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During these extensive visits I have witnessed the rebirth of a nation where at least a trillion US dollars is being spent on reconstruction. Planned or actually under way are thousands of kilometres of new roads, ports, schools, hospitals and airports. Work has started on at least three million homes. Iconic projects have arisen like the ‘Baghdad Eye’ and a high-speed rail link between Basra and Baghdad. I recently visited the stunning Basra Sports City Stadium, a 65,000-seater colossus where from March 2013 football will be played in a building of world-class standards. And on the corniche in Basra they plan to construct the tallest suspension bridge in the Middle East.
I must also mention the amazing revival of Iraq’s oil industry — led by Britain’s BP, whose mega-giant oil field at Rumaila is currently generating more than 40 per cent of federal income. Iraq is now the second biggest oil producer in Opec. One day it will challenge and perhaps surpass Saudi Arabia.Meanwhile, Anglo-Dutch Shell’s operation at Al Majnoon will soon begin a ground-breaking gas capture programme as Iraq moves to fuel all of its power stations by the end of the decade.
Iraq wants and needs foreign investment, and cash from overseas is starting to flood in. Last year it attracted $56 billion from foreign companies, a 40 per cent increase on 2011. China’s stake in the new Iraq was recently valued at more than $3 billion, including Shanghai Electric’s $1 billion power plant deal in Wasit. South Korea is the leading foreign investor at $12 billion. Thanks to the free market which is now beginning to flourish, Iraq’s Central Bank has the biggest reserves in its history at $60 billion and the Iraqi budget for last year was in excess of $100 billion.
Meanwhile Iraqi banks generally are awash with cash as wages quadruple from a decade ago when Saddam was in power.
There are other signs of a true economic revival: recently the Baghdad Stock Exchange successfully hosted the biggest floatation of a public company in the Middle East since 1988 when the mobile phone giant Asiacell raised $1.3 billion. Rivals Zain will follow suit later this year.
All these breathtaking events would never have happened under the previous regime’s fuzzy economic policies and crippling bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, democratic Iraq is proving itself as a regional power-broker. It successfully hosted last year’s Arab League summit and also talks on Iran’s nuclear policy. Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, must take the credit for this and also his country’s moves to normalise relations with its neighbour Kuwait, once so brutally shattered by Saddam Hussein’s invasion.
The Iraqi people deserve the best and a decade from the US-led invasion they are seeking assistance from nations, particularly Britain. I believe it is our duty to ensure that after the dark days under Saddam, the steady light of freedom and democracy burns in Iraq.
So was it worth it?
Yes, a thousand times yes!
Lady Nicholson is a Liberal Democrat peer, and executive chairman of the Iraq Britain Business Council.
The 2003 Iraq war was an act of state aggression that had no basis in law or national or international security. It not only infringed Iraq’s sovereignty and toppled its government — which had not been its declared intention — it devastated its economy and traumatised its people, in a way from which they have yet to recover. Some 200,000 Iraqis died, as did some 5,000 foreign troops. Staggering sums of money were spent on the fighting and the ham-fisted reconstruction.
As from any disaster, a ragbag of ‘good things’ can be said to have resulted, but the conflict did nothing to stabilise the region or suppress terrorism, much the opposite. Iraq was a country brutally led and a mess, though the mess was in part due to western sanctions. A decade later, the streets of Baghdad are reportedly less safe and the civilian death rate higher than before the invasion. Nor has Iraq been reunited with its province of Kurdistan, quite the opposite.
The reason for the war was that a belligerent American president, George W. Bush, wanted to imitate and ‘complete’ his father’s victory in Kuwait in 1991. He was desperate to sustain the triumphalism of his post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan where, as Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘We had run out of targets to bomb.’ Bush’s excuse for the invasion, implausible even at the time, was an edifice of fabrication about Iraq’s ‘imminent threat’ to the world. The Americans did not need allies, but found in Tony Blair a man strangely besotted by American power, whose cabinet was too weak to stop him.
I do not regard Blair as a war criminal. He persuaded himself, and his craven aides, of a tissue of mendacities about intelligence, but he was hardly the first leader to go to war on a whim. He was dancing to Washington’s tune. He sought to legalise the invasion, but with none of the rigour deployed by Margaret Thatcher before the Falklands. International lawyers are the hired guns of neo-imperialism. They can dredge up a war crime, a terrorist menace or a ‘responsibility to protect’ to justify any aggression. As Bush famously said, ‘International law I leave to lawyers.’
At the time of the assault, Saddam was no threat to anyone except his more dissident citizens, despite the frantic efforts of the CIA and MI6 to prove otherwise. His earlier expansionism had been curbed by the Iran war, the first Gulf war of 1990-91 and Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox in 1998. He had lost control of Kurdistan to a Nato air exclusion zone.
Domestically, Saddam was a brutal and sadistic leader. His Sunni tribe ruled the majority Shias ruthlessly. But his Ba’ath party was secularist and a bulwark against simmering Islamist insurgency. He tolerated Christianity and sustained Iraq’s cultural heritage. For more than a decade, the West had regarded him as an ally. By 2003 he was a haunted, besieged leader perpetually at risk of his life.
The violence the Pentagon unleashed on Iraq was appalling to any who witnessed the aftermath. It shattered the social structure of the state and its component communities alike. Neighbourhoods became fortified enclaves, plagued by killings, kidnappings and vendettas, with some two million people driving into exile. Few have returned. Professional institutions, such as hospitals, universities, the army and government, have collapsed.
An estimated 90 per cent of Iraq’s Christian population, resident in Baghdad for a millennium, were driven to Syria by the resulting internecine strife, and still dare not return. Baghdad museum is still not open and archaeological sites are wrecked. Iraqi women are more sheltered and repressed than ever. Militia killings and car bombings continue by the week.
Iraq today is staggering back to its feet, victim of a dreadful mugging. Oil output is getting back to its pre-war level. The Shia majority is in power, albeit treating the Sunnis much as they were treated by them. My Iraqi acquaintances are clear. Saddam was bad, but nothing can forgive the violence inflicted on their country by ten years of the ‘coalition of the willing’. As one put it, ‘Then we knew whom to fear, now we do not.’ The country is wide open to the Iranian-backed militias and Islamist militants. What was a tenuous balance of power in the Gulf region is no more.
Iraq was one of a long list of world nations whose regimes were unsavoury to the West. The end of the Cold War led America to a rash of attempted regime changes, usually by supporting insurgents. It helped the Taleban to oust Moscow from Kabul, separatists to oust Serbs from much of Yugoslavia and rebels to oust Gaddafi in Libya.
The choice was random. Somalians were helped for a while and then left in the lurch. Burmese insurgents were not helped at all, nor was Tibet, nor was Georgia in its spat with Moscow. Syria’s present rebels could be forgiven for wondering what has happened to the 101st Airborne.
The national integrity of small states, irrespective of their governments, was long championed by the United Nations and was indeed its reason for existing. Such integrity is now at the mercy of the electoral needs of the White House and Downing Street. Insurgency is a postcode lottery.
The historian John Darwin has written that the British empire was a ramshackle congeries of properties united by an attitude of mind. The properties have gone, but the attitude survives, a craving of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to teach the world a lesson. This craving is ironically reborn in an America that was created to fight it. Its continuity is reflected in David Cameron’s fixation with building aircraft carriers and boosting overseas aid.
The horrors of the Iraq war more than damaged the West’s moral authority as an intervener. It evoked a neurotic jihadism in the Muslim world and an antagonism to western values that fuels terrorism. That in turn has bred a reactive paranoia which now bloats the American and British security industries.
The world has moved on. But what was done to Iraq was obscene. However we dress up the urge to intervene in other peoples’ affairs, it remains dangerous. Iraq was its most demented outbreak.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist, and a former editor of the Times.
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