Twenty years ago, the United States and 43 allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Upstream, the motive was fallacious and misleading; imperialist and highly criminal as this demiurge was, he had not been involved in the attack of September 11, 2001, nor did he illegally possess weapons of mass destruction. Downstream, the post-war period had been neglected; from the rapid fall of Baghdad, the civilian losses accumulated, the coalition military losses also; criminality, terrorism and repression imposed themselves durably. The case is heard and, even before the expedition, the majority of Westerners (including the author of these lines) had declared themselves opposed to it.
However, an intellectually lazy and geopolitically false posture has prevailed since then: this conflict would have destabilized the entire Middle East, if not the entire planet!
Under the Ottoman Turkish yoke (the reader will be spared the crusades, Mongol invasions and Mamluk epics that preceded it), i.e. from the beginning of the 16th century to that of the 20th century, confessional, tribal and/or ethnic frictions and rivalries never existed. killed, although attenuated by the cane of an empire practicing the relative civil and religious autonomy of the millet, along with a ruthless crackdown on any suspected opponent. The great massacres of Armenians of 1894-1896 bear witness to this, among other horrors. When the United Kingdom seized Mesopotamia at the fall of the Sublime Porte, it created ex nihilo or on the basis of old administrative limits of borders and States with badly carved and sometimes quite artificial dimensions in that ‘they arbitrarily separate linguistic, ethnic, religious or nomadic collectives (France has done the same in the Levant – Syria and Lebanon – and in Africa). From this colonial policy, but also from internal rivalries between regional players, a constant and violent instability will arise with coups d’etat, waves of attacks, inter-state conflict, tribal or religious civil wars, water and oil rivalries, border disputes, unions then disunions, ferocious ethno-confessional repressions, invasions and even annexations. However, we find Iraq at the crossroads of all these scourges, well before the US invasion of 2003! And for good reason: under its mandate from the League of Nations (1921-1932), London had drawn the borders of a new State including a large majority of Shiite Arabs (about 60%), a minority of Sunni Arabs and Christians (about 20%), and another minority, the Kurds (around 20%). Not only Saddam the (minority) Sunni accentuated as soon as he took power the ferocious repression on the Shiite and Kurdish populations (draining of the marshes, state terror, gassings), but he also invaded Iran in 1980, then Kuwait in 1990. A CV that always left the obsessives of 2003 cold…
As for the Islamism that the said American expedition would have favored, its foundations draw on the fanatical exegeses of the 9th century (Ibn Hanbal), 14th century (Ibn Taymiyya) and 18th century (Ibn Abdelwahhab), and its worst contemporary version, that of the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood), was born in 1928 in Egypt. All of this, including the inauguration of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1979, clearly predates Bush Jr.
“Global South”, an empty notion
Let’s also do away with the preposterous idea that the distrust of a “global South” vis-à-vis the West since the outbreak of the Russian war in Ukraine stems from the Iraqi affair. Not only does the notion mean next to nothing – we find a jumble of so-called heavyweights that are no longer heavyweights (South Africa), powers that are technically at war with each other (India and China), still others which abstain from the UN (Brazil, Nigeria, etc.) – but many of these states (including India and rising Arab powers such as Morocco and the United Arab Emirates) have strengthened their strategic ties with Washington. So what does Iraq weigh here? Especially since, at the same time, Russia will have crushed Aleppo, dismantled and occupied part of Georgia, invaded eastern Ukraine and dispatched swashbucklers to plunder resources in Africa… And that would be held in low esteem. moral and intellectual citizens of this “global South” than to believe them ignorant of these realities, or obsessed with 2003.
Last word: today, Iraq, once again fully sovereign, hosts two permanent military bases under a protective military partnership.
They are American.