IRAQ INVASIONThe Iraq Invasion, Twenty Years Later

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq. Code-named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by the George W. Bush administration, the goal was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, topple Saddam Hussein, and remake Iraq into a democracy. Two decades later, U.S. troops are still on Iraqi soil and that nation is ravaged by challenges, including a threat of civil war last August.

Steven Simon, the Robert E Wilhelm Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies; Peter Krause PhD ’11, an MIT Security Studies Program research affiliate and an associate professor of political science at Boston College; and Marsin Alshamary PhD ’20, an assistant professor at Boston College, discuss the history behind the war, lessons learned on state-building, and Iraq’s current political outlook. 

Q: What lessons have political scientists learned from the Iraqi insurgency and the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign?
Peter Krause:One of the first lessons political scientists learned is that that their analysis and predictions can be strikingly accurate, even when their opinions are contrary to those of policymakers and the general public. Although the George W. Bush administration planned and initiated the invasion and a majority of Americans supported it, a majority of political scientists did not. A number of prominent political scientists, including four from MIT, took out a full page ad in The New York Times in September 2002, arguing that the war “[was] not in America’s national interest,” and that such a conflict would “spread instability in the Middle East,” “[increase] anti-Americanism,” “jeopardize the campaign against Al-Qaeda” by diverting resources and attention, and that the U.S. had no plausible exit strategy from Iraq. All of these fears were realized in the subsequent conflict. Although political scientists were unable to do much to impact the decision to go to war, they should take heart that unlike the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Great Recession of 2007-2008, this was a crisis that most saw coming and actively tried to prevent.