Reflecting on the War in Iraq 20 Years Later

At no point before or during George W. Bush's Presidency was I fond of the man.  Pretty much everything about his personal and political profile rubbed me the wrong way.  Even in the weeks after September 11th, when the country rallied around the flag and expressed their support for the President, I didn't feel any more warmth for Bush or his policies than I did on September 10, 2001.  In fact, I was immediately suspicious that insufficient attention was paid to legitimate Middle Eastern threats and enabled the 9/11 attacks.  The weeks ahead reinforced my suspicion, and it made me all the more angry that the Bush administration's incompetence was being rewarded by a pliant public because of misguided patriotism.  It was pretty obvious that the framework was in place for a craven administration to ram through a lot of truly terrible public policy while the literal and figurative rubble from 9/11 was being cleared.

But somehow, I still wasn't cynical enough.  The most bloodthirsty hawks of the Bush administration were dialing up skeptics only hours after the 9/11 attacks to rally support for their long-standing priority of invading Iraq and deposing their strongman leader Saddam Hussein.  And even before the first shots were fired in Afghanistan, there were publicly floated trial balloons coming from the administration attempting to connect the attacks to Iraq.  The case was made more stridently in the months ahead, and despite the apocalyptic rhetoric about "yellow-cake uranium" and "smoking guns being a mushroom cloud", the case for invading a country unconnected to the 9/11 attacks seemed ridiculously flimsy and a needless distraction for a country already at war.

And yet, the opposition cowered, be it Congressional Democrats or a news media that feared alienating an angry population.  Let them have a front-row seat in the nation's most badass military equipment and the reporters decided it was no longer necessary or worth it to ask questions.  Was it possible that all of these very smart people knew more than a 25-year-old small-town reporter in Minnesota, I asked myself at the time on the eve of the Iraq invasion.  Of course it was possible....but they had a long way to go to prove that they did.

Of course, they never would.  The weapons of mass destruction didn't exist.  And the centuries-old tribal fault lines in Iraq ripped apart almost immediately after Hussein was tossed out of office, leaving the US military waist-deep in a quicksand quagmire.  Even the cheap oil promised to US consumers didn't materialize since the warring tribal factions kept blowing up the pipelines.  Yet most infuriatingly, the architects of the war hung on to public opinion by their fingernails just long enough to get re-elected in November 2004, largely by slyly perpetuating the false equivalence between invading Iraq and avenging 9/11.  A clear majority of Americans continued to buy into the Hussein-Bin Laden connection throughout 2004.

The tide turned abruptly and decisively in Bush's second term, but there was no good way out and the architects of the invasion stubbornly circled the wagons for years to come as the political situation in Iraq worsened and the American soldier death count ratcheted higher.  With each passing week, it became harder to deny that invading Iraq was perhaps the biggest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.  When we finally pulled out in 2011, it seemed as though the long national nightmare was finally over, but in retrospect it's kind of amazing we got out of there as quickly as we did without more tangible repercussions.  Certainly the situation in the Middle East remains extremely unstable, but the microscopic lingering U.S. troop presence of the last 10 years amazingly seems to have done its job in preventing the kind of wholesale terrorist refuge that played out in neighboring Syria.  To be continued on that though, of course. Given how little media coverage there is today about the situation in Iraq, it's entirely possible that there's more going on there than I'm aware of, a festering boil out of Baghdad that could burst at any moment.

Still, a generation removed from the Iraq invasion and more than a decade removed from the withdrawal, it's remarkable to see how U.S. foreign policy has evolved and how the political coalitions have realigned.  Self-identified conservatives who were the most hawkish heading into the invasion of Iraq are now the most cynical, isolationist, and war-weary.  The same people who were bulldozing Dixie Chicks CD in 2003 over opposition to the war in Iraq had become the biggest critics of interventionist foreign policy in the Iraq war's aftermath.  Donald Trump sensed this in 2015, his harsh criticism of the Iraq invasion and the Bushies who orchestrated it becoming a centerpiece of his primary campaign.  It played no small part in disqualifying early frontrunner Jeb Bush from winning the GOP nomination.  

And the center of gravity among Republicans has only shifted further since then, with most of the Iraq war-era neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Max Boot having effectively abandoned the party and realigned as born-again lefties.  Meanwhile, the Lutheran farmers of the Upper Midwest who stayed in the Democratic fold through the Bush and Obama years in no small part because of their opposition to the kind of hawkish foreign policy that led to the Iraq invasion, have realigned just as decisively into the Republican Party.

The first contemporary application of the newly configured political battle lines were tested a year ago when Russia invaded Ukraine.  A united front of support to Ukraine similar to what we saw in Iraq in 2003 has given way to polarization a year later.  A bare majority of Americans still support President Biden's pricy open-ended military assistance to Ukraine in holding off the Russians, but the support is tenuous and hanging by a thread.  Furthermore, it's safe to say that a lot of the same voters in Middle America that rallied around Democrats during Bush's second term because of the fiasco in Iraq were among the first to turn their backs on supporting Ukraine 20 years ago.  And while some of that can be explained by reflexive partisanship ("if Biden's for it, I'm against it!"), it seems that over-learning the lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan is probably the biggest factor in the loss of confidence, with voters legitimately concerned about another decade-long quagmire and money hole.

To be sure, the political situation that led to U.S. military involvement--and the level of American involvement--is very different in Ukraine compared to Iraq.  Setting the high price tag aside, any rational observer would conclude that Biden's stewardship of the Ukraine situation has been vastly superior to the Bushies' handling of Iraq.  Nonetheless, the backdrop of Iraq and Afghanistan makes it hard even for a Biden defender like myself to wonder if our involvement isn't doomed to fail.  After the last 20 years, that delicate balance between too heavy of a foreign policy footprint and too light of a foreign policy footprint makes one instinctively lean in the direction of a lighter touch.  It just doesn't seem like this Ukraine situation is gonna end well no matter what we do.

Reflecting on my strident opposition to the war in Iraq 20 years ago when Bush commandeered the invasion, I often wonder to myself how I'd feel if the roles were reversed.  If a hypothetical President Gore had pressed for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, would I have given him the benefit of the doubt based on the same series of events?  Or if Bush was President today instead of Biden, would I embrace maximal isolationism and be fine with letting the Ukranians get slaughtered by Vladimir Putin?  I wish I could say with certainty that my feelings wouldn't have been different.  Given the degree to which American political coalitions have realigned over the last 20 years on policy matters foreign and domestic, I think it's the kind of self-reflection more of us should do on more issues.