Iraq War 10 Years After

10 YEARS AFTER THE IRAQ WAR: WAS IT WORTH IT?

Andrew McKillop

THE SIMPLE ANSWER IS NO

Writing for Bloomberg (19 March), Meghan O’Sullivan, the professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government avoids any real answer and bows out by saying “we need more time”. Nice answer!

She claims this is the “frustrating reality” and rightly says that talking about Iraq is emotional for many Americans and even for some Brits, given that the 2003 war was a co-production of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Both of them are heavily guarded today in sumptuous retirement hideaways, but with problems concerning which countries they could visit without being indicted: For war crime. Costs of the war, and the number of deaths are instantly controversial subjects. Joseph Stiglitz guesses $1 trillion, which could be compared with the number of years of average US oil import spending this equals. Given that US imports are on an increasingly steep downtrend, due to rapid shale oil output growth and slow demand growth, the number of years stretches onward and upward. If we imagined that for some reason the US took all Iraq’s oil exports and got it free, maybe 35 years would be needed. The death toll is just as controversial, but few realistic estimates come in at less that 200 000 dead and 2.5 million Iraqis forced to flee their country as stateless persons. Liberation, that was.

To be sure, Bush and Blair hammered out the theme that “the war was not about oil” but we can start with oil even if it was only a side issue – but not according to Paul Wolfowitz.

Iraq is now the second-biggest crude oil exporter in the OPEC group, after Saudi Arabia and in front of Iran and Venezuela. To this fact we can add that Iraq’s net exports, after serving its domestic oil demand could go on growing quite fast, and might achieve or exceed 4 million barrels-a-day before 2020.

Iraq’s fast growing oil export capability is already not friendly to Saudi Arabia, and “the Kingdom” is making this known, more and more. The reason is simple: Iraq is not bound by the OPEC quota system and is exporting more oil into a nearly flat global oil market, like a rising number of new suppliers. Most of these are non-OPEC and are hungry for revenues.

Oil prices will fall: the Wahabite Kingdom at the highest level – the unelected King – has let it be known that $100 a barrel is the right price – but ex cathedra pronouncements may be nice for the Papal balcony, not global oil markets. The simple fact that KSA says it feels comfortable with hundred-dollar oil means that it fears oil prices will fall. Iraq is the single biggest supply-side cause of this royal fear, outstripping Russia as a menace to the easy and massive revenues for “the Kingdom” and its unelected, autocratic and repressive ruling elite.

Another oil fact driving regional politics, is that “Iraqi” oil export numbers usually include Kurdistan’s oil exports, which are also growing: but Kurdistan ie each day slipping out of Baghdad’s grasp, becoming independent from and unrelated to Iraq. Kurdistan lets this be known in ways that hurt. To date it has signed more than 50 major oil exploration, production and trading contracts with global firms, like the USA’s Exxon Mobil Corp. Iraq’s fragile Shia-dominated government in Baghdad does not like this, and makes its anger known, but any Iraqi military action to bring Kurdistan “back into the fold”, and into line with Baghdad’s oil politics is simply out of the question.

IRAQ, OIL, POLITICS

O’Sullivan’s Bloomberg essay starts with the high ground US and British goal: get rid of Saddam Hussein. But this can be instantly linked with why Baghdad’s fragile Shia-dominated government of Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki will certainly not use military force to rein-in the Kurds. Two reasons sit on Iraq’s northern borders: Turkey and Syria. Kurdistan is a major, or the major Turkish security concern – and a Syrian concern. Turkey however actively enables and provides Kurdistan’s main oil export route, a vast fleet of tanker trucks making Kurdistan entirely free of Iraq-owned and controlled pipelines – because business is business – but Turkey in no way wants Kurdistan to achieve full, total, UN member status. Only enough independence to go on exporting oil through Turkey!

Unknown to many, Syria’s el Assad regime has suppressed its large Kurd minority’s political aspirations with at least as much brutality and ferocity as Turkey still does, or the Iraq of Hussein did for decades.

For all 3 states, but especially Syria and Iraq, the existence of Kurds, and even worse a Kurdistan, is a mortal threat to their existence. The American and British war against Hussein released the Kurdish djinn from the bottle it had been trapped in since 1923 – when a fully independent Kurdistan, member of the UN-forerunner League of Nations, existed with a parliament, flag and national money. At the time, in 1923, it was the US, Britain and France who dumped the Kurdish nation in the trashcan of History. Today, New Kurdistan has oil – and increasing self assurance. This is bad news for Syria and Turkey, and for Iraq, Old or New.

To be sure, Hussein is no longer in power. Although a large minority of Iraqis would embrace his return if it were possible, most have “turned the page” and hope for a better life with him gone. O’Sullivan tells us that “although violence continues”, most Iraqis are now free from arbitrary arrests, torture and killings, visited on them by the militias and secret police of Hussein’s Baath regime. This is false accounting, and blandly disregards daily reality in New Iraq: nighttime in Iraq, you go to ground and stay there, hoping the electric power will hold through the night, this time. Arbitrary killings, especially by massive car bombs, are a tragic ongoing almost weekly reality. Iraq is the world leader, by far, in car bomb killings – but neither Bush nor Blair ever told us that was one of their war aims for the “liberated and democratic” New Iraq after Hussein.

Internal politics, in Iraq today means sectarian conflict: Shia fight Sunni. Under US “pacification” about 400 000 security forces were recruited, armend and trained. Unsurprisingly, they fight – between themselves. Uncannily like Afghanistan, fatally like Afghanistan, Iraqis new “national security” forces die in large numbers on a frequent basis because these forces are not national – but sectarian.

Al-Qaeda is of course present, called “al-Qaeda in Iraq”, and is now a brand name or marketing tool for every kind of business, from car theft, kidnapping, oil racketing and prostitution, to credit card fraud, slavery and extortion – of course with violence. Whether New Iraq’s divided military, militias and security forces would ever be able to repeat the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war against neighboring Shia Iran has a simple answer: No. This would degenerate almost instantly into civil war, and once again independent Kurdistan would be a direct winner.

THE IRAN NUCLEAR CIRCUS

Saying that Saddam’s “constant menace to neighboring countries” is now lifted, although war against Iran is a longstanding Israeli and US Republican “must have it” policy goal, avoids saying why: the fragile country would shatter in weeks, if Iraq ever tried to run a regional war again. In addition, saying that Saddam’s disappearance has any linkage with the “Iran nuclear crisis” is absurd. Hussein’s menace to fellow-Sunni dominated countries – run by the oil exporting princes and kings of the Gulf – was zero: Saddam was the big, bad and dangerous fellow-Sunni protector shielding their easy unearned oil wealth from massive and frightening, Shia-dominated Iran, much too close across the Gulf.

O’Sullivan gives plenty of attention, like other modern historians to regional nuclear arms-acquiring attempts, sugesting that if he had been left in place, Saddam Hussein would have wriggled free from sanctions, used the windfalls from high oil prices since 2005, and continued the pursuit of nuclear weapons that still eluded him in 2003. She says: “It is at least possible that (this hypothetical) Hussein would now have nuclear weapons”. Saddam was hanged in 2006.

That would be like North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, and India to cite four countries with declared (or undeclared), real and operational nuclear weapons – acquired or developed totally outside the NPT. Why would a nuclear armed Iraq, yesterday, or nuclear armed Iran, tomorrow, be so especially dangerous for world and regional security? In all likelihood and on balance, acquisition of nuclear weapons by New Iraq, although it is totally unlikely, would be far more dangerous.

O’Sullivan surmises that a non-nuclear Iraq, today, post-Saddam, creates a greater risk of Iran continuing its nuclear weapons programme until it meets success – or until Iran receives US-approved carpet bombing of its nuclear facilities. Without the weakened “semi democratic” Iraq of today, she suggests, Iran would probably be more quiescent in the region. This ignores the exact reason why Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE are all engaged in a petrodollar-fuelled rush to develop “civil” nuclear power – sometimes saying it is because of their anguish concerning carbon emissions and global warming?

How long it takes the “good Arabs” of KSA, Kuwait and UAE to get a bomb is not discussed by O’Sullivan in her Bloomberg article. To be sure, their Ministries of Information tell us that nuclear power is not only vital to combat climate change, but is also precious to them because they want an “oil free future”. With oil almost useless for the economy, it can be priced accordingly – by them – at its production cost and nothing but. Welcome to oil at a maximum of $50 a barrel!

One thing is certain, New Iraq presently cannot dream of using “civil” nuclear power and giving it “two further turns of the screwdriver” to get a bomb, A. Q. Khan style, which could be exactly what the Gulf Arab states want, a lot more than “fighting” climate change or moving up to a windmill-powered future. This is because Iraq’s industrial, technical and scientific capabilities were shredded by the war. Today’s Iraq was bombed back to the status of a 1950′s Oil Republic, like the Iran of 1956 whose civilian government was overthrown by the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt. Everybody knows what happened as sequel to this gross interference in the government of another country: the US was given the big boot, in 1979 and is still smarting!

PAPER PROMISES – AND THE REAL WORLD

O’Sullivan gives coverage to what the war of 2003 delivered in the way of institutions for the New Iraq. The country has built a set of institutions, on paper, for example its finely crafted Constitution, but these paper promises are light years away from providing a modern, developed, democratic and secure state. It is for example completely impossible to have non-sectarian political parties with any credibility or voter appeal. They will be car bombed to pulp. Coming back briefly to the American bugaboo of regional nuclear proliferation, today’s Iraq has nothing to show other highly divided societies in the region. If (Allah forbid, الله يحرم) the New Iraq was ever capable of developing nuclear weapons – like nearby Iran is capable – its completely divided, sectarian based, incompetent and heavily corrupt government would be a vast proliferation danger for everybody, not just its neighbors.

Our American professor of international affairs with a need to say the right thnigs, or far right things makes the predictable whine that Iraq “has not demonstrated itself to be a useful ally to the US”. After spending 1 trillion dollars and losing 5000 combat troops, the US power elite, composed of proven liars like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and of course Bush expected expect “more bang for the buck” from Iraq,

O’Sullivan notably talks about Iraq’s “emerging role in OPEC (which) could bring significant indirect benefits to the US and global economy”. We have no problems interpreting this as her saying that Iraq should act to take down and destroy the entire OPEC quota system, resulting in oil traders losing no time talking down oil prices, firstly, to the more reasonable and sustainable price level of about $70 a barrel. But even at that price, the Wahabite Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and its fellow easy riders Qatar, UAE and Kuwait would scream: how do they buy 5-star hotels and football teams in Europe, as well as finance Islamic terror anywhere they choose, with such downsized earnings? This is a crisis!

O’Sullivan mentions the “problematic” stance and behavior of New Iraq regarding Syria: we could imagine that US elites would like New Iraq to attack Syria. Iraq, to be sure, already enables or permits al-Qaeda djihadists, armed and paid by KSA and Qatar, as well as by the UAE and Kuwait to cross its desert territory, penetrate Syria, and commit their own atrocities to rival el Assad regime atrocities. But perhaps the New Iraq should do more, kill more, in Syria?

The djihadist aggression is already recognized by the Western press, if not by Western political deciders as much more of a threat – than a promise of freedom and democracy in postwar Syria. More important for the security and integrity of New Iraq, which is already being whittled away by the de facto New Kurdistan, any higher level of belligerance by Iraq against Syria would surely and certainly result in massive and widespread economic damage – and bloodshed – as the Baath regime (Syria) and ex-Baath regime (Iraq) slugged it out.

NICE EXCUSES

Its all well and good for O’Sullivan to opine that “the contours of the Iraqi state are far from being fully formed”, but at least she admits that things could deteriorate badly. Firstly, Kurdistan can easily move up to a full and formal declaration of total independance – in fact only Turkey is preventing that, certainly not Iraq. This would trigger the Nightmare Scenario of the so-called “Shia Anschluss”, where Iraq’s large and geographically concentrated Shia communities “simply” form a Greater Iran.

New Iraq would become a small rump state – with plenty of desert and not much oil. To be sure, all these, and other geopolitical dangers are recognized, if not talked about by Iraq’s fragile and divided government, over which Prime minister al-Maliki tries, every day, with increasing desperation to consolidate power. Asking why new Iraq is not “forthcoming” on cooperation with US is a rather stupid question, anytime you look at the real world.

Making the outlook even less certain for New Iraq holding together in one piece, as it arguably might have been able to do under Saddam Hussein, the “Arab street revolutions” or Arab Spring of the past two years must soon move east to the Arabian peninsula, to the “the Kingdom” and its lookalike autocratic princely states of the Arab Gulf, playing global finance markets with their petrodollar stashes, and promoting Islamic fundamentalism on the side. To be sure it was and is mainly domestic grievances which drove street revolution in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen but the Iraq War was a probable key “upstream trigger event” in the chain of causality.

As even a cursory glance of news coming out of Iraq shows, it is grotesquely undemocratic and the oil wealth is siphoned off by a crony capitalist elite, playacting “democratic” with their purchased politicians and Western expats hurrying to grub the oil out the ground and ship it away. This “democracy show” fools few Iraqis, but having suffered massive bombardment and military occupation by the US and its allies, leaving behind more than one thousand tons of deadly carcinogenic depleted uranium ordnamce “as a parting gift”, they are biding their time. This in no way means they accept the status quo.

Should America have invaded Iraq? The probable answer is No, the simple answer is No, but asking the question today is 10 years too late.

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