Ten years ago tomorrow the US along with its Coalition partners invaded Iraq to topple the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The question of whether or not the war was worth the colossal loss of human life continues to divide opinion.
Ten years ago tomorrow the US along with its Coalition partners invaded Iraq to topple the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
After a fairly hasty disposal of the Iraqi army and the taking of Baghdad, President George W Bush famously declared “mission accomplished” aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Since then, however, hundreds of thousands have died in Iraq, and while elections have taken place and Saddam’s Hussein and his crime family have been deposed, for ordinary Iraqis life remains a struggle – a 2011 poll by Zogby found that 42 per cent of Iraqis felt they were worse off in the fledgling democracy than they had been under Saddam.
The question of whether or not the war was worth the colossal loss of human life continues to divide opinion in the US, too.
58 per cent of Republicans say Iraqis are “better off” compared with just a quarter (24 per cent) of Democrats. Almost half (44 per cent) of all Americans either are “not sure” or say things are “the same” as before the invasion.
Source: Costs of war
For those who backed the war, justification for the invasion may be found in the fact that Iraq is now a – albeit flawed – democracy.
The idea that there was ever a straightforward alternative to overthrowing Saddam Hussein by force was always rather simplistic too, and relied upon the continued presence of a no-fly-zone in the north of the country (also a form of intervention), as well as on crippling sanctions which, according to some estimates, caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children.
However, one of the lessons of Iraq, the French writer Pascal Bruckner says in his book The Tyranny of Guilt, is that “People who hope to see local versions of the Parliament in Westminster established in Kabul, Riyadh, Algiers, and Moscow will have to be patient and learn to accept necessity.”
Quite.
The point missed by those who follow Tony Blair around demanding that he be tried for war crimes, however, is that whether one supported the war in Iraq or not one was still wrong. There was no easy answer to the question of how to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and were he seated in Baghdad today the world would still face the question of how to prize him from power before the country degenerated into bankruptcy and massacre.
Would another Syria really be an improvement on today’s Iraq?
What do you think? Ten years on, was the decision to invade Iraq the correct one?
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21 Responses to “Iraq: ten years on”
Newsbot9
So you think that because the US in particular later committed crimes that it’s fine to back dictators?
Eddy Boyband
Wriggle all you like, it was labour who took this country to war on dodgy evidence, as well as not supplying the proper kit for the solders.
Duncan McFarlane
I’m not wriggling – it was the Labour party leadership, the majority if it’s MPs and the vast majority of Conservative MPs. There were ten times as many Labour MPs who voted against the war than Conservatives who did though.
Duncan McFarlane
The fact is? Based on what source? Who says? You can’t just make a claim without any source at all and expect anyone to believe it. It does depend on the chemical – i said many, not all. How many did Saddam use in the 1991 war? And how many in the 2003 war? None. So whether he had them or not he wasn’t going to use them on the US or its allies for fear of the consequences – and with US and British jets patrolling the Northern and Southern No fly zone he couldn’t use them unless they let him (as they did with the Marsh Arabs in the 90s). All that was over years before the invasion though.
Duncan McFarlane
No – i think it’s not an improvement on a dictator torturing and murdering people to have an elected government’s forces and US forces torturing and killing civilians just like he did. And i think it’s not ok to go to war unless the alternative is a lot more people being killed than if you don’t go to war – which was not the case in 2003 , as Saddam’s massacres were his genocide against the Kurds in the 1980s (while the US and British governments continued to arm him – and after Halabja continued to fund him and support him), his massacre of the Shia in 1991 (caused by Bush senior calling on them to rise up and overthrow Saddam giving the impression US forces would help them if they did, then telling his forces not to get involved even when they begged to be allowed to) and the genocide of the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s while the US and British air forces were once again ordered not to stop it as they patrolled overhead in the Southern No Fly zone. All were over by the end of the 1990s, so war was bound to cost far, far more lives than it saved – even if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld gave a damn about saving a single life, which they didn’t – Cheney and Rumsfeld organised funding and training the death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s and reproduced Iraqi versions like the Iraqi Police Commandos in Iraq , as well as allowing US forces to fire on ambulances and civilians in Coalition assaults like the ones on Falluja and Samarra – with western aid workers and Iraqi civilians, ambulance crews and doctors reporting they were fired on so many times that US forces must have been targeting them.