Read Garrett Graff on the murky decision-making that set the stage for America’s long and bloody occupation of Iraq.
As the United States has reckoned with the human toll and costly legacy of its disastrous war of choice in the Middle East, there are two decisions—the orders to de-Baathify the Iraqi state and to dissolve the Iraqi military—that have been held up as some of the worst mistakes of the conflict. This week, we’re featuring Garrett Graff’s 2023 essay on the mystery that surrounds those fateful choices and what they reveal about Washington’s chaotic policymaking process before and during the war. To piece together the origin story of these calamitous decisions, Graff relied on “memoirs from key participants, archival documents, and fresh interviews with a dozen former top U.S. officials.”
In 2003, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was planning its invasion of Iraq on the basis of the claim that its leader, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction. But the effort to plan for a post-Saddam Iraq “did not begin until tanks and troops were already crossing the Atlantic,” Graff contended. Washington had drafted preliminary blueprints for how to quickly rebuild Iraq once Saddam had been toppled—but they were soon tossed out the window once it became clear that “Iraq had no functioning government or military, and its economy and infrastructure were crippled by sanctions, corruption, and mismanagement.” There were no contingency plans, Graff asserted, “for dealing with a suddenly lawless country.”
Amid this chaos, the decisions were made to prohibit senior officials from Saddam’s Baath Party from participating in the new Iraqi government and to dissolve the army, setting the stage for an insurgency made up of former regime elites and disbanded soldiers. These decisions “are seen as sparks that would ignite the insurgency to come and set Iraq aflame for years,” Graff wrote, “a period of disorder that would claim the lives of thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.”
The orders, which were given out by Paul Bremer, the most senior U.S. official in Iraq and the country’s de facto leader at the time, were slapdash, poorly executed, and rooted in an unrealistic anticipation of a quick and easy war. But better policymaking may not have saved Iraq from the grand, out-of-touch visions of the Bush administration, cautioned Graff. “In truth, the Iraq war was doomed before the first American soldier crossed the border.” |
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