opinion – but the only other action that comes a close second is our entry into WWII after Pearl Harbor. And I aruge that that action is still in second place, because at least the Japanese had more legitimate reasons for attacking us (the oil embargo, etc.) and they went after a strategic military target that was not even a part of our homeland (Hawaii did not become a state until 1959). And even if you hate the AUMF, the one passed in 2001 (not the Iraq War one) was every bit as valid as when FDR got an “official” declaration of war from the Congress. Certainly, we can’t deny the AUMF has subsequently been reworked and overused in the years post-2001 (and it looks like it might finally get repealed soon), but the use of the 2001 AUMF in the initial invasion of Afghanistan was undeniably justified. Keep in mind, this view has absolutely no bearing on how the post-invasion mission was later bungled, nor does it attempt to say things were going swimmingly there just before we pulled out in 2021. Those issues are completely separate from what I’m talking about here.