Why the Iraq War was still the right decision?

Many in the UK and across the World now consider the invasion of Iraq to be a catastrophe, with 43% of people in the UK now believing that it was the wrong decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The UK’s current leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn has said as much, whilst running in the US Republican Primaries, current President Donald J. Trump had expressed the same sentiments. However I profoundly disagree with both Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump and agree with Tony Blair in regards that the Iraq War was the right decision, but with significant mistakes and errors taking place in its implementation.

First I would like to acknowledge one of the biggest issues involved in the Iraq War and that is the miscommunication to the public about the reasoning of the Iraq War. Before the invasion of Iraq War the message was communicated to the public that Iraq had significant weapons of mass destruction. The Chilcot Report has now cleared up the claims Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction in 2003 and that this claim was presented with too much certainty.

Another big claim made by those who oppose the Iraq War is that the invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime, as bad as it was, had destabilised the region. The people who often make this claim are completely ignorant of the realities of Iraq in 2003, whilst Saddam Hussein was in power. There are many things to call Iraq but stable was certainly not one of them.  Iraq was in such a poor situation in 2003 under Saddam Hussein. A United Nations Human Development Report from 2003 put the adult literacy rate at below 40%, there was an infant mortality rate of 107 deaths per 1000 live births, an under-fives mortality rate of 133 deaths per 1000 live births and with 27% of the population being undernourished. This shows Saddam Hussein’s lack of care for the lives of the Iraqi people, that even whilst under sanctions and with the masses in Iraq suffering he would build palaces and other vanity projects.

It is also largely forgotten now that Saddam Hussein was a massive user of state terror with his brutal tactics nearly universally condemned in 2002. Saddam Hussein has been found using his own citizens as human shields in the past. Saddam Hussein’s state apparatus also had a long history of torturing political opponents or supposed criminal suspects in the most brutal manners possible; eye gouging, electrical shocks, sexual abuse and rape were just few of the many ways in which Saddam Hussein’s regime would use torture against the Iraqi people which stemmed far back into his rule.

Saddam Hussein was also a promoter of sectarianism whilst he was in charge of Iraq. The Shia Muslim majority in Iraq suffered from massive repression. Their religious festivals would be banned, Shia uprisings would be brutally crushed with victims being found across Iraq in mass graves. However Saddam Hussein’s sectarianism reached an all-time high with regards to the Kurdish people. The Al-Anfal campaign was a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people with nearly 100,000 people killed. This was a systematic attempt to crush Kurdish rebels with the expressed aim to punish as many Kurdish people as possible. One of the worst events which occurred in the Al-Anfal campaign was the chemical weapons attack on Halabja, this saw the Iraqi Air Force kill nearly 5000 people with a further tens of thousands of people being injured. Saddam Hussein’s regime also kidnapped as many as 8000 people from the Barzani clan. These Kurdish people were later taken to prisons, tortured and executed with their bodies being dumped in mass graves.

It’s a mystery that anyone can claim that the Iraq under Saddam Hussein was anywhere near stable, when his list of human rights abuses and war crimes are so great. There is a clear case to be made for Saddam Hussein’s removal and it was a humanitarian intervention to remove Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq just as much as in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and in my opinion it was just as moral to remove Saddam Hussein from the reins of power as it was removing Mussolini, Hitler from power and expelling Kim Il-Sung from South Korea and Milošević from Kosovo.

The problem with the Iraq War has not been the removal of Saddam Hussein in the first place it has been through badly managing the aftermath and having inadequate levels of troops in parts of the War. George W. Bush did later show leadership by carrying out a troop surge which saw tens of thousands of extra US troops entering Iraq.  This position was opposed by Obama, Clinton and Biden and the vast majority of the Democrats. Obama did later go on to praise the surge and its success. The US troop surge did see decreasing ethno sectarian incidents, reductions in the number of both Iraqi and US security forces deaths.  If US troops had not been removed from Iraq in 2011 and had continued on the trajectory seen under George W Bush it is very likely that the situation in Iraq would be very different today. The rise of the Islamic State terror group could have been more successfully contained and stopped if there were far greater levels of US troops who remained in Iraq, rather than the situation where we had badly trained Iraqi soldiers fleeing from this terrorist group and allowing them to take over more territory.

I do not think that the removal of Saddam Hussein and other tyrants is bad thing and this decision should not be seen as cynically as the Suez Crisis, as it is far clearer that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who not only terrorised his own people but he also terrorised the people of Iran, Kuwait and Israel. But there have been significant errors made in conducting the Iraq War that should serve as lesson that you cannot just expect a country subjected to totalitarian regimes to completely rebuild themselves within a few years and that there has to be long term assistance to these liberated countries with the use of troops and aid to stabilise the situation.