Though history is going to debate endlessly the US invasion of Iraq, certain verdicts are already being pronounced, none of them charitable to the administration that started a war that claimed more than 150,000 lives.
Even seen through the rational, cold prism of self-interest of the Americans, it has been a disaster. A costly war, both in human and financial terms. To the US alone, the eight-and-a-half year war has cost a direct economic cost of $845 billion but its total economic cost is pegged by economists at around $3 trillion. Weapons of mass destruction, one of the major premises of the war, weren’t found anywhere. Al-Qaeda, the shadowy network that served as the bogeyman that the Bush administration used to justify everything, now has a foothold in the country, something that would have been unlikely in Saddam Hussein’s time. The US leave behind exactly the sort of cesspool of violence that breeds terror which they had incorrectly painted out a Baathist Iraq to be.
Saddam Hussein was no angel. And the people of Iraq deserved better than a cruel, totalitarian dictator. But his similarity with, say, Gaddafi, ended at despotism. He managed to build up a middle-class and spent heavily on infrastructure and education. He managed to keep the country’s considerable sectarian tensions tightly coiled up. If a regime’s tyranny on its own people was ever a justification for war, then there were far more despotic regimes in the world that can be higher on the list of priorities, some of them that do, in fact, export terror. The US frets about Iran now. The latter had a counter-weight in Saddam’s Iraq.
The US is the most powerful military force that human history has seen. Any point in the entire globe is in its actionable reach. It is also – despite the occasional economic turmoil – an incredibly rich country, leading the world in scientific research and the ensuing wealth creation. It has managed to absorb even a colossal mistake like the Iraq war. A word of caution to those from within Pakistan who harbour imperial ambitions.