Why Did The Iraq War Fail?

Why America's intervention in Iraq failed to bring peace and democracy.

Hot History

Oct 07, 2023

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“Jaws of victory”

General Jack Keane, who was the Army’s Chief of Staff at the time, warned about the dangers of invading Iraq. He criticized the wartime plans of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Commanding General Tommy Franks, which did not supply enough soldiers to adequately secure Iraq and its population.

Even as an Iraqi insurgency grew, General Franks ordered a withdrawal for most US troops by September of 2003. Over 110,000 troops prepared to leave, while a contingent of 30,000 stayed to keep peace in Iraq.

By May of 2003, President Bush boldly declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. A large sign in the background read, “Mission Accomplished.” But this declaration proved to be very premature.

Paul Bremer

To handle post-Saddam Iraq, the Bush administration hired an obscure diplomat named Paul Bremer. He lacked much practical experience in the region, and did not speak Arabic. Despite this, Bremer was chosen by the president to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA.

When Bremer flew into Baghdad on a C-130, he was shocked to find many of the city’s buildings engulfed in flames. The Iraqi capital had been on fire for a month, since there was no fire department to put out the flames. There was no government. There was no police. The army was gone.

Bremer took up residence at the Green Zone, a heavily fortified area that was cut off from most of Iraq. The rest of the country appeared as a Third World hellhole. Electricity was intermittent at best. Sewage problems abounded. Potholes filled the streets.

De-Ba’athification

As Bremer settled in, he now had to navigate through the convoluted web of Iraq’s sectarian politics. The county’s situation was very factional. Shias and Sunnis each engaged in holy wars against one another. There was the Kurdish Question. For two decades, the government was totally dysfunctional. Saddam and his Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party had controlled Iraq’s majority Shiite population, as well as the Kurds, with an iron fist.

Bremer thought that, by removing Saddam’s loyalists from Iraq’s regime, this would allow more tolerance for Shiites and Kurds. He assumed that the two religious factions would work together peacefully in a democracy. He issued Order Number One, which ended Sunni domination of Iraq’s government.

But Bremer’s policy of total de-Ba’athification was a huge mistake. Any ties to Saddam’s regime became grounds for removal from office. And this was not confined to senior government official; it also spread to other civilian professions, such as teachers.

Then Bremer issued Order Number Two, which dissolved Iraq’s military. It was a colossal error. With the stroke of a pen, 300,000 Iraqi military personnel were in the streets without jobs. US ground forces in Iraq had hoped that a pacified Iraqi army could be repurposed in a post-Saddam, democratic Iraq. But now, this was impossible. The US soldiers could no longer rely on the local military. Within seventy-two hours, the Iraqis perpetrated their first terrorist attack, the target of which was an airport. Two American military police officers were violently murdered in the process.

Insurgency

The situation grew more disastrous by the day. General Franks retired, as did most of Iraq’s senior military officials. This left a huge vacuum, which was happily exploited by disgruntled factions of Iraqis. Sheiks reportedly received money from insurgents to violently resist the foreign occupiers.

Despite the growing instability, the Bush administration continued to regard this extremist violence as isolated incidents that could be contained. The Coalition proceeded to capture 32 of the 35 most wanted Iraqi leaders.

But if there was any doubt about the existence of a full-scale Iraqi resistance to American forces, it would not last long. Soon, a car bomb denoted at a US embassy in Jordan. A UN envoy was killed. Further bombings followed. A police station, the Red Cross, and the UN establishments in Iraq were bombed. It became clear that the Iraqis were leading a systematic effort to uproot foreign influence.

The Pentagon’s plan to withdraw over 100,000 US troops by the end of the summer was now out of the question. Iraq was in chaos. America was still at war.

Abu Ghraib

Rumsfeld arrived in Iraq to tour the country’s deteriorating situation for himself. He was horrified to learn that US intelligence was almost non-existent. The US had no idea who it was even fighting! So US officials had to scramble to arrest and interrogate some Iraqi prisoners, hoping to glean some vital information.

Many of these unsavory characters were held in US custody at Saddam’s most-feared prison, Abu Ghraib. This decision proved to be yet another colossal mistake. Tens of thousands of Iraqis, who might have been previously neutral, were now growing openly hostile to American occupation.

As the situation intensified, Bremer and Rumsfeld clashed over how to handle it. Against Bremer’s wishes, the Defense Department demanded that a provisional Iraqi regime be formed by June of 2004.

Fight for Fallujah

Good news came when Saddam Hussein was captured on Saturday, December 13, 2003. He was found in an underground cellar in the town of Ad-Dawr, about 15 kilometers south of Tikrit. US officials hoped that Saddam’s capture could bring some stability to Iraq. But Saddam’s loyalists would not go down quietly.

Four months later, in the Sunni heartland of Fallujah, four American contractors were brutally murdered. Their mangled corpses were dragged through the streets, and strung up on a bridge for all to see. It was a grisly, horrifying sight. The American public was fuming with rage. President Bush began to personally intervene in the process for the first time, ordering the Marines to inflict an immediate retaliation.

The Marines brought a massive beatdown on Fallujah. They broke into buildings, and killed the Iraqis. Al-Jazeera broadcasted images of this violence to stoke hatred of the Americans. Scenes showed dying Muslim civilians, with their mosques aflame in the background. It only fueled the anti-American insurgency. Iraq’s provisional regime, which had not been democratically elected, faced similar opposition.

The uprising proved disastrous for Bremer’s reconstruction efforts. He begged the president to pull back the Marines, which Bush did. The Marines were instead ordered to simply surround Fallujah, in an effort to quarantine the insurgents. The Americans appeared indecisive, incompetent, and inhumane to the eyes of many Middle Easterners. But Bremer’s gamble managed to work, and his governing coalition managed to hold out.

Iraqi democracy

On June 28, 2004, Bremer rammed through a new democratic constitution. He handed back sovereignty to the Iraqis. It was time to go home. However, US officials feared that the terrorists would stage an attack, in order to embarrass the Americans. There were worries about surface-to-air missiles. So Bremer had to make a silent exit home through Jordan. Bremer left behind 140,000 American troops to oversee Iraq’s transition into democracy. As the Americans left, the terrorists ramped up their attacks. It was an ignominious departure, to say the least.

In the summer of 2004, President Bush ran for re-election. The administration was determined to finish up the Iraqi situation as soon as possible. So the Pentagon picked out General George Casey, who was ordered to pacify Iraq. He ordered US troops to hide in their large bases, only engaging the insurgents when absolutely necessary. He called this the “light footprint” strategy. But this was not a good strategy. The US needed to crush the insurgency. Minimal engagement would not accomplish this goal.

Mahdi Army

In the Shiite slums of Baghdad, the flames of anti-Americanism were stoked by the Islamic clergy. One such figure was Muqtada al-Sadr, who rallied thousands of followers against the US occupation. With support from Iran, Sadr’s Shiite fighters, the Mahdi Army, took up arms in the holy city of Najaf.

Setting up operations in the shrine of Imam Ali Mosque, the cleric dared the Americans to attack. They did. Bombs rained down around the mosque, wiping about the Mahdi forces. US forces had Sadr surrounded. But the White House was afraid to destroy the mosque. General Casey was ordered to arrange a ceasefire.

Sadr agreed to lay down his arms. The US spent $1.2 million buying back weapons, and another $330 million more in reconstruction funds. This part of Baghdad became very peaceful. For the time being, the insurgency had been pacified.

Fall of Fallujah

Now, the US turned its attention toward the Sunni insurgency, who posed a threat to the upcoming elections. They set up operations from Fallujah. So General Casey orchestrated a full-scale assault against the city. It was a massive success. The Marines demolished Fallujah, and brought it back under American control. Optimism surged back home.

However, many Sunni refugees began to portray the Americans as a harsh occupying force. Sunnis became very suspicious of the Americans, and this only fueled the insurgency further.

On election day, Rumsfeld was now about to test his plan for democracy in Iraq. Thousands of Iraqi civilians poured in to make their voice heard. Women, children, and men lined up vote. It was very encouraging. But unfortunately, due to the anger over Fallujah, the Sunnis had boycotted the election.

Despite having a nominally democratic regime, Iraq was deeply divided between Sunnis and Shiites. A de facto sectarian government was effectively in place. So the Sunnis began to ramp up their acts of terrorism, targeting Shiite civilians. The US forces were unable to protect them, further eroding the legitimacy of Iraq’s elected regime.

Holy war

Even as Iraq degenerated further into religious sectarianism, the Bush administration continued to wrongly believe that the insurgency would quickly diffuse. Al-Qaeda bombed one of the holiest sites of Shia Islam, the al-Askari Shrine in the city of Samara, on February 22, 2006.

Iraq was plunged into bloody civil war. It was a full-scale war of religion. Shiites began to retaliate against Sunnis, blowing up their mosques and murdering their imams. Bodies were dragged through the streets. Sadr unleashed his Mahdi Army. What began as a Sunni insurgency, had now escalated into a two-sided civil war between the two religious denominations.

The Bush administration looked frantically for an Iraqi leader to unite the country. They were looking for someone who could be more pragmatic and less sectarian. The choice was Nouri al-Maliki. Little was known about him. He had been an exile during Saddam’s regime, but he had no governing experience. By May of 2006, he was Iraq’s new prime minister.

The Surge

Back at home, President Bush suffered a crushing defeat in the midterm elections. The American public was fed up with Iraq. Rumsfeld was fired. The Bush administration had reached its nadir.

General Keane recommended a radically new strategy: the Surge. He explained that, to pacify Iraq, it would require a vastly larger quantity of American troops. It was a total reversal of Casey’s light footprint. Most of Bush’s advisers warned against any further entanglement in Iraq. But to the president, it was the only remaining option to win the war. On January 10, 2007, the president announced the Surge. An additional 20,000 US soldiers poured into Iraq. To oversee the new strategy, Bush chose General David Petraeus.

Petraeus was an erudite intellectual, with a PhD from Princeton. He spoke well to politicians and journalists alike. He was something of an outsider to the military establishment. More importantly, the general was an expert in counterinsurgency. Petraeus was very blunt with Bush. He informed the president that, if this last-ditch Surge failed, the war would be a complete failure.

In spring of 2007, General Petraeus led 30,000 troops in this new strategy. He dispatched tens of thousands of American soldiers from Iraq’s military bases to confront the terrorists head-on. Door to door, street by street, the US troops fought bitterly to seize back control. Bombs, artillery, and every weapon under the Sun were deployed. The bloodshed was enormous. Petraeus and his men often found themselves in bloody firefights with heavily-armed insurgents. As May turned to June, American casualties continued to mount, reaching into the hundreds. Over 120 Americans were lost in combat in June alone. Political pressure grew more intense. Many Bush officials began to turn against al-Maliki, but the president refused to depose the Iraqi prime minister.

Anbar Awakening

As American losses continued to surge, General Petraeus adopted a new strategy. He would attempt to drive a wedge between the al-Qaeda fighters and their Sunni tribal supporters.

The Sunnis, despite being of the same theological bent as al-Qaeda, were only reluctant allies with the terrorist organization. Al-Qaeda murdered many Sunnis in addition to the Shiites. The Sunni tribes were eager to expel these foreigners from their lands.

So Petraeus made an audaciously controversial move. He chose to make common cause with the Sunnis. He put their leaders on the American payroll. In one secret meeting after another, the US forces handed off millions of dollars to these tribal allies. Petraeus called his cadre of Sunni supporters “the Sons of Iraq.” In exchange for expelling al-Qaeda, Petraeus promised a role for the Sunnis in Iraq’s government.

It was a deeply controversial move. In total, over 100,000 Sunnis swelled in Petraeus’ forces, at a staggering cost of $4 billion.

The Surge appeared to work beautifully. Violence dropped by 90%. By the end of 2008, the Iraqi insurgency had finally been diffused. Al-Qaeda admitted defeat in their transmissions, which were intercepted by American personnel. The Mahdi forces in Basra and Sadr City had been defeated.

The shoe

In December of 2008, in the final month of Bush’s presidency, the commander-in-chief made a final visit to Iraq. He met with Maliki, and the two leaders signed an agreement which retained US military presence until 2011.

But during the press conference, an angry Iraqi reporter threw a shoe at President Bush. He was outraged that at least 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians had been killed since the invasion began in 2003. For Bush, it was an utterly humiliating conclusion to what had already been a strenuous time at the White House.

Obama’s war

When Barack Obama took office in January of 2009, he inherited two deeply unpopular wars. The new president was elected to the White House on the promise to finally end the six-year engagement in Iraq. But General Petraeus warned Obama about the consequences of withdrawing in such a predictable, timetable way.

After a month in office, President Obama spoke to thousands of Marines in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. There, he explained his plan to resolve Iraq. Obama felt that Iraq’s situation had dramatically improved. But against the warnings of his advisers, the president publicly announced a withdrawal from Iraq by 2011.

Obama didn’t care about Iraq, viewing it as a misguided war of choice. He delegated Iraqi policy to his vice president Joe Biden, so that he could focus his attention on other issues. He wanted to double down on Afghanistan, Osama’s base of operations for 9/11. He sought to revive the economy following the Great Recession. The locus of his agenda would be Obamacare. He cared much more about domestic priorities than foreign affairs.

The consequences of Obama’s indifference to Iraq were felt immediately. The US immediately winded down its personnel in Iraq. Meanwhile, the war’s policymakers were shut off from direct access to the president. Iraq was now being treated as a sovereign state, rather than a ravaged country in flux.

Without much guidance from the US president, al-Maliki was left on his own to handle Iraq. He grew increasingly authoritarian and sectarian. He began to purge Sunnis from the ranks of Iraq’s military. He became increasingly concerned about the reliability of the armed forces. The prime minister cracked down on Petraeus’ former allies. Despite these misgivings, the US government continued to back al-Maliki.

Leaving Iraq

By the spring of 2011, there were still about 46,000 American troops inside Iraq. Obama had promised to withdraw all forces by December, but the Pentagon demanded a residual force of about 20,000 soldiers. The Obama White House was shocked. In tense negotiations, the president managed to negotiate that number down to about 5,000. But Obama still needed to negotiate a new agreement with Iraq’s al-Maliki.

Unlike his predecessor Bush, Obama made an extra demand on Maliki’s administration. He required that US troops enjoy legal immunity in Iraq. Iraq’s parliament was not about to make that concession, partly because of Iranian influence and Sunni opposition. Obama’s negotiations were a failure. Both sides were pretty sick of the war, so the preexisting agreement, which had been made with Bush, was kept in place.

By December of 2011, Obama triumphantly announced a respectable conclusion to the ill-fated Iraq War. For him, the mere fact of leaving was a victory in itself. He was not too concerned with what he would be leaving behind in Iraq, because he thought the decision to invade was a mistake from the start. In Obama’s eyes, it was a great relief for America’s economy and military forces. To celebrate, Obama invited al-Maliki to the White House for a press conference. Obama entrusted Iraq’s democratic future to the prime minister, despite his own misgivings about the man.

After nearly nine years of war, the US was finally leaving Iraq. 4,000 brave Americans had been killed. More than 30,000 were wounded. The estimated cost was $1 trillion. The withdrawal was absolute. Over 10,000 State Department employees were recalled from Iraq. The war was over.

ISIS

In the aftermath of American withdrawal, the religious sectarianism of Iraq began to resurface. Maliki began a harsh crackdown on the country’s Sunni population. The Sunnis, which consisted of about one-fifth of Iraq’s population, were outraged by the country’s government in Baghdad. Meanwhile, neighboring Syria was plunged into its own civil war, providing a fresh supply of soldiers and funding for an armed revolt.

By 2014, the Sunnis of Iraq planned their revenge. In northern Iraq, they began organize a resistance to Maliki’s regime. Many of Saddam’s former Ba’athist officials joined their cause. They called themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. One by one, Iraq’s cities began to fall with an alarming rapidity. Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul quickly collapsed. Despite having security forces as numerous as 30,000 troops, Maliki’s government was unable to face down the aggression of only a couple thousand ISIS fighters. There were no American advisers to provide any guidance to Iraq’s military. Nor did the Sons of Iraq, which Petraeus had worked so hard to train, come to Maliki’s rescue. Those soldiers were Sunnis themselves, and felt alienated by Maliki’s religious persecutions. A decade after the original Shia-Sunni conflict, holy wars were once again being fought in Iraq. Sadr mobilized his Mahdi Army. The streets ran red with blood.

Obama’s legacy was on the line. Up to this point, he had successfully handled the crisis in Afghanistan, overseeing the assassination of bin Laden. But now a new terrorist threat was on the rise in northern and western Iraq, involving thousands of armed jihadists.

ISIS was stronger than any iteration of al-Qaeda before it. They were much stronger, and had greater numbers. They had access to passports, which they could use to sneak into the Western countries. They were well-funded, and seasoned by decades of military experience. They were also very well-armed. Worse still, they controlled more territory than Osama ever did. ISIS fighters looted the banks of Mosul, and seized Iraq’s second-largest munitions supply point. Having pillaged Iraq, they took their treasures back to Syria, where they captured the oil-rich province of Deir al-Zor. With ISIS on the loose, a new war had only just begun.

Conclusion

So, why did Iraq fail? What happened?

Numerous mistakes were made, from start to finish.

The first mistake was invading Iraq in the first place. There was only flimsy evidence to suggest a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Nor did the Ba’athist dictator restart his weapons of mass destruction, as had been erroneously assumed by the Bush administration. The war’s apparent lack of justification was a self-inflicted wound, which utterly destroyed much of the popular support for the war effort within the American public.

The second mistake was completely dismantling Saddam’s regime, even after the dictator was apprehended. Paul Bremer’s uncompromising stance toward de-Ba’athification did nothing but make unnecessary enemies in Iraq. Unknown to Western policymakers, Saddam’s Ba’athist regime had been lid on a country torn asunder by religious factionalism and strife. By disbanding the Iraqi Army, US officials deprived itself of local military forces that should have been used as proxies. Instead, the military expertise of those men went to the anti-American insurgency. Huge mistake!

The third mistake was the failure to directly confront the insurgency. The “light footprint” strategy meant that, despite deploying thousands of Americans to Iraq, the insurgents were free to terrorize the civilian population with impunity. The US did not commit a sufficient supply of troops to protect the population and secure the country.

The fourth mistake was Obama’s strategy of withdrawal. The president’s hands-off approach, as well as his obstinate insistence that American troops be shielded from Iraqi law, left Maliki to fend for himself. Even worse, Obama publicly announced his orderly timetable transition, which allowed the Iraqi insurgents to simply wait until the Americans left before seizing power. But worst of all, despite repeated warnings from the Pentagon, Obama made the fatal mistake of not leaving behind any US advisers to ensure the stability of Maliki’s regime. The government in Baghdad quickly collapsed, and this left a power vacuum for dissatisfied Sunnis to fill.

Ultimately, it is unknowable whether the Iraq War could have been won with a better strategy. The country is populated by a superstitious and barbarous people, who are prone to the bloody factionalism that has always accompanied dogmatic religion. Perhaps the Iraqis themselves—or at least their incompetent and brutal leaders—deserve most of the blame. But by studying the failure of Iraq, American policymakers can avoid future mistakes and engage in a more effective war against jihadist violence.