President Biden’s announcement of our imminent withdrawal from Iraq provides a good opportunity for a kind of postmortem. According to the BBC, some 4,487 service personnel have died in country since the 2003 invasion. Many thousands more suffered serious injury and trauma, and untold numbers of Iraqi citizens have suffered, as well.
I’ll leave it to others to fully analyze this misadventure, but there are two quotes from early on that must not be forgotten. I believe they were the wisest things said in 2003, and they come from the most unlikely sources.
One comes from Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the former media and foreign affairs minister under Saddam Hussein. You know him better as “Baghdad Bob.”
Sahhaf (also spelled Sahaf) made many preposterous statements during the early days of the invasion, arguing that the US Army was nowhere to be seen near Baghdad when the city already was largely occupied, or that that the American and British forces either were defeated or in full retreat. Sahhaf was the butt of late-night television jokes and several web sites are dedicated to his incongruous claims to this day.
Yet Sahhaf was to make the most brilliant comment on the war by anyone, which I can only reconstruct here because I could not find it online. It was his response to a question from a Western reporter after Saddam had been deposed (but not yet killed). The reporter had challenged Sahhaf’s earlier denials about the American presence in his country.
“I look into the past and I don’t see any Americans, and I look into the future and I don’t see any Americans,” he replied.
I’ll stand by that quote, or something very close to it, but apparently no one else noticed. Yet, can you find a truer quote about the war, today, now that we are officially withdrawing?
(Sahhaf had another quote, also worthy of acknowledgment, which you can find online easily enough: "When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics, the grandfathers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.")
My other source will have to be unnamed because I cannot even find his name online but I’ll stand by what I attribute to him, as well. The man was an Iraqi general and Ba’ath Party official who did not want war between the United States and his country. No bravado or chest-thumping, just an insight into the nature of bad leadership on the world stage. What did this general propose, in lieu of war? That George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein simply have a duel or gunfight between themselves, something like “High Noon,” maybe “Samson and Goliath,” but really a reference to “single combat” as it was known in classical antiquity. That was when two warriors would represent their opposing armies, leaving the people out of it, at least for the time being.
I believe this Iraqi general wanted to spare his soldiers and his people from what he knew would befall them once the bombs started raining down. Or, perhaps, he was mocking the bellicose, chest-thumping Bush and Saddam. If they had a problem with each other let them duke it out and leave the people out of it.
Had we only listened to this forgotten general in 2003.
I remember Army and Dept of the Army civilian experts in international affairs, regional politics, and military strategy warning (in government published studies, monographs and commentary) - prior to the 2003 invasion - that using US military force to overthrow Saddam’s regime would be a serious mistake with unintended consequences for Iraq, the region and the US. The Administration shut them down.