The Iraq War: Twenty Years On

I supported it at the time and I was wrong.

There has been a wide range of stories coming out this month about the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Much of the coverage has been excellent - I’m particularly proud of my younger brother’s piece - after 20 years there’s enough distance for real reflection and previously undisclosed information is starting to enter the public sphere. Our politics, featuring the resurgent nationalist right and the return of New Deal-esque liberals, would seem to have little space for initiating another war of choice, though our material support for Ukraine seems to have raised the hackles of a significant percentage of the population. This skepticism about foreign entanglement is, I think, a reasonable response to the decided failure of the Iraq War. It is, I believe, a strength of democratic societies that their polities impose limits on their foreign affairs and that has historically (at least in the 19th Century) meant clearing a relatively high bar for action. Given the limitations that exist on modern American power relative to our challenger, this restraint is likely necessary and a useful corrective to the wear and tear imposed by twenty years of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I write all this as someone who, in 2003, thought an invasion of Iraq made sense. My view as a senior in college interested in national security and foreign affairs was that, while it was unclear if Iraq actually had WMD in any meaningful sense, Saddam Hussein was a cruel despot whose legacy of mass murder and torture merited his being removed from power. His ongoing refusal to fully engage with inspectors and his two-faced attempt to claim he possessed no WMD while keeping the facts around these programs ambiguous to dissuade regional was a useful excuse to justify his removal. Thus it was a useful opportunity for us to export liberalism and remove a tyrant from power.

While Iraq now has some semblance of democratic stability, it is exceedingly difficult to say that our operations there were a success in any meaningful assessment of costs and benefits. US forces still remain in Iraq despite the withdrawal of combat forces nominally having taken place in 2021 (and before that in 2013). The direct costs of the invasion are staggering - estimates (some of which are incomplete since they were released during ongoing operations) range into the trillions - $1.7 trillion in a 2007 Congressional Budget Office Report or $2.1 trillion according to the Cost of War project.

And these are just the financial figures, the loss of life is truly horrifying. The US military saw 4,598 dead in Iraq, with additional losses amongst contractors (3,650), civilian employees (15), and allies (323). These numbers pale, however, relative to the massive loss of Iraqi life. The Cost of War project estimates that between 266,000 and 298,000 Iraqis may have been killed over the roughly 20 years of the conflict. Other estimates have given greater numbers, with the Lancet estimating over 600,000 excess deaths were attributable to the invasion. Each of these is a tragedy. Beyond the deaths, there are innumerable wounded and traumatized humans as the savage fighting impacted so many. There are no financial values one could fix to the costs of these deaths and injuries to families and communities.

I could spend a longer time writing about my own disillusionment with Iraq in my first few years outside of college, but that seems self-indulgent when set against the broader tragedy. So instead I’ll simply say that it seems fairly clear from looking at polling data that the broader American public realized more rapidly than our governing leadership that the Iraq war was a mistake. While it took far too long, eventually our political leadership began to reflect that fact. It can be argued that the elections of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump stem, at least in part, from their positioning (accurately or not) as being against the war. While neither of them were successful in fully bringing these operations to an end, the sustained and bipartisan nature of their success has, I think, led to a change in the broader mentality of the national security establishment. Consolidation of American power and investment at home are part of both parties’ main themes and even in the face of Russian aggression, there have been very clear limits on the willingness of the Biden administration to risk escalation. One can only fervently hope that this sort of restraint persists in the coming years.