The Iraq War — Between a Cause and Oil

Twelve years had passed since the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein was still very much in power, and Kuwait’s oil fires had long since been put out. But in the spring of 2003, the world would once again watch the flash of bombardment over the sands of the Persian Gulf. This time the war had a strange feature: the “enemy’s weapons” held up as its reason were, in the end, found nowhere at all.

The Cause of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the mood in America had changed completely. Before long its spearhead turned toward the long-standing enemy, the Saddam regime. The U.S. administration put forward two reasons: that Iraq was secretly holding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the suspicion that Saddam was linked to international terrorist organizations.

The international community did not march in step. France and Germany were cautious about the use of force, and the UN Security Council never issued a clear resolution to go to war. Even so, on March 20, 2003, the United States, together with Britain and others, took the plunge into war with a massive air campaign known as “shock and awe.”

The military verdict came astonishingly fast. Before overwhelming firepower the Iraqi army crumbled, and about three weeks after the war began the capital Baghdad fell. The footage of Saddam’s huge bronze statue being pulled down flowed around the world as a scene symbolizing the war’s “victory.”

The Weapons Never Found, the State That Collapsed

Yet the elation of victory did not last long. After the occupation, U.S. forces and experts searched the length and breadth of Iraq, but the weapons of mass destruction — supposedly the greatest reason for going to war — were never discovered. “Was the very premise of the war mistaken?” — this question erupted even from within the countries that had led it.

What made matters worse still was the way the occupation was administered. The U.S.-led provisional governing authority purged from public office those connected to Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party (de-Ba’athification), and went further by disbanding the Iraqi army. In doing so, tens of thousands to well over a hundred thousand people were robbed of their livelihoods and their pride at one stroke.

This decision — turning into enemies overnight the very people who had held up the pillars of the state — would later be judged “one of the greatest blunders of the occupation.” In a country where the counterweight of Saddam had vanished, a vast vacuum of power had opened up.

The Quagmire and Sectarian Conflict

What flowed into the power vacuum was religious and sectarian conflict. Iraq is a country of artificially drawn borders (recall Episode 3 of this series), where the majority Shia, the minority Sunni who had formed the ruling class under Saddam, and the Kurds of the north all live side by side. The moment the counterweight was removed, the tensions that had been held down burst forth.

In 2006, when the Golden Dome of the Shia holy site at Samarra was bombed, a ghastly chain of violence — reprisal breeding reprisal — covered the entire country. The occupying forces could not restore order, their presence dragged on, and countless civilians and soldiers lost their lives. The war that was supposed to be a “liberation finished in short order” had turned into a quagmire with no exit in sight.

Behind the Cause, Was There Oil?

The deeper the war sank into the mire, the more people began to ask: “What was the real purpose?”

Iraq is an oil producer boasting some of the world’s largest reserves. For that very reason, the view that “the WMD were merely a pretext, and the real aim was the spoils of Iraqi oil” has been voiced persistently from that time to this day. On the other hand, there exist just as many counterarguments: “No state would wade into a quagmire this deep purely out of a hunger for oil,” “the motives were far more complex.”

As Yergin depicted in The Prize, oil can never be separated from “strategy.” But at the same time, it is not profit alone that moves people. Fear, vengeance, pride, miscalculation — the Iraq War was a tragedy in which all of these became tangled together, in complex ways, atop the resource of oil.

And this war left one more enormous side effect. For all the vast expenditure and sacrifice, the stability that had been imagined never came. Within the United States, a deep weariness — a so-called “Middle East fatigue” — quietly spread. A fundamental reckoning had begun with the idea of remaining planted in the Gulf as the world’s policeman.

The very nation that had paid such a price would, before long, begin to distance itself from the Middle East itself. The story arrives at last in the present day we ourselves are living.