After the American troops departed in December, life became more difficult for the thousands of diplomats and contractors left behind. Convoys of food that were previously escorted by the United States military from Kuwait were delayed at border crossings as Iraqis demanded documentation that the Americans were unaccustomed to providing.

Within days the salad bar at the embassy dining hall ran low. Sometimes there was no sugar or Splenda for coffee. On chicken wing night, wings were rationed at six per person. Over the holidays, housing units were stocked with Meals Ready to Eat, the prepared food for soldiers in the field.

The horrors.

via Andrew Exum, Jeremy Scahill, and others laughing hysterically as they tweeted

We got another indication of how far out of step some of the Republican candidates for President are when it comes to public opinion during Saturday night’s debate when Rick Perry said he’d send troops back to Iraq:

Rick Perry said he would send U.S. troops back to Iraq at a Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire on Saturday.

“The idea that we allow the Iranians to come back into Iraq and take over that country, with all of the treasures, both in blood and money, that we have spent in Iraq- because this president wants to kowtow to his liberal leftist base, and move out those men and women. He could have renegotiated that time frame. I think it is a huge error for us,” Perry said at the debate, sponsored by ABC News/Yahoo!/WMUR-TV.

This is the not the first time that the Texas governor has been critical of President Obama’s foreign policy in Iraq, but it is the first that he has suggested sending troops back after their withdrawal last month.

At a campaign stop in Iowa in December, Perry said on Iraq, “Giving your enemy is a timeline of which you’re going to withdraw is really bad tactics.”

Perry was bolder at the ABC News/Yahoo GOP presidential debate Saturday, citing Iran as a potential problem in Iraq.

“We’re going to see Iran, in my opinion, move back in at literally the speed of light. They’re going to move back in, and all of the work we’ve done — every young man that has lost his life in that country will have been for nothing. Because we’ve got a president that does not understand what’s going on in that region,” Perry said.

All I can say Governor is that if the Iranians are literally going to move at the speed of light then they’ve mastered technology that we haven’t even conceived of yet. You gonna send Chuck Norris in to take care of that?

Let’s go over this again. We tried to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement that would allow a residual forces to be left behind (although personally I think that would’ve been a mistake), the Iraqis refused to grant American troops the same immunity from prosecution we normally request from other countries hosting American troops. Moreover, it was clear that the Iraqi Parliament would not have supported Nouri al-Maliki if he’d tried to reach an agreement. They didn’t want us there. More importantly, American public opinion overwhelmingly supports the President on this. Why are the Republicans being so mind-numbingly stupid on this issue?

Here’s the video:

For years, analysts have worried that Iraq’s tenuous hold on stability would collapse upon the withdrawal of US forces. We’re now watching it happen.

AP (“Wave of bombings across Iraqi capital kills 60“):

A wave of at least 14 bombings ripped across Baghdad Thursday morning, killing at least 60 people in the worst violence in Iraq for months. The apparently coordinated attacks struck days after the last American forces left the country and in the midst of a major government crisis between Shiite and Sunni politicians that has sent sectarian tensions soaring.

The bombings may be linked more to the U.S. withdrawal than the political crisis, but all together, the developments heighten fears of a new round of Shiite-Sunni sectarian bloodshed like the one a few years back that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But the bombings bore all the hallmarks of al-Qaida’s Sunni insurgents. Most appeared to hit Shiite neighborhoods, although some Sunni areas were also targeted. In all, 11 neighborhoods were hit by either car bombs, roadside blasts or sticky bombs attached to cars. There was at least one suicide bombing and the blasts went off over several hours.

[...]

For many Iraqis and the Americans who fought a nearly nine-year war in hopes of leaving behind a free and democratic country, the events of the past few days are the country’s nightmare scenario. The fragile alliance of Sunnis and Shiites in the government is completely collapsing, large-scale violence with a high casualty toll has returned to the capital, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is displaying an authoritarian streak and may be moving to grab the already limited power of the Sunnis.

Al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government this week accused Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, the country’s top Sunni political leader, of running a hit squad that targeted government officials five years ago, during the height of sectarian warfare. Authorities put out a warrant for his arrest.

Many Sunnis fear this is part of a wider campaign to go after Sunni political figures in general and shore up Shiite control across the country at a critical time when all American troops have left Iraq.

Because such a large-scale, coordinated attack likely took weeks to plan, and the political crisis erupted only few days ago, the violence was not likely a direct response to the tensions within the government. Also, al-Qaida opposed Sunni cooperation in the Shiite-dominated government in the first place and is not aligned with Sunni politicians.

The Sunni extremist group often attacks Shiites, who they believe are not true Muslims.

Additionally, as Tony Karon reports for TIME (“Baghdad Bloodbath Threatens Sectarian Chaos in Iraq: Will Iran Stoke or Douse the Fires?”), the political balance is falling apart just as quickly.

The move against al-Hashimi coincides with the withdrawal from parliament of the predominantly Sunni Iraqiya bloc, prompting Maliki to urge the legislature to pass a vote of no confidence in deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, the Sunni faction’s most senior figure in the legislature. And, Maliki warned, the boycott of parliament would result in Iraqiya cabinet ministers losing their positions, ending the inter-party accord that formed the basis of the agreement to seat his government. Iraqiya, whose future participation in what had been envisaged as a consensus government but has in practice been run almost entirely by Maliki’s faction, now appears in doubt, accused Maliki of being “the main cause of the crisis,” and urging his Shi’ite-dominated bloc to put forward an alternative candidate for prime minister.

Many of the Sunni leaders, including al-Hashimi, now support a bid by three Sunni provinces — Anbar, Diyala and Salahuddin — to band together into an autonomous zone on the lines that the Kurds have done. That’s an outcome Maliki is determined to avoid, seeing it as strengthening a beachhead in Iraq of regional forces antagonistic to his rule. Indeed, a union of three provinces that had been the cradle of the Sunni insurgency, and which abut Syria, would strengthen the strategic challenge to Maliki in Baghdad — even more so if President Bashar al-Assad were overthrown by Syria’s Sunni majority. Sunni leaders in those provinces have spoken of Sunni insurgencies on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border amplifying one another. And the al-Qaeda element has always sought to turn Sunnis against participation in the Shi’ite-dominated political system.

The power struggle between Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish political factions has been waged in different forms since Saddam’s fall, but it appears to have entered a new phase in recent years, once the clock began ticking down towards the U.S. withdrawal. Maliki has been widely accused of steadily amassing power, particularly through his control over the security forces, and demonstrating his intent to suppress domestic challenges to his increasingly authoritarian rule.

The Prime Minister’s attack on the Sunni political class signals a new round of political brinkmanship, with the danger of a relapse into civil war exacerbated by regional tensions, particularly between Iran — the main outside patron of Maliki’s government — and Saudi Arabia, which has always backed the Sunnis. Those two are at loggerheads in political standoffs throughout the region, from Syria and Lebanon to Bahrain, but Turkey’s growing regional influence has also antagonized Tehran. Ankara has taken a leading role in putting pressure on Iran’s ally in Damascus, President Assad, over his brutal crackdown on a popular rebellion. And last year, Turkey also played a major role in creating and backing the Iraqiya bloc.

Now, this is not an argument for re-entering the conflict in Iraq or even that President Obama’s decision to follow the withdrawal timetable negotiated under President Bush and that the Iraqi government demanded we adhere to was unwise. There were no good options available and Obama chose the least bad of them. Indeed, given how adamant the Maliki government was that we depart on schedule, it was simply a no-brainer.

Patrick Porter, a strategic studies scholar at Reading University, argues that these events should cause us to reassess the Iraqi Surge of 2006-7.

On one hand, the relatively quiet withdrawal of American troops on Tuesday vindicated one objective of the surge: to create more stable conditions to that America could pull out quietly without it being humiliated and without the kind of chaotic flight to the exits that would polarize its society.

On the other hand, the major declared objective of the surge launched by President Bush II in 2006-7 was to depress levels of violence, secure the population and thereby create critical space in which there could be political progress and reconciliation.

Advocates of enlightened counterinsurgency and muscular state-building argued that Iraq vindicated their position. They argued that the combination of more troops and more restraint played a major role in depressing the levels of violence and giving Iraq a breathing space to recover from the communal bloodletting it suffered in the post-invasion years.

But if Iraq descends again into the traumatic violence of 2005-6, we must acknowledge that this approach had its limits. It bought time and got the issue off the front pages – no small thing for a superpower that has seen presidencies destroyed in the past by protracted small wars – but a new civil war of sorts would suggest that the surge did not achieve its most profound objective.

The bottom line is that, as in Afghanistan, the ability of an alien occupying force* to radically transform a society in a relatively short time is limited, indeed. As RealClearWorld’s Greg Scoblete put it in the aftermath of Maliki’s move against his VP,

This incident underscores just how fragile Iraq’s government really is. The timing of Maliki’s moves was clearly intentional and it’s hard to believe he would have pulled a stunt like this had the U.S. remained in Iraq in force. So supporters of an indefinite U.S. military presence in Iraq have a point – the U.S. might well have stayed Maliki’s hand and lent a degree of stability to Iraq that will otherwise be missing.

But this also demonstrates quite clearly that actually creating an Iraq that does not descend into violence the moment the paternalistic hand of the U.S. military is withdrawn was going to be the work of decades – or more. And that’s if everything went well – and there’s no reason to believe that it would have.

Iraq, in particular, is a hard case because of the strong ethno-religious cleavages which have been reinforced by geographical separation, the horrendous treatment of the Shiite majority and Kurdish minority under the Baathist rule that preceded our invasion, and exacerbated further by almost eight years of terrorism and insurgent violence that followed.

Regardless, however, the situation in Iraq appears to be unraveling in rapid fashion and it’s highly unlikely that the international community will be able to do more than contain it; indeed, it’s not a certainly that we’ll be able to do even that.

Caron again:

The key variable, however, remains Iran. Tehran has been the biggest strategic beneficiary of the U.S. invasion, and it has been the most influential foreign power in Baghdad since the moment the U.S. allowed the Iraqis to choose their own government. (They’ve returned Iran-friendly Shi’ite governments at each election.) While he may be a Shi’ite partisan with an authoritarian streak, but — contra the Saudi view — Maliki is no puppet of Tehran. Still, he’s unable to rule without Tehran’s support; it was Iran’s intervention that persuaded Sadr to throw his considerable parliamentary vote behind Maliki to give him the numbers necessary to keep Iraqiya out of power, after the Sunni-dominated bloc finished with more votes than any other list in the last election.

The question that may determine whether or not Iraq descends into sectarian confrontation, then, may be this: What does Iran want right now?

There may be an argument that stoking instability in Iraq suits Iran at a moment when Tehran is facing growing economic pressure and implied military threats over its nuclear program — a tactic of starting fires in order to demonstrate its ability to cause problems for its adversaries. Yet, there may also be reason to believe that Iran could, in fact, decide to restrain Maliki should his actions appear to be raising the danger of renewed civil warfare. The reason is simple: The status quo put in place in Iraq by the U.S. invasion is a huge strategic gain for Tehran, which saw its most dangerous enemy — Saddam Hussein — replaced by an elected government dominated by its allies. The collapse of that political order in a new round of sectarian bloodshed puts Iran’s post-Saddam gains at risk, also inviting its key regional opponent, Saudi Arabia, to intervene more aggressively to turn Iraq into a proxy battlefield.

Either way, Iran is unlikely to accept matters of such great strategic consequence to the Islamic Republic as a confrontation that could potentially draw in Iraq’s major neighbors can be decided simply by the whims and narrow agenda of Prime Minister Maliki. At a moment when the fate of Iraq’s key Arab partner, Syria’s Assad, hangs in the balance, it would take a stupendous recklessness to roll the dice on its influence in Iraq, also, by encouraging Maliki to overplay his hand.

We may be in the ironic position of Iran being our most useful ally in containing this mess.

___________
*Zell Miller’s distaste for that word notwithstanding, it’s how we’re seen by far too many Iraqis and Afghans.

It didn’t take very long after the removal of American troops, for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki to begin trying to consolidate power:

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s Sunni vice president denied charges he ran a hit squad that killed government officials during the nation’s wave of sectarian bloodletting, accusing the Shiite-led government Tuesday of waging a campaign of persecution.

Acting just a day after American forces completed their withdrawal, the government issued an arrest warrant Monday for Tariq al-Hashemi, the country’s highest-ranking Sunni official. The step risks tearing at the same sectarian fault lines that pushed Iraq to the edge of civil war just a few years ago — a prospect that is all the more dire with no U.S. forces on the ground.

Responding to the accusations, al-Hashemi told a televised news conference Tuesday that he has not committed any “sin” against Iraq and described the charges as “fabricated.” He accused the Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, of being behind a plot to smear him and declared that efforts at national reconciliation had been blown apart.

“I’m shocked by all these things,” al-Hashemi told reporters in the northern city of Irbil. “I swear to God that al-Hashemi didn’t commit any sin or do anything wrong against any Iraqi either today or tomorrow and this is my pledge to God.”

He said the arrest warrant was a campaign to “embarrass” him. He blamed al-Maliki, although he did not say specifically what he believed the Shiite premier had done.

“Al-Maliki is behind the whole issue. The country is in the hands of al-Maliki. All the efforts that have been exerted to reach national reconciliation and to unite Iraq are now gone. So yes, I blame al-Maliki,” he said.

The Iraqi prime minister effectively runs the Interior Ministry, where the charges originated.

If this is an indication of how unstable Iraq really is, then all I can say is that I’m glad we got the heck out when we did.

82nd Airborne solider David Hickman was the 4474th American serviceman killed in Iraq. He should be the last.

WaPo (“In Iraq, the last to fall: David Hickman, the 4,474th U.S. service member killed“):

(Courtesy of Zack Zornes) - Army Spec. David E. Hickman, pictured here at Al Asad Airbase in Al Anbar Province, Iraq, was killed in Iraq on Nov. 14, 2011.

Hickman, 23, was killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb that ripped through his armored truck Nov. 14 — eight years, seven months and 25 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq began.

He was the 4,474th member of the U.S. military to die in the war, according to the Pentagon.

And he may have been the last.

With the final U.S. combat troops crossing out of Iraq into Kuwait, those who held Hickman dear are struggling to come to terms with the particular poignancy of his fate. As the unpopular war that claimed his life quietly rumbles to a close, you can hear within his inner circle echoes of John F. Kerry’s famous 1971 congressional testimony on Vietnam:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

“Thank God if David is the last one to die, because that means nobody else will have to go through this,” said Logan Trainum, one of Hickman’s closest friends. “But it’s crazy that he died. No matter your position on this war — if you’re for or against it — I think everybody thinks we shouldn’t have been over there anymore.”

U.S. combat operations in Iraq officially ended months before Hickman’s unit shipped out from Fort Bragg in May. His platoon spent most of its deployment on “presence patrols,” walking through Iraqi neighborhoods to remind insurgents that the U.S. military was still there, said Spec. Zack Zornes, who served in Hickman’s platoon.

Hickman liked the military, Zornes said. “But there were days on end where me and Hickman would be sitting in his room, being like: ‘Why are we even here? What are we doing?’ We were just doing police work. I totally agree with Hickman’s friends and family who are mad. We had no reason to be there anymore.”

Whatever one thinks of the war—I supported the invasion but have long since argued that it was time to pull the plug on the ensuing nation building folly—the death of a soldier after the announcement that we’re ending the fight is particularly tragic. That the war has been going on since Hickman was thirteen years old and that he volunteered for not only the Army but the airborne infantry fully knowing that he might be called to risk his life in Iraq doesn’t diminish that.

Sometime around 5:00am Eastern time this morning, the final convoy of American troops crossed the border from Iraq to Kuwait:

BAGHDAD — The last convoy of American troops to leave Iraq drove into Kuwait on Sunday morning, marking the end of the nearly nine-year war.

The convoy’s departure, which included about 110 vehicles and 500 soldiers, came three days after the American military folded its flag in a muted ceremony here to celebrate the end of its mission.

In darkness, the convoy snaked out of Contingency Operating Base Adder, near the southern city of Nasiriyah, around 2:30 a.m., and headed toward the border. The departure appeared to be the final moment of a drawn-out withdrawal that included weeks of ceremonies in Baghdad and around Iraq, and included visits by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, as well as a trip to Washington by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

As dawn approached on Sunday morning, the last trucks began to cross over the border into Kuwait at an outpost lit by floodlights and secured by barbed wire.

“I just can’t wait to call my wife and kids and let them know I am safe,” said Sgt. First Class Rodolfo Ruiz just before his armored vehicle crossed over the border. “I am really feeling it now.”

Shortly after crossing into Kuwait, Sergeant Ruiz told the men in his vehicle: “Hey guys, you made it.”

Then, he ordered the vehicles in his convoy not to flash their lights or honk their horns.

For security reasons, the last soldiers made no time for goodbyes to Iraqis with whom they had become acquainted. To keep details of the final trip secret from insurgents, interpreters for the last unit to leave the base called local tribal sheiks and government leaders on Saturday morning and conveyed that business would go on as usual, not letting on that all the Americans would soon be gone.

Many troops wondered how the Iraqis, whom they had worked closely with and trained over the past year, would react when they awoke on Sunday to find that the remaining American troops on the base had left without saying anything.

“The Iraqis are going to wake up in the morning and nobody will be there,” said a soldier who only identified himself as Specialist Joseph. He said he had immigrated to the United States from Iraq in 2009 and enlisted a year later, and refused to give his full name because he worried for his family’s safety.

So, after 3,196 days, and 4,484 soldiers’  lives (plus 318 deaths among other coalition members), it’s finally over. I shared my thoughts on the end of the Iraq War late last week.

Photo via The New York Times

The most contentious foreign military action since Vietnam and, depending on how you measure these things, either the second or third longest war in American history, came to a muted end today in a ceremony at Baghdad International Airport:

BAGHDAD — The United States military officially declared an end to its mission in Iraq on Thursday even as violence continues to plague the country and the Muslim world remains distrustful of American power.

In a fortified concrete courtyard at the airport in Baghdad, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta thanked the more than one million American service members who have served in Iraq for “the remarkable progress” made over the past nine years but acknowledged the severe challenges that face the struggling democracy.

“Let me be clear: Iraq will be tested in the days ahead — by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself,” Mr. Panetta said. “Challenges remain, but the U.S. will be there to stand by the Iraqi people as they navigate those challenges to build a stronger and more prosperous nation.”

The muted ceremony stood in contrast to the start of the war in 2003 when an America both frightened and emboldened by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, sent columns of tanks north from Kuwait to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As of last Friday, the war in Iraq had claimed 4,487 American lives, with another 32,226 Americans wounded in action, according to Pentagon statistics.

The tenor of the 45-minute farewell ceremony, officially called “Casing the Colors,” was likely to sound an uncertain trumpet for a war that was started to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction it did not have. It now ends without the sizable, enduring American military presence for which many officers had hoped.

The Washington Post notes the comments that Secretary Panetta made during today’s ceremony:

BAGHDAD — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta paid solemn tribute on Thursday to an “independent, free and sovereign Iraq” and declared the official end to the Iraq war, formally wrapping up the U.S. military’s mission in the country after almost nine years.

“After a lot of blood spilled by Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could govern and secure itself has become real,” Panetta said at a ceremony held under tight security at Baghdad’s international airport. “To be sure, the cost was high — in blood and treasure for the United States, and for the Iraqi people. Those lives were not lost in vain.”

The 1:15 p.m. ceremony (5:15 a.m. in Washington) effectively ended the war two weeks earlier than was necessary under the terms of the security agreement signed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments in 2008, which stipulated that the troops must be gone by Dec. 31.

But commanders decided there was no need to keep troops in Iraq through the Christmas holidays given that talks on maintaining a U.S. presence beyond the deadline had failed. The date of the final ceremony had been kept secret for weeks, so as not to give insurgents or militias an opportunity to stage attacks.

Dignitaries and a small crowd of military personnel in fatigues gathered at a terminal in the Baghdad airport, which until now had been operated by the U.S. military. In the future, it will be overseen by the State Department, which is assuming responsibility for a massive, $6 billion civilian effort to sustain American influence in Iraq beyond the troops’ departure.

The white flag of United States Force-Iraq was carefully folded and put away, and Panetta took the podium.

“No words, no ceremony can provide full tribute to the sacrifices which have brought this day to pass,” the defense secretary said. “I’m reminded of what President Lincoln said in Gettysburg, about a different war, in a different time. His words echo through the years as we pay tribute to the fallen in this war: ‘The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’ ”

In his speech, Panetta singled out U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey and Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, for overseeing the rapid withdrawal of 50,000 troops in recent months and the closure of dozens of bases.

But he paid special tribute to the more than 1 million U.S. troops who have served war duty in Iraq since 2003, including about 4,487 who were killed and some 30,000 who were wounded.

“You have done everything your nation has asked you to do and more,” he said. “You came to this ‘Land Between the Rivers’ again and again and again.You did not know whether you’d return to your loved ones.

“You will leave with great pride, lasting pride, secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people begin a new chapter in history free from tyranny and full of hope for prosperity and peace.”

Panetta also paid homage to military families who, “through deployment after deployment after deployment … withstood the strain, the sacrifice and the heartbreak of watching their loved ones go off to war.”

“Together with the Iraqi people,” he added, “the United States welcomes the next stage in U.S.-Iraqi relations.”

How one feels about the official end of the U.S. mission in Iraq depends, in large part, on how one felt about the mission to begin with. For opponents of the war, who won the war for American public opinion in the end, this is a welcome development and a not-soon-enough end to a war that should not have lasted this long to begin with. For supporters of the war, mostly hardline conservative Republicans at this point, are likely to see this as a defeat of some kind. Ever since the President announced that American troops would be leaving Iraq by the end of this year, there’s been a recurring meme on the right claiming that the President failed by not convincing the Iraqis to agree to an extension of the current Status of Forces Agreement, which was negotiated by the Bush Administration, which required that American troops be out of the country by December 31, 2011. When it comes to the public opinion side of the argument, it’s fairly clear that the President and the opponents of the war have the better argument:

[A] new poll shows that three in four Americans support the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Seventy-seven percent of Americas approve of President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw troops by the end of the year, according to a new CBS News poll, including 63 percent of Republicans.

Just 17 percent of Americans disapprove.

The poll follows on a Gallup poll earlier this month, which similarly found that three-quarters of Americans support the decision to withdraw troops.

In that poll, 96 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of independents, and 43 percent of Republicans supported Obama’s decision.

Additionally, a newly released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that bringing all the troops home from Iraq ranks just behind killing Osama bin Laden when voters are asked to rank President Obama’s greatest achievements of his First Term. Clearly, the public is glad that a war they had grown weary off long ago has come to an end, and the images we’ve seen over the past several days of soldiers being reunited with their families at bases across the country is a welcome sight, especially as we approach the Holidays.

It’s likely to be many years before the full impact of the Iraq War on American domestic politics, not to mention the politics of the Middle East, can be fully measured. Earlier this year, many on the right attempted to make the claim that it was the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 that set in motion the events that led to the Arab Spring of 2011. We haven’t heard this argument very much since protests turned violent and the political future of nations like Egypt has become more uncertain, of course, but even if that had not occurred it strikes me that any link between Iraq and the 2011 uprisings is tenuous at best. Moreover, even if it were true, that hardly stands as justification for a massive war that cost hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

In the end, I think history will judge the Bush Administration harshly for both the run-up to the Iraq War and its initial execution. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, which had no connection at all to the regime of Saddam Hussein, they exploited the nations fear of terror from the Middle East to ramp up war fever against a nation that we had gone to war against ten years before, and whom we’d been staring at, and striking, across a no-fly zone ever since. Saddam was developing a secret chemical and biological weapons program, we were told, even though the United Nations weapons inspectors never found any evidence of the same. There were whispers about a secret nuclear weapons program, which turned out to be entirely unfounded. Rumors were spread about secret meetings between Mohammed Atta and the head of Iraqi Intelligence, which also turned out to be false. Yes, it was true that every major intelligence service in the world believed that Saddam had a WMD program, but what nobody seemed to realize was that the intelligence was based on unreliable witnesses and, apparently, an effort by Saddam himself to make the world think he had WMDs so as make Iraq seem stronger than it actually was. So, we went to war.

The execution of the war also seemed flawed from the start. Even before a shot was fired, there were dissenting voices saying that we were not committing enough troops to deal with the consequences of the inevitable downfall of the regime and the possibility of  guerilla warfare. Administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld dismissed these concerns, and some of them actually seemed to have the fanciful idea that American troops invading Iraq would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people. When Turkey refused permission for U.S. troops to use the nation as the launching point for the northern half of a two-pronged thrust into the country, the effectiveness of the U.S. forces in gaining the type of victory needed for a quick and lasting victory seemed to have been further reduced. There’s no denying that the initial invasion was a massive success, notwithstanding the fact that it took most of the rest of 2003 to finally catch up with Saddam Hussein. However, by July of that year the insurgency had begun and the situation began to spin out of control. The surge in 2007 did stabilize the situation, and Iraq is possibly on its way to some kind of stability, but the future is far from certain. One thing is certain, though, with Saddam Hussein gone, Iraq is now most likely to fall into the Iranian sphere of influence, and I can’t see how one can consider that to be a positive development in the long run.

I was never a supporter of the Iraq War. Even with the evidence the Administration was putting forward in 2002, I was not convinced that the case had been made that Iraq posed such a grave threat to American national security that invasion and regime change were the only options. I wasn’t among the protesters, mostly because it’s just not my style, but I mostly agreed with their message, at least until groups like MoveOn and Answer got involved and the whole thing took a decidedly left-wing, anti-American tilt. When the war started in March, though, I hoped that at least our troops would be able to achieve a quick, decisive victory with minimal casualties. Alas, it had become clear by the summer that this wasn’t going to happen and, as the insurgency grew, the ability of the United States to simply walk away from Iraq became much more difficult. As Colin Powell had said in meetings with the President in the summer of 2002, if we broke Iraq, we would be responsible for it, the Pottery Barn Rule it was called. And, boy, had we broken Iraq into a million pieces. It took four years to put the country back together, and perhaps we could’ve gotten out at some point in that process but it strikes me that leaving a broken country in the Middle East would have been as unwise and foolish as invading it was in the first place.

In any case, though, the war is over, the troops are coming home, and the future of Iraq is in the hands of the Iraqi people. Was it worth it at all? Frankly, I cannot find a single redeeming thing to point to that justifies the costs we incurred for a war we never should have been fighting to begin with.

In her new memoir Condoleeza Rice says that there were significant internal disagreements in the Bush White House over Iraq War policy:

Just days after President Obama declared an end to the Iraq war, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is releasing a memoir providing insight into the turmoil over the war within the Bush administration.

From the beginning, Rice wrote in her new book “No Higher Honor,” she had concerns about the United States’ post-war plans for Iraq. Her attempts to broach the subject before the 2003 invasion “always led to uninformative slides and a rather dismissive handling of the question,” she wrote, according to a preview of her book in Newsweek magazine.

“When I finally arranged a briefing on the issue before the President in early February, he started the meeting in a way that completely destroyed any chance of getting an answer,” Rice wrote. “‘This is something Condi has wanted to talk about,’ he said. I could immediately see that the generals no longer thought it to be a serious question.”

That incident, Rice wrote, revealed the weakness of her position at the time, as the president’s national security adviser. “Authority comes from the President,” she wrote. “If he wasn’t interested in this issue, why should they care?”

By 2006, when Rice served as secretary of state, she was concerned the U.S. would become mired in Iraq’s civil war. According to a review of the memoir in the New York Times, Rice told Mr. Bush she opposed a plan to increase troops there to protect Iraqi civilians.

“So what’s your plan, Condi?” the president retorted, Rice wrote. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?”

She responded, “if they want to have a civil war we’re going to have to let them.”

A harsh response, but perhaps not the incorrect one. Obviously, as is usually the case with these political memoirs, Rice is likely recounting events in a manner that puts her in a good light. Nonetheless, the fact that she was one of the few people in the Bush Administration in 2003 who was trying to talk about post-war planning, which is largely where the entire war plan fell apart, and that she was basically ignored shows just how tightly controlled the group think within the Administration was back then. It was clear to me, for example, that the decision to go to war had been made some time in 2002 and that all of the pageantry we went through with the Congressional vote, the inspectors, and United Nations hearings and the like was simply window dressing to legitimize something that was going to happen anyway.

Some will criticize Rice for not speaking up sooner, of course, but I’m not sure what that would have accomplished. With the President, Vice-President, and the Secretaries of Defense and State all arguing for war, it doesn’t seem likely that the National Security Adviser, more likely former National Security Adviser since dissent on a topic like this would have required resignation, could have changed much of anything.

Republicans are reacting mostly negatively to President Obama’s announcement yesterday that all American troops would be leaving Iraq by the end of the year:

After 8 years of combat in Iraq, the United States Congress remains divided over the need for U.S. troops in that country. The president’s official announcement today that the remaining U.S. troops will withdraw from Iraq by the end of the year drew praise from Democrats while high profile Republicans questioned whether the move is premature.

Republican Sen. John McCain said in a statement that the president’s decision is a “harmful” setback for U.S. interests in the Middle East.

“I respectfully disagree with the President,” McCain said. “This decision will be viewed as a strategic victory for our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime, which has worked relentlessly to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. It is a consequential failure of both the Obama Administration — which has been more focused on withdrawing from Iraq than succeeding in Iraq since it came into office — as well as the Iraqi government.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., echoed McCain’s sentiments. “I fear this decision has set in motion events that will come back to haunt our country,” he said.

Pretty much all the Republican candidates also piled on the President as well:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney harshly criticized President Obama in the wake of the president’s announcement that the United States will withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of the year.

“President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women,” he said. “The unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government. The American people deserve to hear the recommendations that were made by our military commanders in Iraq.”

(…)

Romney wasn’t the only GOP presidential candidate to attack Mr. Obama in the wake of the announcement. Texas Gov. Rick Perry suggested “President Obama is putting political expediency ahead of sound military and security judgment by announcing an end to troop level negotiations and a withdrawal from Iraq by year’s end.”

“The President was slow to engage the Iraqis and there’s little evidence today’s decision is based on advice from military commanders,” he said.

Michele Bachmann called the decision “a political decision and not a military one,” claiming “it represents the complete failure of President Obama to secure an agreement with Iraq for our troops to remain there to preserve the peace and demonstrates how far our foreign policy leadership has fallen.”

“In every case where the United States has liberated a people from dictatorial rule, we have kept troops in that country to ensure a peaceful transition and to protect fragile growing democracies,” she said. “We will now have fewer troops in Iraq than we have in Honduras – despite a costly and protracted war.”

“We have been ejected from a country by the people that we liberated and that the United States paid for with precious blood and treasure,” she added.

Jon Huntsman said Mr. Obama’s decision “to not leave a small, focused presence in Iraq is a mistake and the product of his administration’s failures.”

“The president’s inability to reach a security agreement leaves Iraq vulnerable to backsliding, thus putting our interests in the region at risk,” he said. “An ideal arrangement would have left a small troop presence that could have assisted with the training of Iraqi security forces and vital counter-terror efforts.”

There were similar statements issued by Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. Only Ron Paul and Gary Johnson had anything positive to say about the news.

The reactions from the conservative blogosphere are similarly dismissive. Max Boot calls it a failure of American foreign policy. The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano blames the Obama Adminstration for the refusal of the Iraqi Parliament to come to a deal acceptable to the United States:

With Syria in turmoil, Iran on the march, a more isolated Israel, and Turkey’s ever-more ambivalent policies, now is the worst time to see a diminished U.S. influence in ensuring continued progress in Iraq. A total troop pullout will leave Iraqi security forces much more vulnerable to terrorism, sectarian conflict, and Iranian meddling, and it will leave them much less capable of battling al-Qaeda in Iraq and pro-Iranian shia militias.

In part, Obama and his Obama Doctrine are to blame for the Iraqi government walking away from U.S. support—though it knows this premature decision makes the future of the country’s peace and prosperity risky business. The Obama Administration’s clear preference to disengage from Iraq as quickly as possible has made it more difficult to negotiate with Baghdad from a position of strength. Iraqi leaders, sensing the Obama Administration’s eagerness to head for the exit, are reluctant to take political risks to give U.S. troops immunity from prosecution. This was a deal-breaker.

And Hot Air’s Tina Korbe criticizes the President for, well, doing what Presidents are supposed to do:

Which brings us to the president’s decision to withdraw the troops from Iraq. Obama has never exactly been a humble guy, but my guess is he wouldn’t make this particularly consequential decision if he weren’t feeling especially cocky about his overall success on the foreign policy front. He thinks he has the political capital to do this — but he doesn’t. What’s made the American people trust Obama on foreign policy hasn’t been any decision in line with the Obama doctrine of apology. What’s made the American people trust Obama on foreign policy is that we’ve seen he’s wise enough to change his mind about key Bush policies.

Withdrawing the troops now betrays a certain naivete on Obama’s part — a certain optimistic belief that the American people think he knows best about these issues.

Well, first of all, the apology meme is total nonsense, as I’ve discussed here at length before. But, yes, of course the President is making decisions based on  what he believes is the best course of action. That’s what President’s are supposed to do. The American people elected Barack Obama in 2008 in part because they believed he’d be better suited to make decisions like this, to answer, as Hillary Clinton put it, the 3am phone call, than John McCain. Given his foreign policy track record, I can’t say they made the wrong decision there. While my major disagreement with the President’s foreign policy decisions has been the extent to which they have tracked those of George W. Bush, I don’t really believe that a President McCain would have been all that much different in this area, and given his own odd decision making processes he could have ended up being much worse.

In any event, what makes the Republican reaction to the President’s announcement yesterday even more bizarre was the fact that all he was really doing was announcing the final implementation of a policy that had been initiated three years ago by George W. Bush. Starting in 2008, the United States and Iraq began negotiating a Status Of Forces Agreement governing the basing of American troops in the country. When that agreement was finally approved by the Iraqis in December 2008, it provided that U.S. combat forces will withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, and all U.S. forces will be completely out of Iraq by December 31, 2011. Even though the Iraqi government approved the deal, there was apparently still much disagreement within Iraqi society about the agreement. You may remember, for example, that when President Bush paid a secret visit to Iraq in December 2008 in part to sign the final pact with Prime Minister al-Malaki, an Iraqi reporter threw a shoe at him on live television.

President Obama, of course, had campaigned in part on an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a pivot to Afghanistan. Had he wanted to, he could have accelerated the timetable of withdrawal from Iraq so that American troops would be out earlier than the deadline that the Bush Administration had negotiated. Instead, he announced in February 2009 that the United States would essentially be sticking with the timetable negotiated by his Republican predecessor. That decision was roundly praised by Republicans, including some of the same Republicans who are criticizing him now.

Now, it appears, Republicans are attacking the President for doing something that President Bush wanted to do and for changing his previously stated position on withdrawal from Iraq, based mostly on the advice he recieved from his military commanders at the time. To answer Korbe’s question, yes the President does think he’s making the right decision here. As I said before, that’s what we hire President’s to do. Would you prefer that the President make a decision that he thinks is wrong? Or is it just that he’s Barack Obama? The war in Iraq is over, it’s time for the Iraqi people to sink or swim on their own. Leaving behind a garrison force might have been workable if the Iraqis had agreed to immunity, which Admiral Mike Mullen called an absolute necessity just months ago. They didn’t. Therefore, staying in conditions that could potentially expose our troops to legal process in a nation that is still trying to figure out the Rule Of Law, would have been insane.

Those who argue that we need to stay behind miss that point, but they also don’t seem to be able to come up with a response to this very well-stated question by Jazz Shaw:

What would be different if we left in January? Or in 2013? or 2015? It was always going to end eventually and, given the nature of the region, I doubt it was ever going to end well. Our troops acted in the greatest tradition of our nation. They followed their orders and achieved all of the real victories on a day to day basis which ever truly mattered. But the end approaches and we need to thank them once again and close this chapter. It’s time to come home, and almost ten years too late at that.

Indeed. Whether you agreed with the war or not, and I disagreed with it from the start, we have done everything we can in Iraq at this point. What happens next is largely out of our control.

As James Joyner noted, earlier today President Obama announced that by the end of December all American troops would be removed from Iraq, with the exception of those Marines necessary to defend the American embassy in Baghdad. The media is characterizing this as the end of the Iraq War but, as Spencer Ackerman notes, that isn’t really the case:

The fact is America’s military efforts in Iraq aren’t coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas.

The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security does not have a promising record when it comes to managing its mercenaries. The 2007 Nisour Square shootings by State’s security contractors, in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed, marked one of the low points of the war. Now, State will be commanding a much larger security presence, the equivalent of a heavy combat brigade. In July, Danger Room exclusively reported that the Department blocked the Congressionally-appointed watchdog for Iraq from acquiring basic information about contractor security operations, such as the contractors’ rules of engagement.

That means no one outside the State Department knows how its contractors will behave as they ferry over 10,000 U.S. State Department employees throughout Iraq — which, in case anyone has forgotten, is still a war zone. Since Iraq wouldn’t grant legal immunity to U.S. troops, it is unlikely to grant it to U.S. contractors, particularly in the heat and anger of an accident resulting in the loss of Iraqi life.

It’s a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it’s being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective.

You can also expect that there will be a shadow presence by the CIA, and possibly the Joint Special Operations Command, to hunt persons affiliated with al-Qaida. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has conspicuously stated that al-Qaida still has 1,000 Iraqi adherents, which would make it the largest al-Qaida affiliate in the world.

So, we’re removing our ground troops from Iraq by the end of December. That’s a good thing. But, we’re leaving behind the world’s biggest embassy and a 5,000 man private security force. And we’re probably still going to be hunting al-Qaeda there. The potential for problems is quite evident, I think.

Jake Tapper, ABC News (“BREAKING — President Obama Will Announce Today Complete Drawdown of US Troops in Iraq to Zero By End of Year“):

Sources tell ABC News that the president will announce today that US troops in Iraq will draw down to zero by the end of the year.

A White House official says that at approximately 11:30am today, President Obama convened a secure video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to talk with him about this news.

Thus far, all the talk has been of removing “combat troops.” This certainly sounds like an unambiguous complete withdrawal.

UPDATE: Post-announcement, it seems as if some 150 troops will remain behind to “assist in arms sales.”

Some reports today seem to indicate that the United States is abandoning plans to keep a contingent of military forces in Iraq past the December 31st expiration of the current Status of Forces Agreement:

BAGHDAD—The Obama administration is abandoning plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq past a year-end withdrawal deadline.

A senior administration official in Washington confirmed Saturday that all American troops will leave except for about 160 troops attached to the U.S. Embassy. The Pentagon had considered leaving up to 5,000 troops to train security forces and hinder Iranian influence.

That report was seemingly confirmed by The New York Times this morning:

BAGHDAD — An Obama administration proposal to keep a few thousand American troops here after the end of the year to train the Iraqi military is being scaled back, as the administration has concluded that the Iraqi Parliament would not give the troops legal protection, two American officials said on Saturday.

Both countries are still discussing whether to keep some trainers in Iraq, although the number of troops is most likely to be far less than the 3,000 to 5,000 that the administration had discussed with Iraqi leaders, one of the American officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the continuing negotiations.

The officials said the administration’s plans changed in recent weeks as it became clear that the Iraqi Parliament would not give legal immunity to the American troops, something the Pentagon had insisted would be needed if troops were to continue to operate here.

Two weeks ago, the leaders of the Iraqi political blocs said they wanted American troops to remain to train the Iraqi military after the year’s end, but would not provide them legal protections.

Given the political climate in Iraq, not the least including Prime Minister al-Malaki’s decision to cozy up to the Iranians and the Syrians, the lack of legal protections for American troops would strike me as a deal breaker, even there supposed to be there solely for training purposes. The White House is denying the reports that came out last night, for reasons that would seem to be obvious even if a final decision has been made at this point. Nonetheless, it would seem that the plan to keep thousands of troops in Iraq past December 31, 2011 is being heavily modified at least, and perhaps abandoned completely.

Back during the days of the George H.W. Bush Administration, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney were colleagues. Cheney was Secretary of Defense and Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, along with President Bush, they successfully guided the United States through its largest military engagement since the end of the Vietnam War. Something changed along the way, though, and by the time the two served together in the second Bush Administration the relationship was quite different, a fact that Cheney made quite apparent in his upcoming book:

Just as reporters and former administration insiders have noted that dissenting opinions tended to be unwelcome in the Bush White House, so Mr. Cheney demonstrates here a distinct antipathy toward people who opposed him on matters of policy. Colin L. Powell — who clashed with Mr. Cheney over Iraq and who was characterized in one of Bob Woodward’s books as thinking that “Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact” — is repeatedly dissed in this volume. Mr. Cheney says he “thought it was for the best” that President Bush had accepted Mr. Powell’s resignation as secretary of state in 2004; he says that Mr. Powell handled policy differences not by voicing objections in meetings, but “by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government.”

Powell shot back yesterday in an appearance on Face The Nation:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that former Vice President Dick Cheney took “cheap shots” in his forthcoming memoir, and that he was taking his aggressive promotional techniques “a bit too far.”

Powell, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” targeted Cheney’s claim that the book, “In My Time,” would “make heads explode.”

“My head isn’t exploding, I haven’t noticed any other heads exploding in Washington, D.C.,” Powell pointed out. “From what I’ve read in the newspapers and seen on television it’s essentially a rehash of events of seven or eight years ago.”

In fact, Powell suggested, the most notable thing about the book was Mr. Cheney’s characterization of it.

“What really sort of got my attention was this way in which he characterized it: it’s going to cause heads to explode,” he said. “That’s quite a visual. And in fact, it’s the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist, or the kind of headline you might see one of the supermarket tabloids write. It’s not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from a former Vice President of the United States of America.”

He added: “I think Dick overshot the runway.”

Powell also took issue with Cheney’s claim that, during his tenure as Secretary of State, he declined to fully present his positions to former President George W. Bush.

“Mr. Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President Bush, ‘If you break it you own it,’” Powell said, referencing the administration’s actions in Iraq. “I gave the president my best advice.”

(…)

Powell implied that Cheney’s characterizations in the book are a reflection of what was at the time a dysfunctional White House.

“I’m not going to attribute any emotion to Mr. Cheney in the writing of his book, but it was clear in 2004 that the team wasn’t functioning as a team,” Powell said. “It was not a smoothly functioning team at that point. … I felt that I had to leave the administration. And frankly, I always intended to just serve one term.”

One possible explanation for Cheney’s relentlessness in attacking the State Department in his book (he also goes after Condi Rice) may lie in the fact that Cheney was close friends with Donald Rumsfeld, and sided with him in most of the disputes between Defense and State over the Iraq War. In any case, if this book is any indication, it would seem clear that Cheney still refuses to admit that he made even a single mistake during his time as Vice-President. Which is perhaps his greatest failing.

Five hundred and sixty five pages and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years is we went to war—big war, costly war—under false pretenses. And…to write a memoir in which you say essentially nothing seriously went wrong…if I wrote a memoir of my last week, I would have things to apologize for.

This prompts C&L’s Nicole Belle to snark, “This is just another example of the after-the-fact tacit admissions of the right wing–who spent the entire decade castigating and criticizing the left for questioning why we were in Iraq, mind you–that the Bush administration did lie us into a war of choice against a nation that posed no threat. But where’s the apology for that from George Will, huh?”

Actually, like myself, Will has been questioning the Iraq War and the neocons since 2003 and pretty steadily since. He was ahead of me in saying, years ago, that the Iraq War wasn’t worth the price paid.

The notion that Cheney owes us an apology is interesting. It depends entirely on whether the Bush administration took us to war knowing Saddam did not have a nuclear weapons program or simply dowmplayed evidence casting doubt in order to make the case for war they genuinely believed was necessary.

The Prime Minister of Iraq is backing Syrian leader Bashar Assad over the protesters against his regime, most of whom he has been violently and indiscriminately mowing down:

BAGHDAD — As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

“The unrest in Syria has exacerbated the old sectarian divides in Iraq because the Shiite leaders have grown close to Assad and the Sunnis identify with the people,” said Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for the Middle East.

He added: “Maliki is very reliant on Iran for his power and Iran is backing Syria all the way. The Iranians and the Syrians were all critical to bringing him to power a year ago and keeping him in power so he finds himself in a difficult position.”

Iraq and Syria have not had close relations for years, long before the American invasion. During the sectarian violence here that broke out after the invasion, Iraqi leaders blamed Syria for allowing suicide bombers and other militants to enter the country.

But Syria and Iran have had close ties, a factor in the recalibration of relations between Syria and Iraq. Last year, Iran pressured Mr. Assad into supporting Mr. Maliki for prime minister, which eventually helped him gain a second term. Since then, Mr. Maliki and Mr. Assad have strengthened relations, signing trade deals and increasing Syrian investment in Iraq.

This isn’t entirely surprising. Much of Saddam Hussein’s bluster during the years after the Iran-Iraq War and, especially after the Persian Gulf War, was aimed at projecting a strength that didn’t actually exist in order fend off the Iranians. After his capture, Saddam Hussein told his FBI interrogators that all of his deception about a chemical weapons program after the Persian Guif War was intended to deceive the Iranians:

Saddam Hussein allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, it has emerged.

The former dictator made the revelations in a series of interviews with the FBI during his incarceration before he was hanged in 2006.

The new details were among over 100 pages of notes written by special agent George Piro, who interviewed Hussein after he was found hiding underground on a farm 80 miles from Baghdad.

(….)

Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war with Iran in the 80s that involved the use of chemical weapons and Hussein felt vulnerable to the threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran.

In fact, he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the US to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region,” according to the notes.

The United States was not Iraq’s enemy, he simply opposed its policies, Hussein said, making it clear he considered Iran a greater threat.

(…)

“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” the FBI agent wrote.

“Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”

Now, one would be wise to be wary of the word of a man like Saddam Hussein given his history. Nonetheless, his explanation for his actions in response to UN and US pressure regarding the chemical weapons issue does make a certain amount of sense. Had he agreed to the more rigorous inspections being demanded and confirmed to the world that he had no chemical weapons, Iraq’s vulnerability would have been revealed not only to world, but also to an historic enemy he had just fought a brutal, decade-long war with. How Iran would have reacted to that news is unknown, but given the manner in which they’ve worked to gain influence inside Iraq since Saddam’s downfall it’s highly doubtful that they would’ve done nothing at all.

Maliki’s response is understandable as well. Whatever the state of its democracy, Iraq is a far weaker country than it was ten years ago, and far more vulnerable to Iranian (and Syrian?) influence than it had been in the past. Moreover, Maliki is likely making the calculation that the United States will be otherwise engaged over the next decade and not entirely eager to commit to the defense of Iraq and risk yet another desert war. Additionally, given the political strength of the Shi’ite’s in the south led by Moqtada al-Sadr, who has close ties to Iran, Malki obviously knows that he needs to cozy up to Iran to stay in power.

So, by removing Saddam Hussein from power, we’ve created a weak Iraq that is likely to become a client state of Iran. Tell me again why the Iraq War was a good idea?