TWO decades after the US military machine — aided by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ — stormed into Iraq, that ancient land has yet to recover from the trauma. The ostensible justification for this unjustifiable war was Saddam Hussein’s so-called weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. Yet perhaps amongst the actual reasons for this blood-soaked folly was the desire to project American imperial might in an energy-rich region, at a time when a warmongering neoconservative clique was dominant inside the George W. Bush White House. Unfortunately, the project to deliver ‘democracy’ from F16s did not stop at Iraq, even though similar, earlier adventures elsewhere in the world had proved unsuccessful. After Iraq, the Nato/Western combine went after Libya, which was also destroyed, while similar attempts were made to affect regime change in Syria by hijacking the indigenous movement against Bashar al-Assad. Were it not for military intervention by Iran and Russia — the West’s nemeses on the geopolitical chessboard — Mr Assad may have suffered the same fate as Saddam and Muammar Qadhafi.

Coming back to Iraq, no one has been made to answer for the destruction and bloodshed the country has suffered due to the illegal invasion. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died in both invasion-related violence and acts of terrorism. Despite its massive oil wealth, Iraq’s infrastructure and economy are in a shambles, its society fractured along ethnic and sectarian lines, its institutions suffering from paralysis. However, the corrupt, feuding Iraqi political elite must also shoulder the blame for their post-invasion failure. The Iraqi political system has constantly failed to deliver, while in actuality a confessional structure has been put in place, much like the colonial arrangement in Lebanon, where the country’s top public offices are parcelled out along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iraq invasion should serve as a strong warning against regime change by external means. Saddam’s Ba’athist regime was unabashedly brutal; yet the post-invasion order in Iraq, because of its inorganic nature, has been an unmitigated disaster. In fact, from the smouldering embers of the occupation rose the monster of IS, that drew blood across large swathes of the region and beyond. Democratic change must be a grassroots process and it is the people who should decide when and what shape their government takes. Artificial external solutions are bound to fail, as they have in Iraq.

Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2023