war in iraq essay

How the war in Iraq changed the world—and what change could come next

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How the iraq war changed…, what iraq needs now, what the united states can do now.

Twenty years on from the US invasion of the country, Iraq has fallen off the policymaking agenda in Washington, DC—cast aside in part as a result of the bitter experience of the war, the enormous human toll it exacted, and the passage of time. But looking forward twenty years and beyond, Iraqis need a great deal from their own leaders and those of their erstwhile liberators. A national reconciliation commission, a new constitution, and an economy less dependent on oil revenue are just some of the areas the experts at the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative highlight in this collection of reflections marking two decades since the US invasion.

What else will it take to transform Iraq into a prosperous, productive regional player? What can the United States do now, with twenty years’ worth of hindsight? And just how far-reaching were the effects of the war? Twenty-one experts from across the Atlantic Council take on these questions in a series of short essays and video interviews below.

Oula Kadhum on what March 20, 2003 was like for a young Iraqi

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The cause of democracy in the region

When the United States invaded Iraq two decades ago, one of the public justifications for the war was that it would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East. The invasion, of course, had the opposite effect: it unleashed a bloody sectarian conflict in Iraq, badly undermining the reputation of democracy in the region and America’s credibility in promoting it.

Yet the frictions between rulers and ruled that helped precipitate the US invasion of Iraq persist. The citizens of the region, increasingly educated and connected to the rest of the world, have twenty-first-century political aspirations, but continue to be ruled by unaccountable nineteenth-century-style autocrats. Absent a change, these frictions will continue to shape political developments in the region, often in cataclysmic fashion, over the next two decades.

The George W. Bush administration’s failures in Iraq severely set back the cause of democracy in the region. In the perceptions of Arab publics, democratization became synonymous with the exercise of American military power. Meanwhile, Iraq’s chaos strengthened the hand of the region’s autocrats: as inept or heavy-handed as their own rule might be, it paled in comparison to the breakdown of order and human slaughter in Iraq. 

Citizens’ frustrations with their political leaders finally erupted in the Arab Spring of 2010 and 2011, but their protests failed to end autocracy in the region. Gulf monarchs were able to  throw money  at the problem, first to shore up their own rule and then other autocracies in the region. The Egyptian experiment with democracy proved short-lived; Tunisia’s endured far longer but also appears over. More broadly, the region has seen democratic backsliding in Lebanon and Israel as well.

The yawning gap between what citizens want and what they get from their governments remains. The World Bank’s  Worldwide Governance Indicators  show that, on aggregate, states in the region are no more politically stable, effectively governed, accountable, or participatory than two decades ago. Unless political leaders address that gap, further Arab Spring-like protests—or even social revolution—are probable. 

Having apparently gotten out of the business of invasion and occupation following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States could play a new and constructive role here. It could both cajole and assist the region’s political leaders to improve governance for their citizens. 

The United States exacerbated political tensions in the region two decades ago; now it has an opportunity to help ameliorate them.

— Stephen R. Grand is the author of  Understanding Tahrir Square: What Transitions Elsewhere Can Teach Us About the Prospects for Arab Democracy . He is a nonresident senior fellow with the Council’s Middle East programs.

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State sovereignty

Since the seventeenth century, more or less, world order has been based on the concept of state sovereignty: states are deemed to hold the monopoly of force within mutually recognized territories, and they are generally prohibited from intervening in one another’s domestic affairs. The invasion of Iraq challenged this standard in three important ways. 

First, the fact of the war represented a direct attack on the sovereignty of the Iraqi state, which undermined the  ban on aggressive war. While the Bush administration cast the invasion as a case of preemptive self-defense, it was widely seen as a preventive war of choice against a state that did not pose a clear and present danger. Moreover, the main exceptions to sovereignty that have developed over time, such as ongoing mass atrocities or United Nations authority, were not applicable in Iraq. Thus, the United States dealt a major blow to the rules-based international system of which it was one of the chief architects. This may have made more imaginable later crimes of aggression by other states. 

Second, the means of the war, and especially the occupation, powered the reemergence of the private military industry. Driven by the need to sustain two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US armed forces became dependent on military contractors, which sometimes involved authorizing  paid civilians to kill . The US effort to (re)privatize warfare brought back into fashion the use of private military force, generating a  multibillion-dollar industry that is here to stay. Over time the spread of private military companies could unspool the state’s exclusive claim to violence and hammer the foundations of the current international system.

Third, the consequences of the war led to the spectacular empowerment of armed nonstate actors in the region and beyond, who launched a full-frontal assault on the sovereignty of many states. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, of course, emerged amid the brutal contestation of power in post-invasion Iraq and pursued its “caliphate” as an alternative (Sunni) political institution to rival the nation-state. While the threat has been contained, for now, in the Middle East, it is only beginning to gather force on the African continent. In addition, because Iran effectively won the war in Iraq, it was able to sponsor a deep bench of Shia nonstate groups which have eroded state sovereignty in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq itself. 

The US invasion of Iraq left us a world with less respect for state sovereignty, more guns for hire, and a dizzying array of well-armed and determined nonstate groups. 

— Alia Brahimi is a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and host of the  Guns for Hire  podcast. 

Abbas Kadhim on the opportunities missed

US-Turkish ties

By launching a war on Turkey’s border, against Turkish advice, in a manner that prejudiced Turkish interests, the United States in 2003 upended a strategic understanding that had dominated bilateral relations for five decades. 

During and immediately after the Cold War, Turkey and the United States shared a strategic vision  centered on containing  the Soviet Union and its proxies. In exchange for strategic cooperation, Washington provided aid, modulated criticisms of Turkish politics, and deferred to Ankara’s sensitivities regarding its geopolitical neighborhood. With  notable exceptions  (e.g., Turkish opposition to the Vietnam War and US opposition to Turkey’s 1974 Cyprus operation), consensus was the norm and aspiration of both sides. After close collaboration in the  Balkans ,  Somalia , Iraq, and Afghanistan  from 1991 to 2001, though, Ankara became increasingly  alarmed about the prospect of a new war  in Iraq.

Bilateral relations  deteriorated sharply  after the Turkish parliament  voted against  allowing the United States to launch combat operations from Turkish soil. The war was longer, bloodier, and costlier than its planners had anticipated. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known as the PKK and designated by the United States as a terrorist organization in 1997) ended a cease-fire in place since the 1999 capture of its founder, Abdullah Öcalan, and gained broad new freedom of movement and action in northern Iraq. US military aid to Turkey ended, while defense industrial cooperation and military-to-military contacts dropped. In July 2003 US soldiers detained and  hooded a Turkish special forces team  in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, on suspicions that they were colluding with insurgents. This event, coupled with Turkish anger over the bitter conduct and conclusion of the prewar negotiations, helped fuel a  sustained rise  in negative views about the United States among the Turkish public.

Sanctions and the war in Iraq  damaged Turkish economic interests,  though these would  rebound  from 2005 onward. The relationship of the  US military to the PKK— first as tacit tolerance of PKK  attacks into Turkey  from northern Iraq despite the US presence, and later with employment of the PKK affiliate in Syria as a proxy force against the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)—rendered the frictions of 2003 permanent. That US forces train, equip, and operate with a PKK-linked militia along Turkey’s border today is fruit of the Iraq war, because US-PKK  contacts were brokered in northern Iraq,  and US indifference to Turkish security redlines traces back to 2003.

The story of US-Turkish estrangement can be told from other perspectives: that Ankara sought strategic independence for reasons  broader than Iraq,  that President  Erdoğan’s anti-Westernism  drove divergence, that the countries have  fewer shared interests  now. There may be truth in these arguments, though they are based largely on speculation and imputed motives. Yet they, too, cannot be viewed except through the lens of the 2003 Iraq War, which came as Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party was assuming power and greatly influenced his subsequent decision-making.

Many effects of the Iraq War have faded, but the strategic alienation of Turkey and the United States has not.

— Rich Outzen , a retired colonel, is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council IN TURKEY and a geopolitical analyst and consultant currently serving private-sector clients as Dragoman LLC.

China’s rise

As George W. Bush took office in 2001,  managing the US-China relationship  was regarded as a top foreign policy concern. The administration’s focus shifted with 9/11 and a wartime footing—which in turn altered Beijing’s foreign policy and engagement in the Middle East. 

A high point in US-China tension came in April with the Hainan Island Incident. The collision of a US signals intelligence aircraft and a Chinese interceptor jet resulted in one dead Chinese pilot and the detention of twenty-four US crew members, whose release followed US Ambassador Joseph Prueher’s delivery of the “ letter of the two sorries .” 

But after the September 11 attacks, the United States launched the global war on terrorism, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became the all-encompassing focal points. While that relieved pressure on China, the US decision to invade Iraq raised serious concerns in Beijing and elsewhere about the direction of global order under US leadership. 

American willingness to attack a sovereign government with the stated goal of changing its regime set a worrisome precedent for authoritarian governments. Worries transformed into something else following the global financial crisis in 2008. Chinese leaders became even more wary of US leadership, with former Vice Premier Wang Qishan telling then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson  after the financial crisis , “Look at your system, Hank. We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.”

The war in Iraq was especially troubling for Chinese leaders. Few believed that the United States would engage in such a disastrous war over something as idealistic as democracy promotion in the Middle East. The dominant assumption was that the war was about maintaining control of global oil—and using that dominance to prevent China from rising to a peer competitor status. The so-called “ Malacca Dilemma ” became a feature of analysis in China’s strategic landscape: the idea that any power that could control the Strait of Malacca could control oil shipping to China, and therefore its economy. Since then, China has developed the  world’s largest navy  and invested in ports across the Indian Ocean region through its  Maritime Silk Road Initiative . Its defense spending has increased  fivefold this century, from $50 billion in 2001 to $270 billion in 2021, making it the  second-largest defense spender  in the Indo-Pacific region after Japan, and higher than the next thirteen Indo-Pacific countries combined. 

Since the Iraq war, the Middle East has become a much greater focus in Chinese foreign policy. In addition to building up its own military, China began  discussing security and strategic affairs  with Middle East energy suppliers,  conducting joint exercises , selling more varied  weapons systems , and pursuing a regional presence that increasingly  diverges or compete s with US preferences. 

Would China’s growing presence in the Middle East have followed the same trajectory had the United States not invaded Iraq? Possibly, although one could argue that the same sense of urgency would not have animated decision makers in the People’s Republic of China.

— Jonathan Fulton  is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and host of the China-MENA podcast. He is also an assistant professor of political science at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. Follow him on Twitter:  @jonathandfulton .

The country’s readiness to meet climate challenges

Over the course of the last two decades, Iraq has become one of the five most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. It has been affected by  rising temperatures , insufficient and diminishing  rainfall , intensified  droughts that reduce  access to water ,  sand and dust storms , and  flooding . Iraq’s environmental ministry  warns  that the country may face dust storms for more than 270 days per year in the next twenty years.  While not the sole cause of environmental mismanagement in Iraq, the  muhasasa  system of power sharing has exacerbated and contributed to a culture of corruption and political patronage that has undermined efforts to protect the environment and to sustainably manage Iraq’s natural resources.  Muhasasa  is an official system that allocates Iraqi government positions and resources based on ethnic and sectarian identity. It may have been a good temporary compromise to promote stability in the early 2000s, but today it is widely viewed as a harmful legacy of the post-invasion occupation period. In the context of protecting the environment, the  muhasasa  system has led to a situation where some government officials are appointed to their respective positions without the necessary skills or qualifications to manage resources efficiently or effectively. Forced  ethnosectarian balancing has  encouraged  natural resource misuse for political or personal gain to the immediate detriment of average Iraqis. While  muhasasa  was intended to promote political stability and prevent marginalization of minority groups, in practice it has contributed to a culture of corruption and nepotism, and undermined efforts to promote good governance and sustainable development.  To address its acute climate challenges, Iraq needs to move away from the sectarian-based power sharing and toward a more inclusive, merit-based system of governance. It must strengthen its environmental regulations, commit itself to sustainable development, and better manage its natural resources for the country and as part of the global effort to mitigate climate change. The international community has a role to play here through supporting technical assistance, capacity building, and providing financial resources to help address these concerns along the way. 

— Masoud Mostajabi is an associate director of the Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council. 

Iran’s regional footprint

From the outset of the invasion of Iraq, the United States’ decision was built on several dubious premises that the administration masterfully overhyped to build support for its aspirations of removing Saddam Hussein by force. The last two decades have tragically shown the consequences of this decision—with high costs of blood and treasure and a serious blow to American credibility. But from a strategic standpoint, one particular miscalculation continues to create blowbacks to US regional security interests: top US policymakers willfully ignored the need for an adequate nation-rebuilding strategy, leaving a power vacuum that an expansionist Iran could fill.

With the removal of the Baathist regime, Iran finally saw the defeat of a rival it could not best after eight years of one of the region’s bloodiest wars. This cleared the path to influence Iraqi Shia leaders who had long relied on the Islamic theocracy next door for support. Even as some Shia learning centers in Najaf and Karbala challenged (once again) Qom, new opportunities of influence that never existed before opened up for Iran. 

By infiltrating Iraq’s political institutions through appointed officials submissive to its regime’s wishes, Iran succeeded in two goals: deterring future threats of Iraqi hostilities and preventing the United States from using Iraqi territories as a platform to invade Iran. Through its Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Qods Force, Iran trained and supplied several militia groups that later officially penetrated Iraq’s security architecture through forces called Popular Mobilization Units, which have repeatedly carried out anti-American attacks. Nevertheless, those groups would eventually prove valuable to the United States in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)—yet even then Iran succeeded in appearing as the protector of Iraq’s sovereignty by immediately equipping the Popular Mobilization Units, unlike the  delayed  US response that arrived months later. 

Regionally, Iran’s military leverage and political allies inside Iraq provided it with a strategic ground link to its network in Syria and Lebanon, where the Qods Force ultimately shifted the political power dynamics to Iran’s advantage, especially as they crucially strengthened engagement in  recruiting volunteers  to support Bashar al-Assad’s fighters in Syria. Through the land bridge that connects Iran to the Bekaa Valley, Iran has helped spread its weapons-trafficking and money-laundering capabilities while reinforcing an abusive dictatorship in Syria and a crippled state in Lebanon.

Twenty years ago, the United States went to liberate Iraq from its oppressive dictatorship. What it left behind is a void in governance and an alternative system that fell far short of what the United States wanted for Iraq. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime continues to base its identity on anti-Americanism while it gets closer to its political and ideological ambitions. With US sanctions having so far  failed to halt  Iran’s network of militia training and smuggling—and the attempt to revive the nuclear deal stalled, despite being the main focus of US Iran policy—the question remains: How long will the United States tolerate Iran’s regional ascendancy before it intensifies its efforts toward restraining it? 

— Nour Dabboussi  is a program assistant to the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East programs.

How governments counter terrorist financing 

Without the experience of the war in Iraq, US and transatlantic economic statecraft would be less agile and less able to prevent terrorist financing. However, more work and  continued international commitment  is needed to ensure Iraq and its neighbors are able to strengthen and enforce their anti-money-laundering regimes to protect their economies from corruption and deny terrorists and other illicit actors from abusing the global financial system to raise, use, and move funds for their operations.

The tools of economic statecraft, including but not limited to sanctions, export controls, and controlling access to currency, became critical to US national security in the wake of 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Sanctions and other forms of economic pressure had been applied against the government of Iraq and illicit actors prior to 2003. However, economic pressure and the use of financial intelligence to combat terrorist financing became increasingly sophisticated as the war progressed. Since 2001, the State Department and Treasury have designated more than  500 individuals and entities  for  financially supporting  terrorism in Iraq. Following the money and figuring out how terrorist networks raised, used, and moved funds was a critical aspect in understanding how they operated in Iraq and across the region. Information on terrorist financial networks and facilitators helped identify vulnerabilities for disruption, limiting their ability to fund and carry out terrorist attacks, procure weapons, pay salaries for fighters, and recruit. 

Sanctioning the terrorist groups and financial facilitators operating in Iraq and across the region disrupted the groups’ financial flows and operational capabilities while protecting the US and global financial systems from abuse. Targets included al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, among others. For example, the US Treasury recently sanctioned an Iraqi bank  moving millions of dollars from the Revolutionary Guard Corps to Hezbollah , preventing terrorists from abusing the international financial system. 

Notably, the fight against terrorist financing set in motion the expansion of the Department of the Treasury’s sanctions programs and helped the US government refine its sanctions framework and enforcement authorities and their broad application. 

Equally important, the US government’s efforts and experience in countering the financing of terrorism increased engagement and coordination with foreign partners to protect the global financial system from abuse by illicit actors. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the inter-governmental body responsible for setting international anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist financing standards, strengthened and revised its standards, recommendations, and red flags to account for what the international community learned from the experience of combatting terrorist financing in Iraq. The United States and partner nations provided, and continue to provide, training and resources to build Iraq’s and its neighbors’ capabilities to meet FATF standards and address terrorist financing and money laundering issues domestically. 

— Kim Donovan is the director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. 

— Maia Nikoladze is an assistant director at the Economic Statecraft Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. 

The United States

Perhaps no event since the end of the Cold War shaped American politics more than the invasion of Iraq. It is fair to say that without the Iraq war neither Donald Trump nor Barack Obama would likely have been president.      

Weirdly, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is still almost a forbidden topic in GOP foreign policy circles. After the Bush years, a kind of collective-guilt  omerta  about the Iraq war took hold among Republicans. It was as if US-Iraqi history had started in 2005, or 2006, with Democrats and a few Republicans baying for a needed defeat. It never came. The 2007 surge, as David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy came to be known, was the gutsiest political call by an American leader in my lifetime.      

It happened also to be right when very little else about the war was: There were, of course, no weapons of mass destruction found. Iran did expand its power, massively. Iraq did not offer an example of democracy to the region: rather, it horrified the region. It became linked to al-Qaeda only after the invasion. The White House refused to take the insurgency seriously until it was very serious. Iraq pulled attention away from Afghanistan. And of course there were  4,431 Americans killed.

By 2016, the narrative favored by Republicans had become that the execution of the war was flawed. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, was the villain in this story: But for Bremer’s incomprehensible decision to disband the Iraqi army and institute de-Baathification in early 2003, so the story went, the Iraq war could have succeeded. But in retrospect these decisions were defendable. Bremer was erring on the side of satiating the Shia majority, not the Sunni minority, and trying to reassure them that a decade after they were abandoned in 1991 the United States would deliver them political power. And the one real success of the Iraq war, beginning to end, is that the United States never faced a generalized Shia insurgency.

The other villain was Barack Obama, who played in the sequel. (Obama largely owed his electoral victory to the Iraq war, brilliantly using Hillary Clinton’s vote for the invasion to invalidate her experience and judgment and thus the main argument for her candidacy.) In this version of events, Obama’s precipitous decision to withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011 contributed to the country’s near-collapse three years later under the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). This was basically accurate. The withdrawal of US forces eliminated a key political counterweight from Iraq, and the main incentive for then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to hedge his sectarianism and friendliness with Iran. This accelerated political support for Sunni rejectionist movements like ISIS.

Both the Bremer narrative and the Obama narrative allowed George Bush’s Republican party to avoid revisiting the core questions of American power: intervention, exceptionalism, and its limits—precisely the same questions that had featured prominently in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

This was the broken market that Donald Trump exploited: that Republican voters’ views on Iraq after 2008 looked much like Democratic voters’, but the Republican establishment’s views did not. And it was no accident, in the 2016 presidential primaries, that the two candidates most willing to criticize the interventionism of the 2000s, Trump and Ted Cruz, were the ones who did best.      

This debate remains critical. More than any other decision, Bush’s war created the contemporary Middle East. Above all that includes the unprecedented regional dominance of Iran, the power of the Arab Shia, and the constraints on American power in buttressing its traditional allies. That imbalance, combined with a decade-long sense that America is leaving the region and wants no more conflict, has led Sunni Arab states to look for their security in other places.

Especially in the wake of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which if anything has sharpened foreign policy divisions, the Republican party and the United States need a dialectic, not a purge; a discussion, not a proscription; and a reasonable synthesis of the lessons of Iraq. People want to vote for restraint and realism, as much as or more than they want to vote and pay for interventionism and idealism. Was the Iraq War a mistake? Let us start this debate there, and produce something better.

— Andrew L. Peek is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. He was previously the senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council and the deputy assistant secretary for Iran and Iraq at the US Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.

Andrew Peek on the historical context of the 2003 invasion

US foreign policy

The US decision to invade Iraq twenty years ago was, to use the words of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, a wily French statesman and diplomat of the Napoleonic era, “worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.” 

While Saddam Hussein was a monster, and had ignored numerous United Nation-mandated commitments, the US-led effort in 2003 to topple him as president of Iraq was strategically unnecessary. It became the center of a failed mission in nation-building—one that has proved disastrous for US interests in the greater Middle East and beyond. 

Iraq was at the center, but it was only one of four failed American interventions in the region.  The others were Afghanistan, Libya, and, to a lesser extent, Syria.  The operation to take down the Taliban was fast and efficient, but consolidation of a post-Taliban Afghanistan never occurred. Part of the reason for that was the United States’ war of choice in Iraq, which began less than eighteen months after Afghanistan. That sucked up most of the resources and attention for the rest of that decade. But the other reason for US failure in Afghanistan was that we were beguiled by the same siren song that misled us in Iraq: that we could overcome centuries of history and culture and create a stable society at least somewhat closer to US values. Failure on such a scale is not good for the prestige and influence of a superpower.

But that is not the end of it. There is also the domestic side. The misadventures in the greater Middle East were a failure not just of the US government but of the US foreign policy elite. It was a bipartisan affair. Neoconservative thinking dominated the Republican Party throughout the aughts, while liberal interventionism prevailed in the Democratic Party. They were all in for the utopian policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. 

While the failures in the greater Middle East were widely understood even before the unnecessarily embarrassing 2021 departure from Afghanistan, there has never been a public reckoning. There was nothing like the Church Committee, which in the mid-1970s shined a very harsh light on US failures in Southeast Asia. Few prominent thinkers or officials have publicly acknowledged their failed policy choices. And the same figures who led us into those debacles are still widely quoted on all major foreign policy matters.   

This has had the consequence in the United States of providing ground for the growth of neoisolationist thinking. In running for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump was not wrong in pointing out the failures of elites in both parties in conducting foreign policy in the greater Middle East. Since then, populists on the right have used this insight to undermine the credibility of foreign policy experts. And like generals fighting the last war, they have applied their “insight” from the Middle East to the latest challenges to US interests, such as Moscow’s war on Ukraine.  

In this reading, US support for Ukraine is comparable to US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and will result in failure. There is no analysis—simply dismissal—of the dangers that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine poses to US security and economic prosperity. No recognition that, as Putin has stated numerous times, he wants to restore Kremlin political control over all the states that used to make up the Soviet Union—which includes NATO and European Union (EU) member states. In other words, he seeks to undermine NATO and the EU. 

Furthermore, there’s no understanding that despite the presence of American troops, the United States’ local allies in Iraq and Afghanistan could not win—but without one NATO soldier on the battlefield, Ukraine is fighting Russia to a standstill. Indeed, Ukraine has destroyed between 30 percent and 50 percent of Moscow’s conventional military capability. These analogies with the Iraq war ignore the reality that if Putin takes control of Ukraine, the United States will likely spend far more in financial resources and perhaps American lives in defending its NATO allies.

These failures of understanding are not simply or mainly a consequence of US errors in the Middle East. Utopian thinking in the United States and especially Europe was a natural consequence of the absence of great-power war since 1945. Especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, people on both sides of the Atlantic got comfortable with the notion that Russia was no longer an adversary. And isolationism also has a long pedigree in US society. So it would be vastly oversimplifying to blame the confusion of today’s neoisolationists exclusively on US failures in the Middle East. But the strong US response to the challenge of a hostile Soviet Union was possible because a bipartisan approach on containment was endorsed by leaders of both parties. After the United States’ misadventures in Iraq, such endorsements carry less weight today. In US foreign policy as elsewhere, we still do not know what the ultimate impact of the decision to invade Iraq will be. 

— John Herbst’s 31-year career in the US Foreign Service included time as US ambassador to Uzbekistan, other service in and with post-Soviet states, and his appointment as US ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006.

William F. Wechsler on the future of Iraq

A reconciliation commission to rebuild national unity

One of the most devastating shortcomings of the 2003 Iraq invasion was the dismantlement of state institutions and the weakening of the Baghdad central government. That structural vacuum of power and services forced Iraqis back into tribal, religious, and ethnic allegiances, contributing to the nation-state’s fragmentation and exacerbating divisive sectarian discourses and intercommunity tensions. A quota-based constitutional system only served to institutionalize and legitimize the ethnosectarian distribution of power.   

Conflicting groups grew further apart over the past two decades and became more motivated by accumulating political positions, hefty oil incomes, and territorial and symbolic gains rather than collectively seeking to rebuild their balkanized nation. Iraqi youth, on the other hand—who campaigned in the name of “We Want a Homeland” [نريد_وطن#] during the 2019 Tishreen (October) protests—seem to have understood what political elites might be missing: the necessity for national reconciliation and memorialization. 

The bombing of the  al-Askari shrine in Samarra in 2006  unleashed the chaos trapped inside Pandora’s box and resulted in violent Sunni-Shia confrontations, which pushed the country to the brink of civil war. Today, political elites, aware of the fragility and precariousness of the political consensus, pretend the time of friction is over. My firsthand work in Iraqi prisons and camps, and the research projects I led in the country’s conflict zones off the beaten path, such as west of the Euphrates, in Zubair, and in rural areas in the Makhoul Basin, prove the absolute contrary. 

A flagrant example of the sectarian ticking bomb that persists in Iraq is the mismanagement of the Sunni populations in the aftermath of the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Many pretended that ISIS fighters came from some fictional foreign entity and refused to face the fact that most of them, including their  leader , were Iraqi-born and raised, which I observed as an eyewitness working with the International Committee of the Red Cross during the ISIS war in Nineveh and Salahuddin. Many people who were accomplices of the atrocities even engaged in rewriting the narrative altogether after 2017 in the name of national unity. 

A number of Sunni populations in Iraq were mystified by their sudden loss of power with the toppling of Saddam Hussein and were in disbelief that the Shia they stigmatized as  shrouguis — literally, “easterners,” a derogatory reference used by Sunni elites to refer to Shia Iraqis from the southeast—became the new lords of the land. Instead of engaging in meaningful mediation and reconciliation to work through these social changes, the majority parties preferred to bury their heads in the sand. This tendency led them to allow militia groups  to displace  and isolate the Sunni inhabitants of a key city like Samarra, to  submerge under water  the citizens of northern Kirkuk and Salaheddin, or to conceal the evidence incriminating Tikrit Sunnis during the  Speicher massacre , in which ISIS fighters killed more than a thousand Iraqi military cadets, most of them Shia. 

These are not isolated examples in a chaotic political and constitutional system in which many communities feel persistently misunderstood, including Kurds, Assyrians, Mandaeans, Baha’is, Afro-Iraqis, Turkmen—and even the Shia themselves. The only possible and plausible pathway for the country to be one again in the next twenty years is to engage in an excruciating but indispensable reconciliation process, through which responsibilities are determined, dignity is restored, and justice is served. 

— Sarah Zaaimi is the deputy director for communications at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East programs.

A new constitution

Iraq needs a new constitution. A good constitution spells out the framework and structure of government. It provides essential checks and balances to prevent dictators from coming to power. It helps protect the people’s rights. It has measures to prevent gridlock or the collapse of a functioning government.

Judged by these standards, the  2005 Iraqi   constitution   is only a partial success.

However, complaints have built up since 2005: over the  muhasasa  system under which the established political parties divide up ministerial appointments; over the failure of Iraq’s government or other institutions to deliver basic services like electricity and water; over perceptions of excessive Iranian meddling in Iraq’s politics; and over the inability of the government to provide meaningful employment for millions of young Iraqis—or to foster a private sector capable of doing so. These grievances came to a head in the 2019 Tishreen protests in which more than 600 Iraqis died.

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 in part to bring democracy to Iraq, so it is ironic that Iraq’s 2005 constitution was the product of mostly Iraqi political forces unleashed by the failure of the United States to ensure a democratic transition. It was expected that the Kurdish political parties, which had worked closely with the United States for years, would insist upon a federal republic to ensure their autonomy from a central government whose long-term character and leanings in 2005 were far from settled. Beyond this, however, the small number of Americans actually involved in advising the key Iraqi players in the constitutional process— in the room where it happened —actually had relatively little experience in constitutional mechanics or modern comparative constitutional practice. The American sins of commission during the first two years after Iraq’s liberation were replaced by sins of omission during the crucial months of negotiation of the 2005 constitution.

Genuine constitutional reform in Iraq is not likely to be accomplished directly through the parliament, given the interests of Iraq’s political parties and the parliament’s need to focus on legislative responsibilities. Instead, Iraqi civil society—including scholars, lawyers, religious and business leaders, and retired government officials and jurists—should initiate serious discussions about constitutional reform. Many of these voices were not heard when the 2005 constitution was adopted. Their effort can be far more open and transparent than the process was in 2005.

Foreign governments should have a minimal role, limited to supporting and encouraging Iraqi-led efforts, without trying to broker a particular outcome. International foundations, institutes, universities, and think tanks can offer outside expertise, particularly in comparative constitutional law and other kinds of technical assistance. But the overall effort needs to be Iraqi-led, with input from a broad spectrum of Iraqi voices.

While civil society discussions in Iraq could begin with considering amendments to the 2005 constitution, US experience may be relevant. The US Constitutional Convention convened in May 1787 to consider amendments to the  Articles of Confederation  decided to completely redesign the government, resulting in a Constitution that, with amendments, has been in force in the United States for more than 230 years. Sometimes it’s better to start over.

Iraq’s path to constitutional reform is not clear today, but there is a path nevertheless. Incremental reform is possible, but reform on a larger scale may achieve a more lasting result. The more promising outcome could be for a slate of candidates to run for office with the elements of the new constitution as their platform. A reform slate is not likely to gain an absolute majority, but if its base of support is broad enough, it may be able to gain support in a new parliament needed to send a revised constitution to the Iraqi people for their approval. A new constitution, done right, could propel Iraq towards a better future.

— Thomas S. Warrick led the State Department’s “Future of Iraq” project from 2002 to 2003, served in both Baghdad and Washington, and was director (acting) for Iraq political affairs from July 2006 to July 2007. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Thomas S. Warrick on the need for Iraqi-led constitutional reform

An economy diversified away from oil

The post-2003 political order, based on the  muhasasa  system of  sectarian apportionment, came with the promise of a complete break with the past. The  2005 constitution , drafted by the new order, promised: “The State shall guarantee the reform of the Iraqi economy in accordance with modern economic principles to insure the full investment of its resources, diversification of its sources, and the encouragement and development of the private sector.” 

As with other bold promises made, the economic promise was broken as soon as the constitution came into effect, as the political order pursued a decentralized and multiheaded evolution of the prior economic model, and persistently expanded the patrimonial role of the state as a redistributor of the country’s oil wealth in exchange for social acquiescence to its rule. 

Over the last twenty years the economy developed significant structural imbalances, and was increasingly bedeviled by fundamental contradictions. Essentially, it was dependent on government spending directly through its provisioning of goods and services as well as public services, and indirectly on the spending of public-sector employees. However, this spending was almost entirely dependent on volatile oil revenues that the government had no control over; yet the spending was premised on ever-increasing oil prices.

The political order had the opportunity to correct course and honor the original promise during three major economic and financial crises, each more severe than the last and all a consequence of an oil-price crash: in 2007 to 2009, due to the global financial crisis; in 2014 to 2017, due to the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham; and in 2020, due to the emergence of COVID-19. Yet, paradoxically, the political order doubled down on the policies that led to these crises as soon as oil prices recovered.

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the political order—buoyed by the bounty of high, yet unsustainable, oil prices—is planning a budget that is expected to be  the largest ever since 2003 , to seek legitimacy from an increasingly alienated public. These plans will only deepen the economy’s structural imbalance and its fundamental contradictions, and as such could likely lead to even greater public alienation if an oil-price crash triggers yet another economic and financial crisis. Even if oil prices were to stay high, however, the country’s demographic pressures will in time create the conditions for a deeper rolling crisis. 

— Ahmed Tabaqchali is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. An experienced capital markets professional, he is chief strategist of the AFC Iraq Fund.

Andrew Peek on the current state of Iraq and the US-Iraq relationship

An inclusive vision, representative of all its people

One of the enduring legacies of the 2003 invasion has been its deleterious effect on the many diverse ethnic and religious minority communities that make up the social fabric of Iraq. Yet it is that diversity and rich heritage that could now unlock a brighter future for the nation, if the political system can recognize and represent it. 

Marginalized by an institutionally inscribed political system and few representative seats in parliament, Iraq’s minority communities have found themselves peripheralized by the state—and in the imaginations of the country’s future. Many have emigrated and now reside in diaspora, changing the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of Iraq. 

Calculating the cultural toll of war goes beyond the destruction of shrines and artifacts, and the looting of museums and buildings: One of the biggest social and cultural losses for Iraq has been the exclusion of minority communities from the nation-building processes. This is a tragic state of affairs for Iraq, whose uniqueness, strength, and richness stems from its ancient histories and cultures, its religious, artistic, and musical traditions, and the languages that have contributed to its heritage and development. That heritage deserves to be protected and celebrated. 

Until the day the  muhasasa  system  is dismantled, and a new Iraq built on meritocracy can thrive, minority communities must be safeguarded and included in Iraq’s future. Yet, this can only be achieved through the protection of minorities’ rights in Iraq’s political life, and genuine and concerted effort to increase parliamentary seats and legal representation of minorities. Investment in areas destroyed by terrorism and conflict, more reparations for communities whose livelihoods and homes have been ruined, and more boots on the ground to protect communities and religious shrines should be a priority. 

Twenty years of destruction, corruption, violence, and the subsequent emigration of many communities cannot be erased. Yet the twentieth anniversary of Iraq’s occupation ought to serve as a point of reflection for the kind of Iraq that  Iraqis  want now. There is certainly much hope in a new generation of Iraqis calling for new national visions, an end to  muhasasa , more civil rights, and expanding economic opportunities. 

Yet all of Iraq’s communities must be part of this conversation. A more inclusive Iraq that applauds its diversity and takes pride in difference could be the driving force needed to unify the nation. 

— Oula Kadhum , a former nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, is a postdoctoral research fellow at Lunds University in Sweden and a fellow of international migration at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom. 

Oula Kadhum on the reforms needed to reposition Iraq in the next twenty years

A new US Iraq policy focused on youth and education

As the global community reflects on the twentieth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq and looks to the future, it is time for foreign policy toward Iraq to move beyond its traditional, security-heavy approach. 

While security threats persist, including a potential resurgence of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and should be a priority, US aid to Iraq has historically been  ineffective  and financially irresponsible. Humanitarian assistance, meanwhile, tends to focus on short-term issues like the  response  to COVID-19 and assisting displaced individuals. And while such aid can be beneficial, continuing with the traditional avenues of support is not a sustainable solution to rebuild Iraq. The United States and the international community must begin to focus on long-term solutions that address human security, development, infrastructure, education, and the economy. At the center of all these issues are two key variables that must be the focal point of policy: education and the youth population.

A 2019 UNICEF report estimates that a staggering  60 percent  of Iraq’s population is under the age of twenty-five. Learning levels and access to education in Iraq remain among the  lowest  in the region. The great challenges these two facts pose can also be seen as a unique opportunity: to place its large youth population at the epicenter of Iraq’s future through policy that increases the number of educators and trains them, ensures sanitary and competent learning conditions, and increases access to education.

The benefits of a long-term investment in Iraq’s education system and youth population go beyond simply educating its citizens: It would be the first step in unlocking the human potential of Iraq. More education means more qualified professionals; more doctors would increase the quality and access to healthcare, an increase in engineers will ensure that the country’s infrastructure continues to develop, and additional business leaders and entrepreneurs will assist in growing the economy. 

To truly rebuild Iraq, the United States and the international community can no longer view the country as only a security issue. Rather, this moment must be seen as an opportunity to empower bright Iraqi youths, who hope to lead in rebuilding their own country—providing them with a fair shot of again being a cradle of civilization. 

— Hezha Barzani  is a program assistant with the Atlantic Council’s empowerME initiative. Follow him on Twitter  @HezhaFB .

Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Fuad Hussein reflects on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion

Recommit to the cause of Iraqi freedom

It’s hard to believe that it has been twenty years since the US invasion of Iraq. As I sat waiting to launch my first mission on March 20, the war’s historical significance was not my primary thought. How I found myself flying on the first night of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq was. That thought was accompanied by the tightness in the pit of my stomach that I always got before launching into the unknown. 

We didn’t debate the case for the war among ourselves. It has been discussed thoroughly since, and I don’t claim to have any new insight to offer on that topic. We were focused on not letting down our fellow Marines and accomplishing our mission: to remove Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and replace it with a democracy that would give the people of Iraq the freedom that people everywhere deserve as their birthright. 

Did we succeed? We certainly succeeded in rapidly destroying the Baathist regime and its military, the third largest in the world. The answer to the second question is less clear. On my second and third tours in Iraq, I saw the chaos from the al-Qaeda-fueled insurgency in 2005 and 2006 and the dramatic turnaround following the al-Anbar “ Sunni Awakening ” in 2006-2007. From afar, I watched the horrors that the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham inflicted on its people after US troops withdrew without a status-of-forces agreement. 

Today, Iraq is rated “not free,” scoring twenty-nine out of one hundred in Freedom House’s  Freedom in the World 2022 report . Although not up to Western liberal democracy standards, this is an improvement over 2002, when it received the lowest score possible and was  listed  as one of the eleven most repressive countries in the world. Moreover, Iraq’s 2022 score is vastly better than most of its neighbors: Iran scored fourteen, Syria scored one, and Afghanistan scored ten. 

Despite Afghanistan being widely seen as “the good war” of the two post-9/11 conflicts, where the casus belli was clear, today it is Iraq, and not Afghanistan, that gives me hope that twenty years from now, on the fortieth anniversary, we will see our efforts to promote democracy in Iraq come entirely to fruition. We owe it to the  36,425  Americans killed and wounded there, the thousands of veterans who took their own lives, and the many more still struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder to stay engaged in Iraq and the region to try and make sure that they do.

— Col. John B. Barranco was the 2021-22 Senior US Marine Corps Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. These views are his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or Department of the Navy. 

Balance confidence and humility

I officially swore into the military at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, on April 4, 2003, during the early stages of the US “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq. Having decided to join the Air Force following 9/11, the lengthy administrative process I’d endured to get to this point had been agonizing. I recall going through the in-processing line at Officer Training School on April 9, when an instructor whispered to us: “Coalition forces have taken Baghdad, stay motivated.” The thought that immediately went through my mind was: “I’m going to miss the wars.”

I had made the choice to pursue special operations and still had two years of training ahead of me. At the time, the war in Afghanistan seemed like it was nearing completion, and the swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq had me convinced that, by the time I was ready to deploy, there would be no fighting left. Little did I know that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with their expansions across the Middle East and Africa, would end up consuming a large majority of my twenty years of service, take the lives of many of my special operations teammates, and impact the health and well-being of a generation of US service members and their families.

It’s impossible to know how the war in Iraq shaped other US endeavors in the region. Did it take our focus from Afghanistan and put us on a path of increased escalation and investment there? Did it set conditions for the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham to take root many years later, setting off another expansive counterterrorism campaign? 

More broadly, did it allow adversaries the time and space to study US capabilities and ultimately inform their strategies for malign influence? I often think of this today when I’m asked about what’s going to happen with the Russian war in Ukraine, or how prepared the United States is to defend Taiwan. 

The United States needs the confidence to confront global challenges to peace and prosperity, but also the humility to know we get things wrong, and mistakes involving direct military intervention can be catastrophic. Given the escalatory risks associated with the security challenges in the world today, our pursuit of a balance of confidence and humility has never been more important.

— Lt. Col. Justin M. Conelli is the 2022-23 Senior US Air Force fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

William F. Wechsler on the current political discourse around Iraq

Recognize the successes as well as the failures

“Was the invasion of Iraq worth it?”

I’ve spent a great deal of my military and postmilitary career answering questions about Iraq, but this one—from a brigadier general in the audience—caught me off guard. It was 2018, seven years after the formal withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, and I found myself in front of a roomful of Army officers giving a talk on the future of US-Iraq security cooperation. By that time, such talks had become a little frustrating. The fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (aka the Islamic State group) demonstrated that Iraqi forces could rise to the immediate challenge; however, the conditions that led to their unceremonious collapse in 2014 had not much changed. As a result, there remained many questions about the best way to continue the security partnership to prevent future catastrophe. 

The question I got that day, however, had little to do with how to partner with Iraqi forces. A co-presenter from Kurdistan jumped in immediately to answer the brigadier general’s question: the US invasion had removed Iraqi Kurdistan’s most significant threat—Saddam Hussein—and had provided opportunities for economic and political development it would not have had otherwise. Sensing a trap, I nonetheless walked right into it. While Iraqi Kurdistan was certainly in a better position, I pointed out that was not consistently so for the rest of Iraq. The US invasion had unleashed a sectarian free-for-all that allowed Sunni extremists, Shia militias, and their Iranian sponsors to fill the vacuum of oppression Saddam’s departure had left. Moreover, this vacuum had empowered Iran to challenge the United States and its partners regionally. So my answer was no, toppling Saddam likely did not outweigh the costs.

In previous years, the questions had been more policy-focused. For example, when I arrived at the Pentagon’s Iraq Intelligence Working Group in August 2002, the first question asked was how Iraq’s diverse ethnic and confessional demographics would affect military operations and enable—or impede—victory. By early 2003, the questions were about the larger effort to construct a new political order. Before long, we were asking how the confluence of Islamist terrorism, sectarian rivalries, and external intervention drove resistance to efforts to reconstruct Iraq. 

In 2012, I became the US defense attaché in Baghdad, just after the last US service members withdrew. At first, the question I heard in this capacity was how to continue the reconstruction project with a limited military and civilian presence whose movement was often severely restricted in a sovereign, sometimes uncooperative, Iraq with frequent interference from Iran. Before I left, al-Qaeda had metastasized into the Islamic State group and the question became how to cooperate to prevent the group’s further expansion and liberate the territory it had seized. Meanwhile, Iran’s influence with the Iraqi government continued to grow. 

In retrospect, the conditions I described in 2018 were accurate (and still largely hold today), but I wish I had given a more considered response. What I wish I had said was that a better question than “was it worth it” is: what have we learned about past failures to assess future opportunities? A prosperous Iraq that contributes to regional stability was not possible under Saddam. Now Iraq is an effective partner against Islamist extremists, and the Iraqi people, if not always their government, are in a position to push back on Iran  in their own way , exposing Tehran for the despotic government it is. Moreover, Iraq’s hosting of discussions between Saudi Arabia and Iran was a catalyst to their recent normalization of relations. 

The point is not to rationalize failure. Rather, the question now is: what have we learned from those failures to effectively capitalize on the success we have had, and how can we take advantage of the opportunities the current situation presents?

— C. Anthony Pfaff , PhD, is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative and a research professor for strategy, the military profession, and ethic at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Tony Pfaff on the future of US-Iraq relations

Remember the price of hubris

For me, the memories of those first days and weeks in Iraq remain quite clear. I remember calling my family from a satellite phone on the tarmac of Baghdad International Airport to let them know I was alive, late night meetings with Iraqi agents in safe houses, wrapping up Iraqi high-value targets, the fear amid firefights and the carnage on streets strewn with dead and mutilated bodies, and a confused Iraqi population that at the time did not know what to make of US forces who claimed to be liberating them from the regime of Saddam Hussein. 

Upon arrival in Baghdad in early April, there were few signs of the resistance that would haunt the United States for decades to come. Yes, there were still combat operations underway, but that was against Iraqi military and paramilitary units. So, as we tracked down Iraqi regime targets one by one—members of the famed “ deck of fifty-five cards ” that US Central Command had dreamed up and distributed like we were trading baseball cards—we saw this as part of a new beginning.

Yet soon after, the wheels began to fall off. Orders came from Washington policy officials with absolutely zero substantive Middle East experience both to disband the Iraqi military and purge the future government of Baath party officials, which immediately put tens of thousands of hardened military officers, conscripts, and officials out of work and on the street. The CIA presence on the ground protested, but to no avail. I had never seen Charlie, my station chief, so angry, including face-to-face confrontations with senior figures in the Coalition Provisional Authority. Charlie—the most accomplished Arabist in the CIA’s history—sadly predicted the insurgency that was about to come. If only Washington had listened.

I rarely think of Iraq in terms of big-picture strategy. As a CIA operations officer, I was a surgical instrument of the US government, and I gladly answered the bell when called upon to do so. I am proud to have served with other CIA officers and special operations personnel who performed valiantly. I suppose I can defend the invasion on human rights grounds. It seems we forget that Saddam was one of the great war criminals in history, and Iraq has been freed from his depravity. Yet two numbers are haunting: 4,431, and 31,994. Those are the number of Americans  killed and wounded  in action, per official Department of Defense statistics. 

War is a nasty business, and many times a terrible price is paid for hubris. The casualty figures noted above paint a stark picture of the historic intelligence failure that the analytic assessment that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was. The CIA in particular suffered a credibility hit that has taken decades to recover from.

— Marc Polymeropoulos , a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, served for twenty-six years at the CIA before retiring in 2019. 

Thomas S. Warrick on the lessons to learn from the Iraq War

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What America Learned in Iraq

• March 30, 2023
• Middle East Program

Editor’s Note: FPRI is publishing a collection of essays to mark the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. The articles analyze the war’s impact on US influence in the Middle East , America’s global standing , and US democracy promotion efforts . In addition, our authors identify key lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom , and argue that the inability of American officials to understand Iraqi politics was perhaps the most important intelligence failure of the entire war effort.  

This past week, we marked twenty years since the ill-fated disaster that was the US-led invasion of Iraq. Today, we are sharing at FPRI a collection of essays from our senior fellows reflecting on the ways the invasion and occupation reshaped American foreign policy in the region and beyond. 

Each of our contributors strikes one particular refrain—the invasion damaged, possibly irreparably, the credibility of the United States to promote its values in the Middle East. As Sean Yom argues , the boosters of the invasion held to a kind of post-Cold War domino theory that believed a transition to democracy in Iraq with American assistance would inexorably iterate itself across the region. Instead, the manifest failures of the war turned this hope into a threat, “democratize, or else we’ll do it for you ,” as Yom puts it. 

Fear of the disorder brought about in Iraq certainly played a role in the anxieties of counterrevolutionary forces across the region in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011, as Robert D. Kaplan has elaborated recently in the Wall Street Journal . In his reflection today , he notes how fears of this disorder have strongly characterized President Joe Biden’s response to Russia’s similarly misguided, disastrous invasion of Ukraine—a balanced commitment of American support that forgoes grandiose dreams of remaking a whole region’s value systems reflects “an integration of the lessons learned… without overlearning them.” In the mind of the administration, defending Ukrainian sovereignty in the face of Russian aggression may yet prove both the inverse of the US position in Iraq, and its most successful attempt to secure democracy, to boot. 

The relative success of America’s current Ukraine policy should raise questions about the role of promoting democratic values and human rights in US foreign policy more generally, and what role they may yet play in a region that’s been so damaged by past efforts in this area. Sarah Bush offers an important note to this end. As the tragic fate of Afghan women following the US withdrawal in 2021 has shown, it remains important to maintain commitments to democracy, human rights, and gender equality in foreign policy even in the midst of a disaster like Iraq. Finding ways to push (re)invigorated autocracies in the region to go beyond the instrumental efforts to expand rights, where possible, will be a key element of a foreign policy that seeks a balance between restraint and values. Bush urges US policymakers to employ a “savvy” approach on rights, rather than throwing them out with the bathwater of military misadventure. 

If American values of democracy, freedom, and equality were damaged by the Iraq invasion, so too were American perceptions of its military and industrial capacities to accomplish any of what it set out to do in Iraq in the first place. As Heather Gregg’s contribution reminds us, “the use of the military to change another country’s administration comes with dozens of unforeseen consequences.” Nation-building likely suffered an even more damning fate than democracy promotion, and central to that failure was poor self-assessment in terms of capacity. Recognition of this fact is reflected in the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy that prioritizes building resilience at home. 

Sharing insights gained in the process of researching his impending book on the subject, Samuel Helfont elaborates that the failures of assessment were greatest in terms of intelligence—the United States simply did not know, and could not have known, the extent to which Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was entrenched in the country. Helfont argues that intelligence failure was the prime failure in the invasion, “if [the administration] had not so grossly misunderstood Iraqi politics and society … other American failures would have been a mere footnote in the otherwise inspiring story of Iraq’s liberation from a cruel dictator.”

Reflecting on these pieces, it is clear that domestic investment in intelligence, education, and preparation will play fundamental roles in shaping nuanced responses to future geopolitical challenges. The significant investment of the federal government in training specialists over the last twenty years to focus on Middle Eastern politics and society has in some ways paid dividends we are only beginning to see the fruit of, and just at the moment when funding in these areas is shifting towards Russian and Chinese concerns. While articulating a Middle East policy that both prioritizes American interests and supports the basic dignity of the people of the region along with their basic human rights and desires for democracy is and will continue to be a difficult challenge, it is clear to me when compared with where the foreign policy establishment, Congress,  and the general voting public were twenty years ago, America is better prepared to act with nuanced restraint in the region. One hopes that refining and learning these lessons in the future won’t come at the cost of millions of ruined lives.   

Hegemony, Democracy, and the Legacy of the Iraq War

By Sean Yom

The Iraq War destroyed America’s credibility as a promoter of democracy and liberalism in the Middle East. Revolutionary uprisings for democratic change continue to roil the Middle East, but none desire official sponsorship or support from the United States given its bloodstained legacy in Iraq.

Read the full essay here.  

Iraq: Some Reflections

By Robert D. Kaplan

Iraq was a bloodier war than supposed, when you consider the deaths of civilian contractors as well as regular troops. Despite the suffering caused by the war, Iraq was a far-flung imperial-like adventure gone awry, which will have a limited effect on American power projection going forward.

Democracy Promotion After the Iraq War

By Sarah Bush

The Iraq War has justifiably left Americans skeptical about democracy promotion. Despite its flaws, US democracy promotion is still needed to advance political rights globally.

Operation Iraqi Freedom: Learning Lessons from a Lost War

By Heather S. Gregg

American-led efforts to state and nation-build in Iraq all but failed, resulting in the deaths of 4,431 US troops, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi fatalities, and mixed-at-best results in creating a viable state. Despite these failed efforts in Iraq, the United States will most likely need to work with allies, partners, and the Ukrainian people to reconstruct their country in the wake of Russia ’ s war against Ukraine. Therefore, learning lessons from the war in Iraq is critical for future efforts at state stabilization.

Read the full essay here. 

How America Misunderstood Iraqi Politics and Lost the War

By Samuel Helfont

American war planners’ failure to understand Iraqi politics and society was their most important intelligence failure. The violence in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003 resulted from a political void that Americans failed to anticipate.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities. 

Image: Defense Department (Photo by Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo)

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Misleading Analogies and Historical Thinking: The War in Iraq as a Case Study

Robert Shaffer | Jan 1, 2009

Students come into our history classes well versed in the mantra that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” that history is “useful” in teaching lessons for today. Whether they truly believe this idea is a separate question, and many of us devote a lot of energy trying to make our lectures, discussion questions, and reading assignments “relevant” to the present. But the quest for “relevance” has its own pitfalls, in the overly simplistic analogies that students—and policymakers—make between past and present. Indeed, one of the textbooks that I use when I teach “Theory and Practice of History,” a required course for history BA majors at my university, states boldly in its opening chapter: “Many who believe the proposition that history is relevant to an understanding of the present often go too far in their claims. Nothing is easier to abuse than the historical analogy or parallel.” Authors Conal Furay and Michael Salevouris want students to understand instead that “[g]ood history, on the other hand, can expose the inapplicability of many inaccurate, misleading analogies.” 1

For the past five years, I have used a brief article, “Lessons from Japan about War’s Aftermath,” an op-ed piece published in October 2002 by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower, to help students see the practical—and even tragic—consequences of applying simplistic and misleading “lessons of the past” to current events and policies. 2 I have used the article not only in “Theory and Practice of History,” but also in my classes on U.S. diplomatic history, U.S. military history, and others. I ask students to read and discuss the article on the first or second day of class, as its main points are easily accessible and get students talking, and it provides a wonderful opportunity for students to grapple with the contested nature of the meaning of history and to see how a respected historian used his expertise to try to affect current policymaking.

Dower, the preeminent American historian of postwar Japan and an indispensable authority on U.S.-Japanese relations, responded in his essay to those in and close to the Bush Administration who, in building their case for war against Iraq, put forward the notion that, after an easy military victory over Saddam Hussein’s government, the United States would be able to guide Iraq toward a peaceful and democratic reconstruction along the lines of the post–World War II recovery of Japan. As his essay was a brief, newspaper op-ed, Dower did not provide footnotes or specific references, but news reports on October 11—the day after Congress had voted to give the president the power to initiate war—had indicated that the White House was “developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein.” Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who favored the invasion, reported on these plans the following week, and added that the “labor-intensive tasks” of the occupation—by which he meant the stationing in Iraq of 100,000 American or other foreign troops—should be completed within a year or two. 3

Dower called “the occupation of defeated Japan … a remarkable success,” creating a viable democracy and ending militarism, despite the predictions of many in 1945 that “the Japanese people [were] culturally incapable of self-government.” Nevertheless, he continued, “most of the factors that contributed to the success of nation-building in Japan would be absent in an Iraq militarily defeated by the United States.” Dower then went through about a dozen of the differences between Japan after World War II and what he anticipated the situation would be in Iraq after a prospective war with the United States. A few examples will suffice. While the U.S. retained Emperor Hirohito in office, and he “gave his significant personal endorsement to the conquerors,” nothing similar could occur in Iraq. American planning for occupation in Japan had been ongoing since 1942, and was relatively popular in Japan because it reflected New Deal goals of land reform and encouragement of trade unions; nothing similar could be imagined in a hastily planned occupation of Iraq by the Bush administration. While not minimizing competing political allegiances in Japan, Dower noted that “Japan was spared the religious, ethnic, regional and tribal animosities that are likely to erupt in a post-war Iraq.” Japan’s position as an island shielded it from nations that might resent American occupation or who would wish to intervene for other reasons, while Iraq “shares borders with apprehensive and potentially intrusive neighbors.” Dower concluded strongly: “While occupied Japan provides no model for a postwar Iraq, it does provide a clear warning,” as even in Japan reconstruction was difficult. “To rush to war without seriously imagining all its consequences … is not realism but a terrible hubris.”

Since one goal in having students read Dower’s essay at the beginning of the semester is to encourage them to think about how historians construct an argument, I generally let students confer among themselves for a few minutes to address the following points, working from summary to analysis to evaluation:

• Summarize the “historical” part of Dower’s article about Japan.
• Summarize Dower’s analysis of recent Iraq.
• How does Dower “use” history for an analysis of the present?
• How does Dower criticize the use of history by others?
• Is Dower’s essay convincing, or can criticisms be raised about his argument?
• Why is the date of the article important in assessing its significance?

Students readily identify some of the key points, and the brevity, clarity, and sharp focus of Dower’s essay make it both compelling and appropriate for classroom use. Most students recognize that Dower’s predictions for Iraq have come to pass, and they appreciate that a skilled historian paying attention to specific historical similarities and differences was able to develop such an accurate forecast. Criticisms, of course, have been raised by students, especially about whether the argument about the difficulties of transforming Iraq outweighed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. One of the most perceptive comments by a student came the very first time I used the article, in a diplomatic history class just a few days after it was published, and before the war began. This young lady—who was herself skeptical about the drive to war—noted that Dower acknowledged that many had believed that the occupation of Japan would not lead to the desired results, and so perhaps circumstances in Iraq would similarly surprise the analysts.

I follow the analysis of Dower’s essay with other historical analogies used by both supporters and opponents of the Iraq War, and a discussion of whether these constitute misleading or worthwhile uses of the past to inform present views. These include the use of the terms “axis of evil,” “Islamo-fascism,” and “appeasement,” by advocates of the war; invoking the justice of the American cause in World War II; and comparisons to the Vietnam War, made mostly by opponents of the war, but in August 2007 raised by President Bush himself, in a speech that led to widespread debate. 4 Students remember Dower’s arguments, and their broader significance for historical analysis and for the involvement of historians in public debate over current issues; referring to this essay throughout the semester has helped produce more sophisticated comments by students on other topics under consideration.

But much as I admire Dower’s ability in his op-ed piece to puncture one of the glib analogies that, despite his efforts, helped lead to deadly consequences for both Iraqis and Americans, I must note that his analysis oversimplified the Japanese occupation, in order to appeal to a popular audience and to fit the word count of a New York Times column. There is only one brief phrase in the essay that hints at a less-than-altruistic stance by the United States in the occupation of Japan, on “its incorporation in America’s cold war strategy”—a phrase left undeveloped and which readers can easily miss. Absent, too, was any depiction of the U.S. occupation of Japan as one building block toward the “domination” by the United States of the Pacific as “an American lake,” an idea that had been central to one of Dower’s early articles on the topic. 5 While Dower’s more recent work adopts a more favorable view of the occupation—in part due to his greater attention to Japanese “agency,” rather than simply U.S. power and goals—he still devotes attention to the “reverse course” beginning in 1947, in which occupation authorities limited the rights of trade union members and the Communist Party, and “brought the government and big business into an ever closer embrace.” This “reverse course” is by now standard fare in textbook accounts of the U.S. occupation, based in part on Dower’s work. 6

In other words, Dower juxtaposes a “good” occupation in Japan with what would likely be—and has proven to be—a “bad” occupation of Iraq. By glossing over the limits of reform and the subordination of Japan to U.S. strategic goals in that earlier occupation, Dower’s op-ed could be seen as ignoring the need to develop an understanding of continuities in U.S. foreign policy, continuities that might indicate a long-term trend toward empire. For professors, Dower’s choice to highlight certain ideas and downplay others provides a further opening to discuss with students the constructed and contested nature of history, and how even the most critical uses of history to influence current policy-making may still be shaped by a need to placate popular preconceptions.

Indeed, later incarnations of Dower’s essay did include a somewhat more critical approach to the occupation of Japan. In a longer version, from early 2003, Dower opened by observing that, despite the occupation of Japan by the “Allied powers,” the United States “ran the show and tolerated no disagreement. This was Unilateralism with a capital ‘U’—much as we are seeing in U.S. global policy today.” 7 A statement against the prospective war, released on January 24, 2003, which was signed by over two dozen prominent scholars of Japanese history and politics, including Dower, and which was also a revision and expansion of his earlier piece, spelled out more fully than the original that the occupation, which “subordinated the new political system and Japan’s foreign policy to U.S. strategic interests in Asia,” produced “a long-term ‘subordinate independence’” for that nation. 8 Thus, the U.S. occupation of Japan might still be the “remarkable success” that Dower called it in his New York Times piece, but its significance is more complex. I must confess, however, that given the constraints of class time I have only moved to these more sophisticated perspectives in my advanced classes.

AHA president Gabrielle Spiegel recently set forth in these pages “ The Case for History and the Humanities ,” and referred to “the present situation in Iraq” as a prime example of the need for such training. “Whatever one thinks of the merits of the war or the reasons for undertaking it,” she wrote, “it is palpably true that we entered into it without fully comprehending the character of the country.” She concluded that the “exercise of power without historical knowledge is a prescription for disaster.” 9 Dower’s attention to historical specificity in his prescient essay on the occupation of Iraq illustrates precisely this kind of historical thinking. History professors would do well to assign his essay to their students, as a concrete, accessible model of the dangers of misleading analogies and the careful thinking involved in “using” history effectively.

—Robert Shaffer is associate professor of history at Shippensburg University.

1. Conal Furay and Michael Salevouris, The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide , second edition (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2000), 6, emphasis in original.

2. John Dower, “Lessons from Japan about War’s Aftermath,” New York Times , October 27, 2002. Dower’s books include Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton/New Press, 1999), which received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize and War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

3. David Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “Threats and Responses: A Plan for Iraq,” New York Times , October 11, 2002; Michael O’Hanlon, “The Price of Stability,” New York Times , October 22, 2002.

4. Useful analyses of the 1930s appeasement analogy are: “Historians Debate Iraq,” The Guardian (London) , February 19, 2003, online at http://hnn.us/comments/8816.html and Jeffrey Record, “Retiring Hitler and ‘Appeasement’ from the National Security Debate,” Parameters: U.S. Army War College Quarterly 38:2 (Summer 2008), 91–101, online at www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/08summer/record.htm . For Bush’s comparison of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and a response by a political scientist (and Vietnam veteran) see: Jim Rutenberg et al, “‘Free Iraq’ Is Within Reach, Bush Declares,” New York Times , August 23, 2007, and Andrew Bacevich, “Vietnam’s Real Lessons,” Los Angeles Times , August 25 2007. Scholarly books by historians of the Vietnam War which compare and contrast Iraq and Vietnam include: Robert Brigham, Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2006) and Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past , Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds. (New York: New Press, 2007).

5. Dower, “Occupied Japan and the American Lake, 1945–1950,” in Edward Friedman and Mark Selden, eds., America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations (New York: Random House, 1971), 146–206.

6. Dower, Embracing Defeat , 27, 271–73, 536; see also Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), chapter 9, and Thomas Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations: A History , vol. 2, 6th edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 248–49.

7. Dower, “A Warning from History,” Boston Review , February-March 2003, republished in expanded form in Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds., The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: New Press, 2005), 182–97.

8. “U.S. Plans for War and Occupation in Iraq are a Historical Mistake: An Urgent Appeal from Students of the Allied Occupation of Japan,” January 24, 2003, available online as “The Japanese Model for Iraq Revisited,” on H-Japan, January 26, 2003, at h-net.msu.edu. See also Chalmers Johnson, “Iraq is Not Japan,” Los Angeles Times , October 17, 2003, reprinted online at http://hnn.us/articles/1225.html , for a more critical approach to the earlier occupation. In a sense, Johnson previewed here some of the arguments that Dower would make a week later. However, since Johnson’s language is less temperate, and he does not develop the comparisons with Iraq as clearly, Dower’s article works better for teaching purposes.

9. Gabrielle Spiegel, “ The Case for History and the Humanities ,” Perspectives on History 46:1 (January 2008), 3–6. Spiegel also provides a powerful critique of the misuse of historical analogies by proponents of the “ War on Terror” in “’Getting Medieval’: History and the Torture Memos ,” Perspectives on History 46:6 (September 2008): 3–6.

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Insight and Analysis from Foreign Affairs Practitioners and Scholars

Established 1996 • Raymond F. Smith, Editor

American Public Opinion on the Iraq War

Review by michael schneider.

American Public Opinion on the Iraq War by Ole Holsti , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011, ISBN-13: 9780472034802, pp. 238, $40.00 (paper)

Few conflicts have so engaged, or enraged, American public opinion as the war in Iraq, especially in the first four years. Uncertainty in response to an insistent President turned to anguish and outright opposition as casualties and costs mounted between March 2003 and the growing success of General Patreaus’ troop surge and the Sunni Awakening in 2007-2008. Noted political scientist and Duke University Professor Ole Holsti analyzes the interaction of leaders and public opinion, and adroitly shows both the manipulation of public attitudes by the Bush Administration after 9-11, and the reaction as Administration claims proved false and expectations for “mission accomplished” fell flat. This is a worthwhile companion piece to the defensive memoirs by Bush Administration leaders, the insider depictions of decision-making by political analysts such as Bob Woodward, and histories of that troubled decade.

American Public Opinion on the Iraq War presents a well-structured narrative of the sequence of decisions regarding Iraq. The author breaks no new ground in use of sources or revelations of the internal decisional process in the Bush Administration. Nor does the reader come away with any special insights into personalities or rivalries – the gossip about conflict behind the scenes we all love to hate. Yet, for a short tour of the political battlefield this book recalls the milestones and major sites, and offers a useful timeline.

Holsti’s key judgment was that “…survey data apparently played little role in policy decisions [italics by the author] but they helped shape how issues were framed in what was a relentless effort to gain public support for the administration’s policies on Iraq. Although his team examined a variety of polls, President Bush “…had a very low regard for pollsters and was skeptical of evidence from their surveys, believing that his own instincts provided a better guide to the public mood.”  (p. 132)

The author points out the extraordinary effort by the Bush team to sway the public, in two phases, from 2001-2003, and in 2003-2009.  At the outset, this paid off, according to the author. Media and Congressional doubters lost traction and fell into line, particularly in Holsti’s view, because the Bush team framed the Iraq issue “…. as a central part of the post-9/11 ‘global war on terrorism.’”(p. 137)

Holsti’s current analysis is enriched by his long experience in the examination of public opinion and decision-making. His explanations are salted with frequent references back in time for parallels in naiveté  (the British, in the face of an incipient rebellion in Mesopotamia in 1920, the U.S. in Vietnam) or comparisons of American attitudes about prior wars. He refers easily to leadership and decision-making challenges of other eras, and compares how Americans felt about other conflicts. He asks a series of questions that gauge changing American perceptions: were we right to invade … what are criteria for success … was the war in Iraq worth the loss of lives and money?

According to the author, the Bush team adopted several arguments to justify the run-up and the invasion: First and foremost was Saddam’s possession of massive stocks of WMD, especially bio- chemical weapons. Closely related was the fact that Saddam had used such weapons against his own Kurdish population and against Iranian forces when his troops invaded Iran in early 1980. Holsti recounts how a deeply unhappy Secretary of State Powell made the case for the Administration in the UN Security Council and the public response here and abroad. The Bush Administration traded on, and ultimately spoiled, Powell’s impeccable reputation and the trust of the public.

The second argument that also had some impact on American public opinion in particular was the case against Saddam’s tyranny, his domestic brutality, ambition for regional hegemony and even global reach through support for terrorists. This all rang true to many in the public and provided supporting evidence for our invasion. But the Administration had to reach far for proof, such as the alleged meeting by a Saddam agent with al Qaeda agent in Prague, much ballyhooed by the Bush team, but later proved false.

The President and his senior leaders reinforced the “evil guy” argument in the now famous “axis of evil” comment in the 2002 State of the Union, branding Iraq, Iran and North Korea as universal threats, despite the number of real differences. Nevertheless, this case against tyranny and threats to our lives, property, and most importantly, our way of life, comported with the general panic early after 9/11 regarding Islamic Radicalism. The threats of violence and radicalism seemed so universal and pervasive.

The President and his team also played on American frustration over the grinding pace of our effort to constrain Saddam and produce change, and his clever ability to evade, distract and divide opponents.

Finally, later, came the argument for helping initiate democracy in the Arab/Islamic Middle East, which would become the one solid justification for the invasion and subsequent occupation. This rationale expanded in President Bush’s 2004 inaugural address, and must rank as one of the most sweeping analyses of history and U.S. “exceptionalist” mission.

Events on the ground did not justify any of the Bush Administration arguments, although the President was able to gain some public support initially.  Historians might someday conclude that the U.S., despite our early blunders in Iraq, indeed started a process that led to stable democracy in Iraq. The link to regional change is likely to be tenuous at best. For the time being, the war counts as one of the costliest in many ways. We disposed Saddam and an odious tyranny, helped establish a new (Shi’a-dominated) government, and contributed to some stabilization. Yet important issues remain unresolved internally.

Moreover, our invasion disrupted the power balance between Iraq and Iran. It gave Iran the opportunity to capitalize on the weakness of its nemesis to help influence developments in Iraq, and to expand efforts in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the Gulf States. One might argue that Iran would have taken such measures regardless of who ran Iraq, but perhaps with less immediate effect. Iraq is now a transit route for Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon.

Ironically, by lumping Iran and Iraq together, the Administration made it more difficult to differentiate among, and play off, the rivals. Instead of carefully understanding and articulating the differences, the underlying worldview of the Bush administration, post 9/11, focused on an existential threat, not only to the American people and property, but also to our way of life. This concept made it difficult for critics to argue for more nuanced understanding and approaches.

Chapter Three on partisanship debunks the myth that politics stops at the water’s edge; there have always been partisan battles before, during and after our engagement in conflicts. The author harkens back to earlier conflicts and shows a “partisan gap” in support or opposition to engagement in a war or major military intervention, centering often on perceptions of success or failure.

In Chapter four, Holsti explores the “spillover” effect of public opinion on future wars. He asks if American public regrets over the war in Iraq would inevitably lead to opposition to future conflicts and finds far greater continuity in American public opinion over the long haul in our attitudes toward engagement in conflict. In a nutshell, the public reluctantly accepts the responsibility to intervene with force, but far prefers such intervention to be internationally sanctioned and supported.  A “shared leadership role” and responsibility including reliance on multi-national military forces ought to be the norm. The public abjures being the world’s policeman. These findings are confirmed by other studies, notably the writings of Steven Kull and University of Maryland Professor, I.M. (Mac) Destler in the ‘90s.

Holsti refers to one striking dis continuity: the American public increasingly believes  – one might say, observes – that the rest of the world does not look favorably upon the United States. Trend-lines reported by any number of surveys after the invasion of Iraq would confirm this. We have yet to recover global approval, the advent of the Obama Administration notwithstanding.

Holsti concludes his study with a series of valuable questions for the long run, stemming from our collective, if divided, experience: Is public opinion random and volatile or sensible and stable? What is the role and influence of media over public opinion, and what should it be? Is the media as powerful as critics in a beleaguered administration assert? He faults the media for “indexing” stories in advance of the invasion, i.e. following the apparent trend of the debate for and against military action and not fulfilling its role as watchdog. The fourth estate seemed less influential in American public affairs just at a time when it should clarify choices and point out fallacies.

The author also notes the bitter partisanship that has emerged in the past decade, in some measure because of Iraq. If Iraq development is not sustained and major setbacks occur, Holsti fears the possibility of a retrospective “stab in the back” argument by the right, accusing Obama and the left of failure to capitalize on the Bush legacy of a stable, democratic Iraq. Vietnam remains fresh in his mind.

American Diplomacy is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to American Diplomacy

Michael Schneider is a professor of practice at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and director of the University’s Washington International Program. In the 1980s Schneider was deputy associate and acting associate director of USIA for policy and programs and served as USIA liaison with the National Security Council. He was senior advisor to the Under Secretary of State in the mid-1990s. He served as executive secretary of a panel of U.S. and international leaders who examined the Fulbright Exchange Program, and authored the report, Fulbright at Fifty, and a subsequent report to the State Department, Others’ Open Doors.

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A look back at how fear and false beliefs bolstered u.s. public support for war in iraq.

Twenty years ago this month, the United States launched a major military invasion of Iraq, marking the second time it fought a war in that country in a little more than a decade. It was the start of an eight-year conflict that resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The war began March 19, 2003, with an overwhelming show of American military might, described by the unforgettable phrase “shock and awe.” Within weeks, the United States achieved the primary objective of Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the military operation was called, ousting the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein.

Yet the military campaign that began so auspiciously ended up deeply dividing Americans and alienating key U.S. allies . As Americans looked back on the war four years ago, 62% said it was not worth fighting. Majorities of military veterans, including those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, came to the same conclusion.

The bleak retrospective judgments on the war obscure the breadth of public support for U.S. military action at the start of the conflict and, perhaps more importantly, in the months leading up to it. Throughout 2002 and early 2003, President George W. Bush and his administration marshaled wide backing for the use of military force in Iraq among both the public and Congress.

The administration’s success in these efforts was the result of several factors, not least of which was the climate of public opinion at the time. Still reeling from the horrors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans were extraordinarily accepting of the possible use of military force as part of what Bush called the “global war on terror.”

By early 2002 , with U.S. troops already fighting in Afghanistan, large majorities of Americans favored the use of military force in Iraq to oust Hussein from power and to destroy terrorist groups in Somalia and Sudan. These attitudes represented “a strong endorsement of the prospective use of force compared with other military missions in the post-Cold War era,” Pew Research Center noted at the time.

Bush and senior members of his administration then spent more than a year outlining the dangers that they claimed Iraq posed to the United States and its allies. Two of the administration’s arguments proved especially powerful, given the public’s mood: first, that Hussein’s regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), a shorthand for nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; and second, that it supported terrorism and had close ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, which had attacked the U.S. on 9/11.

As numerous investigations by independent and governmental commissions subsequently found, there was no factual basis for either of these assertions. Two decades later, debate continues about whether the administration was the victim of flawed intelligence, or whether Bush and his senior advisers deliberately misled the public about its WMD capabilities, in particular.

In the months leading up to the war, sizable majorities of Americans believed that Iraq either possessed WMD or was close to obtaining them, that Iraq was closely tied to terrorism – and even that Hussein himself had a role in the 9/11 attacks. Two decades after the war began, a review of Pew Research Center surveys on the war in Iraq shows that support for U.S. military action was built, at least in part, on a foundation of falsehoods.

The path to war: From the ‘axis of evil’ to a ‘mushroom cloud’

In his 2002 State of the Union address , Bush began making the case for why the United States might need to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror,” he said. “The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons, for over a decade.”

Iraq was one of three countries, along with Iran and North Korea, that constituted an “axis of evil,” according to Bush. But Iraq drew much more attention from the former president than did those countries. “This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world,” Bush said.

Even before his speech, Americans were inclined to believe the worst about Hussein’s regime. In a survey conducted a few weeks prior to the State of the Union , 73% favored military action in Iraq to end Hussein’s rule; just 16% were opposed. More than half (56%) said the U.S. should take action against Iraq “even if it meant U.S. forces might suffer thousands of casualties.”

Bush delivered this address, among the most memorable of his presidency, just four months after the terrorist attacks in New York City and near Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Americans remained on edge: 62% said they were very or somewhat worried another terrorist attack was imminent.

At that point, more than a year before the United States went to war, Americans overwhelmingly embraced several possible rationales for military action: 83% said that if the U.S. learned that Iraq had aided the 9/11 terrorists, that would be a “very important reason” to use military force in Iraq; nearly as many said the same if it was shown that Iraq was developing WMD (77%) or harboring other terrorists (75%).

Over the next several months, Bush and other senior officials claimed with varying degrees of certainty that there was evidence justifying the use of U.S. military force. In a speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2002, former Vice President Dick Cheney was unequivocal in asserting: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

On other occasions, Bush and his advisers suggested that even if there was no definitive proof that Iraq possessed WMD, it was too risky not to act, given Hussein’s failure to abide by UN weapons resolutions. “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he [Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons,” said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a CNN interview . “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Such warnings resonated strongly with Americans: Most believed that Hussein either already possessed WMD or was close to obtaining them. In October 2002, 65% of the public said Hussein was close to having nuclear weapons, while another 14% volunteered that he already possessed them. Just 11% said he was not close to developing such weapons.

That month, Congress overwhelmingly approved a resolution authorizing Bush to use the U.S. armed forces “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate” to defend the security of the United States and enforce UN resolutions on Iraq. (This month, more than 20 years after it passed, Congress is moving to repeal the resolution. )

In addition to alleging that Hussein possessed (or was on the verge of obtaining) unconventional weapons, administration officials also repeatedly linked his regime to terrorists and terrorism. For the most part, these allegations were vague and unspecified, but on occasion, senior officials – including the president himself – directly connected Iraq with al-Qaida, the terrorist group that attacked the United States on 9/11. “We know that Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy – the United States of America,” Bush said that October . “We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.”

Neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or its leader to the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. Yet a sizable majority of Americans believed that Hussein aided the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives.

The same month that Congress approved the use of force resolution against Iraq, 66% of the public said that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks”; just 21% said he was not involved in 9/11. In February 2003 , a month before the war began, that belief was only somewhat less widespread; 57% thought Hussein had supported the 9/11 terrorists.

It is not entirely clear why so many Americans – including majorities in both parties – embraced this falsehood. But by connecting Hussein to terrorism and the group that attacked the United States, administration officials blurred the lines between Iraq and 9/11. “The notion was reinforced by these hints, the discussions that they had about possible links” with al-Qaida terrorists, the late Andrew Kohut, founding director of Pew Research Center, told The Washington Post after the war was underway in 2003.

As prospects for war grew, thousands took to the streets to protest

In the months leading up to the war, majorities of between 55% and 68% said they favored taking military action to end Hussein’s rule in Iraq. No more than about a third opposed military action.

However, support for military action in Iraq was consistently less pronounced among a handful of demographic and partisan groups.

The Center’s final survey before the U.S. invasion, conducted in mid-February 2003 , highlighted these differences: Women were about 10 percentage points less likely than men to support the use of military force against Iraq (61% vs. 71%).

A sizable majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (83%) favored the use of military force to end Hussein’s rule. Democrats and Democratic leaners were less supportive; still, more Democrats favored (52%) than opposed (40%) military action.

Yet Democrats were divided in opinions about whether to go to war in Iraq, with liberal Democrats less likely than conservative and moderate Democrats to favor using military force.

To build greater backing for the use of force among U.S. allies – and assuage lingering public concerns about war – the administration dispatched one of its most popular figures, Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the UN Security Council. In a pivotal moment in the Iraq debate , Powell presented what he described as “facts and conclusions, based on solid intelligence” to show that Iraq had failed to comply with UN weapons resolutions. “Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-Sept. 11 world,” Powell said.

Powell’s address had a significant impact on U.S. public opinion, even among those who were opposed to war. Roughly six-in-ten adults (61%) said Powell had explained clearly why the United States might use military force to end Hussein’s rule; that was greater than the share saying Bush had clearly explained the stakes in Iraq (52%). Powell was particularly persuasive among those who were opposed to using force in Iraq: 39% said he had clearly explained why the U.S. may need to take military action, about twice the share saying the same about Bush.

In a last-ditch effort to prevent war, millions of protestors took to the streets in numerous cities across the world and in the U.S. on Feb. 15. While the largest demonstrations were in London and Rome , several hundred thousand antiwar protesters crowded the streets of New York City, with some carrying signs saying “No Blood for Oil.”

Americans initially rallied behind the war; then support plummeted

After the war began, administration officials were confident that the United States would quickly prevail. For a time, it appeared they would be right: U.S. and allied forces easily overwhelmed the Iraqi army.

By April 9, U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians brought down a statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square. And on May 1, Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln – in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” – and declared that major combat operations had ended.

Yet the war continued for another eight years. Public support for the use of U.S. military force in Iraq, which rose to 74% during the month that Bush gave what became known as his “Mission Accomplished” speech, never again reached that level.

As U.S. forces faced a mounting Iraqi insurgency, a growing share of Americans – especially Democrats – expressed doubts about the war. The share of Americans saying the U.S. military effort in Iraq was going well, which surpassed 90% in the war’s early weeks, fell to about 60% in late summer 2003.

There had been partisan differences in attitudes related to Iraq since Bush began raising the prospect of war in 2002. But as the war continued, these differences intensified: In October 2003 , a 56% majority of Democrats said that U.S. forces should be brought home from Iraq as soon as possible, a 12-point increase from just a month earlier. By contrast, fewer than half of independents (40%) and just 20% of Republicans favored withdrawing U.S. troops.

Support for U.S. military action declined further the next year as two incidents brought the horrors of war home to Americans. In March 2004, four American private security contractors were killed and their bodies desecrated in a spate of anti-American violence. Then, the first pictures emerged of abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib , an Iraqi prison. In a survey that May , the share of Americans who said the use of military force was going at least “fairly well” fell below 50% for the first time.

Bush’s reelection as president in November underscored the extent to which the war in Iraq had divided the nation. Among the narrow majority of voters (51%) who then approved of the decision to go to war, 85% voted for Bush; among the smaller share (45%) who disapproved, 87% voted for his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, according to national exit polls .

Public support for the war declined further during Bush’s second term. By January 2007, with the situation on the ground deteriorating, Bush defied growing calls from Democrats to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq and instead announced that he was sending more troops to the country. What Bush called “a new way forward ” in Iraq – which became more widely known as the troop surge, or surge – was a risky gambit to alter the trajectory of the war.

The new strategy, in which more than 20,000 additional U.S. forces were deployed to Iraq, was broadly unpopular with a public that had grown weary of war. By roughly two-to-one (61% to 31%) , Americans opposed Bush’s plan to send additional forces to Iraq. Bush’s new strategy “triggered increased partisan polarization on the debate over what to do in Iraq,” the Center noted in its report on the January 2007 survey.

Still, while the overall impact of the surge on Iraq was intensely debated, it was widely credited with helping to reduce the level of violence in the country, both among U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians . While Americans acknowledged the improvement in the situation in Iraq, they remained deeply skeptical of the decision to go to war.

In November 2007 , nearly half of Americans (48%) said the war was going very or fairly well, an 18 percentage point increase from February of that year. Yet support for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq was undiminished; by 54% to 41%, more Americans favored bringing troops home from Iraq as soon as possible rather than keeping troops there until the situation had stabilized. Those attitudes were virtually unchanged from earlier in 2007.

With the 2008 presidential campaign approaching – and roughly 100,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq – it seemed likely that the war would again be a major issue. During the Democratic primaries , Barack Obama repeatedly contrasted his early opposition to the war with Hillary Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote in support of the war authorization.

However, after Obama defeated Clinton for the Democratic nomination and faced John McCain in the general election, the Iraq War was increasingly overshadowed by turmoil in financial markets, which triggered a worldwide economic crisis. In national exit polls conducted after Obama’s victory over McCain, 63% of voters cited the economy as the most important issue facing the country; just 10% mentioned the war in Iraq.

During the 2008 campaign , Obama vowed to end the war in Iraq, adding that the United States “would be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.” Three years later, the U.S. withdrew all but a handful of its troops; in a ceremony on Dec. 15, 2011 , the United States lowered the flag of command that had flown over Baghdad. President Obama’s decision drew overwhelming public support. A month before the ceremony , 75% of Americans – including nearly half of Republicans – approved of his decision to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq.

Yet Obama soon discovered how difficult it would be for the U.S. to fully disengage from Iraq. In 2014, a new security threat emerged in Iraq – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. With ISIS taking over territory in Iraq and committing high-profile terrorist acts, the group quickly became one of the U.S. public’s top security threat s . In response, Obama reluctantly authorized U.S. airstrikes and dispatched a small number of U.S. forces back to Iraq. Five years later, his successor, then-President Donald Trump, claimed that the group was on the verge of defeat in Iraq and Syria , although some U.S. security officials say it remains a threat .

Judgments on the Iraq War and its impact on Bush’s legacy

The Iraq War has a long and complicated legacy. After the war officially ended, it remained an issue, to varying degrees, in both the 2012 and 2016 presidential election campaigns. Even in the 2020 campaign , nearly a decade after the war’s end, Trump and Joe Biden each portrayed themselves as better able to extricate the nation from what have been called “endless wars” – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By that point, most Americans had largely moved on from the war. Shortly before the United States withdrew its forces in 2011, a majority of Americans (56%) had concluded that, despite the war’s enormous costs, the U.S. had “mostly succeeded” in achieving its goals in Iraq.

But over the next few years, that belief faded. By 2018 , the 15th anniversary of the start of the war, just 39% of Americans said the U.S. had succeeded in Iraq, while 53% said it had failed to achieve its goals.

Even among Republicans, who had consistently favored the use of U.S. military force throughout the war and before it began, there were divisions over whether the U.S. had achieved its goals in Iraq. Only about half (48%) of Republicans and Republican leaners said the U.S. had succeeded, although that was 10 points higher than four years earlier.

The Iraq War will long be associated with the presidency of George W. Bush, its primary architect and one of its strongest advocates. When Bush looked back at the war in his 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” he acknowledged that mistakes had been made. Among them, he said in an interview with NBC News , was his 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech. “No question it was a mistake,” Bush said.

As far as the failure to find WMD in Iraq, “no one was more shocked and angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons,” Bush said. Still, he was insistent that going to war in Iraq and removing Hussein from power was the right thing to do.

The war’s impact on Americans’ views of Bush’s presidency was underscored in a December 2008 survey , conducted shortly before he left office. Asked what Bush would be most remembered for, roughly half (51%) cited wars, with 29% specifically mentioning the war in Iraq. No other issue, not even Bush’s leadership following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was mentioned as frequently.

Lead image, from left: President George W. Bush declares that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” on May 1, 2003. Soldiers in Kuwait near the Iraqi border. Baghdad burns at the start of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Students in Los Angeles protest the coming war. Wooden crosses for lost U.S. troops at a roadside memorial in Lafayette, California, in 2007. (Stephen Jaffe/AFP; Ian Waldie; Mirrorpix; Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times; Justin Sullivan, all via Getty Images)

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Iraq’s dangerous balancing act between Iran and the US

Iraqi PM al-Sudani’s visit to Washington. DC, came as its neighbour Iran attacked Israel, raising fears of regional conflict.

Four days ago, Iraq’s airspace had hundreds of projectiles fired from Iran flying through it towards Israel, caught in the crossfire of what many fear could be the opening salvoes of a regional war dragging in the United States.

On Monday, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani was in Washington, DC, meeting President Joe Biden and other top US officials – a preplanned trip that took on new importance for all involved.

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From the White House, al-Sudani addressed the uptick in tensions, saying he encouraged “all efforts to stop the expansion of the area of the conflict”, highlighting his fears of being dragged into a regional war involving countries that continue to have a strong influence in Iraq.

Iraqi officials say their country was among a handful that Iran told of the attack – which followed an Israeli strike on the Iranian Embassy in Damascus that killed a senior Iranian general – in advance.

Regional tensions aside, al-Sudani’s primary focus appears to be Iraq’s domestic concerns as he hopes to attract investment in Iraq’s private sector and progress on a US troop withdrawal from the country, analysts told Al Jazeera.

“[Al-]Sudani’s agenda is domestically oriented. He is seeking less American restrictions on the Iraqi banking system, more investments and enhancing security ties,” Tamer Badawi, an Iraq analyst focusing on politics and security, said.

According to Sajad Jiyad, a fellow at Century International and director of the Shia Politics Working Group, the meetings went well but the timing – so soon after Iran’s attack – limited the outcome.

“I think the Iraqi side had higher expectations of what support and agreements they could reach but those were tempered by the events preceding the meeting,” Jiyad told Al Jazeera.

“For the US, the Iran-Israel clash served to highlight the need to keep US troops in Iraq for now and that the Iraqi government needs to do more to prevent Iran and groups allied with it from using Iraq as a base of operations against the US and Israel.”

Tightrope walk over US presence

More than 20 years after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 to remove former leader Saddam Hussein, 2,500 US troops are still based in the country, primarily in counter-ISIL (ISIS) roles.

For many Iraqis, who remember the deadly post-war period well, the US presence is not welcome. Al-Sudani has had to walk a tightrope between the US and placating parts of his domestic base.

And for Iran-aligned groups, such as the militias that form the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), the US troops became a target starting October 18, in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza.

However, after the US assassinated three senior figures in Kataib Hezbollah, the most powerful force in the IRI, in early February, the group announced it would suspend attacks on US troops.

As tensions rise in the region, Washington may view al-Sudani as a potential interlocutor with Iran.

US officials have repeatedly said they do not want to be dragged into a wider regional war and Iraq – while relatively quiet since February – has reason to fear Iran-aligned groups in the country remobilising if regional tensions expand.

“Iraq’s position is that it wants an end to hostilities in Gaza,” Yesar Al-Maleki, a Gulf analyst at the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES), told Al Jazeera.

“If Washington can manage to bring the war there to an end, it will no doubt aid Mr Sudani’s efforts to spare Iraq the repercussions, whether security or economic, from a continued conflict.”

Iraq is set to have elections in 2025 and the prime minister needs the support of his domestic backers as well as the US if he wants to renew his mandate.

“If the PM returns from Washington with US support for his government, promises of a US troop reduction or a scheduled withdrawal sometime in the future, and relieving of US restrictions on Iraq’s financial sector, these factors would support his position and even add to his public image,” Al-Maleki said.

“His visit to the White House is the first step towards building more trust to have American support for his appointment as prime minister after the next elections,” Badawi added.

Finding that balance has not always been easy, with al-Sudani pushed to call for a complete withdrawal of US troops in January, seemingly in response to some 53 US attacks on Iran-aligned groups in Iraq.

“It is important for [al-]Sudani to sustain good relations with the US,” Harith Hasan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told Al Jazeera. “He doesn’t want to come off as anti-American or to portray the end of the occupation in bad faith.”

Analysts said al-Sudani will want to show that his meetings in Washington, DC, brought progress on this issue and is under pressure to secure a troop withdrawal while maintaining US support in other areas.

But if he can reframe the US presence to show the two working as partners in a “new phase of engagement that is no longer restricted to security collaborations, it would be considered a win for [al-]Sudani”, Nancy Ezzeddine, a research fellow at the Hague-based Clingendael Institute, told Al Jazeera.

Financial stressors

In addition to discussion on US troops, al-Sudani hopes to secure financial agreements in his DC meetings to ease the pressure on Iraq.

Iraq’s economy is over-reliant on oil , which pulls in more than $100bn a year, with a bloated public sector where doing business is difficult and credit is hard to access, according to the International Labour Organization.

The revenue from Iraq’s oil is held in an Iraqi government account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York but the US has restricted transfers to the Iraqi Ministry of Finance in recent months due to concerns over money laundering and the flow of US dollars to Iran.

“There’s been a number of anti-money laundering policies that have come into play over the past few months by both the Americans and Iraqi government by curbing usage of US dollar transactions in a number of commercial banks and closing down the money traders,” Ezzeddine said.

“This has really shrunk the foreign currency supply in the country.”

Iraq has taken steps to appease the US, including “suspending the licences of some banks, pushing for documentation and auditing of dollar transactions, reducing cash transactions and limiting the amount of dollars that banks make available for withdrawals,” Jiyad wrote in a Q&A with the Century Foundation,  published on April 5.

US interests

As for the US, Biden will have both domestic and regional concerns for Iraq.

On the former, the US will be looking to nudge al-Sudani to cooperate with US allies in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

Over the past six months, members of the Kurdish region’s government have made multiple trips to Washington in efforts to have the Biden administration act as mediators with Baghdad, with which it has had several disputes in recent years.

“The delegation accompanying Sudani includes officials from the [Kurdish] Regional Government, which is a positive indicator of his relationship with the KRG,” Sarhang Hamasaeed, the director of Middle East Programs at the US Institute of Peace, told Al Jazeera.

“The Kurdish leaders generally view Sudani favourably and as genuine in trying to resolve Baghdad-Erbil issues.”

“Washington wants to see Sudani enforcing Baghdad’s financial commitments towards the Kurdistan Region consistently and sustainably and allow Erbil to export oil,” Badawi said. “The Iraqi federal court’s rulings have been increasingly perceived as ‘politicised’ by Erbil and its foreign allies.”

One of these cases concerns a pipeline sending oil to Turkey from KRG-controlled territory in northern Iraq, which was shut down after the Iraqi federal government objected to the direct transfer of oil without its involvement, leading to the shutting down of the pipeline last year.

“The opening of the pipeline has been delayed with no justification for over a year now,” Ezzeddine said. “This relates not only to oil exports but also a number of other budgetary, legal and constitutional issues.”

Regionally, the Biden administration is looking to counter Iranian influence in Iraq.

“The US would want commitments to guarantee Iraq’s sovereignty by minimising Iranian influence across all levels of decision, including the politics, the economics and the security decision-making in Iran,” Ezzeddine said.

“The US president hopes to find in Sudani a partner who could contain pro-Iran factions, especially armed militias, in Iraq as the US gears into its presidential elections and Washington is more pressed than ever to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East,” Al-Maleki said.

“Success would require compromises by both leaders.”

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Guest Essay

Keeping U.S. Power Behind Israel Will Keep Iran at Bay

By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Until Iran’s barrage of missiles and drones against Israel, the two countries had avoided open military intrusions into each other’s territory. Tehran most often acted through proxies, and Jerusalem via bombing runs and unacknowledged assassinations in the region.

Iran’s unprecedented attack this weekend, which failed to kill a single Israeli, has perhaps now opened the clerical regime to a major reprisal. The White House clearly does not want Jerusalem to undertake such a response, fearing escalation that could bring the United States into a regional war.

But the chances are good that Israel will strike back to deter future direct attacks. And the best way for Washington to limit the expansion of this conflict is to signal clearly its intention to support an Israeli counterattack. It’s the recurring military paradox: To contain a war, a belligerent sometimes needs to threaten its expansion. Iran’s internal situation, its memory about past U.S. military action and a conspiratorial worldview all support this strategy.

An Iranian regime well aware of its weaknesses knows how convulsive a war with Israel and America would be and how unwelcome it would be received by a restive populace already protesting a dysfunctional economy and increasing oppression. Many within the elite are surely angry at having fallen from the inner circles of power and wealth as the 84-year-old supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, engineers his succession.

A powerful Israeli response could include a preventive strike against Iran’s nuclear sites. In what may prove a miscalculation, Ayatollah Khamenei is not known to have given the green light to assemble a nuclear weapon. Why strike Iran hard and leave its atomic ambitions undamaged? Washington will surely want to reduce the consequences in the region from such an attack. To do that, the White House will need to make Tehran understand that U.S. forces will immediately intercede if Iran then tries to escalate.

To be sure, Israel and America may both be at fault for giving Ayatollah Khamenei the impression that they had no appetite for escalation. Tehran has abetted Islamic militants who have killed a lot of Israelis and Americans while seeming to be immune from a direct attack. The occasional Israeli and American assassination of Iranian military men on foreign soil, or in Iran without fanfare, actually highlighted a reluctance to confront Iran more directly.

And yet the Islamic Republic remains careful not to get into direct conflict with America. Senior clergy members and the commanders in the Revolutionary Guards are all old enough to remember that the U.S. Navy inflicted severe damage on the Iranian Navy in 1988 in retaliation for the mining of an American warship. It was one of the biggest U.S. naval operations since World War II. The United States said the downing in 1988 of Iran Air flight 655 by the Navy warship Vincennes was an accident, but Tehran believed it was deliberate and an indication that Washington was ready to intervene in the war with Iraq. It was thought to be a factor in helping to convince Iran to end the conflict. Senior Revolutionary Guardsmen, angry at Israel for the killing of senior commanders on April 1 in a strike in Syria, may doubt Washington’s volition, but they have no doubts about American military hardware.

Sometimes conspiracy-mindedness, instead of interfering with clear thinking, can be useful to an adversary. It is a conceit of the Iranian Islamist elite that Jews manipulate Americans into wars not of their choosing. Ayatollah Khamenei has articulated this idea : “The Western powers are a mafia,” he said in 2022. “At the top of this mafia stand the prominent Zionist merchants, and the politicians obey them. The U.S. is their showcase, and they’re spread out everywhere.”

It is time for Washington to feed this conspiratorial thinking. The United States should augment its presence in the Gulf, dispatch admirals and spy chiefs to Israel and undertake joint Israeli-U.S. military exercises that highlight long-range bombing runs. With its darkest conspiracies reconfirmed, Iran’s elite will search for a way out — even if Israel decides on a frontal assault.

The United States has often favored containment and de-escalation with Iran. When Iran’s proxies killed three American service members in Jordan on Jan. 28, Washington didn’t hold Tehran directly responsible. While attacking the proxies, the White House conveyed to Tehran its non-escalatory intentions. It had even renewed a sanctions waiver granting Iran access to $10 billion held in escrow by Oman for Iraqi electricity purchases.

The strategy has worked. Ayatollah Khamenei clamped down on his surrogates, who desisted from further attack on Americans. But the supreme leader can turn that spigot back on at any time.

Today, the problem with Washington distancing itself from Jerusalem, as it has over the large-scale civilian deaths and humanitarian suffering in the Gaza war, is that it will not defuse a crisis that puts Iran and Israel in direct confrontation. And Ayatollah Khamenei will not allow himself to be seen as backing down to Jews — particularly if they are unmoored from superior American power.

For the United States, standing by Israel would allow Ayatollah Khamenei another path, a way to back down without losing face. There is a precedent for such a retreat. Again, the Iran-Iraq war is instructive. The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, opted for an armistice with Iraq, a country he had long denigrated, because of the sheer exhaustion of his nation and the fear that the war could simply not be won. The implicit threat of American involvement was a big factor in this decision.

Now only the United States can again prompt similar foreboding in Tehran about the intercession of an indomitable force. For years Washington has been doing, more or less, just the opposite.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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