Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the first phase of the Iraq War that culminated in the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein and the demise of his autocratic, Sunni-dominated regime. George W. Bush’s administration claimed its primary rationale for the invasion was to dismantle Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction — weapons he could have, in theory, passed to al-Qaeda-type terrorists. WMDs were never found, however, leaving Americans suspicious about the real motive for the war.
So why did the United States invade Iraq, launching a war that would take the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and cost $2 trillion?
The decision was rooted in a decade-long effort on the part of the United States and Saudi Arabia — traditionally America’s closest Arab ally and Iraq’s southern neighbor — to get rid of the Iraqi dictator they considered a regional menace. For most of the previous decade, U.S. and Saudi leaders had similar ideas about how to do this. They harbored no grand ambitions to remake Iraq. They simply wanted a less threatening Iraqi dictator.
Advertisement
Then in 2003, Bush finally delivered Hussein’s overthrow, but in a way that was repugnant to the Saudis. To there shock, Bush initiated the wholesale reordering of Iraq’s political system, enabling the Iraqi Shiites to rise to power, which ultimately benefited Iran. Hussein’s removal, when it finally happened, created a rift between the two allies. The Saudis felt deeply betrayed by the Americans and refused to help them stabilize post-Hussein Iraq.
The Saudis had been gunning for Hussein since 1990, when the latter launched his ill-conceived invasion of Kuwait. That August, Iraqi forces seized the small Arab sheikhdom and were poised to invade Saudi Arabia. The Saudis believed this action had only been prevented due to the rapid deployment of U.S. troops to the kingdom. Thereafter, they became, according to Secretary of State James Baker, “the most aggressive” member of the international coalition to liberate Kuwait. Baker recalls in his account of this period that the Saudis not only wanted Iraqi forces out of Kuwait — they wanted Hussein “destroyed.”
The members of the 1990-91 Gulf War coalition — Western countries such as the United States, France and Britain, as well as Arab ones such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria — believed that the fall of Hussein would be the natural consequence of the Iraqis’ ejection from Kuwait. No dictator, they surmised, could survive such a humiliating defeat.
Advertisement
After Hussein accepted a cease-fire in late February 1991, uprisings soon spread like wildfire throughout Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish heartlands. This sparked a major debate between U.S. and Saudi leaders over whether they should support the Iraqi rebellion. The Saudis vigorously advocated arming the rebels in the hope that doing so would pressure the Iraqi military to sack Hussein.
President George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy team considered such a move too risky. They had hoped for a military coup at the end of the war, not a popular uprising, which they believed risked devolving into a destabilizing civil war that could benefit Iran. In the Saudi view, Tehran was too weak at that time, three years at the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War, to take advantage. Nevertheless, to the Saudis’ enduring regret, Bush let Hussein’s forces crush the rebellion.
While that decision left the dictator in power in 1991, the Bush administration authorized a covert CIA program to get rid of Hussein, kept in place by President Bill Clinton and supported by the Saudis. The idea was to foment a coup with the help of Iraqi dissidents. Hussein would be removed and replaced by another autocrat. But a 1996 coup attempt was a catastrophe. Hussein uncovered the plot and executed 80 Iraqi officers. The CIA began to lose faith in the coup effort.
Advertisement
The Saudis continued to push Washington to get rid of Hussein. However, Clinton’s foreign policy team balked for the same reason that Bush’s advisers had demurred in 1991. They wanted Hussein gone, but feared destabilizing Iraq to the advantage of Iran. Over time, the Clinton team resigned itself to Saddam’s continuation in power.
The 9/11 attacks put Hussein’s removal back on the agenda and in the sights of George W. Bush. Many of Bush’s advisers thought U.S. policy toward Iraq had become too passive and used the terrorist attacks to pursue a more hawkish approach. Given its previous failures, the CIA advised the administration that it would take a military invasion to overthrow the Iraqi leader.
The Saudis were alarmed by the plan to invade Iraq. As much as they detested Hussein, they feared, as Bush’s father and Clinton had before them, that a massive military intervention would create a power vacuum in Baghdad that would destabilize the region and ultimately benefit Iran. Throughout the 1990s, the Americans had evinced more concern than the Saudis about the ramifications of destabilizing Iraq. In 2003, these roles were reversed. Having pushed Washington for years to take more action, the Saudis seemed to think on the eve of the invasion that the Americans were about to take too much action.
Advertisement
Where the Saudis irrevocably parted ways with the George W. Bush administration was over its vision for post-Hussein Iraq. Bush regarded democracy as the answer to the Middle East’s ills. He was committed to establishing a democratic system in Iraq, a natural consequence of which was that Iraq’s long-repressed Shiite majority would come to power. The Saudis remained committed to preserving Iraq as a Sunni autocracy — the objective they had shared with the first president Bush and Clinton. For the Saudis, given their historic interest in balancing Iran and Iraq against each other, Shiite power in Baghdad was anathema. While the elder Bush and Clinton had also thought in balance-of-power terms, the younger Bush rejected such formulas. He believed that bringing democracy to Iraq would have beneficial knock-off effects throughout the region.
The Saudis were aghast when the Americans, post-invasion, launched a complete overhaul of Iraq’s political system. As Iraq’s Shiites came to power via democratic elections in 2005, Saudi Arabia’s then ruler, King Abdullah, concluded that the country had been lost to Iran’s influence. Abdullah felt deeply betrayed by the Americans, whose Iraq project he found inexplicable. While the Bush administration placed considerable pressure on Abdullah to engage with the new Iraq to help stabilize the troubled country, the king refused. Not until Abdullah’s death in 2015 did Saudi Arabia begin to normalize relations with Iraq.
In short, the overthrow of Hussein, when it finally happened in 2003, caused the Saudis to lose considerable faith in their American ally, exacerbating a rift between the two that started with 9/11 and that has deepened ever since.
Advertisement
For the Americans, Saudi hostility to post-Hussein Iraq hindered efforts to stabilize the country. The success of the younger Bush’s Iraq project depended, in part, on its Arab neighbors, most especially Saudi Arabia, accepting the new Iraq. The absence of Saudi support weakened Iraq and paradoxically left it dependent on Iran.
This history reminds us that there was no good way to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was a menace, but the cost of his removal was an atrocious set of wars. Iraq, the rest of the Middle East and the United States are still recovering from those wars today — a full 20 years later.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLqisMRmmbJlmJ7AtbvRsmZraGJofHF%2FjmpuaKGilr5uv8Cum6Jlkaeuo7XAZqqanJSWum601KyqnqGeZA%3D%3D