Mick Hartley

David Patrikarakos at UnHerd – The West still doesn’t understand Iraq:

Last year was, on balance, a miserable one for the world. And while only a fool attempts to predict the future in geopolitics, I am firm in the conviction that 2025 will be worse.

If 2024 was depressing, it was also instructive, in the Middle East at any rate. There, we saw the deepening of a trend which I suspect will come to characterise 2025 even more strongly: the shattering of political and policy beliefs so long and dearly held that they have amounted to orthodoxies. For the smart politician or state, this allows for sparks of opportunity amid the gloom.

Towards the end of the year, I was in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, discussing the supposedly imminent withdrawal of coalition troops from the country. Under Operation Inherent Resolve, Washington keeps 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria, where the UK has 1,000-1,200 and 150-200 respectively. Their job is to work alongside local partners, like the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to prevent a resurgence of the terror group ISIS. Coalition forces also fill critical gaps in Iraqi security.

But Iran, which dominates Iraq through its proxy Shia militia groups, has long wanted us out. In September, the US and Iraq agreed to conclude the formal coalition mission by September 2025, though some troops will remain in advisory roles. The first phase of withdrawal has already begun. A final withdrawal means that Iraq will fall almost completely into Tehran’s grip. My interlocutor was Kurdish and, unsurprisingly, this worries him — as it does millions of Sunnis.

There are, you see, many Iraqis who not only have no problem with Western intervention in their country, but don’t want it to end.

But I was surprised later when a Sunni Arab friend told me that many Iraqis love Trump because, in January 2020, he whacked Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force and the man responsible for so much violence in their country. No matter that Trump brought in a so-called “Muslim ban”, his Western “intervention” in Iraq was more palatable to a section of its people than Iran’s far more localised — and constant — meddling.

This speaks to a broader, unignorable truth: the reality on the ground in the Middle East is often not just merely different to what we read, believe or are told in Oxbridge Area Studies departments, but entirely at odds with it; as is our relationship to the region, and how that is often received by the people there.

So, talking of the "shattering of political and policy beliefs so long and dearly held that they have amounted to orthodoxies", how about the orthodoxy that the 2003 Allied invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam was a horrendous error? It's absolutely set in stone now; you will not hear a word in its favour. Well, tell that to the Kurds. Tell that to the Sunni Trump supporters who welcomed the killing of Qasem Soleimani. 

The opposition to the invasion at the time focused on the horrors of a war against Saddam, but the regime collapsed with remarkable speed. It was hollow – like Assad's regime in Syria. Should the Allies have planned better for the sftermath?…have retained more of Saddam's men for the rebuild? Well, yes, no doubt. But it was always going to be a nightmare with Iran next door. A Sunni regime, that they'd been at war with just a couple of decades back, ruling over a Shia majority, finally overthrown?…of course they were going to take every opportunity to interfere. And of course they did. 

And yes…Syria. Iraq and Syria were the two Ba'athist dictatorships. Of the two, at the time, Saddam's regime was surely the more brutal – as anyone who read Kenan Makiya's Republic of Fear or Cruelty and Silence will attest – with psychopathic sons Uday and Qusay waiting in the wings. The West overthrew Saddam, but Obama declined to intervene in Syria, having learnt the orthodox line that Iraq had been a disaster. Result? The disaster of Syria dwarfed that of Iraq: some 600,ooo slain, millions fleeing the country, Putin testing out his aerial bombardment of civilians and hospitals ready for Ukraine…

Patrikarakos is having none of it. That's clealry not one of the orthodoxies he has in mind:

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a historic mistake. We should not have done it. But we did, and in so doing we removed a brutal and sadistic dictator, but one who nevertheless kept chaos at bay. Chaos that, lest we forget, is built into the Iraqi state, carved illogically from three Ottoman provinces, and filled with a toxic mix of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Iraq was constructed (by us and the French no less) as if it were designed to be a sectarian tinderbox; and once Saddam’s controlling authority was gone, that tinderbox erupted. Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I reported for UnHerd from Baghdad where my fixer Ammar told me something that has lodged, ineradicably, in my mind ever since. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he said. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought.”

Well OK. But note that “We had so much hope in the beginning”. Should we really have left Saddam in charge, defying UN sanctions, terrorising his people with a secret police force and a prison system of torture and death that put Syria's in the shade? And who's to blame that it didn't work out after Saddam's overthrow led to that hope in the hearts of so many Iraqis? Yes, we should have done better. But might Iran not take some of the blame? The Iraqi politicians, even?

Ah….where's Christopher Hitchens now we need him?