Operation Iraqi Freedom set in motion a disastrous war that killed hundreds of thousands and triggered a new era of instability in the Middle East.
These revisionist narratives typically get some pushback. But it’s not enough to re-examine what Americans got wrong. A true reckoning requires examining. And while many are broadly familiar with the huge number of Iraqi casualties, few in the West have paid attention to how the war reshaped Iraqi politics and society. What did the U.S.
It was a political project. It was very clear that Saddam had turned into enemy No. 1 since the Gulf War when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. And throughout the decades, the U.S., even under the Clinton administration, had continued to work with different Iraqi opposition forces outside of Iraq trying to force regime change. 2003 was the opportunity, and so they had to find a way to sell it to their people.When WMDs weren’t discovered, it became important for the U.S. and the U.K.
What ended up happening was elite exiles who were coming back empowered themselves. They built a political system that would serve their interests, not the interests of the people. So that’s the contradiction of Iraq’s democracy you have. There are the trappings of democracy, but in reality you’re not close to democracy.The exiles were specific political parties. There were two primary Kurdish parties, who had fought a long insurrection against Saddam, who had gassed Halabja in 1988.
And the third big decision they made was de-Baathification, which was meant to remove Saddam’s party, the Baath Party, from power. Instead of just removing the inner circle, this group of exiles working with the Americans removed over 40,000 civil servants — the entire human capital of the state, all of the service ministries, like the ministry of electricity, teachers, hospitals. In Saddam’s Iraq, you had to be a member of the Baath Party to have these jobs at a senior level.
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