We are all paying the price for America’s greatest post-war foreign policy blunder this week. It has made the world a more dangerous place Analysis by michael2day
It started, we were told, with “shock and awe” as hundreds of cruise missiles rained down on Baghdad, lighting up the night sky. But the US-led invasion of Iraq, launched 20 years ago this week, will be remembered for the two decades’ of violence, destruction and misery it unleashed afterwards.
The survivors and the bereaved from countless terror attacks in London, Paris, Mumbai and elsewhere might not agree.into the UK’s role in Iraq: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack upon Islam.”
Very few people today would dispute that removing Saddam, without properly thinking about or planning for the consequences, ignited a sectarian Sunni vs Shia conflict across the region. Displaced Iraqi Sunnis gave rise to Isis, whose “caliphate” ravaged Iraq and Syria. Over 23 million Iraqis and Syrians have fled their homes – many are now refugees.
US president Donald Trump personified the move away from interventionism. He was elected in 2016 on a ticket of extricating America from foreign wars and avoiding its involvement in new ones. Presdient George W. Bush, delivers a 2003 speech on the flightdeck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, claiming that the Iraqi conflict was coming to an end – eight years before US troops left the country
“I think there was a sort of madness in the air after 9/11, which sort of infected everyone,” says Menon. The Pentagon toy shop expanded when Donald Rumsfeld, the prince of neo-cons, became US defence secretary in 2001. He shifted the Pentagon, in the words of experts, from “threat-based budgeting” to “capabilities-based budgeting”. This meant the Pentagon bought weapons according to their propensity for hi-tech death and destruction, regardless of whether they were actually needed.Egged on by arms firms, the US Invaded Iraq.
“What we now have in terms of the open-source community, are capabilities that the CIA would have killed for 1990 in terms of satellite and signals, Intel and all that kind of stuff,” says Alberque. Patricia Lewis, the director of Chatham House’s International Security Programme thinks that Britain’s more honourable and clear-cut role in Ukraine, and Nato’s transparency with the military and surveillance data it has used aiding Kyiv might help restore some confidence in our intelligence services. She notes, too, that most of the intel is being verified – or even produced by OSINT. And this could have immediate benefits.
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