The United States has fought three wars since the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001: against Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. The United States was forced into the first two, but the third was the result of a deliberate decision by former President George W. Bush, based on ideological grounds and, more likely, personal reasons.
If Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and their neoconservative allies were sincere in their intentions - to overthrow Saddam Hussein by military means and, at the same time, create a new, pro-Western Middle East - they would never have received the support of Congress and the US to the public.
Their vision was both simple and thoughtless. That is why it was necessary to create a threat, in the form of weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, that threat was based on lies (examples include aluminum tubes for the nuclear weapons program; meetings between 11/XNUMX mastermind Mohammed Atta and Iraqi officials in Prague; and falsified orders for uranium—"yellowcake " - from Nigeria).
These were the justifications for a war that would claim the lives of nearly 5.000 American soldiers and more than 100.000 Iraqis. Add to that millions of injured and displaced from their homes, but also the destruction of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. The United States alone spent up to three trillion dollars on it.
Bush's war against Saddam Hussein radically changed the Middle East, but not in the way he imagined. To begin with, if the United States had intended to destabilize Iraq, its efforts would hardly have been more successful: ten years later, the country's ability as an independent state has never been more in question.
With the fall of Hussein, Iraq's Shiite majority took power after a vicious civil war, leaving the defeated Sunnis longing for revenge and waiting for an opportunity to regain their supremacy. The Kurds in the north of the country are cleverly given the opportunity to take advantage of de facto independence, although the key issue of control over the northern city of Kirkuk remains a ticking time bomb. And all of them are fighting for the largest possible share of Iraq's huge oil and gas reserves.
Analyzing Operation Iraqi Freedom a decade later, the Financial Times concluded that the United States won the war, Iran won the peace and Turkey won the contracts. I can only agree. In the political aspect, Iran is the big winner of Bush's war. Iran's number one enemy, Saddam Hussein, was assassinated by its number two enemy, the United States, giving Tehran a golden opportunity to extend its influence across its western border for the first time since 1746.
Bush's war, with his poor strategic vision and even worse planning, strengthened Iran's position in the region in a way that the country would have had difficulty achieving on its own. The war allowed Iran to position itself as a dominant power in the Gulf and in the wider region, and its nuclear program serves precisely those ambitions.
The losers of the war in the region are also obvious: Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which feel a threat to their existence and consider their Shia minorities to be Iran's Trojan horse. And they are right: with the Shiites in power in Iraq, Iran will look for suitable opportunities to assert its dominant influence through the local Shiite population.
This is precisely what is fueling the internal turmoil in Bahrain. Leaving aside lies, delusions, questions of ethics and personal responsibility, the key mistake of the US war against Iraq was the absence of a viable plan or the necessary force to implement Pax Americana (American peace, Latin.) in the Middle East. America was strong enough to destabilize the existing regional order, but not powerful enough to establish a new order.
America's neoconservatives, despite their wishes, at the time terribly underestimated the scope of the task—unlike the revolutionaries in Iran, who quickly reaped what the United States sowed. The Iraq War also marks the subsequent relative decline of America's influence.
Bush threw away much of the US military force in Mesopotamia because of an ideological fairy tale – a force that is sorely lacking in the region ten years later. Although there is no causal connection between the Iraq war and the revolutions in the Arab world that began in December 2010, these suggestions are combined into one malignant creation.
Since the war, bitter hostilities between Al Qaeda and other Salafist and Sunni nationalist groups have given way to cooperation or even alliances. It is also a result made possible by America's neoconservative minds. And the destabilization of the region caused by the revolutions in the Arab world is moving more and more into Iraq, mainly through Syria and Iran.
Indeed, the most serious danger to the region at the moment is the process of national disintegration stemming from the Syrian civil war, which threatens to spread not only to Iraq, but also to Lebanon and Jordan. What makes the civil war in Syria so dangerous is that its driving forces are no longer forces on its soil. Rather, that war became a battle for regional dominance between Iran on the one hand and Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey on the other.
Because of this, the Middle East risks becoming the Balkans of the XNUMXst century - falling into the regional chaos that began with the American invasion ten years ago - and is largely the result of it.
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