October 2, 2024

Labour Hub Editors

Revisiting a war based on lies and deceit

Mike Phipps reviews Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq, by Dennis Fritz, published by OR Books.

It’s over twenty years since the US invaded Iraq. There have been plenty of books picking over the ‘errors’ of what the US did, although not so many lately. Dennis Fritz’s offering may seems a bit belated, but it reminds us of the deceit on which the entire policy was based. It also holds lessons for future US incursions in the region.

A dissident in the Pentagon

Fritz worked directly for and advised some of the most senior figures in the Department of Defense, including General Richard Myers, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the height of the Iraq War. After military retirement, he worked inside Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon working for Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and key architect of the case for war. 

In the course of his work, Fritz unearthed documentation about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 which he believed to be as damning as the Pentagon Papers had been for the Vietnam War, which had shown the extent to which then President Johnson had misled the American public. The material Fritz found showed that all the justifications for the Iraq War were “pure fabrications.”

Fritz is clear on why the US invaded Iraq, a country which did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction and posed no military threat to the US. The first reason was to reassert American credibility in the region, which had become more feasible at a moment when public opinion could be corralled into support following 9/11. “The second reason why we invaded Iraq was to start a proxy war on behalf of Israel by eliminating its enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah.”

“The third reason we invaded Iraq was to bring democracy to the Middle East through force,” writes Fritz. This sounds more questionable, but if we reframe the author’s idea as one of bringing a free market economy with a limited electoral input into selecting the Iraqi governing elite, it makes more sense. Democracy in its fullest sense was never on the agenda.

Fritz goes further: “If we hadn’t gotten bogged down in Iraq, the plan was to invade Syria next, then Iran.” In fact, Israelis working with the Bush Administration wanted these countries targeted first.

In Fritz’s assessment: “Saddam was willing to give us everything we wanted to prevent war: open elections monitored by the UN; disarmament inspections led by US personnel; support in the global war on terror; first priority in mining rights and oil; and, finally, help in finding solutions to end the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. And yet, the neocons completely rejected Saddam’s offer—nothing was going to stop the war.”

Fritz believes that the strategy of President Bush’s Defense Secretary could be summarised as follows: “Create a diversion by declaring war on terrorism, starting with Afghanistan. Then, enlarge the problem by pursuing the so-called sponsors of terrorism: Iraq (WMD), Syria (chemical weapons), and Iran (nuclear weapons program).”

“If the American people knew the real reasons we went to war, they probably wouldn’t have supported the invasion,” suggests Fritz. Hence the Administration’s Information Strategy, which “aggressively sold the war by flooding the media with disinformation,” with the help of pliant journalists and retired generals.

So far, so opinionated. The problem for Fritz’s account is that, at the Pentagon’s insistence, large chunks of the documentation he unearthed to support his analysis, have been redacted: huge blocks of blacked out text punctuate the book. This must have been all the more galling, as Doug Feith, whom Fritz had worked for and whom one senior general called “the fucking stupidest person on the planet”, had earlier written a book justifying Bush’s Iraq policy which escaped such censorship. It’s Feith whom Fritz holds most responsible for the war: “Most of the deceit was devised by him.”

Once in Iraq, the Administration appeared to have swallowed its own propaganda that its troops would be welcome with open arms: it was blindsided by the mounting opposition to it. “There was a reconstruction plan, but we couldn’t implement it due to the insurgency,” writes Fritz. “ Besides, keeping the peace was of lesser concern to the neocons, compared to protecting the oil fields and refineries.”

Fritz calls for a major shift in US foreign policy. Terrorist attacks should be seen as criminal acts, not as military operations that can be used to justify launching invasions. “Terrorism is ideological; we cannot defeat it solely through military efforts.” Moreover, he concludes, “we can’t keep provoking other countries and not expect them to retaliate sooner or later.”

The view from Iraq

There is a lot of perception in Fritz’s analysis. Take his first reason for invading Iraq – to reassert American credibility in the region. The end of the Cold War allowed the US to operate with much less restraint in several international theatres. The September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks generated popular support for doing so. I have argued elsewhere that ‘regime change’ in Iraq was “an opportunity to impose the power realities of the New World Order on a host of countries not yet willing to subordinate themselves to the requirements of the US.”

Fritz’s third reason – bringing democracy to the Middle East through force – needs reframing. The imposition of a free market economy may have had an ideological motive but it also suited material interests. As  I have written elsewhere, “More than forty government-owned enterprises were earmarked for privatisation within months of the invasion and there were lucrative profits to be made from reconstructing Iraq’s infrastructure in a bidding process that was restricted to US firms. On top of this, Iraq’s vast international debt was used by international creditors as a lever to control its economic policies in a further affront to Iraq’s sovereignty.”

Iraq’s oil reserves in particular were largely privatized in processes that have given foreign companies decades-long control of these resources. The law to do this was prepared in secret behind the backs of Iraqi parliamentarians and forced through following US threats to withhold financial support from the country that its military had so recently trashed.

Another notion to interrogate in Fritz’s analysis is that the reconstruction plan for Iraq was thrown off course by the insurgency. The problem with this oft-repeated line is that it ignores the sheer scale of the occupation’s brutality that made such resistance inevitable. An estimated 37,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the first eight months of the occupation alone. These numbers increased sharply with the widespread deployment of US air strikes over civilian areas.

Such contempt for human life was not a ‘mistake’ – especially if one accepts that a key rationale for the invasion of Iraq, as Fritz suggests, was to reassert US credibility in the region. On that basis, the occupation had to be murderous in order to have the necessary effect – just as the Israeli onslaught on Gaza today needs to be barbarous in order to deter regional players from coming to the aid of the Palestinians.

US forces committed grave war crimes in Iraq, from the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere to the bombardment of Fallujah, where up to 6,000 civilians were killed and three quarters of the city’s housing was destroyed and where white phosphorous and depleted uranium munitions were used, resulting in a rise in birth defects and cancers.

The US also saddled Iraq with a toxic political legacy. Using the traditional tactic of ‘divide and rule’, it imposed a previously unknown religious sectarianism on the country, dividing its central state between parties based on ethnic and religious lines, which used their privileged position to sell public sector jobs to their supporters.

It also imported wholesale corruption. Transparency International consistently ranks Iraq as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. But, as I have argued elsewhere, “the template for the financial plundering of Iraq was made not by Iraqis, but by the US-led occupation itself. Halliburton alone, whose former CEO, Dick Cheney, was Vice President from 2001 to 2009, made $39.5 billion on Iraq contracts. Some of the profits made by business came from flagrant overcharging, such as the contractor which billed the US government $900 for a switch that was valued at $7.05, a 12,000% mark-up.”

It’s worth pondering too why the insurgency was so militarily potent. The so-called ‘Islamic State’ in particular benefited enormously from the sheer volume of war materiel that the western coalition had brought into Iraq. When the Iraqi army fled Mosul without firing a shot, it left behind a majority of all the armoured vehicles the US had delivered to Iraq – which made the subsequent war against the terrorists all the more protracted.

The US response was a new wave of aerial bombardment in 2016, including the alleged targeting of civilians. A further estimated 10,000 civilians were killed in this new phase of ‘liberation’.

As with its other wars, the US has moved on from Iraq. We are left with a version of history embodied in entertainments like The Hurt Locker, which focus on the psychological impact fighting in Iraq had on US soldiers.

Iraqis are less fortunate. There are no Hollywood investors to underwrite the telling of their stories. The social, cultural and psychological damage done to an entire nation endures. It is unlikely to be overcome without a deep-rooted truth and reconciliation process, focusing on physical and psychiatric healing, health and wellbeing, neighbourhood re-generation, schooling, a cultural renaissance and much more. None of these much-needed steps look likely in the near future.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.