We Really Did Win the Iraq War

I just don't see all the failures that so many analysts claim for the Iraq War initiated 15 years ago.

So "some" Iraqi officials said the sanctions were being felt and would have led to Iraqi compliance with American demands?

But by early 2001 the sanctions were clearly weakening as Saddam exploited fake "dead baby parades" (see my quotes of the same article noted there but now offline in the undead archive of pre-Blogger TDR--behold the primitiveness! Scroll down to "This Just Sickens Me" (Posted June 19, 2003)) to convince Westerners that post-1991 war sanctions were killing Iraqis.

Basing analysis on Saddam officials' statements seems a problem to me given contrary evidence of the oil-for-food corruption and the rising clamor to lift sanctions. Remember that our government was speaking of "smart sanctions" to cope with erosion of support for sanctions by replacing them with more focused sanctions to escape the growing outrage.

We had no substantive plan for Iraq after the war? But the New York Times said that we had extensive plans (called "the most ambitious American effort to administer a country since the occupations of Japan and Germany at the end of World War II").

And if your template for what we should have done is post-World War II, have you looked at the chaotic mess that Europe was after the war for years? We extensively planned that horror show?

I think post-war Iraq went reasonably well considering the Shia victims of Saddam had no experience governing. Just who inside Iraq could have taken over without problems? Seriously, we followed COIN 101 even in the face of heavily supported opposition.

Also, given that the war really continued to evolve after the fall of Saddam's regime, the war didn't really end until 2008, by which time Bush 43 put in place a plan for long-term engagement.

Why didn't the Obama administration formulate a plan during the three years it had to use it's big-brained nuanced foreign policy team to make a post-war plan before walking away from Iraq?

And I absolutely reject the idea that it was a mistake to disband Iraqi security forces. That was as necessary as de-Nazifying Germany was. Further, at least for the army, disbanding it was a legal formality--it was gone.

Do you really believe that disbanding those entities caused Baathist resistance? You may have missed decades of Baathist Sunni Arab minority rule on top of centuries of Sunni minority rule of the Shias. Good Lord, believing we caused Sunni Arab resistance by not essentially reversing the military victory over them is nonsense. Indeed, in the uprising of early 2004 by pro-Iran Shias and the Sunni Islamists, can you imagine what our forces would have faced if the surviving Iraqi security forces had been staffed with Baathists?

If it is true that the destruction of Saddam's government helped Iran gain influence in Iraq, it is also true that the destruction of the Nazis helped Soviet-backed communists gain influence in post-World War II Western Europe as well as full control of Eastern Europe.

And check this out. Defeating Japan opened the way to Mao winning the civil war in China. Do we blame our current problem with modernizing China on the decision to wage war on Japan the morning of December 7, 1941 rather than letting the Japanese occupy large parts of China to keep Maos's communists suppressed?

Are we having "blowback" fun yet?

Solving one problem--aggressive, brutal, WMD-pursuing Saddam--does not solve all problems. Work the Goddamn problems.

And blaming the Iraq War for Iran's influence in Iraq requires you to neglect that Saddam's brutal minority rule over the Shias was the reason Iran had influence within Iraq in the first place. Recall that Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 in part to reverse the influence revolutionary Iran had on Iraq's restive Shias. Saddam wasn't sure he could even count on his Shia soldiers to remain loyal without inflicting a humiliating defeat on Iran.

The idea that ISIS arose from the Iraq War ignores the terror group's origin in the pre-Iraq War al Qaeda, the role of the Syrian revolution in creating a sanctuary for jihadis in eastern Syria, the role of Syria in the Iraq War terrorist campaign that made Syria a haven for Iraqi Baathists who joined with the jihadis, and the failure of America to remain in Iraq after 2011 to keep the Iraqi government and security forces on track and to keep our foot on the gas to pursue the beaten jihadis inside Iraq rather than let them regenerate.

The charge that what we achieved was a failure is nonsense, and Iraq War 2.0 that President Obama initiated in 2014 indicates that even he--who won the presidency on his absolute opposition to the war--thought we needed to salvage what we achieved in the Iraq War rather than walk away from the "mistake."

Iraq is an imperfect democracy that is not brutal to minorities, is not a threat to neighbors, and is not a threat to gain and use WMD. Iraq doesn't train and import terrorists but kills them in large numbers at our side.

And following the ending of the ISIL caliphate in Iraq, with more American support along with increasing foreign Sunni Arab states' support, Iraq will be able to resist and reverse Iranian influence among the Shias of Iraq (and even in that community, only a minority back Iran).

We won the Iraq War. It didn't become Vermont immediately after the war, it is true. But it took a long time to make Europe--West and East--the secure friendly bloc it is today after the victory in 1945. And South Korea did not become the free prosperous democracy it is today without decades of effort following the Korean War.

Have a little damn patience and work the problems that inevitably arise in any endeavor.

God almighty,



I'll skip the rest of the article, although the remainder have a bit more balanced views. The consensus is failure. I don't agree with that consensus, although leaving in 2011 made the success harder than it needed to be.

Don't forget that the consensus during the war was that our military was flailing in a "fiasco." Until somehow we won on the battlefield.  So I reject the consensus now that says "Sure our military performed well. But the outcome is a disaster (with it commonly claimed the Iraq War was possibly one of the greatest American errors in all of our history!)."

That is nonsense. And I'd be remiss not to (again) note Learning Curve on assessing the Iraq War.

And I don't rule out that the Arab Spring could yet be seen as one sign post on the way to opening the Arab Moslem world to democracy and rule of law as an alternative to the traditional forms of their government of either an autocracy (that itself spawns Islamist resistance) or an Islamist regime. The Great West Hope of autocrats who suppress jihadi ideology doesn't work and encourages Islamist growth.

I've argued that repeatedly. Autocrats may support "tame Islamists" but they simply encourage the "wild" Islamists who become more extreme as opposition; and which attract even non-Islamists to the only game in town for opposing the regime.

But I (sort of) digress.

I really am weary of fighting against the impossibly high standards so many Westerners insist America--and America alone--most meet to call a war victorious.

Here's my 10-year piece on the war as well as some frustration with others' thoughts on the so-called disaster of the war, for what they're worth.

We won the Iraq War. Get over it.

UPDATE: Honestly, can you see no value to having one of the Axis of Evil states helping us fight jihadis and not being a threat given the immense problems that the surviving two-thirds of the Axis of Evil (North Korea and Iran) pose to us and our allies?