Less than 20 years ago, the phrase “Arab Street” generally meant a collection of countries that were both anti-Israel and largely opposed to the United States. Mainly thanks to President Trump himself, the region has flipped from adversary to ally and that might be enough.
President Donald Trump’s bold, risky, some would say reckless decision to use military force to topple the Iranian regime has prompted obvious comparisons to the ill-fated War in Iraq, launched on March 20, 2003 by the George W. Bush Administration with the express purpose of removing Sadsam Hussein from power. As everyone knows by now, the success of the initial “shock and awe” campaign that toppled the government quickly became a quagmire when no new government could be formed with enough public support to unite the competing factions of the populace and an insurgency erupted in the aftermath of the invasion. Indeed, the country had fallen prey to widespread looting and criminal activity even as President Bush infamously declared “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of an aircraft carrier that May and there were already signs the situation would continue to devolve. By the end of the year, the insurgency was strong enough to mount a counter offensive against coalition partners, attacking the Jordanian Embassy and the UN Headquarters in Baghdad along with other locations in Al Anbar and Saladin. The insurgency would grow in these regions throughout 2004 as an influx of soldiers and terrorists from throughout the Middle East poured in, somewhere around 2,000 foreign fighters hoping to eject the United States and our allies from the country. On March 31, 2004 the effort was brazen enough to attack a Blackwater convoy outside of Fallujah, resulting in the deaths of four armed contractors who were dragged from their vehicles by locals, beaten, burned and mutilated. Though the US struck back at the unsuccessful first Battle of Fallujah that April, Muqtada al-Sadr, a mullah and leader of the Mahdi militia was able to publicly parade through multiple cities, boldly proclaiming resistance. Nor were US soldiers and contractors the only target. The insurgents also took aim at anyone connected with the new Iraqi government and anyone who supported them, killing hundreds at the Ashoura celebrations in March alone when five bombs exploded. Fallujah itself would not be pacified until November, after a 46 day battle costing 95 American lives, what was described by the military as “the heaviest urban combat (that they had been involved in) since the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam.”
Afterwards, the situation seemed to have improved somewhat. Elections were held in January 2005, and the average number of attacks per day fell from around 70 to 30, but it couldn’t last. On April 2, 2005, somewhere around 120 insurgents armed with grenades, small arms, and two vehicle mounted with improvised explosive devices stormed Abu Ghraib Prison after revelations of abuse there surfaced the year before. The fighting was so desperate that the US service members inside the prison ran low enough on munitions they were ordered to use bayonets, prompting another ignominious comparison to Vietnam as the largest coordinated assault on a US base since that dreadful war. Things only got worse in May, which proved to be the bloodiest month since the initial invasion, when hordes of suicide bombers attacked Shias throughout the country, ultimately kicking of a summer of frenetic fighting. As the year drew to a close, it was readily apparent that the insurgency was only gaining in strength, causing some 34,131 incidents of violence in 2005 compared to 26,496 the year before. By 2006, it was clear Iraq was in the middle of a bloody civil war that neither the new government nor the United States was able to stop. Indicative of the carnage, the al-Askari Mosque bombing in the Iraqi city of Samarra on February 22, 2006 resulted in the deaths of 165 people – some 100 with bullet holes as well – and the average homicide rate in Baghdad tripled to a staggering 33 deaths per day. Though there were some notable successes, such as tracking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and killing him in a targeted attack, the situation was unsustainable. On January 10, 2007, President Bush flooded the country with more US troops as part of a temporary surge of more than 21,500 additional soldiers. Though the surge initially resulted in more violence – the rate of US deaths in Baghdad nearly doubled in the initial days – it proved enough to change the trajectory, and after May 2007, violence against the US and our allies fell to the “lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion.” At least some of this was prompted by the Iraqis themselves, however. In August 2007, nearly 800 civilians were killed by a series of coordinated attacks and over 100 homes and shops were killed, strengthening what was known as the “Anbar Awakening,” an alliance of Sunni Arabs that opposed the insurgency.
Though the civil war continued for another full year, the insurgency as whole was slowly crushed between the surge and the increased skill and dedication of Iraqi Security Forces, prompting the United States to begin drawing down troops. On January 1, 2008, the United States formally handed control of the Green Zone and Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace to the Iraqi government. While the move was largely symbolic, it encapsulated the reality that the civil war was essentially over and the Iraqis could defend themselves. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki proclaimed it “Sovereignty Day,” claiming “This palace is the symbol of Iraqi sovereignty and by restoring it, a real message is directed to all Iraqi people that Iraqi sovereignty has returned to its natural status.” Sadly, however, the saga does not end on an entirely positive note. After President Barack Obama failed to secure a Status of Forces Agreement that would allow a small number of US troops to remain in Iraq for peacekeeping purposes, the insurgency transformed into ISIS and ultimately grew to 100,000, continuing to terrorize the region, operating beyond Iraq itself in Syria and elsewhere until 2017. All told, the war cost 4,492 American lives (the Baghdad, Anbar, and Saladin regions accounted for only about 35% of Iraq’s population, but 73% of US lives lost in combat by December 2006) and some 32,000 wounded, along with somewhere between 186,000 to 210,000 civilian deaths due to violence, though some studies add indirect deaths to produce truly staggering figures of 460,000 to 500,000, a few say as high as 1,000,000. Whatever the precise count, it is clearly not something anyone would want to repeat, ever again. Though I personally believe the motivations for the war were just despite actual Weapons of Mass Destruction never being found, there is no doubt that the actual fighting of it after the invasion was a largely unmitigated disaster and some say President Trump is making the same mistake, perhaps even worse.
As the progressive website, Salon.com framed it “Trump’s Iran War Could Be an Even Bigger Catastrophe Than Iraq,” claiming that “he is in the midst of cooking up a military disaster in Iran that could rival in size and scale the Iraq War unleashed by George W. Bush in 2003,” if not worse “a sequel to Iraq that has every likelihood of being an even bigger catastrophe.” Bamo Nouri, a research fellow at the Department of International Politics, City St. George’s University London, put the same prospect more soberly and with more detail in a recent post on The Conversation. “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan offer a cautionary precedent. Together, they are estimated to have cost the US between US$6 and and US$8 trillion when long-term veterans’ care, interest payments and reconstruction are included. These conflicts stretched over decades, repeatedly exceeded initial cost projections and contributed to ballooning public debt. A war with Iran – larger, more capable and more regionally embedded – would almost certainly follow a similar, if not more expensive, trajectory. The opportunity cost of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were potentially greater, absorbing vast financial and political capital at a moment when the global balance of power was beginning to shift. As the US focused on counterinsurgency and stabilisation operations, other powers, notably China and India, were investing heavily in infrastructure, technology and long-term economic growth. That dynamic is even more pronounced today. The international system is entering a far more intense phase of multipolar rivalry, characterised not only by military competition but by races in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and strategic technologies. Sustained military engagement in the Middle East would risk locking the US into resource-draining distractions just as competition with China accelerates and emerging powers seek greater influence.” Even when detractors do not provide as much detail or geopolitical context, anyone who references a “forever war” or derides the very idea of “regime change” are implicitly invoking a comparison to our failure in Iraq and in at least some ways, they aren’t wrong.
There are reasons to be skeptical even after we have succeeded in killing the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini and his top leadership on day one, particularly around what comes next and whether or not we will be forced to put troops on the ground that become embroiled in a grinding civil war. At the same time, Iran is not Iraq and 2003 is not 2026; comparison can truly capture the dramatic differences between them. First, the insurgency in Iraq was both fueled by outside fighters and largely funded by Iran. The Ayatollah provided cash, weapons, training, and men including at least 150 intelligence officers to what were known as “Special Groups” such as the Mahdi army, Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, and the Promised Day Brigade in attempt to destabilize the regime and force American troops out. “We know that they do have official involvement,” Air Force Colonel Donald Bacon explained during a conference call from Baghdad in October 2007. “When you actually have captured Quds Force operatives and leaders in country and you know that they’re involved in it…there is no doubt that there’s official involvement.” “The area they oversee here in Iraq is an area that we have found a lot of explosively formed penetrators. Those come from Iran,” he continued. “We’ve also had a lot of indirect-fire attacks involving weapons that come from Iran, missiles, in particular, and 240 mm rockets.” “We know from our experts that [a cache of 12 mm mortar rounds] were of Iranian origin,” he added. “You wouldn’t think so because it has English markings on there, but that’s the way they market them. And you can actually look at the Iranian Web site and actually look at the weapons that they market on their Web site, and they have the same kind of markings.” According to declassified documents from the Pentagon, Iran was directly responsible for the deaths of around 600 US servicemen and women, roughly 17% of the total number killed, largely as a result of either insurgents they personally trained or munitions they provided.
Today, however, there is no equivalent power to back an insurgency on this scale and no ready source for foreign fighters, leading to the second reason, one directly attributable to President Trump himself: The entire Middle East has changed, even if it is hard to capture the extent. Rather than remaining on the sidelines at best or actively being our adversaries at worst, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and others are all on our side this time along with our perennial ally in the region Israel, forming a coalition the likes of which would have been impossible to conceive a decade ago, much less two. Saudi Arabia alone is instructive. Before the Iraq Invasion, they condemned the effort and refused to participate. “We do not accept that this war should threaten Iraq’s unity or sovereignty or that its resources or internal security should be subjected to a military occupation, and we have let the United States know about our position on this,” explained Crown Prince Abdullah on behalf of King Fahd at the time. “The special circumstances surrounding this crisis over the last 12 years demand that we not get involved in any uncalculated adventure that might jeopardize the security and peace of our country and our people,” he added. On Saturday, Saudi Arabia condemned Iran rather than the United States, as the dying regime lashed out at their Middle East neighbors. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia expressed its strongest rejection and condemnation of the blatant and cowardly Iranian attacks targeting Riyadh and Eastern regions, all of which were repelled.” After Iran attacked other Arab countries, the Saudis even hinted that they might respond directly, “the Kingdom affirmed that it will take all necessary measures to defend its security and protect its territory, citizens, and residents, including the option of responding to the aggression.” The UAE has had a similar trajectory. In 2003, they issued a “complete rejection of any aggression on Iraq,” and yet they are now condemning Iran itself along with Saudi Arabia. “The United Arab Emirates has condemned and denounced in the strongest terms the blatant Iranian missile attacks that targeted the UAE and several brotherly nations in the region, considering these acts a flagrant violation of national sovereignty and a clear breach of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.” Qatar is similar as well. Though they didn’t outright condemn the Iraq war, saying instead that they were against it and it would be destabalizing, they too are now condemning Iran.
As a person who came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the radical scope of this change in alignment is hard to appreciate, especially when major shifts can be difficult to observe amidst the steady stream of news and the day to day of our lives. When I was young, the phrase “Arab Street” generally meant a collection of countries that were both vehemently anti-Israel and largely opposed to the United States. Mainly thanks to President Trump himself, who began the rapprochement of Israel with the broader Middle East in his first term with the Abraham Accords and who has continued to bind us to the region n his second, we do not live in that world any longer. The Arab Street is now an ally and while tensions with Israel remain, they are actively collaborating and even celebrating together on the streets of countries around the world, where people have gathered to show their support for a brighter Iranian future. If anything, Mr. Nouri’s notion that Iran is “more regionally embedded” than Iraq might well work in our favor rather than the other way around. Not only is there no external power ready to fund a long insurgency or much in the way of external countries with men and women ready to die, we are the ones that are embedded and that might be enough to succeed beyond all expectations. Though neither President Trump’s detractors nor the mainstream media are likely to give him credit, he has changed the region and the world for the better, faster than most would have thought possible, including me, and in ways that are hard to fully capture. The question is whether or not the change is enough to prevail.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 