This was published 1 year ago
Opinion
Putin’s war has uncomfortable parallels with our invasion of Iraq
Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten's The Project and academicIn the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I found myself thinking frequently about Iraq. In the environment of the moment, such thoughts felt almost heretical, but the parallels were just too plain for me to suppress. Here was Vladimir Putin invading a sovereign country on massively trumped-up pretexts, without any of the necessary authorisations under international law. The result would inevitably be a heavy, unconscionable loss of civilian life.
As I absorbed the strident commentary on just how gross a violation this was – with which I agreed – I couldn’t outrun an obvious question: didn’t we do that, too?
Russian President Vladimir Putin.Credit: AP
I don’t mean to say these invasions are the same, as so many Putin apologists do. You could point to any number of differences, and I’d agree with most of them. Iraq was a brutal dictatorship; Ukraine is a democracy, albeit a flawed one. A reasonable number of Iraq’s majority Shiite population would have welcomed an invasion to remove Saddam Hussein, whereas even if you believe the claim Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens would rather be part of Russia, that doesn’t explain why Putin started pounding Kyiv.
And the history is also incomparable. Russia’s invasion follows an era of Soviet dominance, in which most of Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet empire, which then sought to crush Ukrainian nationalism and inflicted atrocities upon the Ukrainian people.
The nadir was surely Stalin’s Holodomor of 1932-33, in which the Soviets drastically cut back food rations to the very Ukrainians who had been growing that food. The result was a man-made famine that killed at least 3.5 million Ukrainians, and which the European Parliament officially recognises (with pro-Soviet objections) as a genocide deliberately targeting the Ukrainian people. Against that background, Putin’s invasion is especially chilling.
But the commonalities bear contemplation, too. Both invasions relied on a similar melange of dubious justifications. For Iraq, the claim that Saddam’s regime had weapons of mass destruction, as well as connections with terrorist organisations which made it a terrorist threat to the West – all of which was quite predictably untrue.
Credit: Illustration by Andrew Dyson
For Ukraine, that it was seeking NATO membership, thereby continuing NATO’s onward march to surround Russia, placing American forces on the Russian border and leaving Russia seriously under threat. Both, then, followed the logic of pre-emptive strike, in which a grave threat need only be asserted to justify invasion.
Then there were the human rights justifications. In Iraq, Saddam’s persecution of non-Sunnis, and especially the Shiites – which was true. In Ukraine, an alleged genocide of ethnic Russians – which was not. In both cases, though, these were never primary reasons for war. They were convenient narratives, invoked to add a veneer of legitimacy to illegitimate invasions.
It’s 20 years ago this week that we embarked on our share of that illegitimacy. To our people’s credit, the Iraq war was never popular outside the United States, and you’ll no doubt remember the enormous rallies against it. Today, even most Americans think it was the wrong decision. But if we’re honest, while we might have this general sense the Iraq war was a blunder of sorts, we don’t seem to regard it as an especially grave moment, if we pay any regard to it at all. If I had to summarise our attitude towards this invasion two decades on, it wouldn’t be “how could we?” It would be “whoops!”
But it’s not a whoopsie to precipitate that many civilian deaths (estimates range from about 180,000 to a million, but we don’t know because we never tried to count them). It’s not a whoopsie to have handed Iraq over to Iranian influence, especially when you regard Iran as a serious foe. It’s not a whoopsie to have promised a democratic utopia, but instead left behind a traumatised country, racked with corruption and sectarian bloodshed, and power blackouts with a third of the country’s people living in poverty. These are major failures, none of which could possibly have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the tectonic plates on which Iraqi society is built.
All this has thrown up some galling ironies. We went to war to disrupt a fictional association between Saddam’s Ba’athist regime and terrorist groups. Then those vanquished Ba’athists wound up in prison with terrorists, where they actually did forge an alliance we came to know as Islamic State. And so, our fictional threat became a real one.
But perhaps the most current irony is that the Iraq invasion took an axe to the “rules-based order” Western nations so frequently like to trumpet. So when Putin decided to nick Crimea and then finally invade Ukraine, there was little left of the rules we might have invoked to restrain him. Putin even facetiously referred to weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine.
Would Putin have invaded in any case? Quite possibly. But it’s a counterfactual scenario in which our objections couldn’t so easily be dismissed as hypocrisy. And it’s also a scenario in which the threat of American power might have been more real. The disaster in Iraq has made America uncharacteristically gun-shy: a fact which showed up most starkly when Barack Obama declared Syria’s Assad regime had crossed a “red line” in using chemical weapons, then promptly proceeded to do nothing about it. If it will sit idle over that, Putin could be sure it would have no real response to him taking Crimea.
That’s the final commonality these invasions share. They began as demonstrations of the invaders’ military might, but instead exposed the limits of their power. Both assumed victory would be swift, then found themselves ensnared.
Putin apparently figured he’d take Kyiv in a few days, has manifestly failed, and may never win the war. George W. Bush famously stood before a “Mission Accomplished” banner a mere six weeks after he unleashed “Shock and Awe”, only to see American troops stuck in Iraq for another eight years, sustaining 97 per cent of their casualties after this moment.
Power, it seems, can be blinding. If it’s possible Putin took the opportunity Iraq opened for him, it’s certainly true he never fully learnt its lessons. Meanwhile, we seem to have forgotten just how much we’ve taught him.
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