Ukraine battle: Did Putin study from Bush’s Iraq horrors? | The Iraq Battle: 20 years on

Twenty years in the past, on Might 1, 2003, then-United States President George W Bush introduced the top of main fight operations in Iraq, an enormous banner behind him triumphantly screaming, “Mission Achieved”. Six weeks earlier, the US had invaded the Center Japanese nation illegally.

As US armour was rolling into Iraqi cities, worldwide information networks replayed time and again a scene from April 9 that 12 months that in hindsight appears loaded with dramatic irony.

The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos sq. — an occasion that turned out to be stage-managed — was meant to symbolise the liberation of Iraqis and the top of the Ba’ath Get together’s 35-year-long rule in Iraq. But it was not the grand finale of the US invasion however slightly the prelude to a protracted and bloody revolt and armed rebellion.

The US occupation that lasted eight years created aftershocks of regional instability and left lots of of hundreds of Iraqis lifeless — so many who nobody has a precise rely.

Just like the US-led coalition in Iraq again then, the Russian authorities anticipated its unlawful invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to finish with a fast and decisive victory.

Fooled by a way of its personal invincibility, the Russian military entered Ukraine as if on parade, in lengthy columns that grew to become simple targets for US-made Javelin missiles. They anticipated to be marching by means of the streets of Kyiv inside days, however a 12 months later, the Russians stay slowed down in a protracted and bloody battle.

So did Russian President Vladimir Putin find yourself repeating the errors — and for a lot of, the crimes — of Bush in Iraq 20 years in the past? How a lot do these two epoch-defining invasions have in frequent? What are the variations?

The brief reply: The parallels run deep, from the false pretexts underneath which they have been launched and the failings of the United Nations system that the wars confirmed up, to using non-public navy contractors. However key variations exist within the deeper motivations that triggered the wars, mentioned navy historians and analysts. And the US navy proved more practical at combating a standard battle in Iraq than Russia has in Ukraine.

‘We create our personal actuality’

Each the US-led coalition in Iraq and Russia in Ukraine have been led to battle by unbridled hubris — that could be a “key component” that these two conflicts have in frequent, mentioned Ibrahim al-Marashi, professor of Iraqi historical past at California State College. Each belligerents assumed it could be simple to launch “decapitation” assaults and exchange the governments of the international locations they have been invading with pleasant regimes that will merely serve their pursuits.

“Within the US case they achieved the decapitation, however they actually misinterpret the Iraqi inhabitants,” says al-Marashi. “The US thought they’d be greeted as liberators overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and that didn’t occur. What did Russia suppose? That the Ukrainians would additionally welcome them as liberators for overthrowing this so-called ‘fascist regime’.”

The result was the identical in each instances — a “dogged nationwide resistance that humbled each powers,” he mentioned.

The hubris confirmed up in some ways.

As soon as senior Bush administration officers had made up their minds about invading Iraq, their single-minded willpower to topple the Iraqi regime rendered them oblivious to the unintended penalties of battle, mentioned analysts.

It additionally blinded them to inconvenient truths — one thing neatly encapsulated in what a White Home official reportedly advised journalist Ron Suskind. “We’re an empire now, and once we act, we create our personal actuality,” the official mentioned.

Creating their “personal actuality” meant ignoring worldwide legislation and the United Nations Constitution that the US and Soviet Union have been unique signatories to. The lack to cease the 2 bellicose powers from attacking sovereign states starkly uncovered the weaknesses of the post-World Battle II worldwide order.

Each Russia and the US went to battle off the again of bogus pretexts — alternate realities they created. Within the case of the US and its closest ally within the invasion of Iraq, the UK, doubtful intelligence painted Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a harbourer of al-Qaeda, a hoarder of weapons of mass destruction, and an all-around worldwide bogeyman.

Al-Marashi has firsthand expertise of this. A paper he wrote was plagiarised by the UK authorities in a 2003 doc used to make the case for invading Iraq — the so-called “dodgy file”. Al-Marashi mentioned his work was utilized in “setting up the picture of a dictator who needed to be overthrown”.

Russia constructed the picture of a hostile administration in Kyiv that wanted to be overthrown and took that misinform its absurd outer limits, portraying Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a wicked addict presiding over a authorities of neo-Nazis.

“The primary ‘purpose’ for Putin taking Ukraine was that he was saving the Ukrainians from this drug-crazed felony Nazi gang operating the nation,” says Margaret Macmillan, professor of historical past on the College of Oxford. “And when it turned out that quite a lot of Ukrainians have been supporting the drug-crazed felony gang the battle was now on the Ukrainians themselves, after which there was discuss of re-educating them.”

Different backdrops

As a state where power is concentrated in one man, Russia’s war in Ukraine is Putin’s war — the brutal incarnation of his own imperial designs, said experts.

According to Jade McGlynn, research fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London, and author of the book Russia’s War, the invasion of Ukraine “at its heart is a war over identity and conceptions of the [Russian] nation”.

Putin “conflated himself with the facility constructions of Russia,” mentioned McGlynn, and “constructed a post-Soviet Russian id that could be very depending on Ukraine and the concept of a better Russia”.

For al-Marashi, who used to show at Ukraine’s Ivan Franko College, Russia’s battle has an undeniably imperial side to it that may be traced again to Ukraine’s incorporation into the Russian empire and deliberate insurance policies of “Russification”, which tried to disclaim Ukrainian tradition and id within the nineteenth century. This “imperial mindset” has a protracted historical past to it, mentioned al-Marashi, from Catherine the Nice’s description of Ukraine as ‘New Russia’ all the best way to Putin. “These are imperial linkages that I don’t suppose you possibly can deny,” he mentioned.

The US’s imperial mindset in direction of international locations it has invaded and occupied can also be onerous to disregard, mentioned specialists. However there’s a key distinction highlighted by the contexts that set the stage for the wars in Iraq and Ukraine.

Russia, mentioned Macmillan, “is the final standing European empire”. However it’s a crumbling empire, and the speeches and revisionist historic treatises that laid Putin’s ideological groundwork for the invasion of Ukraine are sometimes shot by means of with a way of historic loss. Putin has lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union as a “real tragedy” through which “tens of hundreds of thousands of our fellow residents and countrymen discovered themselves past the fringes of Russian territory”.

His battle arose out of the perceived lack of Russia’s greatness, its humiliation and betrayal by the hands of the West, and the will to reclaim Russia’s place on this planet, based on specialists. “Putin was a KGB agent when he witnessed the collapse of the Soviet empire from East Germany,” mentioned al-Marashi.

But it surely was very totally different for Bush, who “inherited the windfall” of the top of the Chilly Battle and was “using the emergence” of the US because the superpower in a unipolar world.

Unfinished enterprise

In line with al-Marashi, the 2003 invasion of Iraq got here at a “distinctive historic second” for the US, when its hegemony was comparatively unchallenged and it “sought to reshape the world” in its picture.

When Bush ran for president, he was targeted on home affairs, not international intervention, al-Marashi identified. However that modified with the 9/11 assaults, which emboldened the administration’s hawks, who felt that the US had unfinished enterprise in Iraq.

In a lot the identical means, the Putin regime had unfinished enterprise in Ukraine. Putin, mentioned specialists, felt the necessity for a long-lasting answer to the Ukraine query that had plagued Russian nationalists for the reason that Soviet breakup in 1991. That query — particularly, what to do about Ukraine drifting in direction of the West’s embrace — had change into ever extra urgent for the reason that 2014 battle within the Donbas.

Russia’s “Vietnam” — the disastrous 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and retreat 9 years later — was a cautionary story about underestimating the resistance of an invaded folks. However the reminiscence of that battle had pale, and for Russia’s international coverage hawks, there have been extra encouraging historic examples nearer at hand: the brutal suppression of Chechen independence, and more moderen navy successes in assist of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

For Bush Junior, returning to the Center East was a possibility to complete off what his father began within the First Gulf Battle. Key officers and ideologues of the second Bush administration had served underneath the elder Bush together with his vp, Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Protection Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and US commerce consultant Robert Zoellick. That they had lengthy advocated for US navy intervention overseas.

Wolfowitz, Armitage and Zoellick — three main “neocons” — along with one other key battle architect, Bush’s Secretary of Protection Donald Rumsfeld, have been signatories of a letter to President Invoice Clinton in 1998 calling for regime change in Iraq.

“The one acceptable technique is one which eliminates the likelihood that Iraq will have the ability to use or threaten to make use of weapons of mass destruction,” the letter learn. “Within the close to time period, this implies a willingness to undertake navy motion as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long run, it means eradicating Saddam Hussein and his regime from energy.

“In any case, American coverage can not proceed to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity within the UN Safety Council.”

From Blackwater to Wagner

Security concerns, although they turned out to be highly exaggerated, played into the decisions of the US and Russia to embark on their illegal invasions.

Moscow has pointed to its fears of NATO expansion and the existential threat posed by a hostile Ukraine, describing its neighbour as merely a proxy for the West. It is, in Putin’s view, the latest episode in a long history of Western attempts to cripple Russia.

To some extent, it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. European support for NATO is far greater than before the invasion, and Russia is more isolated, more economically vulnerable, and faced with biting sanctions.

Similarly, in the aftermath of 9/11, paranoia crept into the US establishment. The first major attack on the US mainland exposed the vulnerability of the world’s sole superpower and left the US public deeply shocked. Although Iraq had nothing to do with the attack, Americans “were prepared to believe the government if it told them Iraq was responsible,” Macmillan said.

Ultimately, both wars left the countries that started them — and the world at large — less secure than before, and as the costs and casualties began to mount, their citizens became predictably wary. The aftermath of 9/11 saw jingoism reach a fever pitch in the US but also galvanised an anti-war movement. By the end of Bush’s final term, public support for the war had plummeted.

It is much harder to gauge Russian public opinion — criticism of the war has been banned and early shows of public disapproval were ruthlessly stamped out — but the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing abroad to avoid the draft gives some indication of the public mood.

When the war in Donbas started in 2014, “there was a nationalist revival”, said McGlynn, “you saw people volunteering to go off to Donbas.

“In 2022 it was different, people were anxious”.

Yet again, Putin appears to have followed Bush’s example.

The US did not rely on conscription to fight its war in Iraq, but was nevertheless wary that a steady stream of body bags for regular troops would take a major toll on public opinion. Its widespread reliance on private military contractors in Iraq, however, helped solve that problem.

The war in Iraq presented a boon for security firms like Blackwater, whose mercenaries were implicated in civilian killings. Russia has followed suit in Ukraine, outsourcing its war to private companies like the notorious Wagner Group that has recruited widely from prison populations.

Newly recruited, poorly trained prisoners have been pressed into service with the promise of freedom, and have reportedly been used as cannon fodder in some of the most intense fighting in Ukraine. Wagner’s fighters have also been implicated in some of the worst atrocities in the ongoing war.

Who received, and who misplaced

The US didn’t have a sound exit technique in Iraq and so received trapped in a grinding battle, mentioned Macmillan, including that Russia has made the identical mistake.

But the outcomes of the Russian and US invasions have been felt most acutely by the invaded populations — Iraqi society was “shattered” by the US’s “shock and awe” offensive, mentioned Macmillan, whereas the prices of reconstruction for Ukraine will doubtless be increased than in Iraq.

Nonetheless, there are variations within the penalties that the US confronted and that Russia will doubtless confront for years to come back.

Whereas the US was caught in a quagmire of its personal creation for almost a decade, there have been no important financial hardships skilled by its inhabitants. The US financial system didn’t endure a war-induced shock, it confronted no sanctions and diplomatic isolation, and its navy was not humiliated in the best way Russia’s has been.

Condemnations of US actions have been in the end inconsequential. The US was just too safe in its function as international hegemon to be handled like a pariah state, and the prospect of an Worldwide Legal Courtroom arrest warrant for Bush or another senior US authorities official, as has been issued for Putin, was inconceivable.

For Russia, it’s totally different. Russia isn’t the Soviet Union — it’s a rump state with a struggling financial system overly depending on hydrocarbon exports. Its navy, as soon as seen as among the many world’s most subtle, more and more appears to be like like a Potemkin military when put to the check.

The implications for the world at massive may be extra extreme this time.

Battle in Ukraine threatens to feed into international insecurity. In Iraq, other than oil provide instability, the spillover from battle was largely contained to the Center East. Ukraine, then again, is extra built-in into the worldwide financial system and is a breadbasket that sustains international meals markets, whereas sanctions on Russia have destabilised international power provides.

The battle additionally comes at a time when the guardrails of an interconnected international order that disincentivised wars between main economies are falling aside. “Globalisation is unwinding,” mentioned Macmillan.

World attitudes to flashpoint points like Taiwan are hardening, because the US and China inch in direction of open battle — their strategic choices doubtless knowledgeable partially by each transfer on the Ukraine chessboard.

The world, in brief, is a extra harmful place than it was twenty years in the past. A significant nuclear energy is engaged in a battle that’s sucking in NATO powers. And even superpowers can not create another actuality.