Irish Examiner view: Iraq war casts long shadow over us all

Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad on March 21, 2003, during a massive US-led air raid on the Iraqi capital. 

It seems like yesterday that the Iraq War was unleashed upon the world in what was one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in the history of the US. Yet it was 20 years ago this weekend that Operation Shock and Awe, the opening attacks against the regime of Saddam Hussein, were launched in a campaign that has changed the world, and not for the better.

In Ireland, we had been celebrating Best Mate’s second consecutive Cheltenham Gold Cup win, with Kerry’s Jim Culloty on his back. But the Irish Examiner leader writer was casting a bleak look at the looming crisis in the Middle East and, in particular, the willingness of our government to allow the military use of Shannon.

“By permitting the US to use Shannon, this country is facilitating a war with Iraq, a war regarded by many as illegal and immoral” we wrote, adding that, “from the moment bombs begin to fall, the balance of international relations will suffer a major reversal from which it could take years or even decades for the world to recover.” 

The hard facts have gone into history. The accumulated, long-term costs of the nine-year conflict and occupation are €3tn. More than 300,000 civilians were killed. The ‘weapons of mass destruction’ cited as the justification for invasion were never found and it is impossible to challenge the assertion that they never existed. Certainly, Hussein was a bad man, even a monster, but there are many of those in the world and toppling him left a devastated country beset by civil war and permanent emergency.

Into the vacuum stepped Islamic State/Daesh, which led, in its own way, to the crisis and civil war in Syria. We have had the Arab Spring, countless insurgencies, and terrorist attacks. Through its unmandated war and subsequent actions, including hideous torture and human-rights abuses in locations such as Abu Ghraib prison, the West lost its moral force and has failed to recover it.

Before the Iraq invasion, Russia’s influence in the Middle East was waning, a position that has been recovered in grisly form, by Vladimir Putin. This emboldened him in the Ukraine, and in his closer alliances with China and Iran, personified by the visit of China’s president, Xi Jinping, to Moscow next week. The Kremlin has been quick to reference the US invasion of Iraq in any criticism of its own actions.

The world is indubitably a more dangerous place since the 2003 invasion, which dissolved the unity of purpose and direction that had been assembled after 9/11 to pursue its Al Qaeda perpetrators into their client state of Afghanistan. At that time, we wrote that the “UN needs reform to avert collapse”. That hasn’t happened. What happens in the Ukraine, now, on Day 388 of its war, may be the final straw for it.