In the next couple of weeks, you will see a greater media focus on Iraq looking back at the fateful invasion in 2003 by UK and US-led coalition forces and how the country has changed. The general consensus in Britain was never hard to gauge; millions marched through London ten years ago in protest against the proposed invasion and looking back, you can see their justification. Vast amounts of money and resources were invested into a war that seemingly no right thinking person in the country wanted. The result turned out to be a long, bloody, unmitigated disaster that should never have been allowed to pass. Bush and Blair’s claims about weapons of mass-destruction were laughable at the time but in hindsight, acquire a harrowing poignancy when you consider their ramifications; thousands of innocent lives were lost as a result of such tenuous and unfounded allegations.
There are various theories regarding the true reasons for invading Iraq, ranging from the US’s desire to secure oil supplies, its desire to assert its global dominance as harshly as possible, to Blair willing to help the US in order to get a share of the oil and other profit from the invasion. The rhetoric of the time was along these lines: Blair claimed that there was ‘no doubt’ that the invaders would ‘find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction’ whilst Colin Powell claimed evidence would be found of how Iraq had ‘provided training in these weapons [of mass destruction] to al-Qaeda’. Apart from disarming Saddam Hussein of supposed WMDs, another motivating factor for the war was to topple Saddam’s Ba’athist regime himself and prevent the dictator from further brutalising his own people. Dick Cheney optimistically (and in hindsight, foolishly) claimed that the foreign troops would be ‘greeted as liberators’; ‘the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East’ would be ‘a watershed event in the global democratic revolution’ Bush claimed at the time.
Whatever the motivations were, the most pertinent question now is this: what has the invasion actually achieved? Iraq is still a turbulent country and prone to frequent and sporadic acts of terrorism and violence that often goes unreported. Recent statistics claim that 4,500 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in 2012. Instead of the brutality and corruption of Saddam’s regime, the Iraqi people now have that of Nouri al-Maliki and the ruling Dawa Party. Iraq has become such a turbulent region that the news outlets have become almost blasé to the near-daily violence and suffering on its streets.
Iraq has no doubt made us think twice about foreign intervention; the principle has become synonymous with a kind of refurbished imperialism. However, such a close-minded hostility to any foreign intervention whatsoever is perhaps a dangerous notion to entertain and the responsibility to protect can and should be part of a progressive view of global problems. The on-going conflict in Syria should not be brushed under the carpet. Bashar al-Assad is brutally butchering countless dissidents on a daily basis. Iraq made us trepidatious about intervening in Libya before we realised the extent of Gaddaffi’s brutality and did eventually get involved. The Syrian crisis is reaching a tipping point. Although Iraq was a long, expensive and seemingly pointless campaign, it was ultimately an ill-judged one, and its failures should not necessarily be used as an excuse for inertia in the Middle East.
By Indranil Chaudhury