The Iraq War Reconsidered

Twenty years ago, the United States went to war in Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Except for an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads, those weapons weren’t there—Saddam had shut down his efforts to build a nuclear bomb as well as his biological-warfare program. Instead, he thwarted and resisted international weapons inspectors in order to bluff the world into believing that he still possessed capabilities for mass killing. Saddam’s best-hidden secret was his (at least temporary) weakness.

The United States went to war to build a democracy in Iraq. That did not work well either. Iraq does have elections, but the governments produced by those elections have been frail, unstable, and corrupt. The most recent elections were held in October 2021. It took a year of wrangling afterward to form Iraq’s present administration.

The United States hoped that regime change in Iraq would bring stability to the Arab Middle East. Instead, Iraq plunged into civil war. Libya and Syria soon followed. A gruesome, ultraradical “caliphate” seized territory and revenue from both Iraq and Syria. Millions of refugees headed toward Europe, upending the politics of that continent. The war transformed U.S. politics too. The presidential hopes of Hillary