Lookback: Iraq 2003
From day of infamy to one fleeting "feel good" moment.
From time to time I’d like to dredge up some old writing to see how it holds up, and to reflect on what I’ve learned since. One piece I often recall was the one I wrote when Bush started bombing Baghdad in 2003. It was a landmark piece for me, a point when I started focusing more on politics, with a distinctly egalitarian and anti-war viewpoint that was actually pretty well settled for me back in 1965-66. My views haven’t changed much since then, but my attention to the politics of war got a big boost on March 18, 2003 — following similar boosts on September 11, 2001, which needs no introduction here, and September 28, 2000, which marked the start of what I’ve long called the Shaul Moffaz Intifada (for the Israeli security chief who ordered the massacre at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem; you can look it up as Second Intifada, which was the beginning of Ariel Sharon’s Politicide). These three events fed the sense that those in power could trust in violence to advance their causes, setting Israel on a path to genocide in Gaza, and Trump and Netanyahu to launching their war against Iran.
I started my “online notebook” on February 13, 2001, with no real ambitions. My first entry mentioned “a theological skirmish with a correspondent today,” and my second toyed with an album list. Subsequent months mention music, movies, cooking, books, travel. I was in New York on September 11, when Al Qaeda wrecked the World Trade Center, and I didn’t get back to Wichita where I could write again on October 27. At that point, I wrote a couple of brief entries on events as I remembered them. I didn’t start writing more about the war until December 3, when I wrote this:
In this, the US leadership has managed to reverse the plain truth of the 9/11 attacks, which is that the victims had no relationship to any plausible complaint about the US or how the US power has damaged any other part of the world, and that the terrorists had shown themselves to be utterly immoral in their slaughter of innocents. Hertzberg is right that no one disagrees with this judgment of the terrorists. Where he misses the boat is in not realizing that the same logic that lets the US leaders justify their bombing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other quarters of the Islamic world, is the selfsame logic that leads terrorists, with their relatively crude weapons, to target US innocents. And while in the US people like Hertzberg are grinning over laundered news about US military success in Afghanistan, the even more hardened government/terrorist factions in Israel have viciously expanded their own power tryst.
The bottom line is that the logic of terrorism and repression, the indifference and contempt for the lives and liberties of innocents, is the common denominator for terrorists and repressive powers alike. They need each other to justify themselves, in effect they are each other. But why on earth do we need either of them?
I never for a moment bought the notion that going to war in Afghanistan was the right thing to do, or for that matter was in any way justified. Bush could have chosen to deal with 9/11 as a simple crime, and pursued justice through diplomatic means. Had he done so, hardly anyone would have second-guessed him. But he was heavily invested in the idea of America as global hegemon, and saw the 9/11 attacks as an affront to American power — one that could only be redressed by a show of power. Besides, he wanted a rematch with Iraq, and he saw Afghanistan as a stepping stone to Iraq and whatever other grudges the US harbored (like Iran and North Korea). Few Americans quarreled with his decision to go to war, either, which was a reflection of how little they had learned from the Cold War years.
While there were reports shortly after 9/11 that Bush was pushing to find an excuse to go to war against Iraq, few people noticed until the fall of 2002, when the Bush administration launched its public campaign to invade Iraq. However, I noticed this isolated leak:
February 14, 2002
The main headline in yesterday’s paper announced that Bush has decided to go to war against Iraq: that the US would commit 200,000 ground troops, and that Cheney was out of his foxhole and touring the Middle East to tell whoever needs to know what the US is going to do. Today there was not a single mention of it, no follow-up, no comments. Of course, part of the reason has to be that the farm bill passed, which is obviously much more important out here in Kansas, not to mention the sports page dedicated to the American who came in 2nd in some skiing event (gee, wonder who won?). I don’t know which is more striking: the casualness with which one nation decides to destroy another, or the indifference of the people presumably represented by the first party.
I didn’t make a serious effort to track Bush’s path to war from this early leak to the actual outbreak in March 2003, so my notebook isn’t much use in tracking that history. What little I wrote was more concerned with how people on the left who should have known better were falling for Bush’s propaganda. For example, on December 9 I commented on a piece by George Packer called “The Liberal Quandry Over Iraq.” The liberals in question were pro-war (David Rieff, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, and Christopher Hitchens), and I found much to critique. On December 14 I tried playing devil’s advocate and “construct a better argument in favor of the US invading Iraq in order to depose Saddam Hussein,” before explaining why the “better argument” was still a bad one. I wrote more on December 28, based on a Dissent questionnaire. Again, I’m not focusing on Bush and his war promotion, but on confused people, nominally left of center, who should know better. I concluded there:
If forced to choose between the leftists and the pacifists, I’d take the pacifists any day. For one thing they have principles that one can practice immediately and build on in everyday life, while the anti-pacifist left can only struggle for power, becoming what they first hated and losing their bearings.
There are more entries in January and February, but nothing major until my big one as the war formally started in March. I’ve added some annotation disguised as footnotes:
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Yesterday, March 17, 2003, is another date that will live in infamy. On this date, U.S. President George W. Bush rejected the efforts and council of the United Nations, and the expressed concerns of overwhelming numbers of people throughout the U.S. and all around the world, and committed the U.S. to attack, invade, and occupy Iraq, to prosecute or kill Iraq’s government leaders, and to install a new government favorable to U.S. interests.
That Bush has given Iraq’s Saddam Hussein 48 hours to surrender in order to spare Iraq inestimable destruction is clearly intended to shift blame for this war to Saddam. While this particular ploy may have been intended cynically, we must be clear that this war would not be looming were it not for numerous acts that Saddam and Iraq have committed, including aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait, use of poison gas both against Iran and against the Kurdish minority within Iraq, and long-term efforts to obtain horrific weapons. We should also be clear that after a broad U.N. coalition drove Iraq out of Kuwait and brokered a cease-fire that left Saddam in power, his government failed to show good faith in implementing the disarmament specified in the cease-fire and U.N. mandates. Even now, Saddam’s character is put to severe test, where he has within his power one last chance to put his country’s welfare about his own. If he fails to do so, we must conclude not only that he is a long-standing war criminal, but that he is the essential cause for this war.[1]
However, the proximate cause for this war lies squarely with the Bush administration, aided and abetted by the so-called “coalition of the willing.” They are the ones who rejected concerted efforts by Iraq and the U.N. to complete and verify Iraq’s mandated disarmament, who pushed the new agenda of regime change, and who locked this agenda into a final ultimatum. In pushing for regime change, Bush continued and escalated policies of previous U.S. presidents, especially Bill Clinton, during whose administration the U.S. worked deliberately to sabotage the inspections process, to promote Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein, to prolong sanctions which inflicted great hardships on the Iraqi people, to engender much ill will. Especially complicit in this war is the Republican-led U.S. Congress, which passed a law in 1998 directing that U.S. policy toward Iraq work toward regime change, and Democrat President Bill Clinton, who signed that law, and who repeatedly ordered air strikes against Iraq. But the actual push to war, the setting of the time table and the issuing of the ultimatum, was squarely the responsibility of George W. Bush. In this act, which he was completely free not to do, Bush has placed his name high on the list of notable war criminals of the last century.
As I write this, we cannot even remotely predict how this war will play out, how many people will die or have their lives tragically transfigured, how much property will be destroyed, how much damage will be done to the environment, what the long-term effects of this war will be on the economy and civilization, both regionally and throughout the world. In launching his war, Bush is marching blithely into the unknown, and dragging the world with him. It is generally believed that U.S. military might is such that it will quickly be able to subdue resistance from Iraq’s depleted and mostly disarmed military, and that the U.S. will quickly dispose of Saddam Hussein and his top people. However, it is widely speculated that over the course of U.S. occupation there will be continuing resistance and guerrilla warfare to burden the expense of occupation, in the hope of sending an exasperated occupation army packing. It is expected that the fury over the war will lead to new acts of terrorism directed against U.S. citizens and interests elsewhere in the world, possibly including the U.S. homeland. It is already the case that Bush’s insistence on going to war, along with many other aspects of his foreign policy, has soured relations between the U.S. and a great many nations and people of the world, including many traditional allies, and that this situation will get progressively worse the longer and nastier the war and occupation goes on.
There is, I think, one hope to minimize the damage that inevitably comes with this war. This is for the Iraqi people, at least those who survive the initial onslaught, to roll over and play dead, to not oppose or resist invasion and occupation, and to play on the U.S.’s much bruited “good intentions” -- the dubious argument that the U.S. is invading Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people. To do this they must not only not resist, they must collaborate to prevent others from resisting.[2] Moreover, they must adopt the highest principles of their occupiers: embrace democracy and respect the civil rights of minorities. They should in fact go further: to denounce war, to refuse to support a military, to depend on the U.N. for secure borders, and not to engage in any hostile foreign relations. The reasons for this are twofold: in the long-run, these are all good things to do; in the short-run, they remove any real excuse for the U.S. to continue its occupation, and will hasten the exit of U.S. forces.[3]
It is, of course, possible that the U.S.’s “good intentions” are cynical and fraudulent. Over the last fifty years, the U.S. has a very poor record of promoting democracy, and has a very aggressive record of promoting U.S. business interests. (And in this regard, Bush has proven to run the most right-wing administration in U.S. history.) Many of the same people who in the U.S. government promoted war on Iraq clearly have further names on their lists of enemies -- Syria, Iran, even Saudi Arabia -- and a number of fantastic scenarios have been talked up. But the aggressive projection of U.S. military force depends on having enemies that can only be kept at bay by such force. An Iraq, with no Saddam Hussein, with no military, with no way to threaten its neighbors, with its own people organized into a stable, respectful democracy, provides no excuse for occupation. If those conditions prevail, which is within the power of the Iraqi people to make happen, even the Bush administration would have to pull out.
There are, of course, other things that will be necessary to overcome the inevitable damage of this war. Presumably the war and occupation will at least get rid of one set of war criminals: Saddam Hussein and his crew. The other set of war criminals, the Bush administration in particular, need to be voted out of office. The consequences of Bush’s foreign policy, even if they luck out and yield a democratic Iraq, bear extraordinary costs and engender international distrust at the same time Bush’s tax policy bankrupts the U.S. government and undermines the U.S. dollar while Bush’s domestic policies lay workers off and degrade the environment. But also the world community needs to come to grips with conflicts in ways that look beyond self-interest to provide systematic means to peacefully resolve conflicts that might otherwise turn into injustice and war. That Saddam Hussein was allowed to turn into a monster, the essential cause of Bush’s Iraq war, was the consequence of a great many failures along the way -- serious mistakes on the part of nations, including the U.S., who promoted him politically, who armed him, who encouraged him to wage war with Iran, and so forth. The U.S. must recognize that it cannot alone solve conflicts such as these; the many nations of the world must in turn step up to the responsibility.
I believe that this is in fact the way the world is, unfortunately too slowly, moving: despite the immense amount of terrorism and war of the past few years, people all around the world are, in their hearts, actually moving to a much firmer realization of the need for peace, order, respect, fairness, and opportunity for all. The worldwide reaction of shock and horror at the toppling of the World Trade Center was one expression of this; the worldwide protest against Bush’s Iraq war was another. The only way to have peace is to be peaceable.[4]
[1] Rereading this, and other posts from the same period, I think I went too far in indicting Saddam Hussein. Not that, in some ideal court of justice, he wasn’t guilty of all this and much more, but few if any of his “crimes” factored into Bush’s decision to invade. From Bush’s personal perspective, Iraq was a blot on his father’s legacy, and a personal challenge to succeed where his father had failed. From the standpoint of the other neocons, this was about demonstrating American power as forcefully as possible. One should remember that Iraq was encouraged to invade Iran by Persian Gulf states, and ultimately by support of American arms, and that Iraq turned on Kuwait only after a shakedown. To indict Hussein as the “essential” cause of the war overlooks a lot of disreputable and malicious action by the US and other parties. It could also be taken as justifying the war, but I hope I was clear enough in the next paragraph that no one came away with that idea.
[2] This hope was, of course, domed to failure. Still, it is surprising the extent to which this actually happened: most Iraqi soldiers abandoned their units, and civilians (warily more often than eagerly) welcome their “liberators.” While resistance may have been inevitable, Americans provoked it in many ways: by permitting (or simply being incapable of restraining) internecine violence by Shias and Kurds against Baathists (or more generally Sunnis); by dismantling the Baathist state and civil order; and by just being arrogant, trigger-happy assholes.
[3]: The US never allowed any of these things to happen, nor did Bush and his people do anything to make them possible. Rather, they moved almost immediately to impose an occupation government that opened the country up to foreign exploitations, while offering Iraqis nothing of note. The Paul Bremer administration destroyed any chance of a peaceful postwar transition to self-government. When the Bremer government proved untenable, it was replaced with a Quisling puppet regime, and eventually with highly-rigged elections to populate a government that was bitterly divided and lacked any real autonomy. My next line about “cynical and fraudulent” proved not only true but an understatement.
[4]: Again, way too optimistic. It’s taken a while, but the US has finally moved on to Iran, although Trump is still far short of occupying Tehran, and unlikely ever to. But the war mentality persists, and has if anything grown more deeply rooted, even though they have nothing good to show for all their efforts. The mental rut is way too deep for them to escape (or maybe their minds and feelings are just too shallow).
I wrote more in following days. On March 19, I explained some of my idealistic notions that Iraqis should practice pacifism by referring to John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. Some war hawks had recently been stressing how successful the US occupation of Japan and Germany had been. Dower wrote several pieces stressing not only that Iraq isn’t analogous, but that America has changed profoundly since WWII. It was obvious to me that Iraqis would have a much harder time blaming themselves for the disaster of war and occupation than WWII-era Japanese or Germans did. But also the US was much less innocent in the start of this war. I also admitted:
There is little reason to be optimistic at this stage. We know for certain that there will be resistance. We know that Saddam Hussein and his party do not believe in or practice peace. We know that jihadists like Osama Bin Laden do not believe in or practice peace. We also know that when faced with danger, military forces all the world over, all throughout history, kill and destroy unnecessarily, often deliberately, sometimes just inadvertently, which feeds a vicious cycle of resistance and retribution. We also know that alien occupation armies misunderstand things, communicate poorly, grow impatient and resentful, get spooked easily, and often with little provocation resort to force, sometimes viciously. Even if we accept the proposition that the U.S. has nothing but good intentions toward the Iraqi people, remaining peaceable is going to be a tall order. So while it’s what I prescribe, it’s not what I expect to happen.
The next couple days, I mentioned the war in passing, noting its “progress” and expressing my misgivings. Already on March 25 I admitted:
The war grinds on. The fantasy that expected the Iraqis to roll out the red carpet for their American liberators has been dashed. Nobody expects that Iraq will be able to repulse the U.S. invasion, but the level and form of resistance pretty much guarantees that eventually the U.S. will leave Iraq without having accomplished anything more notable than the perverse satisfaction of serving up Saddam’s head on some platter.
As I said earlier, the level of resistance will be telling. If you want a rule of thumb for neocolonialist wars of occupation, it’s that once you can’t tell your friends from your enemies in the native population, you’re fucked. . . .
So, let’s face it, the U.S. war against Iraq is a colossal failure. The only question remaining is how long it will take the U.S. to give up and get out, and how much destruction the U.S. will leave in its wake. So remember this: This war did not have to happen. No one who has died, been injured, been captured, been terrorized by this war had to suffer. This only happened because of one mad tyrant: George W. Bush. Even today, if sanity were to suddenly overcome him, all he’d have to do is cease fire and order the troops home. Every day, every minute that he does not do this just adds to the grossness of his crime.
It occurs to me that I should pull all of the Iraq entries out and put them into a single, chronological file. As you now know, the US occupation extended the Iraqi government sent the US packing in 2011. After that, ISIS took over Mosul and most of northwest Iraq, leaving the Baghdad government little alternative but to bring the Americans back in, and extending the war into Syria. That intervention lasted over seven years (2014-2021), but even now there are over 2,500 US troops left in Iraq.
But for purposes here, I want to limit myself to one more post. I should have been more explicit about what happened on April 9. That was the day when the huge statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square was pulled down, symbolizing the capture of Baghdad:
April 11, 2003
There was a period back in the Afghanistan war when the Northern Alliance started reeling off a quick series of victories — not so much that they were defeating the Taliban in confrontations as that the Taliban was high-tailing it out of the cities, allowing Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar to fall in quick succession. The hawks then made haste to trumpet their victory and to dump on anyone who had doubted the US in this war. Back then, I referred to those few weeks as “the feel good days of the war.” Well, we had something like that in Iraq, too, except that use of the plural now seems unwarranted. So mark it on your calendar, Wednesday, April 9, 2003, was the feel good day of the Iraq war. The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime has proceeded apace, but there seems to be much less to feel good about. One big thing was the killing of the bigwig shia collaborators that the US started to promote, combined with the unwillingness of other shia bigwigs to collaborate. One of the problems with this is that it suggests that the US, as always, is looking for religious leaders to control the people — which in turn threatens to roll back the one thing Saddam had going for his regime, which was that it was strongly secular. The fact is, you want to introduce something resembling liberal democracy in Iraq, you have to promote secularism. (Of course, given the contempt that Bush has for liberal democracy in the US, it’s hard to believe that he really wants that.)
Bigger still is the whole looting thing, as well as mob reprisals against Baath leaders, which threaten to turn into the much predicted Iraqi-on-Iraqi warfare. The looting itself basically means that what infrastructure the US somehow managed not to destroy will be taken down by Iraqi mobs. The likelihood that those mobs are anything other than just isolated hoodlums is small, but collectively the damage that they inflict is likely to be huge. And given how unlikely it is that the US, its allies, and the rest of the world who were so blatantly disregarded in this whole affair, are to actually pay for anything resembling real reconstruction, this is just digging an ever deeper hole. While right now, given that their is still armed (if not necessarily organized) resistance to the US, it’s hard to see how the US could keep order even if it wants to (which is to say the least a mixed proposition), but failure to do so is already setting the US up as responsible for the looting, and adding to the already huge responsibility that the US bears for the current and future misery of the Iraqi people. And when the US does start to enforce order, what is bound to happen? More dead Iraqis. And who’s responsible for that? The US. If this had just happened out of the blue, I might be a bit sympathetic, but this is exactly what we had predicted as the inevitable given the US course of action.
So happy last Wednesday. That’s very likely to be the last one for a long time now.
Indeed, it all got much worse after that. According to the Wikipedia article on 2003 invasion of Iraq, the war lasted 1 month + 11 days, ending on May 1 with Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech. (I didn’t even post on the speech. By then, the situation was deteriorating, but Bush was getting a lot of press pressure to declare victory and an “end of major military operations.”) During this phase, 139 American forces were killed, as well as 11-45 thousand Iraqis. But by the time in 2011 when American troops finally left, the death count stood at 4,492. There are various counts and estimates of Iraqi deaths, ranging from 186,901 minimum by the Iraq Body Count project to over one million. More were killed in the 2013-17 ISIL war.
Back in the heady early days of the Iraq War, hawks were boasting about moving on to Damascus and Tehran next. The US found itself bombing Syria as a result of the ISIL War, on behalf of Iraq. Only in 2025 was Trump able to start bombing Iran in the Twelve-Day War of June 13-24, followed by renewed bombing starting February 28, 2026, in a conflict that is still far from settled.
Trump and his advisers do seem to have learned one lesson from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: that the US is simply not capable of occupying and managing foreign countries, especially one as large and well-organized as Iran. On the other hand, three American presidents periodically bombed Iraq over 12 years (1991-2003) before Bush decided that the only way he could actually achieve his goal of toppling Iraq’s regime was a full-scale invasion. The prospects of Trump toppling Iran without “boots on the ground” are no better, and probably much worse. With no “win” even remotely imaginable, what point can the war possibly serve? It’s coming off as an exercise in performative cruelty, or would be if Iran had no power to hit back. But they’ve already “hit back” at US bases and allies much more effectively than Iraq or Afghanistan (or Venezuela) ever could. The notion that he could bomb with impunity, as the US had repeatedly done in Iraq and Afghanistan, has already been disproven. His cycling through bombing lulls and apocalyptic threats show he has no plan, but also can’t admit his cluelessness.
Still, while Trump is unlikely to repeat all of the miscalculations that Bush made in Iraq, he has already made many that could have been avoided had he learned the most basic lessons of Bush’s wars:
Trump, like Bush, made no serious effort to try diplomacy before resorting to force. This boxed him into finally having to use force to save face. Of course, he did this willingly because he has great faith in force, and a view of power that interprets any concession as humiliating. The main point above is that Bush chose his war consciously, and could all by himself have avoided that choice. As such, he bears complete personal responsibility. Same for Trump. Even if we agree that Netanyahu tricked him, Trump could have said no. That he didn’t makes him responsible.
In resorting to force, Trump (like Bush) gave no consideration to it not working, let alone backfiring. He had little if any notion of what might go wrong, or even of how others might view his acts. He had no concept of consequences, or perhaps he just figured that nothing bad could ever happen to him: his ignorance is exceeded only by his carelessness. My favorite line above is “Bush is marching blithely into the unknown, and dragging the world with him.” Trump did the same, on a larger playing field, with much more at risk.
It’s amusing, and ridiculous, to hear Trump recite the lengths of various other wars, as if any amount of time can correct for the horrible mistakes he has made. Like Bush, he will long be remembered as the guy who chose war when he didn’t have to, to solve a problem that didn’t exist, with a solution that couldn’t possibly work. Unlike Bush, he never even tried to sell us on his fantasy. Asking permission would only have detracted from his sense of omnipotence as president.
For me, this cult of power has long been central. That was the lesson I took from the Vietnam War, prosecuted by the generation of Americans who emerged victorious from WWII, convinced they had saved the world from fascism, their heads so swelled they threw off their founders warnings about the peril of a standing army and follies of going “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Since then, politicians of both parties have fought a rear-guard battle to salvage the feelings that first drove them to war, to reclaim the sense of power and righteousness they held after liberating the Nazi death camps and obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For all of my 75 years, they have tried to justify and sanctify their obscene acts and rationalizations (a conceit John Lennon skewered with “but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”). Trump’s only innovation is that he is shameless: he feels no pain or remorse, pretends to no greater good, and pursues nothing beyond his own profit and imagined glory. Give him no credit if he finally frees us from our illusions. They should have been clear, as they were to me, long ago.