Editor's note: Ten years ago the war in Iraq
began. This week we focus on the people involved in the war, and the
lives that changed forever. Ed Husain is a senior fellow for Middle
Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Follow him @ed_husain.
(CNN) -- I was living in Syria when the statues of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq came toppling down.
Saddam, who had arrogantly had his name inscribed
on bricks at the ancient city of Babylon, did not expect his rule to
end so abruptly, so humiliatingly. And at the University of Damascus,
students told me that they expected Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to
fall soon, too. They were not alone.
With 250,000 U.S. troops amassed in Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush's White House had contemplated rolling American tanks
into the Syrian capital. The Middle East was to be reshaped in the
image of American democracy. But events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and North
Korea distracted the Pentagon, and the "democratic domino theory" did not come to pass.
Ten years after Iraq, did the war give birth to the Arab Spring?
Yes, the Iraq War had
indirect connections to the Arab uprisings that swept the Middle East
and northern Africa in 2011. For one, the fall of Saddam must have
psychologically empowered Arab opposition activists who saw that a
Ba'thist dictator and his sons could be removed from power.
But it is a mistake to
suggest that Arabs across the region were directly inspired by the fall
of Saddam -- if that were true, they would have risen a decade ago. Why
wait until 2011? The answer is that other, more direct developments led
to the ongoing Arab revolutions.
First, in the immediate
aftermath of the September 11, 2001 atrocities, Arab governments used
the ensuing "war on terror" to quell domestic dissent. When opposition
Islamist parties questioned the legitimacy of Arab dictators, they were
portrayed as al Qaeda sympathizers to the West, and their imprisonment
in Cairo or Riyadh or Tripoli didn't raise international eyebrows.
The violence of radical
Islamists failed to topple strongmen in Egypt and Syria in the 1960s and
1980s. And once again, from 2001 to 2011, government repression of less
radical, nonviolent Islamists signalled to a younger generation of
Arabs that Islamism could not overthrow autocratic regimes.
Second, as the "war on
terror" unfolded, Islamists continued to fail in their decades-long
pursuit to gain political office, and the widespread corruption and
nepotism of regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt sunk deeper, US support
for Arab dictatorships also came into question.
Then U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice put it best in June 2005: "For 60 years, my
country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of
democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved
neither."
These were not just
empty words. The U.S. government identified civil society organizations
and financially supported NGOs through the "democracy promotion" agenda.
During the Bush administration, annual funding for these programs
exceeded the total amount spent on such programs in the entire decade to
2001, according to the 2009 budget report from the Project on Middle East Democracy.
Funding for the mostly
secular democracy activists was bolstered by the training provided for
them in use of social media in mobilizing people. The invention and
popularity of Facebook and Twitter helped young Arabs bypass
communications controlled by their dictators.
Even if this U.S.-funded
training in creating political parties, electioneering, communication
and media training only reached a small portion of the population, is it
any wonder that English-speaking, elite, urban Arabs took to Facebook
and Twitter to help overthrow dictators? Yes, there were local
grievances and the uprisings were homegrown. The Arab uprisings belong
to the Arab youth. But they were also responding by using modern
technology to amplify the mood music of Western belief that Arabs too
could create free societies. They were not an exception.
Why else were Arab
protesters' attention focused on the Obama White House as they demanded
the president call on Mubarak to depart? As Turkey pressured the White
House to oppose Mubarak, Saudi Arabia pressured Obama to support Mubarak
-- and in that way the uprisings revolved to some degree around the
messages sent from the U.S. government.
The Arab Spring was
going to happen with or without Saddam Hussein, but it would not have
happened had it not been for the attacks of September 11. In fact, in
many ways the Iraq War has prevented more from being done to aid the
uprisings, hindering global resolve in attending to the killing fields
of the full-blown civil war in Syria.
It is the ghost of Iraq
that prevents the U.S. from leading attempts to topple the brutal Assad
regime in Damascus. Regime change has consequences, as we learned in
Iraq. There will be no new commitments to "nation build" again, or
re-train police and security forces in a far off Arab land.
The sectarianism,
tribalism, Jihadism, border skirmishes and threat of chemical weapons
use in Syria reminds U.S. policymakers of the American and Arab blood
and treasure sacrificed in Iraq. And to what avail?
The ongoing loss of life
in Syria is a direct result of U.S. foreign policy blunders in Iraq.
Syrians are the victims of America's Iraq adventure. So as we ponder the
last decade and current Arab uprisings, let us not gloat about the
"success" of Iraq. Iraq is not a success. It is now an ally of Iran,
home to a prime minister who persecutes his own political opposition,
and unashamedly supports the Assad regime in Syria. Egyptians, Yemenis,
Libyans, and Tunisians were not inspired by America in Iraq.
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