Historians would later record how Secretary of State Colin Powell prevailed in a key Cabinet meeting in early 2003, when he refused to go before the United Nations because he lacked proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
“What if the U.N. inspections have actually worked, Mr. President?” he asked. “It would be a disaster if we invade and then can’t find anything.”
A reluctant George W. Bush agreed, maintaining the no-fly zones and other pressure but postponing the invasion. Saddam Hussein kept his crowing to a minimum, recognizing his narrow escape. What’s more, he had other problems....
Despite the obsequious yes-men around him, Saddam was still cunning enough to maintain back channel intelligence sources who told him at least part of the truth. He heard that unrest among the Shi’a majority continued to grow, despite the repression, and there were even grumblings from the Sunni. His regime had always depended on huge amounts of oil money to pay off the people with public works and populist health and education spending, and to also finance a giant network of informers.
But Iraq’s oil earnings were way down, due partly to deteriorating infrastructure and a stubbornly low world price. Saddam had invaded Kuwait in 1990 mainly for financial reasons, but that gambit failed. Iraq was cheating on the U.N.’s oil-for-food program, but he still was not getting enough income to maintain his system.
So in late 2003, when the first uprisings broke out in the south, the Iraqi army, with aging equipment and low morale, was slow to respond. The revolt spread to Saddam City right in Baghdad itself, which the Shi’a majority there had already started called Sadr City in honor of one of their martyrs. Hundreds were killed, but just as in the uprisings against the hated Shah in nearby Iran a quarter-century earlier, the deaths only inspired even more resistance.
After 6 months or so, the Sunni tribal sheikhs northwest of Baghdad recognized Saddam was losing control, which jeopardized their privileged position within the system. Their efforts to persuade him to leave peacefully failed, in part because no country could be found to accept him and his family into exile. So eventually, some of the Sunni generals staged a coup, killing him and many of his immediate entourage.
Yet violence only got worse. Armed militias formed from various religious and tribal groupings, and waged a horrible civil war, characterized by widespread torture and murder. The violence looked anarchic, or atavistically religious, but there was actually a grim but understandable logic to it. At bottom, the armed groups were fighting over access to Iraq’s oil wealth.
As the death toll climbed, commentators in the shocked outside world deplored “the flaws within Arab and Muslim culture“ and cited passages from the Koran they said explained the violence. But genuine scholars reminded the public that 620,000 people had died in the American Civil War itself, and that after the war was over white people in the U.S. south had lynched thousands more, most of them black, to restore and maintain white political control. Others added that Europe in the 20th century also had plenty to answer for with respect to war and mass murder.
At least there were no American occupation troops in Iraq to make the violence even worse. General David Petraeus, a brainy but little known lecturer at the National War College, pointed out in an Op-Ed piece: “Foreign soldiers can become a big part of the problem. Most of the local people reject their presence, and some start to attack them. The armed factions try and manipulate the occupiers into taking sides, which inflames and prolongs the conflict. Money from outside is also an incentive to keep fighting – just imagine if we had flooded Iraq with many millions of dollars! We Americans are lucky our far-sighted president kept us out.”
Without the complication of foreign troops and financial support, it only took the Iraqis a couple of years of fighting to realize they had to compromise. The warfare had cut off just about all oil exports, and the leaders of the various factions understood that they needed peace to get back to business. The negotiations were lengthy and painful. Certain injustices, such as the increased Sunni-Shi’a residential segregation in Baghdad, were ratified, at least provisionally, over the heated objection of Iraqi human rights groups.
By the middle of 2007, a working coalition government was in power in Baghdad. Violence continued, but at a much lower level. General Petraeus published another opinion piece. “The violence in Iraq in recent years has been horrible,” he wrote. “But with a U.S. invasion it might be still continuing – until 2010, or even longer, hard as that may be to imagine.”
Two implausibles in this otherwise plausible novel.
“Without the complication of foreign troops and financial support, it only took the Iraqis a couple of years of fighting to realize they had to compromise.”
Maybe.
And, in whatever time period the fighting did occur (say five years), the price of oil would likely have doubled, due to only moderately to the reduction of global supply, but considerably due to the fear that the urge to civil war would spread.
And, THAT would have precipitated a European, US, Chinese invasion.
quoth the Witty: ““Without the complication of foreign troops and financial support, it only took the Iraqis a couple of years of fighting to realize they had to compromise.”
Maybe.”
maybe Israel will realize it has to compromise?
maybe?
Pot calling the kettle black, Mr. “Precious Jewel.” Mr. North doesn’t hold a candle to you when it comes to promulgating fiction — but then, in this instance, he isn’t pretending to do otherwise, which is something he has over you.
Nice.
Meanwhile, the WaPo reports that the CIA is gearing up for its next mindless, bloody debacle:
‘The sober new assessment of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has helped prompt senior Obama administration officials to call for an escalation of U.S. operations there – including a proposal to add armed CIA drones to a clandestine campaign of U.S. military strikes, the officials said.’
“We are looking to draw on all of the capabilities at our disposal,” said a senior Obama administration official, who described plans for “a ramp-up over a period of months.”
link to washingtonpost.com
Who are these ‘officials’? Does Congress still exist, other than as an vaudeville act? What happened to public debate?
Obama the sock puppet, along for the ride. His melanin-enhanced features were quite a brilliant marketing ploy, you gotta admit. Too bad no one’s home …
fantasy thinking as a form of escape…
the fact is the usa is a war mongering country that goes from one war to the next as it lurches towards it’s own imminent demise.. i like fantasy as much as the next person, but one only has to study the actions of the usa to realize they are responsible for much of their own undoing, not to mention the huge mess they have made and continue to make internationally.. i’ll stick with a type of reality thinking…
And the huge bill that follows. I don’t understand why empires insist on making the same mistakes as their predecessors.
Regarding the article, I think Saddam would have lasted much longer than what’s stated. It requires a lot of effort to bring down an autocrat and the level of opposition was not yet overwhelming.
A civil war of some sort would have probably been inevitable after the toppling of Saddam but it’s unrealistic to make a definitive statement as to what would have happened after that. It’s as uncertain as Iraq’s future once the US pulls out (properly, not the pull-out that’s not really a pull-out) .
Richard,
I don’t see why a rise in oil prices necessitates an invasion. China doesn’t do military intervention (at least not yet), neither does Europe (unless done with US leadership) and I doubt the US would have wanted to intervene in the midst of such a bloody civil war. Would you have supported intervention in 2006, during the worst of the violence?
Shafiq: Thanks for your comment. There were plenty of signs that Saddam’s regime was weakening in 2003, as the veteran journalist Hugh Pope documents in his recent book, Dining With Al-Qaeda. And once unrest starts, it can reach tsunami proportions quickly, as the Shah of Iran found out in 1978-79.
I wouldn’t have supported intervention at all. My proposed remedy is national effort at energy conservation, say 5% national reduction in fossil fuel consumption every year for 15.
The advocates for the “neo-cons got us into war for Israel theme” NEVER addresses our oil addiction, and then never solves it.
I prefer that the US and more specifically New England, move away from “national interests” rooted in structured addictions.
Your attempts to deflect attention from Zionist support for the invasion of Iraq aren’t working, Witty. “Wouldn’t have supported” isn’t nearly as good as “didn’t support.”
“I don’t understand why empires insist on making the same mistakes as their predecessors.”
Empires don’t make decisions; politicians do. Politicians make decisions based on their own short-term self interest.
The gamble of imperial expansion seems to be ‘Will I have time to organise, consolidate and draw resources from my gains before I have to pay the bill?’ Some imperialists keep their heads. The Romans decided in the 120s under Hadrian’s presidency that they had made a mistake in conquering Iraq and withdrew, presumably before the bill became too high – though the bill was to be presented anew in the next century when Iran had moved into the vacuum and become very powerful. The British won most of their gambles until 1918 when the new territories couldn’t be made to pay in time to finance another European war. The game for control of Iraqi resources this time round may not be quite over.
James has gone to a good deal of trouble constructing this alternative history that I find quite plausible. Of course, it is impossible to speculate with any accuracy whether he is right as to certain details, but there cannot be any reasonable dispute that our military action has taken an enormous toll in human life and misery. Even the most pessimistic view of what would have happened had we not invaded would include a tiny fraction of the enormous number of corpses and refugees resulting from our real-life invasion. How many terrorists did we create at the same time?
Regime Change Since 1893….On January 16, 1893, United States diplomatic and military personnel conspired with a small group of individuals to overthrow the constitutional government of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Best. Irony. EVER.
Chaos4700, the King of Spam
link to tinypic.com
One man slander factory, huh? “Spam” is what you do when you post the same crap over and over and over again. Especially personal attacks and trolling attacks to detract from the conversation.
Me? I’m merely verbose.
And then, after completing the negotiations that would secure peace and prosperity for all Iraqis regardless of ethnic affiliation, the entire nation of Iraq made a ring of love by the linking of hands and screaming in unison toward the island of Israel: We love you too, always have and always will.
Please. We instigated the Sunni Shia “conflict”, arguably with false flags. I remember indy reports coming out of Iraq at the time – early; 2003-2004 that questioned the actual perpetrators of sectarian violence time and time again. What happened to those reports? I would link to them if I could. I wish I’d at least saved the text.
And remember early in the war when a bunch of Iraqis in Fallujah were killed from above as they were protesting the conversion of one of their schools into a military hq? It seemed like right after that the whole “sectarian violence” propaganda and “theory” was really amped up, as a pure distraction of course from the atrocities the US was committing. Then came the blackwater debacle – they actually caught them in an act of some sort, it would seem. And remember, the media constantly repeated the lie that they were ‘civilian contractors’, at least until after they incinerated Fallujah with radioactivity. After a while the formulaic violence might have gained a tinge of credibility but I know the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when the Golden Mosque was precision-bombed by “insurgents” dressed in Iraqi police uniforms – it certainly smelled like a US op given the troop movements of the time, preceding sectarian herdings and the unnatural pushes for diplomacy – there were report of native-based reconciliations going on, to neocon punditry’s chagrin iirc. And of course it led to some of the bloodiest retributions ever. Eventually we were able to label areas like this “ethnically cleansed” and start designation of fake local gov’ts, leading to even further animosities.
So I call bullshit on the gloomy fantasy forecast above. More likely Saddam would have been popularily ousted from within by a clerical figure. Shia, Sunni, it doesn’t matter. The violence would be short lived and regionally contained. Iraq may have even amicably fractured. Not saying that would be a stellar trajectory but…I do remember a time when Sunni and Shia leaders would leak out statements like “we are all Iraqis”. When you look at it this way it makes our invasion even more necessary – a peacefully broken-up Iraq, egads! We can’t have the Iraqis as competent energy traders on the international stage, period.
Sorry for the angry mishmash but it’s therapeutic sometimes to vent your recollections, especially after they’ve been pushed down the memory hole.
This piece particularly irritated me, as someone who worked in Iraq under Saddam, and has continued to work on since then.
It is retrospective, presuming that the same conditions as exist today, would have existed without the invasion.
Saddam was such a powerful, dominating personality, that he would have remained in power until his death. After the Shi’a revolt of 1991, no-one would have dared contest his power. He was executed at around the age of 67, one could imagine a much longer life without the invasion. He knew when people were about to revolt, and shot them personally, according to report. He much admired Stalin. His regime was brutal and ugly – I met them – but the opposition had pretty much given up.
Secondly, as Palmyra reminds us above, the sectarian conflict in Iraq is a product of the invasion. It didn’t exist before. Sunni and Shi’a got on well together. There were many Shi’a in Saddam’s regime. Even the idea of the independence of Kurdistan was stimulated by Peter Galbraith’s advice, followed by the Israeli “advisors” who flooded into Kurdistan.