KOCHVILLE TOWNSHIP, MI — A pair of mid-Michigan university professors say scholars already are portraying the latest Iraq War as an American blunder historically.
This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the United States’ entry into Operation Iraqi Freedom, an offensive that toppled the Saddam Hussein regime and led to an 8-year military campaign that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
While some say the story’s epilogue is far from written, Saginaw Valley State University History Professor Eric Petersen and Central Michigan University History Professor John Robertson agree: Scholars who will write the history books so far see the war as a mistake.
“By and large, the consensus I’m seeing is, in hindsight, it was a major mistake on the part of the U.S. in terms of the results,” said Robertson, who specializes in Middle East history extending back centuries. “Nothing of what America hoped to achieve has been achieved.”
When then-President George W. Bush sought public support for the Iraq campaign a decade ago, he and his administration cited Hussein’s likely possession and pursuit of chemical and nuclear weapons as reason for military involvement.
No such weapons were discovered, Robertson pointed out. Other objectives failed too, he said.
While Hussein’s dictatorship was toppled, its replacement is beginning to resemble a “Saddam-like government” ruled by one religious group in a country divided by religions, Robertson said.
Petersen agreed the new Iraq so far hasn’t offered promise diplomatically for America.
“(The conflict) replaced a dictatorial but relatively stable regime with an unstable government that’s in flux,” he said.
Hussein’s absence has “empowered” a neighboring nation Bush once labeled one-third of a global “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea, the SVSU educator said.
“Iran is in a much stronger position now than it had been,” said Petersen, who has begun to teach about the conflict in his American Diplomatic History course.
“(The war) has probably encouraged Iran and North Korea to (seek) nuclear weapons. The more the U.S. uses force, the more other countries would like to have nuclear weapons.”
Robertson, who plans to publish a book later this year about centuries of Iraq history, said other potential benefits of the war never panned out.
“There was also the possibility (the war) would open up a gold mine of oil contracts but, as it turns out, a lot of Americans have been shut out of getting contracts,” he said.
Domestically, the Iraq War is seen as a failure both because of the lives lost and the financial toll, both professors say.
About 4,500 U.S. troops died and 30,000 were wounded while more than $2 trillion was spent in combat and reconstruction costs, U.S. officials estimate. In addition, some estimate more than 110,000 Iraqi civilians died during the 8-year conflict from March 2003 to December 2011.
“Most people would consider (the Iraq War) to have been a rather serious mistake,” Petersen said.
Historically for America, he said the Iraq conflict most closely resembled the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ‘70s.
That earlier conflict arose as part of the Cold War, with American leaders making the case that Vietnamese freedom from Chinese communism was critical for United States safety.
The Iraq War, in a similar way, was in part sold to Americans as necessary to eliminate Iraq as a pro-terrorist nation in a post-9/11 world. As Robertson puts it, America’s “boogeyman” in that old war was communism; in 2003, it was terrorism.
The end result of both conflicts historically may be comparable, Petersen said.
“In retrospect, as tragic as the Vietnam War was, it probably did not affect the Cold War,” the SVSU professor said. “The Cold War came to an end to the U.S.’s advantage with or without the Vietnam War. You can see the Iraq War in the same line.”
He said it may take decades for scholars to fully understand the Iraq War’s impact on global politics or whether its effect will resemble the Vietnam War’s postmortem.
Robertson said America’s reaction to the Iraq War was different from its reaction to the Vietnam War because the nation no longer uses a military draft to send civilians to overseas battles. That wasn’t the case in the 1960s and ‘70s.
“Because we had an all-volunteer Army, by in large people were able to ignore the Iraq War,” Robertson said. “It didn’t affect them unless they had family members over there, fighting.”
Whose war was it?
Both professors say scholars likely will see the Iraq conflict as Bush’s war, even though it ended nearly three years into President Barack Obama’s term.
“Given the fact that the Iraq War helped trash the economy and America’s prestige overseas, and that the impetus was Bush’s and (Vice President Dick) Cheney’s, historians will remember that it was Bush who launched the war on pretext that was pretty clumsy,” Robertson said. “Obama worked pretty assiduously to get the (troop) withdrawal.”
The CMU professor was unsure how scholars will view the conflict over time.
“I’ve read that, decades from now, we’ll talk about it like we talk about the War of 1812; It was in the distant past and wasn’t that big of a deal historically,” Robertson said.
“It depends where the U.S. is 50 years from now,” he said. “I do think, unless there’s some huge turnaround in Iraq, given the cost of war and chain of events, what some scholars are saying — that the Iraq War was one of the greatest strategic blunders in American history — may well be true.”
Petersen agreed that time will determine the Iraq War's place in history.
“Whether, 50 years from now, it has any lasting affect is anyone’s guess,” he said.