Twenty years ago today, the U.S. invaded Iraq under the code name Operation Iraqi Freedom, setting in motion a disastrous war that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over four thousand Americans, and triggered a new era of instability in the Middle East.
Every time an anniversary for that catastrophic war passes, American commentators and former government officials who supported it engage in a nauseating ritual of trying to escape accountability. They downplay what was foreseeable, obscure the lies that served as pretexts for the war and critique the invasion primarily through a strategic lens rather than a moral or an ideological one.
These revisionist narratives typically get some pushback. But it’s not enough to re-examine what Americans got wrong. A true reckoning requires examining what happened to Iraqis. And while many are broadly familiar with the huge number of Iraqi casualties, few in the West have paid attention to how the war reshaped Iraqi politics and society. What did the U.S.-sponsored “democracy-building” project actually produce in a country that Freedom House ranks today as definitively “not free,” despite its nominal status as a democracy?
To get an analysis of the war’s political effects on Iraq, I called up Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow and the project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, and a co-author of “Once Upon a Time in Iraq.” Mansour, who is currently on one of his regular visits to Iraq, discussed the contradictions of the U.S.’s political goals in nation-building, how elite exiles worked with the U.S. to reshape the Iraqi political system to suit their own interests, and the dark prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Zeeshan Aleem: What’s your assessment of why the Iraq War was waged?
Renad Mansour: I think it became very clear in the early days of the George W. Bush administration that Iraq, Saddam Hussein and his…
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