[size=30]American analyzes compare the wars in Iraq and Ukraine and reveal that Saddam fell into the trap of being deceived by Iran
[ltr]2023.03.21 - 09:14[/ltr]
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[ltr]2023.03.21 - 09:14[/ltr]
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Baghdad - people
It has been 20 years since the United States invaded Iraq, and just over a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Some believe that Washington's mislearning of lessons from Iraq is linked in one way or another to the war on Ukraine and that Saddam Hussein was trying to deceive Iran by claiming to have lethal weapons, but he fell into a suicide trap that killed him and caused great damage to America along with himself, according to analyzes published by major news organizations in the United States. .
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The administration of former President George W. Bush was often accused of bad faith when it decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime: the analyzes ranged from highlighting Washington's desire to seize Iraq's oil on the one hand, and to achieving a "neo-conservative" view of the Middle East and the world on the other.
However, Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University, blames prominent officials in Washington from both parties, especially Republicans, for the war on Iraq.
But he takes his analysis to a broader horizon: Wertheim believes in an article published by "Foreign Affairs" on Friday that the main reason for the war on Iraq is the attempt to build the United States' geopolitical supremacy in the Middle East and the world after the fall of the Soviet Union.
A "victim" of the post-Cold War system
According to Wertheim's narrative, supported by US officials, preparations for the war on Iraq began in 1992. At that time, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Chief of Staff of the US Forces Colin Powell worked on setting up an American strategy for the post-Cold War. At the time, Powell said that the United States should have "enough strength" to "deter any challenger from even dreaming of challenging us on the world stage."
At that time, Cheney instructed his deputy to draft a "Defense Planning Manual", which is a comprehensive framework for US security policy. The goal of these personalities was to move preemptively and prevent potential competitors from aspiring to a regional or international role. In 1997, thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the "Project for the New American Century," an opinion foundation that warned of the danger of Saddam's Iraq "almost certainly" obtaining weapons of mass destruction. In a paper signed by Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, who would later become Secretary of Defense and others, To change the Iraqi regime.
With the September 11 attacks, this requirement became viable. Hours after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld was promoting striking Iraq as well and not only targeting the "Al Qaeda" organization, according to what the writer quoted from one of Rumsfeld's aides.
According to Wertheim's analysis of the American view, "showing strength" by invading Iraq was the only effective way to deter other powers from thinking of competing with America in the long run and to compensate for the erosion of prestige they faced in 2001.
Wertheim also writes that the real concern of any potential Iraqi program of weapons of mass destruction is not so much its use to attack the United States as it is a deterrent to American supremacy in the region. He criticized the Bush administration for not knowing the size of the cost it would pay in the war on Iraq, and for not knowing that Saddam was deceiving when he talked about a nuclear program in order to strengthen his position towards Iran.
It is easy to talk about what the United States should have known after years of war. Saddam's deception was confirmed after the invasion, not before it.
What Wertheim also did not mention (perhaps due to space constraints) is that defectors from Saddam's army were subjected to lie detector tests when they spoke about the program of mass destruction, and those tests did not show that they were lying. The United States also intercepted communications between Saddam regime officials alluding to the existence of such a program. Saddam was talking about the program in front of his aides to send messages of strength to Iran, messages that he later fell victim to.
The repercussions of the intelligence mistakes that the United States made before invading Iraq accompanied it for a long time. Few trusted American data about Russia's imminent invasion of Ukraine. Even the US's European allies were skeptical of her warnings.
But this time America was right. Russia really invaded Ukraine. On the other hand, Russian intelligence failed colossally. Despite all the intelligence advantages that Russia possessed relatively compared to the situation of the United States in Iraq, that is, the geographical proximity to Ukraine, the cultural and social ties with it, and the possession of intelligence elements in eastern Ukraine, Moscow failed to know the extent of the resistance that the Ukrainians, especially the Russian-speaking people, would show. It is clear that the United States has learned a lot on the intelligence level since the beginning of the millennium. Most likely it wasn't a fluke.
It seems that China got angry with Russia when Washington warned of Beijing's possible support for Moscow militarily. China wanted this likely support to remain secret, but Washington was able to monitor its indicators, according to the "Economist" magazine.
Other reasons for the ambiguity of Saddam's plans
Wertheim also noted that it is difficult to know how much weight the administration placed in making the war decision on the possibility that Saddam would one day help terrorists attack the United States. According to Wertheim, “The probability was always entirely speculative, although policy makers did not want to suffer another 'imaginary failure' after failing to anticipate how commercial aircraft could be hijacked and turned into missiles.”
However, the decision-makers' desire to avoid another scenario similar to the September 11 attacks does not strip this "conjecture" from its potential, especially since the world has become more tense in terms of security after the attacks. During the following year, terrorist organizations launched several attacks around the world, killing hundreds of people, including 30 Americans. The obsession with repeating the September 11 scenario in a different form was present, if not dominant, in decision-making in Washington. On the other hand, the United States suspected that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had found refuge in Saddam's Iraq in 2002.
In addition, the suspicions of Saddam developing weapons of mass destruction were not unfounded. The former Iraqi president previously used chemical weapons against Iran as well as against his own citizens in the late 1980s. Saddam believed that his chemical weapons program was what deterred the United States from overthrowing his regime in 1991. That was completely wrong. In addition to Saddam's burning of documents, which made it difficult for UN inspectors to trust the evidence he destroyed after 1991, the world did not realize the scope of Iraq's former biological weapons program until after the defection of the former president's son-in-law and Minister of Military Industry, Hussein Kamel, in 1995.
On the other hand, Haass presents in "Project Syndicate" a less "ideal" critical view. First, not all officials in Washington had a uniform view of the war. Bush was more enthusiastic about spreading democracy, and Rumsfeld was more afraid of cooperation between Saddam and terrorists, while Hass is skeptical about the issue of spreading democracy and the possibility of Saddam's cooperation even with extremist organizations.
Indeed, what Haass drew attention to was the level of divergence of views within the Bush administration, as mentioned by other observers. Some think that Colin Powell did not want war, but he did not have the courage to dissuade Bush from his decision. While others believe that Rumsfeld was more cautious than Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about dealing with Iran after the fall of Saddam.
Haass also notes the error of leftists when they accuse Washington of seeking Iraqi oil: “Narrow commercial interests are not generally what drives US foreign policy, especially when it comes to the use of military force. Instead, interventions are based and motivated by (related to) strategic considerations.” , ideology, or both. Indeed, former President Donald Trump criticized his predecessors for not claiming a share of Iraq's oil reserves."
Haas believed that the administration erred in calculating the worst scenario as the basis for its war (development of a clash of weapons and his desire to cooperate with al-Qaeda) and, on the contrary, it erred in relying on the least bad scenario for post-war expectations (lack of resistance).
The debate in the United States will not end soon over the mistakes the United States committed, whether in thinking about war, preparing for it, or executing it. Most senior members of the Bush administration, including the former president himself, have admitted that they made many serious mistakes. However, Saddam's problem remains that he bet on a "suicide game" at bad timing, and lost his bet. The loss was costly to the United States and Iraq as well.
This cost was one of the reasons why Russian President Vladimir Putin believed that Washington and its allies would not come to Kiev's aid. Ultimately, as the United States did in Iraq, the Kremlin justified its invasion of Ukraine as preemptive. However, any perceived danger that could arise from Ukraine's choice to join NATO (one day) was much less than the danger posed by Saddam's regime, at least in the context of the global atmosphere of terrorism at the time and in the context of the former Iraqi president sending ambiguous signals regarding his program. The way to respond to that danger will remain for a long time subject to debate and response.
about extracting lessons
According to Wertheim, it is not enough that Washington has learned the lesson about not imposing democracy with a gun and the difficulty of applying the concept of building states abroad, and in general about the policy of regime change. He believes that the subsequent administrations could not completely get out of the mentality of that war.
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