General Overview Of Iraq War: Analytical Essay

The United States entered the Iraq war shortly after the tragedy of 9/11 in 2001. This war was initially fully supported by the American people because at that time the country was in a state of high patriotism. Citizens felt wrong by an outside country and wanted to find the perpetrator as soon as possible as a way of showing that no one can come to American soil and bring down the American spirit; the thought was, though the United States may have been caught off guard, Americans will prevail and will always win. However, looking back on it now many Americans will claim the complete opposite of the above sentiment. The war had several underlying goals such as “removing the regime of Saddam Hussein and with him the spectre of a nuclear armed Iraq” (Fawcett, 325). When the United States’ goals became muddled and Iraq turned out to not be the deranged enemy that was holding and hiding members of the terrorist organization that attacked the United States as once anticipated, American public approval started to drop. This is what was happening in the United States, however the sentiments of the citizens of Iraq have almost always been negative.

As Louise Fawcett writes in The Iraq War ten years on: assessing the fallout, “Barack Obama, then senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, described it as a war which ‘never should have been authorized and never should have been waged’. Whatever the perspective from which it is viewed, it cannot be described as a success” (Fawcett, 325). Many have claimed that the United States lost the war, though can there really be a winner when both countries came out worse off than before they entered the war? There were so many negative outcomes and consequences that have implications on the global atmosphere and market to this day. Some of these include the effect of the strength of Iraq as a legitimate state, a negative attitude toward Western powers.

The strength of Iraq as a legitimate and stable state has been challenged and proven non existent since the 2003 Iraq war for several reasons. First of which comes after American soldiers were told to dismantle the existing government because the leadership at the time, Saddam Hussain, was thought to be harboring and building weapons of mass destruction (nuclear weapons). Though this was never proven, it was enough cause to justify United States’ intervention. Once the existing government was dismantled not much was left to take its place but secular groups that were arguably more dangerous and radical than the previous leadership. Additionally Iraq had deep lines of division that had the potential to lead to a really hostile environment, however as Craig White writes in Iraq: The Moral Reckoning, since “the Sunni Arabs, a small minority, have been the dominant group in Iraq for hundreds of years,” the unrest had been quelled. But once the United States intervened, the hostility was initiated and unrest ensued. All of this proves to be a negative impact on Iraq because “ shifts in the regional balance of power resulting from the Iraq War, [which] transformed Iraq from a strong to a weak state” (Fawcett, 326). Some argue that this was one of the many factors that led to and fueled the Arab Spring.

Another negative impact for Iraq in this post 2003 war era was the anti-western sentiment that spread like wildfire. Though the United States thought that entering Iraq was a way of helping them in addition to achieving our goal, it actually had the opposite effect. White puts it best when he writes, “invasions of countries with sharply different cultures from those of the invader, however well-meaning the invaders claim to be, have a history of leading, often, to bitter insurgencies” (White, 92). Not only were there emotional consequences of the US invasion into Iraq-the citizens of Iraq felt that the United States military (and the nation as a whole) was involving themselves in something they had nothing to do with and was overstepping boundaries into a culture that they had no knowledge of, but there were also tangible consequences. According to The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary “With hindsight, greater efforts should have been made in the post-conflict period to determine the number of civilian casualties and the broader effects of military operations on civilians. More time was devoted to the question of which department should have responsibility for the issue of civilian casualties than it was to efforts to determine the actual number” (Chilcot, 163). This was a main factor that led to anti- western sentiments in post war Iraq. The citizens of Iraq felt that the United States and other Western nations involved, did not take good enough care to avoid civilians during the war, therefore resulting in a high number of civilian casualties. Though most of this anger was directed towards the United States, other western countries were part of the negative impact on Iraq. And many of these countries did not do enough research or planning before going to war. For example as acknowledged in the Executive Summary, “Although the UK expected to be involved in Iraq for a lengthy period after the conflict, the Government was unprepared for the role in which the UK found itself from April 2003. Much of what went wrong stemmed from that lack of preparation” (Chilcot, 170). This shows that more than likely the 2003 war on Iraq was mostly fueled by emotional retaliation than strategic planning and proven potential threats.