Sao Paulo
As the culmination of the disastrous war on terror waged by the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the invasion of Iraq completes 20 years of Americans projecting their power around the world like a TV series zombie.
The metaphor also applies to the status of the conflict, which was declared won by a triumphant George W. Bush in 2003, ended officially in 2011 and resumed at low intensity in 2014.
The invasion also marked the end of the postCold War American imperial project. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Washington began to gain the upper hand in international relations, dictating military interventions around the world with varying degrees of success.
In 2001, the destruction of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon in the US paved the way for an unprecedented expansion of America’s radius of action. The legitimate pretense to punish terrorism, put forward with global support in the case of Afghanistan, home of the al Qaeda network, ended in the exploitation of a power project.
There was a strong personal component as Bush’s father was the president who ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 but failed to overthrow the dictator. Twelve years later, hunger and cravings came together, and Bush Jr. retaliated with the false excuse that the dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction and was connected to the 9/11 terrorists.
With him went the entire American militaryindustrial apparatus, a new generation of mercenary troops, and the western oil companies participating in the looting of the world’s fifthlargest oil field. In fact, Iraq is a semifailed state ruled by corrupt people and in the throes of political upheaval, yet its oil production to date has practically doubled from prewar levels.
The economic aspect of the war, important as it is, somewhat clouds the perception of political failure. The desert zombie largely determines how the Presidents who succeeded Bush behaved on the battlefield.
Firstly, because war, like all good zombies, didn’t die but was transformed. Four years after Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, safely docked in California with a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” American involvement in Iraq reached 176,000 troops.
It was the “surge” that tried to stem the Shia resistance fighting the US puppet government. PostSaddam Iraq has had seven prime ministers and multiple elections, but the country is a long way from the liberal democracy Bush promised. To make matters worse, Iraq is now a political vassal of Iran, America’s biggest regional rival in the Middle East.
Barack Obama recognized the inappropriateness of the task and in 2011 ordered his soldiers to pack up their weapons. But the bad job of internal repression gave rise to a new evil, ISIS (Islamic State), which would soon control large parts of Iraq and Syria, in addition to attacking targets across Europe.
As a result, Operation Inherent Resolution was launched in 2014, which today deploys perhaps 2,500 US troops in and around Baghdad against what remains of ISIS. In 2022 alone, the campaign carried out 313 airstrikes, 191 of them in Iraq.
However, American withdrawal was inevitable, so much so that the US did not directly intervene in the Syrian civil war, a task Russian Vladimir Putin gladly undertook in 2015. The intervention in Libya, which turned a bloodthirsty dictatorship into murderous anarchy, was the work of more Europeans.
Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and promised Americans something attractive, the end of “useless and endless wars”. It changed nothing in practice, but neither did it trigger a new conflict under the pretext of exporting democracies.
A tripod guided the changes. First, the fact that wars like Iraq’s are impossible to win even if the rival is killed, as happened with Saddam on the gallows in 2007.
Second, the paperback: According to the latest report from the benchmark program Costs of War at Brown University (USA), the Iraq war and the Inherent Resolution have cost $1.79 trillion to date, little more than Brazil’s annual GDP. The number falls within the universitycompiled $8 trillion War on Terror total.
Last but not least, the humanitarian impact which of course always hits the weakest side. Using Brown’s highest estimate, 315,000 people died in the Iraq war, including 210,000 Iraqi civilians. “Enemies,” as the Pentagon calls enemies, maybe 44,000.
US troops numbered 4,599, plus a group of 3,650 employed by private military contractors, the euphemism Bush allies coined for mercenaries. But the impact on the country is great, as seen in documentaries such as Pai, Filho e Pátria (2020). $232 billion has already been spent supporting veterans, and it’s estimated that by 2050 that account will grow by $1.1 trillion.
The global context has also changed with the economic and military rise of China under Xi Jinping, leading to the first salvos of Cold War 2.0 by Trump in 2017. led to the Ukraine war and the return of clashes between states to Europe after almost 80 years.
In all of this, it fell to Joe Biden to execute the most mature phase of this reorientation, with the botched exit from Afghanistan in 2020 and the acknowledgment that the business of “building nations” was an arrogant bore. It was a way of continuing methods, as demonstrated by Inherent Resolution’s zombie, until the next effective terrorist threat, but also keeping political costs to a minimum.
According to a survey by the British YouGov in February, only 25 percent of Americans still think about the Iraq war, for example. Another 20% say their lives have been impacted in some way by the conflict.
But in Ukraine, theory now meets practice. Biden is bolstering Kiev’s resistance after providing $47 billion in military aid to Ukrainians by January, 75% of all global aid, but without officially sending a single soldier. An American shooting at a Russian means, in his words, World War III.
It may be, and speculation runs wide in the context of the clash with China, but there is a lot of the Iraqi zombie conflict factor involved in this approach. Indeed, he does not appear to have frightened Putin, whose operation is increasingly taking on the character of a war without end in sight, even with the memory of “his” Iraq, the decade of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that helped dehydrate the communist empire .