The Costs Of The Iraq War

Terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has a new book, "Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror," arguing that U.S. policymakers have consistently failed to understand Al Qaeda’s strategy against the U.S., and through a series of policy mistakes played right into that strategy.

Having read the book, I think one of its greatest strengths is its rigorous explanation of why the Iraq war was an enormous strategic blunder for the United States. In an interview with Abu Muqawama’s Andrew Exum, Daveed sums up the case:

I think understanding the mistakes involved in our decision to go to war in Iraq is important because it was a major strategic blunder (and let’s be frank: the enormous human costs of the war make it so much more than that). A lot of our shortcomings in fighting jihadi militancy over the past decade have been strategic, and a failure to appreciate the consequences of the Iraq war means we haven’t grasped an absolutely vital strategic lesson.

Now, it’s well known that the justifications for the Iraq war haven’t held up: Saddam Hussein’s regime didn’t have an active WMD program, nor did it have significant connections to al-Qaeda (though some connections did in fact exist). And we can see many of the costs of that conflict clearly. In addition to the aforementioned human costs, our invasion of Iraq damaged the war effort in Afghanistan (which quickly became an economy-of-force mission as resources were diverted to the Iraq theater), allowed the regeneration of al-Qaeda’s core leadership as pressure was removed from it, angered our allies while empowering the Iranian regime, and served as a potent tool for jihadi recruitment.

These costs, though not totally unforeseeable, have become clearer after the fact. But one point I make in the book is that a better appreciation of al-Qaeda’s strategy would have made the dangers of invading Iraq quite apparent in advance. As I said, al-Qaeda had two overarching strategic ideas about defeating America: bleeding its superpower adversary’s economy, and making the battlefield on which the fight against the United States occurred as broad as possible. The Iraq war plainly advanced both of our adversary’s goals. Despite the best-case scenarios concerning the war’s costs trumpeted by the Bush administration, it was extremely expensive—something that people like army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki foresaw. And the Iraq invasion helped the other major element of al Qaeda’s strategy, broadening the battlefield and feeding the group’s narrative that Islam itself was under attack by the United States.

None of this is to say that there aren’t any potential benefits from the Iraq intervention. But as we showed in our May 2010 CAP report, The Iraq War Ledger, those benefits are overwhelmingly outweighed by the human, strategic, and economic costs of the war. Hopefully Daveed’s book will help hammer that point home to a U.S. foreign policy elite that, in the wake of "the surge", has tended to act as if the U.S. "broke even" in Iraq, when in fact we’re still deeply in the hole because of the intervention.