Now that the United States has said its official goodbye to the Iraq War, it is time to draw lessons from a misadventure that will rank among the most foolish of American interventions around the world. At one level, it was a toxic cocktail of neo-conservative thinking and a US itch for unilateralism to turn the world around to its own way of thinking and show who the boss was. At another level, it was a tragic misreading of how the region works, accentuated by the umbilical cord that unites the US with Israel.

After losing more than 4,500 US troops, tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and an estimated $800 billion in treasure, Americans are leaving behind an uncertain Iraq driven by the Shia-Sunni equation the US helped reverse, a semi-autonomous Kurdish region, the oil town of Kirkuk remaining in dispute and a Shia Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who has retained power by outmanoeuvring his Shia and Sunni opponents by giving in to Shia factions demanding their pound of flesh.
Long before the George W. Bush administration acknowledged that there was indeed no smoking gun as far as the Saddam Hussein regime’s nuclear efforts were concerned, it was clear that the official excuse for the invasion was manufactured. The United Nations inspectors were sidelined and not allowed to complete their inspection as President Bush’s civilian and military advisers pushed for the invasion for their own different reasons.
Few tears were shed around the world over the end of the Saddam regime. But President Saddam was the standard Arab dictator, perhaps more extravagant than others because of his country’s oil wealth but less so than Col. Muammar Gaddafi, a succession of US administrations were happy to do business with. Unseating Saddam became an attractive idea for some influential Bush advisers because they felt the road to peace and safeguarding Israeli interests lay through Baghdad. Stung by 9/11, the greatest peacetime attack on American mainland, President Bush was more than willing to flex his muscles.
The Arab Spring has brought dramatic changes in the Arab world for other, more legitimate and indigenous, reasons even as the US and other outside powers have been trying to keep pace with the momentum of events dislodging favourite American dictators. The Libyan denouement was aided and abetted by Western powers because, for once, there was a consensus that Gaddafi must go. But the roiling in the Arab world continues as outside powers seek their own profit.
US President Barack Obama has already drawn some lessons from the Iraq War. As the American approach to the air war over Libya showed, he is stressing a more cooperative effort among allies and more burden sharing, relying on modern technology than boots on the ground to serve his country’s military objectives. This has been clear from the intense drone attacks over Afghan and Pakistani targets and the spectacularly successful effort to get Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.
The United States, of course, reserves the right to attack a country, if sufficiently provoked, but the age of gung-ho unilateralism is over. This is so for economic and political reasons. Economically, the US is no longer in a position to support major operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan (estimated cost for the latter $450 billion). Politically, with the centre of activity gravitating more to the East from Europe, the US must keep its powder dry to deal with a more powerful, richer and assertive China, underlined by the signals President Obama has been giving of late.
There is also a tendency in US establishment circles in drawing a narrower interpretation of essential national interests. The flaw in this policy is that America remains chained to Israeli interests, however damaging they might be to Washington’s worldview, because Israel is a matter of domestic policy as American presidential candidates have been demonstrating each day by outdoing each other in their sycophantic support for Tel Aviv. Of American politicians, it might be said that they are all Israelis.
Short of Israel dragging the United States into another war in West Asia, the projected end of American military operations in Afghanistan in 2014 will see the finale for the kind of wars America has been fighting. Although boots on the ground will remain necessary in subduing a hostile environment in the final phase, machines rather than men will be deployed extensively to cut down on US military casualties and achieve broad military objectives. Inevitably, the strength of US forces will be reduced as will the enormous capacity Washington has built up.
West Asia (the Middle East and North Africa) will remain an American priority because of the oil and gas wealth and Israel’s security, but US efforts to safeguard its interests will take the form of positioning warships and missiles to do its work, rather than massing of troops on alien land. It is no secret that Washington’s attitude to Bahrain’s turmoil is vastly different from its slamming of other Arab regimes because the US Fifth Fleet is based there.
Indeed, the future trend in American military thinking will be along a more selective deployment of its military resources, leaving some areas to its allies and supporters. If the Obama administration represents a Democrat-inclined multilateral policy, rather than the more belligerent Republican approach, the new compulsions determining US military policy will also apply to a future Republican administration. Republican rhetoric might take a different form, but the diminution of America’s ability unilaterally to change world events is a fact neither party’s administration can quarrel with.
President George W. Bush is likely to go down as the last holder of office to indulge in the luxury of deciding to take his country into vast land wars unthreatening to his country’s existence. Only Israel will continue to retain the ability to take the US into a superfluous war. And Palestinians will remain hostage to a scheme of things in which they can play no part.