14-06-2025
The Iraq war may have ended, but its lingering impact – on the Middle East and beyond
Rania Abouzeid has won the Michael Kelly Award and George Polk Award for foreign reporting, among many other prizes for international journalism. A former Harvard Nieman fellow, her books include No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria.
The past 25 years have been momentously eventful in the Middle East, even by the standards of a region whose many states have frequently experienced domestic turmoil and foreign interference, including military aggression.
There were moments so bright they felt like supernovas, most notably the 2011 Arab uprisings that unseated dictators in Yemen, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia. The protesters around me on the streets of several Arab capitals who braved tear gas and more lethal projectiles didn't call their movement a 'spring.' Instead, they roared 'revolution!' It was a contagious, indigenous Arab democratic fervour born of raw outrage and courage. It briefly swept across the region until some of those decapitated regimes rebounded, installing even stronger strongmen than those deposed, with the backing of Western and Gulf states that prefer iron-fisted stability to the messiness of democratic transitions that might empower forces they disapprove of or can't control.
Other revolutions descended into war. In Libya and Syria, militias birthed to confront the counter-revolutionary violence of reeling regimes soon also turned their weapons on each other. Along the Arabian peninsula, Yemen's internal divides were blown open, precipitating a civil conflict in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East that was exacerbated and influenced by the mega-wealth and militaries of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (and Iran on the other side of the political divide). Petro-fuelled Gulf states, meanwhile, continued to build their futuristic bubbles, seemingly oblivious but not immune or independent of troubles some also had a hand in fomenting and sustaining.
There have been two wars between Israel and Lebanon since 2000, the year that Hezbollah forced Israel to retreat from a vast swath of southern Lebanon, becoming the first and only armed Arab force to oust Israeli troops from occupied Arab territory. The foes met in battle in 2006 as well as last year after Hezbollah opened what it called a 'support front' to aid its Palestinian ally Hamas and draw Israeli military resources away from a beleaguered Gaza Strip. In 2023, after decades of Israeli subjugation of Palestinians, on Oct. 7, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel. The Israeli war on Gaza (and now the West Bank) that followed has placed Israel in the dock at The Hague on charges of genocide. During the recent conflict in Lebanon, Israel dealt Hezbollah a series of unprecedented, painful blows through the assassination of dozens of its most senior commanders, including the group's long-time leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Despite the abundance of historic moments to choose from this past quarter century, it's not difficult to pinpoint one event – America's invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and the lies underpinning it – as perhaps the single most significant development that has had the greatest impact on the Middle East.
There are actually two key dates to consider: Before March 20, 2003, there was Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations Security Council laying out the supposed evidence of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The speech was a prelude to a war that reshaped the Middle East, shattered America's credibility, and mainstreamed gaslighting as a foreign policy instrument. And even at the time, it was an objective failure.
It did not persuade the Council to pass a second resolution backing military action against Iraq, prompting the U.S. and its partners in the 'coalition of the willing' to illegally invade a country without UN support, and in so doing, cemented the cornerstone of an American-led rules-based order that made it clear that America does as America pleases, and that its rules apply to others but not to itself or its friends.
I watched Mr. Powell's 76-minute speech in a Beirut newsroom with colleagues gathered around a television set suspended from the ceiling. The secretary of state's opening claims, backed by intercepted telephone conversations of Iraqi Republican Guard officers supposedly discussing where to hide a modified vehicle and other items from UN inspectors, were ambiguous, open to interpretation and as evidence, surprisingly thin.
I remember the confusion and general sentiment of disbelief in the newsroom: Was that it? Was that mighty America's opening gambit? 'My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,' Mr. Powell told the Council. 'These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.' Except they weren't, a reality that years later, after all the damage was done, Mr. Powell publicly regretted.
By the time the decorated former general dramatically waved a vial of 'anthrax' in the Security Council chamber during his presentation, warning of the dangers that 'about this amount' could unleash, some of my colleagues had returned to their desks.
The Americans, it seemed, had very little in the way of convincing evidence, an assertion only strengthened by Mr. Powell's insistence of a 'sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.' It was an emotive claim in a world still reeling from al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks in 2001, but most of us knew it wasn't true. Although Saddam Hussein had instituted a so-called 'Faith Campaign' in the 1990s aimed at fostering a Saddam-centred religiosity in the wake of the devastating Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the crushing UN-enforced economic sanctions that impoverished Iraqis, the dictator detested any Islamism, particularly militant, that might threaten his one-man rule.
Although there was no love for Saddam's tyrannical regime in that Lebanese newsroom, many of us still believed that in the 21st century, a country couldn't simply be invaded on such flimsy pretenses, and that solid evidence and the backing of the UN were required. How naive.
On March 20, 2003, the U.S. unleashed its ferocious 'shock and awe' bombing campaign of Baghdad, an attack whose ramifications continue to reverberate across the Middle East. America's war unseated a despised leader, but it also destroyed Iraq, installed a sectarian governance system that planted the seeds of future conflicts, gave rise to ISIS, directly strengthened Iran and its regional allies, changed Syria, and shaped the conduct of Israel's war in Gaza. It created the first major cracks in the foundations of political, legal and journalistic institutions entrusted with telling the truth and upholding international law that post-Oct. 7, 2023, are crumbling and discredited in the eyes of many.
Regionally, Saddam's demise accelerated the rise of his arch nemesis in Tehran, strengthening Iran's hand in Iraq via its newly empowered Shiite allies, many of whom had armed and mobilized to confront the U.S. occupation. Before the U.S. invasion, there were no Shia militias in Iraq. Saddam was in many ways a counterbalance to the ayatollah's regional ambitions and his removal helped embolden Iran's anti-American and anti-Israeli Axis of Resistance grouping Tehran and its partners in Iraq with long-time allies in Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and the Palestinian group Hamas among others. To be clear, Saddam was also anti-Israel, lobbing Scud missiles into Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, and although he was supported by the United States in his war against Iran, after invading neighbouring Kuwait in 1990 he went from U.S. ally to U.S. enemy. Iran's ascendance, however, shifted the regional balance of power.
In 2004, Jordan's King Abdullah coined the term 'Shiite Crescent' to describe what he saw as an Iranian threat to the traditional Arab Sunni elites led by Saudi Arabia. Iran's ideological belt of influence was superficially sectarian (although Hamas is Sunni and Mr. al-Assad is Alawite, a sect considered heretics by some Shiites), the deeper divide was between a Western-influenced Saudi axis and the Iranian project countering it. Tehran propped up Mr. al-Assad's Syria, a lynchpin state in its supply route to Hezbollah. It supported Yemen's Houthis against their Saudi-backed foes, and strengthened some Iraqi militant factions that also had vibrant political wings including members of parliament. More recently, the Iranian axis was dealt a debilitating – but not deadly – blow by Israel and its Western allies through military strikes on its members during a Gaza war that has drawn in most of the players in the axis.
Back in 2003, the ill-fated decision of Baghdad's new American overlords to disband its military and purge its civil service of members of Saddam's Baath Party, not knowing or understanding that nominal party membership was usually a prerequisite to even the most mundane of administrative positions, collapsed the state and its security apparatus, fomenting chaos and deep resentment. American officials sequestered themselves in a walled-off bubble of Baghdad they called the Green Zone, dubbing everything outside it – that is, Iraq – a no-go Red Zone. Their interactions with Iraqis were largely limited to those allowed into their fortress, to exiles with self-interested agendas, and an English-speaking Western-friendly elite.
The Green Zone wasn't Iraq any more than post-Taliban Kabul was Afghanistan. It was a self-selecting echo chamber. Republican Party political appointees, in many cases young graduates whose loyalty was more important than their (in)competence, were tasked with remodelling Iraq's bureaucracy including major sectors such as legal and financial.
The Americans installed a governance system in Iraq that apportioned senior political positions based on sect, replicating a Lebanese system that had contributed to a civil war in the 1970s and '80s, and in so doing, elevated a sectarian identity above a national one. Iraqi friends who told me they grew up not knowing their own sectarian affiliation, let alone that of their friends, were now pigeonholed and catalogued by Americans who presumptuously and erroneously referred to 'the Sunnis,' 'the Shiites,' 'the Christians' and other religious groups as monolithic political blocs (many still do). In the years to come, the Lebanonization of Iraq would play a role in the Iraqization of Syria, but in the early post-Saddam era, the new power system – underpinned, determined and divided by sect – helped incite a sectarian war. Militias proliferated.
There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, just a small band of ultraconservative Sunni Islamist Kurdish separatists called Ansar al-Islam near Halabja, a city in the predominantly Kurdish north. The group was said to have ties to both Iran and al-Qaeda, as well as to a two-bit Jordanian gangster known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Some time after the U.S. war on Afghanistan post-9/11 began, Mr. al-Zarqawi moved into parts of northern Iraq that pre-2003 were protected by a U.S-enforced No Fly Zone, and hence outside the dictator's control. After the U.S. invasion, Mr. al-Zarqawi formed and led a group that became Al-Qaeda in Iraq, responsible for suicide bombings in markets, churches and mosques as well as on United Nations and Iraqi government facilities, and American troops.
Mr. al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006, but his group lived on. Al-Qaeda in Iraq became the Islamic State of Iraq which in 2013 became ISIS, exporting its terror across the world. In those formative early years (and well beyond) al-Qaeda drew recruits from across Iraq as well as foreign Islamist fighters from the region, including one Ahmed al-Sharaa, the current president of Syria, who most recently went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani.
Mr. al-Golani fought with Al-Qaeda in Iraq before being captured by the Americans, who misclassified him as an Iraqi from the city of Mosul, and tossed him into the Camp Bucca detention centre in Iraq's southern desert near Kuwait.
The future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and men who would become his senior lieutenants were also in Camp Bucca, although my reporting revealed that Mr. al-Golani didn't know Mr. al-Baghdadi inside the wire. They would meet later. Mr. al-Golani was released months before the Syrian revolution began in March, 2011.
With Mr. al-Baghdadi's blessing, in August of that year, Mr. al-Golani clandestinely crossed back into Syria with a handful of men to establish the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. His group fought the regime as well as the rebels. After 14 years, Mr. al-Assad fled to Russia and Mr. al-Golani swapped his military fatigues for clean-cut suits, dropping his nom de guerre, to lead Syria into an uncertain future.
But during those brutal years of the Syrian war, which I covered intensely, hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed and disappeared, and the country splintered into slivers of influence drawing in Turkey, Jordan, the Gulf states, Iran, Hezbollah, Russia, Iraqi militias, the U.S. and other Western powers. The Syrian conflict propelled millions of refugees into neighbouring countries, in some cases destabilizing or otherwise significantly burdening them, as well as into a Europe that after initially welcoming the newcomers, declared their influx a crisis, feeding the rise of the political right and its xenophobia. (In 2015, all of Europe absorbed a million refugees, most of whom were Syrian. Lebanon alone, a country of about five million people, hosted more Syrian refugees than that while Turkey became home to more than three million.)
America's war on Iraq, dubbed 'Operation Iraqi Freedom,' was supposed to liberate Iraqis from a leader who robbed citizens of their basic human and democratic rights. Not for the first time in history, the disconnect between America's stated ideals and its actions were soon laid bare in the horrors of Abu Ghraib, which exposed the hypocrisy of a superpower whose soldiers were not above torturing and sexually abusing detainees, or committing war crimes including the extrajudicial killing of men, women and children in Haditha, the 'free-fire zones' of Fallujah, and the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus.
None of the architects of the war, from U.S. President George W. Bush, to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell and their British counterparts and accomplices including Prime Minister Tony Blair (and their dodgy intelligence dossier), paid a price for contravening the UN Charter, destroying a country and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Instead, they enjoyed lucrative retirements.
The message was clear: America, the world's self-designated policeman, and its friends, were above being policed, a doctrine taken to its zenith in the Gaza war with America and the West providing diplomatic cover (and military hardware) to support Israeli transgressions that legal scholars and human-rights groups (including Israeli) have deemed war crimes. The same United States and its Western allies that a few short years ago welcomed warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against their enemies (principally Russian President Vladimir Putin), are now openly undermining the court, and other tenets of international law, for indicting their Israeli allies. The crack in the Western edifice of international order and its lofty principles struck in Iraq has collapsed in Gaza. And it is not just restricted to institutions of international law and politics.
Colin Powell's gaslighting was enabled by a journalistic community that, with a few commendable exceptions, suspended its skepticism to cheerlead and parrot rather than interrogate what were official lies. And who paid the price? A prominent female journalist lost her job and was practically hounded out of a career, while the men who peddled falsehoods, including the al-Qaeda link to Saddam, were promoted and remain respected industry leaders. Instead of learning from the mistakes of its Iraq coverage, much of Western journalism as an industry has superseded them in its reporting on Gaza, uncritically repeating claims, however flimsy, that align with an Israeli narrative while demonizing, denying or ignoring others, including evidence of atrocities live-streamed to our phones. Future generations will no doubt look back at Gaza just as we look back at Iraq, and wonder how it was allowed to happen. The Iraq war may have ended, but its lingering impact – on the Middle East and beyond – has not.
