A belated admission of leaving Iraq to fail

 

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  by Karam Nama

   karamnama2

Twenty-two years after the invasion of Iraq, a new American voice has emerged to concede that the war was not just a political miscalculation, but rather a structural failure that struck at the heart of the Middle East. Tom Barrack’s remarks as the US Presidential Envoy to Syria read like an addendum to a long history of misjudgement — a belated recognition that the United States cannot and never will be able to remake countries in its own image through military force. Nations are not built by tanks, nor do they rise from the rubble of toppled regimes without vision.

Speaking to The National in Abu Dhabi, Barrack abandoned the habitual diplomatic language and spoke with unusual candour. Washington, he said, ‘Balkanised Iraq and Syria,’ and the invasion of Iraq became ‘a great example of what we should never do again.’ He was not attempting to soften the past, but offering a blunt diagnosis: three trillion dollars spent, twenty years of fractured history and hundreds of thousands of lives lost — and, in his own words, ‘we left with nothing’.

While this acknowledgement is not new, it is the most explicit to emerge from within the decision-making circle. It articulates what successive US administrations have tried to avoid admitting: that Washington attempted to impose a federal republic on a deeply divided, sectarian and ethnic landscape. Instead, a fragmented system was created that empowered militias rather than institutions. Barrack was unequivocal: ‘The structure we created allowed the militias to effectively control parliament. And Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has no authority.’

This single sentence encapsulates the current state of Iraq: a country presented as a democracy, yet suspended between unrestrained weaponry and paralysed politics. It is a country with a ruling class held in place by militias and political parties that operate according to external balances that have nothing to do with Iraq’s interests.

READ: How can Iraq reach the zero equation?

The United States did not leave behind a functioning state or institutions that were capable of standing on their own. It created a vacuum, and in the Middle East, vacuums never remain empty for long. Iran filled the entire space. Barrack described it plainly: ‘Iran intervenes and fills the void… that’s all they have left.’ Washington resists confronting his conclusion: Iran does not treat Iraq as a sphere of influence, but as an extension of its own political identity — and it has no intention of surrendering it.

If the United States leaves Iraq to Iran once again, it will recreate the same chaos that it helped unleash in 2003. Iraq, given its composition, history and geography, cannot survive without a state, nor can it withstand external agendas fuelled by its internal divisions. The chaos in Iraq never stays in Iraq. It spreads, reshaping the region in its own image of ruin.

Barrack is not the only one to have admitted this failure. Former CIA Director William Burns informed senior agency officials that the CIA had made a disastrous misjudgement regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. While modest, this was still not a political reckoning. He described how the White House’s arrogance overpowered the facts and how the desire to topple the regime triumphed over all available evidence.

Prior to this, British historian Elie Kedourie of Iraqi origin argued that the West’s greatest mistake in the Middle East is its desire to exert influence without accepting the responsibilities of an occupying power. The West fears the word ‘imperial’. It hesitates to see itself as such. In the space created by this hesitation, Iran and Russia stepped in, openly and shamelessly building influence.

As Kedourie summarised, the West wants to govern the region without appearing to do so. It is a recipe for perpetual failure.

The occupation of Iraq also revealed that the international order is not a neutral framework for cooperation, but rather a mechanism for imposing Western political will. When marketing the invasion, the George W. Bush administration relied on moral panic. Condoleezza Rice offered her infamous warning: ‘If we do not remove Saddam Hussein now, we may see a mushroom cloud over an American city.’

Full-scale war is based on political imagination rather than intelligence.

READ: The sectarian equivalent in Iraq

Since then, liberal democracies have never fully regained their self-confidence. They have fractured internally and faltered externally, and they remain unable to admit that the invasion of Iraq was not a minor error, but rather a political crime that shook the foundations of the world order.

The central question remains: can Iraq move forward under the current political system? The answer is simple: it cannot. The existing political process is not a path towards statehood, but rather a mechanism for perpetuating failure. It is a closed loop: corruption feeds corruption; militias are multiplying within the state; parties view the country only as spoils; and institutions are left to decay. The real Iraq is missing. The Iraq that exists today is a kidnapped state.

It cannot be saved unless it is reclaimed from the sectarian parties and militias that dominate it. But that is precisely what the ruling class seeks to prevent. The emergence of a real Iraq would signal the demise of the other Iraq — the Iraq of spoils, weapons, and foreign loyalties.

Barrack’s admission matters. However, it does not change reality. It simply adds another document to the archive of what Iraqis have known since 2003. America made a mistake. Iran benefited, and Iraq paid the price. However, confessions do not build nations. They do not restore sovereignty. They do not halt the collapse. They only serve as a reminder that the country needs a certain kind of courage that is currently lacking. A courage not found in Baghdad, nor in Washington.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251207-a-belated-admission-of-leaving-iraq-to-fail/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOmwH5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEez360LiOlkV8v_gHX4VJKlZdvyJQLXDXrsERKaX_nBTL1nzdrdrItFrlWsUg_aem_x4o8vrXQUWsDijhY0aBN2g