An Amazing Read From The Daily Beast
America’s Lost Decade in Iraq: A Marine Officer Looks Back
A Marine officer who served two tours in Iraq looks back at 10 years of war, death, and destruction and asks what we learned: nothing. By Benjamin Busch
“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure.”
—President George W. Bush, March 19, 2003
Jerome Delay/AP
Today marks the 10-year anniversary of our second invasion of Iraq, and the questions that were never answered about our nearly nine-year occupation are no longer being asked. Americans, our allies, and the Iraqi people are still owed an honest answer from the leaders who created the war and kept us in it: why were we there?
Hundreds of thousands of Americans protested at the start of the war, but bombing inevitably began on March 19, 2003. The next day U.S. and British forces drove through a breach in the high berm dividing Kuwait from Iraq. I entered as part of the invasion force sent to disarm Iraq. Colin Powell told the U.N. that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to 9/11. Rumsfeld said we would be done within a few months at a cost of around $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz said Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction with oil revenue. Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators. President Bush declared an end to major combat operations 44 days later under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” We were not briefed on a post-hostilities plan, and even Saddam Hussein managed to evade capture for another seven months.
Bruce Adams/AP
Iraq was to be made a democracy, by force, but I quickly felt our ideological irrelevance. Saddam’s state fell apart into tribal factions, religious sects, and ethnic divisions under our cosmetic stewardship. The country murdered and looted itself as we watched, hopelessly ignorant of causality and cure. We spent the early years telling Iraqis who they couldn’t be but never deeply sought an understanding of who they already were. A strange symbiotic bond formed between us; their increasing dependency on our resources justifying our continued occupation. The State Department was largely restrained, leaving our military under the control of political appointees like Paul Bremer, who dictated policy by decree in a series of missteps without any comprehension of consequence. It was he who disbanded the Iraqi Army, flooding the country with unemployed militants, and it was under his rule that all former Baath Party members were banned from ever holding government posts again, decapitating Iraq of its only experienced managers. Our military, in turn, divided into sects of its own, the initiatives of regional commanders entirely dependent upon their personalities and situations. Iraq was reinvented all the way back to where it had been before our invasion, only with dysfunctional corruption installed where functional corruption had been.
This war, which was never even a declared war, went on for 4,101 days, sent more than 1 million U.S. service members into the desert, left 31,926 troops wounded, and brought 4,409 of them back in flag draped coffins. The cost ballooned into an incalculable sum over a trillion dollars, a considerable amount of it impossible even to account for. The money was borrowed, and what we haven’t printed is still owed with interest. There has been no political contrition for the war’s false necessity, myopic approach, or inept management. We kept context out of the discussion, refused to exert wisdom over rhetoric, stripped the conflict down to catchphrases, and finally just stopped talking about it.