WHAT IF THE UNITED STATES CHOSE NOT TO INVADE IRAQ?

by **Rocky** Mon 13 Sep 2021, 8:05 am

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WHAT IF THE UNITED STATES CHOSE NOT TO INVADE IRAQ?

by Rocky Mon 13 Sep 2021, 8:05 am

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WHAT IF THE UNITED STATES CHOSE NOT TO INVADE IRAQ?
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[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]2 hours ago38

If Iraq had remained under international sanctions and totalitarian rule for another decade, it would have become a failed state, with parts of the south and Iraqi Kurdistan out of Saddam's control. Kh

Journalist Ishan Tharoor asserted in the beginning of an analysis published by the "Washington Post" that the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, unlike the invasion of Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, was an unjustified voluntary war. On the other hand, it launched a series of events that radically changed the region. It is impossible to undo what the Bush administration started, but let's imagine what the world would look like today if America had not invaded Iraq.
"First of all, there is the Iraqi death toll," Tharoor said. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, about 184,382 to 207,156 Iraqi civilians were directly killed in war-related violence between the start of the US invasion in March 2003 through October. (October) 2019. But researchers suggest that the real number may be many times that number.”
Sinan Antoun, a New York-based Iraqi poet and author, said that even given Saddam's long record of brutality, it's hard to imagine the future of the Iraqi people's suffering if the United States had not ousted him from power.
“Regardless of whether the regime remained in power – and I say this as someone who opposed Saddam’s regime since childhood, and wrote my first novel about life under a dictatorship – tens of thousands of Iraqis would be alive today, and I will not Babies in Fallujah are born every day with birth defects," he said, referring to the impact of US forces' alleged use of depleted uranium in their battles across Iraq.
We also would not have seen the rise of ISIS, Anton added, had the United States not invaded Iraq — a conviction shared by former President Barack Obama and echoed by countless experts.
As international relations scholars Hal Brands and Peter Pfeffer wrote in a 2017 study, “In the short term, the Iraqi political system may not have collapsed and created a vacuum that non-state or semi-state actors could fill.”
They continued, "The Sunni-Shiite divide that made Iraq very difficult to govern was going to exist, but without the violence and political chaos, terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS would not have found in Iraq such a fertile recruiting ground."
In 2002 Shibley Telhami, a veteran pollster affiliated with the Brookings Institution and a professor at the University of Maryland, was part of a group of US-based Middle East scholars who opposed the Bush administration's drumbeat for the war in Iraq.
“Bush had an opportunity to build global alliances, strengthen international norms and institutions, focus on the al-Qaeda threat, reshape relations in the Gulf region, and use domestic and international support to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which before the September attacks was a complaint,” Telhami told Today World View. Centralization against the United States in the Middle East.
"Instead, Bush chose a unilateral policy," he added, and went on to wage a war that wracked the Middle Eastern country, fueling sectarian violence and extremism, and "ending the balance of power between Iran and Iraq."
Telhami said that Iran's gains from the fall of its old foe in Baghdad would, in turn, re-calculate the geopolitics of the Gulf Arab states, which have become "so insecure that they have embarked on destabilizing policies as well, including the Yemen war."
In 2003 - Tharoor notes - the Saddam regime was still facing stifling international sanctions. Had it been watered down, Iraq's youth would have been better connected to the world and the established regime would have faced its own Arab Spring uprising.
Rasha al-Aqidi of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington think tank, notes that the "Iraqi Spring" would still have been brutally suppressed by the country's Ba'athist government. Saddam would die, his son Qusay would become president – just like in Syria,” he imagined a more moderate end to the Iraqi dictator who was hanged in 2006. The status quo in Baghdad would have been as stable as the authoritarian Baathist state could have been.
A steady internal disintegration would have occurred, with the United States in a stronger position to support democratic and economic development, as Amy Hawthorne, director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Today World View: International and totalitarian rule for another decade, it would have become a failed state, with parts of the south and Iraqi Kurdistan out of Saddam's control.
Instead, by 2007, the United States had had to increase its troop numbers to fight the insurgency that never abated.
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