This morning’s New York Times story on the refugee crisis in Europe was disheartening. Europe has reached its limit, and is starting to close down borders continent-wide wherever they face the Middle East. Nations like the United Kingdom are giving aid to places such as Turkey instead of absorbing any more of the refugees themselves, while Turkey is saying they can’t handle it because they’re already engaged in war on two fronts (one of which is unnecessary, but more on that in a minute).
So many have died, and so many more are going to die, and it’s not so much that we are powerless to stop it, but that we face no good choices in the matter. Worst of all, we did it to ourselves.
The Middle East has never been what one would call an island of stability, but there was always a degree of order. Its wars were contained and between nations of the region. The United States broke that containment, and did so willingly, when we invaded Iraq in 2003. It was a war of choice, not of necessity, and it sowed the seeds for every single Middle East problem we face today. I do not believe we will ever know all the reasons that George W. Bush and his administration chose to go to war, for it is a safe bet to say that from Bush on down, everyone involved with the decision had their own reasons. Bush wanted to do what his father didn’t, which was to put an end to Saddam Hussein. Nevermind that his father had exercised great prudence in not pursuing Saddam’s last forces all the way to Baghdad, Bush felt a duty to exorcise that ghost. Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to create yet another New World Order, where democracy would be spread across the MIddle East by our bullets, acting, in his mind, judiciously. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to prove that American technology was so great that we would only need a smaller token force to achieve our goals. All of these men had different motivations, and they were all terribly misguided.
Garrett Graff’s book on the FBI and its post-Hoover history, The Threat Matrix, featured a chapter where he interviewed the agents who conducted the debriefing of Saddam Hussein after we captured him in 2003. Those interviews revealed information that we hadn’t considered, but should have been easily deduced. Hussein didn’t have squat left for a weapons of mass destruction program. The United Nations missions in the 1990s had successfully disarmed him. He bluffed frequently, keeping the inspectors from certain inspections. He was willing to absorb our air raids, like in 1998’s Desert Fox campaign, because he was terrified that without the threat of chemical weapons, Iran would invade and seek to finish him off. He was strong enough to oppress his nation, but too weak to fight off a determined foe. He lied because he thought it would keep his nation safe from its sworn enemy to the east, and so we took fragmented intelligence and deliberate lies told by people who were in a position to profit by Hussein’s fall, and we created a case for war against Iraq.
Mind you, at this time, Afghanistan was not complete. We had not captured Osama bin Laden, nor had we successfully established a stable government. Our decision in 2002 to shift resources out of that nation and into the failed Iraq mission sowed the seeds for what has transpired this decade. Had we not left Afghanistan, we could’ve built a nation that had the ability to prosper and succeed. We could have secured it for women, given an entire generation the chance to grow up under freedom, and left it to a people who would’ve had the benefit of safety and stability that could return to the flourishing nation they were between 1930-1979, before the Soviet Union invaded and trashed it.
We did none of those things. Today Afghanistan is barely holding on, and Iraq exists more in name than it does in actuality. The greatest war crime committed by the Bush administration was not in the myriad acts of wrongdoing, but in the arrogance they displayed in believing they could walk into a nation, beat up on the enemy, take over for a few months, and then hand off to others and leave. The best chance for bringing democracy to the Middle East was in Afghanistan, because they had done it before. It wasn’t too big to manage. We had thoroughly uprooted and run the Taliban to ground, but building a nation, building democracy, are long-term projects, and the instinct of the Bush administration was to declare quick victories and leave.
That instinct was even more dangerous in Iraq, because whereas we viewed the Afghan population as subjugated, we viewed a lot of the Iraqis as collaborators in the Hussein Ba’ath Party. The quick de-Ba’athification effort we tried to implement under the miserably incompetent Paul Bremer knocked down the whole house of cards that Iraq was at that moment. Being in the Ba’ath Party was the only way one was allowed to be involved in the governing of Iraq, whether at a low level or at the top. Iraqis who were invested in seeing their nation forge a successful path were stripped of their jobs and sent home. The Iraqi military was disbanded, and sent home. At a time of great chaos, we willingly sent home over a million Arab men with no money, no jobs, and no pride. For the sake of political propriety, we committed a blunder so great that when the history is written in later decades, it will make the Hurricane Katrina aftermath look like soft waves in comparison to Iraq’s tsunami.
These million-plus Arab men ended up being in opposition to us, joining the variety of militias and terrorist groups that sprung up, one of which was Al-Qaida in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After his death, from that group’s ashes grew a group that became ISIS, and because of the sheer failure of America to fix what it broke in Iraq, we left it without infrastructure, political stability, or any sense of security. This burden falls solely on America. We broke a functioning nation, then we took the broken pieces and smashed some of them for purity’s sake, and for good measure we used it as a playground for American contractors to make a quick buck instead of building up local businesses that could thrive upon our departure. Let’s also not forget that America re-elected the chief engineer of this disaster when a change of administration might have prevented all that has come since.
President Barack Obama came to office promising that he would withdraw us from Iraq, and he kept that promise, but keeping that promise meant making one of two bad choices. The first was to withdraw, which he did, leaving a nation very broken and left to clean up our mess. The second was to stay where we weren’t welcome, and where we’d already wasted many of our nation’s soldiers on the wrong mission, not to mention we continued to not build anything worthwhile for the Iraqis. We killed their electrical grid, their sanitation services, their clean water, and we never fixed it up again to its pre-invasion condition. Leaving was the best choice at the time for America, but nothing we did was the best choice for Iraq. That much would become clear in the subsequent five years.
From 2011 on, the Middle East has seen massive turmoil. Civil wars in Syria and Libya have left both nations shattered, and again, we intervened in Libya, successfully helped depose Muammar Qaddafi, only to see it split apart. In Syria, we haven’t done anything more than half measures, which allowed the new bane of Iraq, ISIS, to cross the border into Syria, and add another virulent measure of chaos to an already terrible situation. ISIS has now caused the Western powers, headed by America, to return to the Middle East with bombing missions and special forces, once more trying to fix something we broke, and all we are accomplishing is to smash it even more in the process. One need only look at Saudi Arabia’s missions against the Houthis in Yemen, or the Turks’ reborn efforts to crush their Kurdish minority, to see that our way of doing things is now spreading to others with calamitous results.
The refugee crisis has sprung from all of this, with millions of scared, shellshocked people desperately hoping to rebuild what little remains of their lives in Europe, and Europe is now closing the doors, refusing to help any more people displaced by war that was sparked by our actions over a decade ago. The Middle East is slowly falling apart, disintegrating into nothing more but rubble and war. We did this. The least we owes its peoples is to help them in their hour of desperate need, instead of saying, “We can’t do this, we don’t have the space or the money or the jobs.” If we had the money to destroy what held it together, then we surely can find the money to save the lives of those running from the carnage.
