The West needs to learn from its mistakes or be doomed to repeat them (again)

It’s the 2nd of August 1990. Saddam Hussain has just invaded Kuwait in order to absorb the country as the ‘19th province’ of Iraq. The next year a counter invasion to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait (known as Operation Desert Storm) is launched by the US and other western countries on the orders of President George H. W. Bush. While the coalition suffers casualties, the Iraqi army is much worse off and surrenders within 42 days. The operation is hailed as a ‘success’ by the international community. However, the success is to be very short lived, as it marks the beginning of deep tensions between the US and Saddam; distrust was to linger and with terrible consequences.

Jump forward 26 years to the 2nd of August 2016, and the headline ‘RAF attacks Islamic State base at Saddam Hussein palace in Mosul’ is breaking news on the BBC. There’s something very unsettling about this. We have a new threat quite literally residing in the home of the last. And for all the Iraqi people’s euphoria at being liberated from a brutal dictator, another more complex form of brutality would emerge to swiftly extinguish the happiness.

What’s most unsettling about this headline is the eerie feeling of nostalgia it stirs; it’s a reminder of a time when we seemed so sure that nothing could be worse than Saddam Hussein, and to remove him would be to end all our problems. But although now we may be faced with a new and more resilient threat, there’s certainly a sense that not much has changed in 26 long years.

For a significant proportion of this time the US, and by default the world, had one political dynasty as overseer – the Bush’s. George H. W. Bush (the 41st US president) was in power from 1989-1993 and his son George W. Bush (the 43rd US president) held power from 2001- 2009. One family in charge of the most powerful country in the world, instrumental in the meltdown of relations with Iraq which started with the defence of Kuwait in 1991. Some would go on to say that George W. Bush’s later invasion of Iraq in 2003 was putting right the ‘unfinished business’ from the last Bush administration. This came after there was evidence from the UN to suggest there had been an attempt, by Iraqi intelligence, to explode a car bomb on the streets of Kuwait. The target? George W. H. Bush. The assassination attempt would have undoubtedly influenced George W. Bush’s decision to invade in 2003; it would be a kind of revenge on the regime that tried to kill his father.

In the speech George W. Bush gave in October 2002 in order to coerce the US into a war, he said “The entire world has witnessed Iraq’s 11-year history of defiance, deception and bad faith”, referring to the years since the Kuwait war. But while the world may have witnessed some “bad faith” from Iraq, those 11 years had been much more personal to Bush. He had already made his mind up, probably years before, to uphold his father’s legacy and make sure Saddam could not step out of place ever again. The US would go to war with Iraq and that was a given.

While George W. H. Bush’s legacy was passed onto his son, Saddam passed his on to the Islamic State. After the 2003 invasion, Saddam’s Baathist party was dissolved, meaning there was no one left to run the country other than the US and the Brits.

Almost all of the high ranking commanders in the Islamic State were former officers of the Baathist Army

Without authorities who knew the people of Iraq, chaos quickly enveloped the country. Looting, rioting and the rise of angry militia were epidemic as a result of the West’s lazy planning for life after the war. Islamic State was able to form amidst all of this, growing from the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda and recruiting Sunni militants. What’s often swept under the carpet, though, is that almost all of the high ranking commanders in Islamic State were former officers of the Baathist Army. It’s these Saddam loyalists who are the ones making the battle plans and overseeing smuggling routes for the group’s oil trade.

Now they have no country left to dictate, they’re trying to create a new one with an even more ruthless regime than the one before it. And while the strategies and fabric of the Islamic State army may be different to that of the Baathists – now they use lone attacks as a form of warfare and have fighters from all over the world – so many things have remained the same. Mainly the people of Iraq and now Syria are still defined by unthinkable suffering, and anti-Western ideologies have only been amplified.

In George W. Bush’s now infamous speech putting forward the case for the invasion of Iraq, he reads “By our courage, we will give hope to others. And by our actions, we will secure the peace and lead the world to a better day”.

How sad it is to read such words now, because if anything the invasion secured the very opposite scenario. The relevance of the saying ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même’ could not be more hard-hitting than it is in the tragic case of Iraq. If you don’t know what this means, it roughly translates as ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’.