Although the United States intervened in Iraq after it began its intervention in Afghanistan, it is withdrawing from Iraq first. Therefore, what the United States has and has not accomplished in Iraq will be discussed first.
It must be said to begin with that the United States did achieve some important successes in Iraq. It destroyed the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein — something that the Iraqi population had not only been unable to do on its own, but may not have been able to do later either. If Saddam had managed to transfer power to his sons (who were reportedly just as, or even more, vicious than their father), the regime may have survived for years or even decades.
In addition, the U.S.-led intervention helped the Kurds in northern Iraq. They had suffered terribly under Saddam Hussein but were able to solidify the tenuous autonomy they had achieved (also with U.S. help) after the 1990-91 Kuwait conflict and even build some prosperity in their zone.
Although Iraq’s Arab Sunni tribes were initially hostile to the U.S.-led intervention and fought an insurgent war against it, American forces were eventually able to make peace and work with most of them.
Most important, the United States organized and protected the holding of relatively free and fair elections at both the national and local levels. This allowed Iraq’s Arab Shia majority, which had also suffered dreadfully under Saddam Hussein, to play a leading role in Iraqi politics for the first time.
In addition to these successes, however, the United States has had some noteworthy failures in Iraq. First, the failure to halt the massive violence, looting and infrastructure breakdown that took place throughout the country immediately after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This was caused by the Bush administration’s failure to anticipate and plan for the aftermath of Saddam’s downfall as well as to deploy enough troops to maintain order. As a result, the initial gratitude displayed by much of the Iraqi population toward the United States for delivering it from Saddam quickly disappeared.
Further, despite a massive troop presence, the United States was unable to prevent or stop the large-scale ethnic-cleansing campaigns that violent Arab Sunni and Arab Shia groups conducted against each other’s communities. These campaigns were so successful that some observers attributed the decline in violence in Iraq in 2008-09 not to the American troop surge ordered by President Bush, but to the ethnic-cleansing campaigns having largely completed the violent work of segregating the Sunni and the Shia communities from each other.
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