This take by a documentary author is hogwash:
As with any situation, there are causes and effects going back a long way, but it seemed to me that the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, in 2003 was as good a place as any to start. The falling of that domino led to the destabilisation of the region, and that led to refugees arriving in Europe and that, in turn, was one of the factors in the rise of far-Right nationalism.
Ah! Bask in the glorious Middle East stability that the Iraq War upset. Connecting dots from the war to destabilization glosses over the inconvenient fact that there has been no stability in the Middle East!
And reporting the bloody obvious is no defense of this mistaken interpretation: "“War as an institution is pure evil,” he told me. “It’s pure evil.”" Duh. But one hopes that the reason you fight is good enough to justify the Hell that war is. And face it, not destroying the Saddam regime was a choice that would have had a lot of evil consequences.
Looking at any war in detail makes it easy to see any victory as a defeat. And looking at any post-war can provide all the ammunition you need to think the war was futile. There are a lot of problems in the Middle East that have nothing to do with America justifiably taking down a brutal dictator with a proven record of threatening the stability of the Middle East.
For those eager to declare defeat at any point over the last 17 years, it is kind of funny that they keep arguing we lost. If we lost at any of those points in the past, why haven't enemies ejected us from Iraq already? It can take time to fully judge victory or defeat.
And what would have happened to the glorious international community's ability to stop thug rulers from aggression and oppression if Saddam had been allowed to defy said international community's demand--following the UN-approved war in 1991--that he wast too untrustworthy to have WMD and that he must disarm and prove he had disarmed?
First of all, you want to argue that Iraqis should have been compelled to endure Saddam's cruel reign of terror passed through his sons, with WMD threatening the region in a Middle Eastern version of he North Korea problem as the price of a supposed happy center-left Europe free of refugees and migrants?
The migrants/refugees were the result of Obama's Libya War that was supposed to be an example of leading the Europeans from behind, but only opened the spigot to human trafficking from the south; and Turkey's decision to weaponize refugees to pressure Europe which flooded Europe from the east. And those were floods that the European elites led by Germany accepted to signal their virtue and only belatedly recognized as a mistake when the problems ceased to be borne only by their people and affected them.
And the complaints that the de-Baathification of Iraqi government and the disbanding of the Iraqi military caused the insurgency that supposedly led to the chain reaction endpoint of Far Right Europeans is false. We had to get rid of the senior echelon of the Sunni Arab oppressors and eliminate the military structure which had already self-disbanded during the war. Seriously, discard those so-called errors.
War is riddled with error. That is a feature and not a bug.
Honestly, I'm looking for the al Qaeda documentary on how they screwed up in Iraq.
As an aside, I'll bet the documentary maker interviewed Sunni Arabs out of proportion to their numbers. A common problem during the Iraq War was that Western reporters would interview educated Iraqis who could speak English--which meant a lot of complaints from the minority privileged class that benefited from Saddam's rule got to complain about their problems stemming from loss of status as if they represented all Iraqis.
And yes, as that "documentary" maker says, Iraqis still live in fear 17 years after their liberation from Saddam. That is the fault of Iran that wants Iraq as its vassal, Sunni jihadis who want a base of operations there, and corrupt Iraqis of all persuasions who cripple rule of law. Work the problems. There would be more to fear if Saddam ran things or if any of Iraq's current enemies win. America has given Iraq hope to break the cycle of fear and should not be damned for that.
This documentary is just about providing the faithful who always rejected the Iraq War with proof that nothing good could have or did come of it. That is ridiculous.
The Iraq War was a justified and victorious war, and I'm stunned the victory is so easily overlooked.
But the struggle for Iraq isn't over. Work the problem. We still need to defend what we won and win more.
