U.S.-Iraq War

A

Outlining the ‘Surge’ Strategy

On January 10, 2007, in a nationally televised address, Bush largely rejected the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and put forward many of the recommendations made in the AEI report. He called for an additional 21,500 soldiers to be deployed in Iraq, mostly in Badhdād to halt sectarian violence by both Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. Most of the U.S. troops were to be embedded with Iraqi army forces. A smaller number of the new troops would go to Anbar province, where foreign and native fighters, some aligned with a group known variously as al-Qaeda in Iraq or al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, were active. The group did not exist prior to the September 11 attacks, and some intelligence officials doubted whether it had organizational ties to al-Qaeda itself.

Bush accused Iran and Syria of allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory “to move in and out of Iraq” and he charged Iran with providing “material support for attacks on American troops.” He said, “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” Bush warned that he was ordering a second aircraft-carrier battle group and Patriot antimissile batteries to the Persian Gulf.

During his speech, Bush acknowledged that mistakes had been made in Iraq and said that he took responsibility for them. Asked in interviews what mistakes had been made, Bush cited among other incidents the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. In a background briefing for reporters prior to his January 10 speech, Bush also mentioned an apparent massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. marines in Haditha in 2005.

Bush’s decision to introduce more troops to Iraq, which he characterized as a “surge,” not an escalation, met with opposition in Congress. But Democrats were divided on how to respond. In March 2007 the U.S. House of Representatives took the boldest step, voting 218 to 212 for a binding resolution that would require most U.S. combat troops to leave Iraq by September 2008, a resolution that was vetoed by Bush. Democrats agreed to drop their demand for a timed withdrawal. Instead, a compromise was reached in which progress in Iraq would be measured by certain “benchmarks,” with the administration reporting periodically on its progress in meeting those benchmarks.

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In September 2007 General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, gave the first formal presentation on the administration’s progress since the “surge” began. In his testimony Petraeus asserted that the surge was successfully reducing the level of violence in Iraq. He said that the 30,000 troops added to U.S. forces by the surge, bringing it to a peak level of 169,000, would no longer be needed by July 2008. However, he cautioned that about 130,000 remaining U.S. troops would need an indefinite amount of time to help stabilize Iraq and that it would be “premature” to discuss further withdrawals. Petraeus said he foresaw a long-term need for the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq.

In October 2007 another significant military voice cast doubt on the effectiveness of the surge strategy, however. Retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who headed U.S. combat forces in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, called the U.S. mission in Iraq “a nightmare with no end in sight.” Sanchez called the surge a “desperate attempt” to make up for failed U.S. policies in Iraq. In November, Sanchez allied himself with Democratic legislation to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2008.

Opponents of the war challenged Petraeus’s assessment of the surge’s success, saying that the general had selectively “cherry-picked” statistics to support his claim that violence was declining. They pointed to a nonpartisan report released just prior to Petraeus’s testimony by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent agency that advises Congress. The report maintained that the Iraqi government was failing to meet the chief political benchmarks needed for political reconciliation in Iraq and an end to sectarian fighting.

President Bush followed up Petraeus’s testimony with a national TV address in which he called for an “enduring” U.S. relationship with Iraq that would require a U.S. troop presence long after his presidency ended. Bush proposed a defense pact with Iraq along the lines of the defense treaties that have kept U.S. forces in South Korea since the Korean War ended. Bush said a long-term U.S. force was needed to prevent a victory by al-Qaeda and to counter Iran, thereby preventing extremists from gaining control of “a key part of the global energy supply.”

B

The Iraq War and the 2008 Presidential Election Year

As 2008 began, attention focused on the U.S. presidential election year with the two major political parties taking nearly opposite positions on the Iraq war. The leading Democratic presidential candidates promised to begin phased withdrawals of U.S. combat forces from Iraq if elected, while leaving some troops there indefinitely to help train the Iraqi military in counterinsurgency efforts. The leading Republican candidates supported the war, insisting that the war could still be won.

The Republicans generally championed the surge strategy as a success. They pointed to a decline in the number of attacks on U.S. forces and a lessening of sectarian violence, particularly in Baghdād, the capital. They also noted the emergence of Awakening Councils consisting of former Sunni insurgents, who were cooperating with U.S. forces in attacking al-Qaeda in Iraq, particularly in volatile al-Anbar province. They also credited increased pressure on Iran with a decline in the use of armor-piercing roadside bombs known as explosively formed projectiles or explosively formed penetrators, both dubbed EFPs, which were especially deadly and were supposedly supplied by Iran.

The Democrats and other opponents of the war generally disputed the success of the surge, arguing that the number of insurgent attacks remained significant, averaging about 2,000 a month, and that 2007 was the deadliest year yet for U.S. forces. They noted that sectarian attacks on civilians continued to occur in Baghdād and that any lessening of violence was more likely the result of firm boundaries being established between Shia and Sunni neighborhoods rather than the beginnings of political reconciliation. Many observers also believed that the cooperation of the Awakening Councils was likely to be short-lived and was mostly opportunistic since they were being paid by U.S. forces. According to this outlook, the Sunni insurgents remained the principal component of the anti-U.S. resistance, while al-Qaeda in Iraq’s largely foreign fighters were not a significant military force, numbering only about 6,000 fighters. There was also evidence that U.S. forces increasingly relied on air strikes, rather than infantry encounters with insurgents, in order to keep U.S. casualties low. The number of U.S. air strikes in Iraq increased by five times in 2007 over the number in 2006, with an average of four bombs a day dropped on Iraqi targets in 2007.

By March 2008 Senator John McCain had become the Republican Party’s apparent presidential candidate, having won enough delegates in the party’s primaries and caucuses to ensure his nomination at the Republican convention. McCain traveled to Iraq in March and returned with a report that the surge was working and Iraq was becoming less violent and more stable. McCain argued that even if it took a 50- to 100-year occupation to succeed, the effort would be worth it.

VI

Economic Costs of the War

In January 2008 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that $440 billion had been spent on the war in Iraq since it began. The CBO estimated that the war would eventually cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. A study by two U.S. economists—the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes—calculated that the total cost of the war might reach $4 trillion. The study factored in long-term health-care and disability costs for U.S. forces wounded in Iraq, interest on borrowing to pay the war’s costs, and the impact on the U.S. economy from higher oil prices.

Similarly the Iraq Study Group report found that the costs of caring for wounded veterans and replacing damaged or destroyed military equipment would reach into the hundreds of billions. The Iraq Study Group cited estimates as high as $2 trillion for the final cost of U.S. involvement in Iraq.

The Iraqi economy was devastated by the invasion and the guerrilla war that followed. Electricity was often not available to run factories. Unemployment was variously estimated for much of this period from 20 to 60 percent, compared with an unemployment rate of 25 percent during the Great Depression in the United States. According to the Iraq Study Group report, Iraq’s economy grew at a rate of 4 percent in 2006, well below the target growth rate of 10 percent. The rate of inflation was more than 50 percent. Iraq went from producing 2.8 million barrels of oil a day to 1.8 million barrels a day in January 2006, as a result of guerrilla war and pipeline sabotage. Some economists estimated that the decline in production represented a loss of roughly $14 billion in oil revenues. By the end of 2006 the Iraq Study Group report found that production had climbed back to 2.2 million barrels a day, but was still below the Iraq government’s goal of 2.5 million barrels. By early 2008 Iraq had begun producing 2.4 million barrels per day. However, renewed fighting in the southern oil port city of Al Başrah and elsewhere in southern Iraq between the Shia militia known as the Mahdi Army and regular Iraqi army forces was accompanied by sabotage of oil pipelines, which threatened to curb Iraq’s oil production.

VII

Causes of the War

The Bush administration maintained that it invaded Iraq because it believed the Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies. Only the ouster of Hussein from power would end that threat, the administration argued, and prevent Iraq from giving those deadly weapons to terrorist groups. After no such weapons were found, the Bush administration still argued that the invasion was justified because it ousted a tyrant responsible for numerous human rights violations. The creation of a democracy in Iraq, President Bush said, could have a transformative effect on the entire Middle East, helping bring peace to the region and isolate the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalist jihadis (holy warriors), who believed in waging a jihad (holy war) against the West.

Critics of the invasion from various political positions took issue with most of the Bush administration’s fundamental premises and advanced their own theories for why the invasion and subsequent occupation were undertaken. First, on the political merits of the case for war, they argued that Hussein’s regime had been severely weakened by economic sanctions and Iraq’s military was incapable of posing a serious threat to the United Sates or its allies in the Middle East. They further disputed the likelihood that Iraq would furnish extremely destructive weapons to a terrorist organization, weapons that could in turn be used against Iraq. As a secular government, they argued, Iraq had reason to fear and distrust jihadi groups, such as al-Qaeda, which favor strict theocratic rule and have grandiose visions of reestablishing a caliphate throughout the Islamic world.

Critics of the war advanced a variety of theories to explain why the Bush administration was intent on invading Iraq. These theories ranged from a desire to seek short-term advantages in domestic politics to the desire to establish long-term military and economic control over a region that contains more than half of the world’s oil and natural gas production.

Iraq has the Middle East’s second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and may well possess the largest. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known reserves, but the extent of Iraq’s petroleum deposits is still unknown. Some estimates have placed the country’s possible reserves as high as an additional 220 billion to 300 billion barrels, which would makes its reserves worth an estimated $41.5 trillion with the price of oil at $100 a barrel.

Moreover, most of the Middle East’s oil passes through the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz, and Iraq is in a strategic position for guarding the strait. Most of the European Union and Japan are largely dependent on this oil supply. The rapidly developing economies of China and India are increasingly reliant on the safe passage of oil from the Persian Gulf. After the United States was asked to remove most of its military forces from Saudi Arabia, the United States no longer had significant military bases in the Gulf region. Some foreign policy analysts suspect that the Bush administration sought a military presence in Iraq as a way to control oil supplies.

For these critics, the U.S. goal was not so much to exploit Iraq’s oil as it was to position the United States as the strategic controller of these crucial resources, thereby giving the United States leverage over the economies of any potential rivals. This leverage was increasingly needed, left-wing critics of the war said, because of the mounting debt of the United States and in particular because one nation, China, with one of the most rapidly growing economies in the world, was becoming the single-largest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds among foreign nations. China, along with Russia, had also proposed an Asian Energy Security Grid that aimed to give the developing industrial countries of Asia assured access to energy resources independent of the United States.

In September 2007 more credence was given to the view that Iraq’s oil was instrumental in the decision to wage war by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Greenspan wrote in his just-published memoir: “Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.” Greenspan clarified in later interviews that he supported the invasion of Iraq precisely for that reason, saying it was “essential” to “take out Saddam.” Greenspan admitted he never heard Bush cite oil as his motivation for the war, but he quoted a lower-level administration official as saying, “Well, unfortunately, we can't talk about oil.”

For some opponents of the war, the Bush administration’s alleged goal of gaining access to Irag’s oil was about more than just controlling energy supplies. These critics charged that the U.S.-British invasion sought to open the way for U.S. and British oil companies to gain access to Iraq’s oil and to be in position to explore for additional oil and gas reserves. They pointed to the close ties of leading figures in the Bush administration to the oil industry itself, noting that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had been a member of the board of Chevron Corporation; that Vice President Dick Cheney had been the chief executive officer of Halliburton, a key player in oilfield technologies and services; and that Bush himself, along with his father, had long been involved in the oil industry. In September 2007 the Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas, Texas, signed a production-sharing contract with the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq. The president of Hunt Oil was a long-time political ally of Bush and a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Board.

Furthermore, according to this view, the Bush administration created as a “benchmark” for progress in Iraq the passage of a new oil law. U.S. officials helped draft a proposed law that would give foreign oil companies the ability to operate in Iraq and to reap the profits from newly discovered oil fields.

But others discounted economic reasons as primary and cited the political stature of the United States as the world’s leading superpower. In this view, a military response against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was insufficient. It was both necessary and convenient to make a stronger statement in response to the September 11 attacks by flexing U.S. military might in Iraq.