On the last day of summer 2010 Barack Obama will officially announce the end of the Iraq war. Operation Iraqi Freedom, which began on 20 March 2003 with an invasion by «coalition of the willing» troops under US leadership, is over.
In its place we will see the beginning of operation New Dawn, as part of which around 50,000 American military personnel (not counting private outfits — at least a further 10,000 or so) will remain on Iraq territory for another year. However, they are not planning to conduct active operations but are supposed to simply provide an insurance policy for the local military and security forces.
This will be the second statement by an American president drawing a line under the Iraq campaign. The first was made on 2 May 2003. On that day George Bush proclaimed victory on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and triumphantly stated: «The tyrant has been overthrown, and Iraq is free.» What followed in no way resembles either a victory or even the termination of large-scale hostilities.
Fatalities among US military personnel started to increase rapidly from the summer of 2003 and peaked in 2007. Then a new strategy envisioning a significant increase in the contingent stabilized the situation, which is what made it possible to start pulling out combat units.
Apart from a struggle against the occupation forces, Iraq experienced a full-on civil war, which has now abated somewhat but has not ended. In 7.5 years the coalition has lost 4,734 people (4,416 Americans, 179 British, and 139 representatives of other countries). There are no official statistics for fatalities on the Iraqi side, and assessments by various organizations differ greatly. The most commonly encountered figure is between 100,000 and 120,000. But some people claim that the actual number is as high as half a million.
The Ba’ath party was disbanded, and former President Saddam Husayn and several other representatives of the top leadership were executed. In the spring a country saw the second parliamentary elections since the ousting of the previous regime — elections that were apparently pretty honest and whose results reflect the disposition of forces pretty accurately. This is why it has not been possible to this day to form a government — Iraq is split along ethnic and religious lines.
Behind all this statistical and factual aspect of events lies not only a local armed conflict and not even an operation to replace one of the most ruthless dictatorships. The Iraq war will go down in history as a turning point for both the Near East and world development. As yet it is hard to predict whether it will be assessed positively or negatively.
The ousting of Saddam Husayn and the fragmentation of Iraq has changed the disposition of forces across a vast area from the Mediterranean to South Asia. Secular totalitarian Iraq had served as a reliable guarantee against the spread of Islamic extremism, whereas the invasion and war turned the country into a training ground for radical activity and brought Al-Qa’ida to a place where it had never been before.
But it became clear that this was not the principal problem. «International terrorism,» for all its danger, is not so much an independent threat as an element in a broad range of threats associated with the erosion of the world order and established systems of ties and relations. The process is continuing, and the operation in Iraq served as a catalyst for it.
The events in Iraq have sharply strengthened Iran, a traditional rival of Baghdad. Saddam’s behavior on the eve of the war, when — despite clearly knowing that he had no nuclear weapons — he behaved as if he had something to hide, is explained, in the opinion of some experts, by his reluctance to show «weakness» to Tehran. This was a fatal mistake by Husayn.
George Bush did something that Ayatollah Khomeini was unable to achieve during the long years of the war with Iraq in the 1980 s. Iran’s opportunities are today much more extensive than eight years ago, and its influence has spread not only to the Shiites living in Iraq but also to people sharing the same faith in other Near East countries. This is encouraging Iran’s ambitions to play the role of the leading regional power, which, in turn, is making the entire set of negotiations about the future of the Iranian nuclear program much more complex. Precisely this subject promises to become a world collision in the year ahead.
Another neighbor of Iraq — Turkey — is also undergoing a transformation. Changes in Ankara’s policy were perceptible as early as the end of last century, but the Iraq war has brought them to the surface. Turkey did not support the invasion and refused to make its territory available as a jumping-off ground, while the emergence of a de facto independent Kurdish entity in northern Iraq created additional tension. Turkey is continuing to change, seeing itself as a regional force and, consequently, drifting slowly away from alliances with which it had previously aligned itself — NATO and the European Union.
The George Bush administration’s intention was that that the replacement of the regime in Iraq should transform the Near East. On the one hand, favorable democratic changes in Iraq were supposed to become a model for the development of other states, while on the other, anti-American dictators would have to think about their fate. Absolutely nothing was achieved in terms of the former task. Iraq did not become a democratic showcase, and the attempt to promote democracy in Palestine ended in a victory for the HAMAS movement that plunged the Western world into a stupor and the Near East peace process into an impasse. The second task was partially fulfilled — Libyan leader Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi, who started to panic after the rapid annihilation of the Iraqi Army, sought a reconciliation with United States and the West.
But local success did not change the main thing — a feeling that the United States’ position in the region and ability to influence the course of events are weakening. The Iraq war has been a failure for Washington from various viewpoints. The motivation for the invasion, which turned out to be false, the American leadership’s hypocritical rhetoric, behind which mercantile intentions could be discerned, and also the manifest violation of international procedures for the use of force undermined trust in US actions.
The numerous failures in the process of nation building in Iraq demonstrated the weakness of the American administrative machine and an inappropriate assessment of the situation. The division among the allies is not the result of the Iraq campaign — it was coming to a head anyway — but the demonstrative disregard for the European partners’ opinion deepened the estrangement.
After 2007, the United States, having learned from the bitter experience of the first years of the occupation, started to get the situation under control. However, this was no longer a proactive strategy but a process of rectifying previous mistakes. Iraq graphically demonstrated something that people had been contending theoretically — world domination by one power, even one that is many times superior to other countries in terms of all indicators of power, is impossible.
Iraq’s future is unclear, but it is hard to assume that the United States will pull out of there completely. Success for the anti-American forces would mean a strategic defeat for the United States and unpredictable consequences in the region, which is critically important from the viewpoint of resources and their transportation routes. Admittedly, unlike Afghanistan, where the outlook looks simply hopeless, in Iraq it is possible to preserve governability through a calculated policy of support for the local authorities.
Many neighboring countries also have an interest in an American presence — Arab states are afraid of a further surge by Iran and its Shiite fellow believers. So New Dawn is unlikely to be shorter in duration than Iraqi Freedom. Unless, of course, there should be some other cataclysm that forces the United States to switch to something else.
Fedor Lukyanov — chief editor of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, member of the Foreign and Defense Policy Council
