The Lesson From Iraq That Gives Me Hope For Ukraine

The Lesson From Iraq That Gives Me Hope For Ukraine

Jeff Maurer — Read time: 10 minutes

The Lesson From Iraq That Gives Me Hope For Ukraine

It's not the lesson you might think

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It’s hard to describe how badly I want Ukraine to win this war. I’m legitimately moved by the acts of heroism and stirring resilience from many people who hadn’t exactly won the “life on Easy Street” lottery to begin with. I know that some of what I’m reading is probably exaggerated, but if only a fraction of the stories are true, then it’s inspiring. Plus, I’m impressed that, between “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” and “I need ammunition, not a ride,” one week of actual rebels fighting actual imperial forces has produced more good lines than the last six Star Wars movies combined.

Most analysts agree that — on a basic level — Russia’s invasion is likely to succeed. That is: Russia will probably reach some milestone that will allow them to say “invasion complete”. But then what? Nobody knows. They could install a puppet government, but that government will get bounced like a broke guy at a strip club the minute Russia leaves. They could make Zelensky sign a bullshit “peace agreement”, but that will have as much force of law as a missive from a high school Model UN conference. The “push on to Poland” option seems to literally be running out of gas on Ukrainian highways. What is the plan here? Is there a plan?

It makes sense to assume that Putin has a plan. In the interest of not underestimating your opponent, it’s good to act under the assumption that your adversary is a master strategist playing eight-dimensional chess, and not a glue-sniffing half-wit who currently has both hands stuck inside of pickle jars. But, sometimes, the second thing will be true. And the Iraq War — the most salient lived military conflict for most Americans — provides a vivid example of just how poorly leaders sometimes play their hands.

Americans are well aware of the deeply unfunny comedy that was our invasion of Iraq. Did you know that the invasion happened almost exactly concurrently with the legendarily bad movie The Room? The Iraq War and The Room actually have a lot in common: Both were were jaw-dropping disasters, both lit a gigantic pile of money on fire, and both have been analyzed for nearly two decades by people trying to figure out how anything could go so wrong. Of course, the big difference is that war was not funny at all, while The Room might be the greatest comedy movie of all time. I mean:

The most obvious lesson of Iraq is that invasions are a lot easier than occupations. Anyone who hadn’t learned this lesson from Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, or the French occupation of Algeria, or any of the several-odd-dozen occupations of Afghanistan should have learned it from Iraq. Honestly: You can also learn this from Risk. Any halfwit can take Asia, but holding it is another story. Risk tells us this, an it also tells us that Ukraine is definitely a distinct country, though I’m not sure if that particular finding has any status in international law.

Ukraine — which is larger than China or the United States — is a country in Europe.

But I think there’s another big lesson from Iraq that’s relevant here. Instead of looking at the conflict through American eyes, we should try to see things from Saddam Hussein’s point of view (to my knowledge, this is the only blog arguing people to see things from Saddam Hussein’s point of view). As badly as the war went for the US, it went a million times worse for Saddam Hussein. In an odd bit of self-loathing hubris, we tend to focus exclusively on American agency in the conflict while ignoring the remarkable role Hussein played in his own downfall.

In much of the popular memory — especially among those who are too young to remember the war — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program was entirely a figment of George W. Bush’s imagination. And, of course, by the time we invaded, Iraq’s WMD program was not much more than a mayonnaise jar full of change on Saddam Hussein’s nightstand labeled “ANTHRAX FUND”. But that wasn’t always true. Iraq once possessed chemical weapons, and Hussein used them against Iran and the Kurds. Iraq deployed (though didn’t use) biological weapons during the Gulf War, and they continued to pursue them into the mid-’90s. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program was basically C&C Music Factory: Defunct by 2003, but a big deal in the early ‘90s.

I ran that one several different ways so feel free to choose whichever option you prefer.

The UN resolution that ended the Gulf War required Iraq to give up its chemical and biological weapons and submit to international inspections. To back up the resolution, the UN continued to enforce the rather-large sanctions package that had been imposed when Hussein invaded Kuwait; the sanctions wouldn’t be lifted until the inspectors completed their work. The sanctions quickly became extremely contentious; Hussein railed against them constantly, and they became a bludgeon used by anyone critical of the West. A highly contentious UNICEF report said the sanctions were responsible for more than 500,000 child deaths; an Irish official who once worked for the UN called them “genocide”. As we assemble the “mother of all sanctions” packages against Russia,1 let’s recall that what would, I suppose, be the “child of all sanctions” packages was thought to be extremely potent. Iraq’s defiance of the UN came at a cost.

Hussein’s refusal to let the United Nations Special Commission inspectors do their work became a perpetual cat-and-mouse game. He would let them work for a while, then declare a site off-limits, kick them out of the country, and then let them back in several months later. In 1998, this escalated to open warfare; the US and the UK bombed Iraq for four days. In addition to harassing the inspectors, Hussein embarked on a campaign of general roguishness (of the unsexy kind) that led to several military responses. In 1993, we struck Iraq with cruise missiles after they tried to assassinate George H.W. Bush. In 1996, another cruise missile strike deterred Hussein from an offensive against the Kurdish town of Arbil. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Iraq repeatedly fired on coalition planes tasked with enforcing no-fly zones. Hussein remained the object of Western attention by generally acting like a Batman villain minus the sartorial flair and ease with wordplay.

The fact that Hussein wouldn’t let the inspectors finish their work so that sanctions could end may have ultimately been the single biggest piece of evidence suggesting that he was developing weapons of mass destruction. By the time Colin Powell was at the UN in 2003 holding up vials of white powder and saying “this vial contains ordinary household cocaine but imagine if it held anthrax,” even people who were skeptical of Bush’s claims assumed that Hussein was hiding something. That was certainly my view. Of course, I was a 22 year-old nobody — it would be accurate to call me “not a major player” — and if any CIA officials showed up at the temp job I was working to deliver a high-level intelligence briefing, then I’ve forgotten it. But I know I wasn’t the only person who thought that Hussein’s actions only made sense if he had a weapons program. That circumstantial evidence was a major factor drumming up support for the invasion.

The war, obviously, could not possibly have gone worse for Hussein. He was deposed, captured while hiding in a hole, and photos of him with severe bedhead were broadcast around the world. He was put on trial, convicted, and hanged by his enemies, who taunted him by chanting the name of a rival cleric while he walked to the gallows. From his perspective, this was quite possibly a worse outcome than anything he ever imagined. This wasn’t like going bowling and rolling 20 straight gutter balls; this was like going bowling and somehow ending up on the cover of Time magazine under the heading “The New Face of Premature Ejaculation”. It’s hard to imagine things going much worse than that!

Why did Saddam Hussein play his cards the way he did? That question baffles me to this day. We basically know the answer: He wanted the world — especially Iran — to think that he had WMDs so that he wouldn’t appear weak. That’s what he told the FBI after he was captured. But I’m flummoxed by this rather-straight-forward explanation because it’s such an unbelievable miscalculation. How could Hussein — even post-9/11 when the US had shifted to war footing and was amassing troops in the Persian Gulf — still see Iran as the greater threat? It seems like worrying about melanoma mid-shark attack. But it’s the calculation he made. And any rationalization that can possibly be offered in his defense — such as “Iran was a threat” or “he didn’t think the US was serious” — is countered by the reality that he was deposed, captured, and hanged.

The lesson I take from this is: Leaders sometimes miscalculate in ways that are difficult to fathom. It’s not just that I didn’t think Hussein would make that miscalculation; I didn’t even imagine that it was possible. Sorry to be a back seat Saddam Hussein, but the hazards of his cat-and-mouse game with the UN were so obvious to me, and the first-order costs were so high — the sanctions forbade importing military equipment, which is something you’d want to do if you’re trying to deter Iran — that it honestly never occurred to me that the whole thing might be a gigantic bluff. It’s a level of miscalculation that I can’t begin to comprehend, and I speak as a man who left his job right before a global pandemic and who once owned a Microsoft Zune.

I’m currently wondering how likely it is that Putin has made a Saddam Hussein-level miscalculation in Ukraine. Now, granted: This may just be wishful thinking on my part. I want to see a “Ukraine rebuffs Russia > Putin gets overthrown > China cancels plans to invade Taiwan” triple play so badly that I’m prone to seeing what I want to see in the extremely-patchy evidence. Plus, all of us — including the media — are rooting so hard for Ukraine that “good news for Ukraine” stories travel quickly, while “bad news for Ukraine” stories are about as popular as Alf-themed erotic fiction. I’m aware that my biases might be shading my perception.

But from where I sit, things do not loot good for Russia. As I publish this (late Sunday night), Ukraine still holds Kiev and Kharkov. Military analysts are starting to wonder if Russia might lose the war outright. The world is uniting behind Ukraine in ways that were inconceivable only days ago. The Ruble has dropped 47 percent. The upcoming peace talks seem far more likely to produce capitulation from Russia than from Ukraine. At a minimum, the resolute defense that’s been summoned by brave Ukrainians in the past several days will inspire other Ukrainians in ways that will make any Russian occupation extremely bloody.

I didn’t think the invasion would happen. Last month, I buttressed my credentials as the Detroit Lions of forecasting by saying that I thought Putin was bluffing. I made that prediction because the benefit to Putin of keeping Ukraine within Russia’s “sphere of influence” — whatever that means — seemed miniscule next to the cost of invasion. I was obviously wrong about the invasion, but I have not yet been proved wrong about the cost/benefit tradeoff being way out of whack. If Putin thought that Russia’s “shared history” with Ukraine would cause them to be greeted as liberators (I’ve heard that before!), he was wrong in a way that can’t be expressed in the English language. From Russia’s perspective, the invasion is clearly going somewhere between “not great” and “horribly”. If Putin has a workable plan, I still don’t know what it is. I’m starting to wonder if we might be witnessing one of the greatest own-goals in geopolitical history.

The “dictators get things done” argument has become fashionable in the authoritarian-curious circles of American politics. You hear it non-stop from Trump; Trump has the same amount of love for strongmen that people in the Guy Who Plays Mr. Belvedere Fan Club had for Mr. Belvedere. And, look: Though I am a committed democracy fanboy, I sort of understand the argument. It would be nice to govern without checks and balances. I admit that I have been at public meetings listening to some obnoxious NIMBY tripe and thought: “I’ll bet Robert Mugabe never had to deal with this shit.”

But a person who has the ability to steamroll the opposition to enact a good decision can use that same power to enact a bad decision. And dictatorships might be especially prone to bad decisions; after all, not many people say “gee boss, seems dicey” to a dictator. Those who do tend to have short careers. Not many dictators replicate Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach; very few are into red teams. A much more typical method was broadcast from Russia on the eve of the invasion: One delusional weirdo with absolute power interacts with terrified stooges whose only role is to validate whatever potentially disastrous decision the Dear Leader pulled out of his ass that morning. In my opinion, that’s a bad way to make decisions.

To be fair to Saddam Hussein (to my knowledge, this is the only blog that strives to be fair to Saddam Hussein), he’s far from the only dictator whose incredibly poor judgement led to his downfall. The same was true of Charles I of England, Charles X of France, and probably many other people named Charles (Charles Manson, Charlie Tuna, etc.). But when I think “incredible miscalculation”, I think of Iraq, because it’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever personally witnessed, non-The Room Division. Though, as I watch what appears to be a five star shit show unfolding in Ukraine, I’m starting to wonder for how much longer that will be true.

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