• The U.S. invasion of Iraq dismantled most of the institutions of the Iraqi state, and attempts to rebuild them were undermined by sectarianism, corruption, and civil war; though, the country is in a better place today than post-Arab-Spring Syria or Libya.

• At the regional level, the war benefitted Iran and Israel, removing their main enemy from the map, while also providing fuel for terrorist groups, and ended up being a strategic loss for the U.S.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 20 years ago has had profound consequences for Iraq itself, for the Middle East, and for U.S. influence and credibility.

For Iraq itself, the invasion not only toppled the Saddam Hussein regime but also dismantled most of the institutions of the Iraqi state — particularly the military — leaving a near-total institutional vacuum for many years. Attempts to rebuild robust state structures faltered as sectarianism, corruption, and civil war took their toll. It is an open question as to how Iraq would have evolved internally if the 2003 invasion had not taken place; but seeing what happened during the Arab Spring eight years later, a popular uprising may well have broken out in Iraq, just as ones did in neighboring Syria and in Libya. Of course, seeing where Syria and Libya are today, it might be fair to say that Iraq ended up in a better place when it comes to basic elements like an inclusive political system, a (low) functioning state, and a pathway forward — something that notably cannot be said in the other two cases.

At the regional level, the war benefitted two main players: Iran and Israel. For Tehran, the invasion removed its most serious Middle Eastern enemy, the Saddam regime, and replaced a hostile, Sunni-dominated Iraqi government with a friendly, Shi’ite-dominated one. This enabled Iran to extend its proxy forces into Iraq, which proved particularly beneficial when the Bashar al-Assad regime faced an armed uprising in Syria: Iran could, thus, deploy its proxies into the Syrian theater from both Lebanon and Iraq to support Damascus.

The invasion of Iraq was encouraged by Israel and pro-Israel groups in Washington, as Saddam’s army had attacked Israeli civilian targets with Scud missiles during the First Gulf War. The Jewish state in early 2003 still saw Saddam’s Iraq as its main military threat. The war wiped the Iraqi army off the map and put an end to any speculation about whether Baghdad had clandestine nuclear and chemical weapons programs — something that had worried Israel before and impelled them to bomb the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Another major beneficiary of the Iraq war was al-Qaeda and the armed jihadist movement, a part of which later morphed into the Islamic State. Previously confined largely to the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, al-Qaeda leapfrogged into the Iraqi arena, fighting alongside disenfranchised Sunnis against the U.S. occupation and attracting fresh fighters from around the world. The movement became a major force in Iraq, which, after the uprising in Syria in 2011, spilled across the border to establish the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — ISIS.

The Iraq war proved a strategic defeat for the United States on several levels. First, while its military performed impressively in the first days of the invasion (in ways that Russian President Vladimir Putin thought he could emulate 19 years later), U.S. forces became deeply mired in Iraq (as well as Afghanistan), unable to turn a quick military victory into a lasting political one. This decades-long over-engagement in the Middle East focused the U.S. military toward counterinsurgency operations and away from the high-tech and multi-domain competition required to contain a rising China. Second, the invasion drained U.S. political capital and credibility in the region; other than Israel, America’s other Middle Eastern friends — including the main Arab countries and Turkey — had all strongly opposed the invasion. They were proven right, as the war greatly strengthened Iran, introduced a new wave of region-wide sectarian tension and conflict, and plunged Iraq into considerable turmoil. Washington would face the consequences of this loss of credibility when it sought regional solidarity in opposing Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine; the response frequently was, “The U.S. illegally invaded Iraq two decades ago, and under false pretenses, so you have no moral leg to stand on.”

In the wider picture, the war also gave a bad name to democracy promotion in the Middle East, as it was brought on the backs of U.S. tanks. Interestingly, however, pro-democracy sentiments survived this tarnishing and erupted quite impactfully during the Arab uprisings that started in 2011, and continued — e.g., in Sudan, Lebanon, and even Iraq — through to the next decade.

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Link : https://www.mei.edu/blog/special-briefing-legacy-lessons-and-future-course-iraq-20-years-us-invasion