The U.S. Departs Iraq

For many of us, the Iraq war was a defining event. It became synonymous with the post-9/11 “forever wars,” Abu Ghraib and the limits of costly military campaigns in the name of spreading democracy.

Yesterday America’s long and unhappy adventure in Iraq formally ended. The last U.S. soldiers withdrew, leaving behind a battered nation. My colleague Alissa Rubin was there just after U.S. troops invaded, and has covered many of the chapters between then and now. Today she writes about what she saw in Iraq and what she’s still trying to understand.

What I saw as the U.S. debacle in Iraq unfurled

by Alissa J. Rubin

I got to Iraq a few weeks after the U.S. Army. It was April 2003, just a couple of days after the statue of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was pulled down in Baghdad.

The early days of the invasion, which toppled a hated despot, were so heady with possibility that it was easy to dismiss the warning signs.

In the streets, the mood was charged, watchful. I don’t want to suggest that the Americans were greeted with flowers, let alone as “liberators,” as the American vice president had predicted. But the Iraqis seemed not so much afraid of the invaders, even those in Humvees, as they were curious. The ones I met were intrigued by finally getting a glimmer of a future not defined by the brutality of the Hussein regime. And it was the Americans who had helped bring about that change.

But from the beginning, the United States did not understand the country it was storming into. Twenty-three years later, as it pulls the last of its forces out, it probably still does not.

One misstep after another

The reason for the invasion and then occupation always seemed like a moving target.

The Bush administration had initially justified it with the claim, later debunked — that Iraq was developing chemical weapons.

But the military officers and policymakers who moved into the palaces of Baghdad’s so-called Green Zone had a new set of rationales: It wasn’t that Hussein was a danger to mankind, or a brutal dictator. Instead, as President George W. Bush put it, the U.S. and its allies were there “to help the Iraqi people build a lasting democracy in the heart of the Middle East.”

This began the pattern of changing the justification for the continued U.S. presence in the country. Along the way, the U.S.-led coalition made one disastrous misstep after another.

Soon after the invasion, a fast-growing Sunni insurgency began taking on the American occupiers. The insurgents bombed U.S. checkpoints and military vehicles; they laid ever more sophisticated road bombs.

That made U.S. troops more skittish. They fired upon speeding cars near traffic stops, believing they were being targeted, even when the cars were merely carrying families trying to get to safety. Some U.S. troops engaged in human rights abuses, among them the sexual violence and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison and the killing of civilians in the village of Haditha.

This only fueled the insurgency, which over the years became a training ground for the even more militant Islamic State group.

Since ousting Hussein created not just a political vacuum but a security one, Iran moved methodically to fill the gap. By backing Iraqi Shia Muslim politicians with whom it shared some common ground, it gradually embedded allies in key ministries including the Interior, which controls the police. Today, parties with links to Tehran are the kingmakers in Iraqi politics.

‘Do you mean, disband the whole army?’

Of all the mistakes, one moment in particular stands out.

I remember vividly the order from Paul Bremer, the chief civilian administrator, to disband the Iraqi Army. “Do you mean, disband the whole army?” I asked a military press attaché.

Iraq had some 400,000 troops.

Stunned, baffled and increasingly angry, the dismissed Iraqi soldiers gathered every morning at the gates of the Green Zone. Some had a message for Washington.

“Tell your president that we had to fight for Saddam,” one told me. “We are glad he’s gone.”

Another said he was 51 years old and could not make ends meet without his pension. “I have five children,” he said. “My son lost his leg. I work as a janitor. I am too old to find a new job.”

One man wearing a long dishdasha robe — I can still see his face in my mind’s eye — asked the interpreter where I was from. When he heard “U.S.,” his face twisted in disgust and he spat a stream of liquid at me. Some landed on my shoe. I stared at it, unsure whether to wipe it off.

I wondered if no one saw the widening gap between Iraqi hopes for a post-Hussein future and what the U.S. was actually offering.

Many Iraqis had unrealistic expectations. They wanted America to transform their country overnight into a Middle Eastern version of the shiny, idealized American world they knew from the bootlegged movies they had watched secretly under Hussein.

But what many more were unprepared for was America’s disregard for the economic realities of their lives. They were unprepared for America’s failure to realize that when you take away a person’s job, you take away their place in their communities, their families, their dignity.

Only much later did I connect the fury of the man who spat on me with his feeling of having been disrespected. It was just a few weeks after the fall of Saddam; a dangerous dynamic had already begun.

Read Alissa’s full story.

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