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After four years of war, what have we learned? This was the dominant question asked by Professor Douglas Allen at Thursday’s Socialist and Marxist Studies lecture series. “The situation in Iraq today is unbearable,” he said. “The U.S. occupation in Iraq is part of the problem and not part of the solution.”
Last week was the four-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in order to topple Saddam Hussein. On March 20, 2003, American forces conducted the infamous “Shock and Awe” campaign to remove Hussein’s Ba’ath Party from government. They succeeded, capturing the ousted Iraqi leader in December 2003. He was executed three years later, nearly to the day. Although the initial overthrow of the Ba’ath Party and installation of a new Iraqi government were largely successful undertakings, the problem of stability has plagued Iraq since the early stages of the war. Violence is a daily occurrence; casualty estimates range from 50,000, by former senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, to more than 655,000 by the British medical journal, The Lancet.
To frame the situation in Iraq today and the discussion of lessons learned, Allen read from an op-ed piece he wrote for the Bangor Daily News in February 2003, a month before the invasion. “As we prepare for war, the key points of discussion should be to assess the real threats to the United States and the best way to deal with the crisis with Iraq . Saddam Hussein and Iraq are a threat, but they are not an immediate threat.”
“There are many unstable and dictatorial regimes, some of which already possess nuclear weapons, unlike Iraq, and some of which possess far more biological and chemical weapons than Iraq, but Washington is inappropriately obsessed with Iraq to the detriment of local, state and national interests,” Allen continued.
He stated that everything the leading policymakers were saying in the months prior to the war was false, most notably Colin Powell’s testimony to the United Nations, which was built on false intelligence about mobile biological weapons labs and Iraqi links to al-Qaida. Allen questioned who could have known about the discrepancies in hindsight and who did know about them and lied.
Among the major lessons learned, Allen pointed to militarism on the part of the United States. He said that since the onset of the war, rhetoric has been altered and the United States is acting unilaterally in an apparent “arrogance of power.” American military expenditure is more than that of the rest of the world’s nations combined and the “doctrine of pre-emption has given war a new status,” according to Allen.
The consequences of war are “unpredictable and very threatening,” Allen wrote in his op-ed column. He prophetically listed these consequences as being “the likely escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the volatile destabilization of Iraq, with Shia uprisings in the South possibly linked with Islamic militants in Iran; Kurdish uprisings in the North . and the permanent stationing of many thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq and the expenditure of many billions of dollars trying to impose foreign order on the chaos.”
At this point in Iraq, Allen said, “The best thing we can do is withdraw the troops . but then our policy should not be hands-off.” He went on to say that the United States needs to help undo some of the damage with reparations and should be working hand-in-hand with the U.N. and other countries in the region to stabilize and rebuild Iraq.
