Eli5: how did America actually destabilize the Middle East in the Iraq war? What was done specifically that caused all of the chaos in the countries we were involved in?
In: 185
[Blowback](https://blowback.show/) is a great podcast that on Friday began releasing a season about the Soviet Afgan war that goes into a lot of the history of the area. The first season is about the Iraq war too for some more info
This isn’t really an EILI5 question, as the answers so far demonstrate. More, your question assumes a major point of contention, that much of the Middle East wasn’t already very unstable.
Was neighbouring Iran destabilized by the invasion? No. Was neighbouring Turkey, a long-time NATO member, destabilized? No.
Was neighbouring Saudi Arabia destabilized? No. Was neighbouring Kuwait destabilized? No.
Who did have trouble? Syria, a country which was already on shaky ground and yet somehow the same leader, Pres. Bashar al-Assad, remains in power there now.
The later Arab Spring which started in Tunisia had nothing to do with Iraq, and a lot to do with Ben Ali an aging leader of a heavy-handed dictatorship overdue for overthrow. Similarly, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was an aging dictator who had alienated his military supporters by grooming his son to replace him.
None of this means that what Bush and Rumsfeld did to Iraq was not criminally irresponsible. Just that instability in the Middle East was not simply caused by the US’s disastrous and illegal decision to invade Iraq. The US ended up making both Iran and Saudi Arabia much stronger than they had been, but did not achieve any stated policy goals. It did make some contractors very rich though.
Destabilize middle East 😂😂😂😂
American president imprisoned. LOL…the advocates of “so called” democracy!
And after trillions of dollars and state of the art technology…where did “America” find Osama?…in his house? 😂😂😂😂
Of course I’ll get banned on this democratic “heavily moderated made in USA reddit”
The thing that probably had the most consequences were the attempt at De-Ba’athification.
The thinking, in as far as there was much of it, was that Saddam was sort of like Hitler and that after WWII the US had denazified Germany, by banning all the high level Nazi party members from holding positions of power. Of course in Germany this was done rather halfhearted and often people escape consequences because the US needed them to stabilize the country for the coming cold war.
In any case they tried to do in Iraq, what they thought they did in Germany.
Saddam was part of the Ba’ath party. And they thought it was just a normal political party. it wasn’t. It was more complicated than that. It was full of Sunni Muslims who held most of the positions of power.
When the US and the allies came to Iraq one of the ways the convinced everyone to surrender as quickly as they (in addition to simple overwhelming firepower) did was by making promises.
Those promises weren’t kept. during the De-Ba’athification all the government workers from teachers to cops to clerks and most importantly most of the military officers lost their jobs, their pensions and became basically unemployable.
As you can imagine they were upset about that.
In addition with all the Sunnis out of power the Shi’a Muslims filled the gap.
Shi’a Islam is the dominant religion in neighboring Iran, which Iraq had had a long and bloody war with for decades before the first gulf war.
To many Iraqis who thought more along those sort of lines of sects and tribes instead of nations and parties they had been riven out of power and replaced with a group that looked a lot like their old enemy and the local minorities their formerly dominated.
Many of the people who had been part of the military and now had no jobs and no money and no power, were unhappy with the result.
Enter the Sunni Islamic fundamentalist. the were able to give people something to believe in and fight for and even if the ex-iraqi military people didn’t actually believe what they were saying it gave them an excuse to get back power.
Those guys eventually became ISIS.
ISIS hated the government is Iraq and Syria and the Kurds and everyone else who wasn’t them. The Iranians also were opposed to ISIS.
the Kurds just wanted to be left alone and ideally have their own country, but the US couldn’t give them that because Turkey would not have approved and Turkey was an alley. Iran and Syria who were not allies also wouldn’t have approved.
It all became a giant mess of competing interests.
It was not that Saddam was a good guy, he was extremely evil and removing him as a good thing, but doing it the way it was done was like removing a card at the bottom of a house of cards.
We sent our army into Iraq and took over the whole country. We shut down their old government and made many people unemployed all at once. We shut down their old army and fired all the army officers. All of a sudden Iraq was full of people who were used to power and had nothing to do. The people we put in control of the new government were inexperienced and many of them had not lived in Iraq for a long time. The new government system was an imitation of our system and many Iraqis didn’t like it. It was very weak and unable to control the country or provide safety for people. Many people started their own private armies (militias) to try to establish public safety in their areas, take over smuggling operations, and/or participate in politics. Iran and Saudi Arabia interfered in Iraq as well as we did, because of historical religious differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, and between Arab and Persian ethnic groups, which I’ll explain to you when you’re older. was always going to be a disaster. Our government in 1991 was smarter and didn’t take over Iraq completely, we stopped the first gulf war after Iraq gave up its takeover of Kuwait. We also put our army in other countries in the Middle East which a lot of people who live there don’t like. We also support governments such as in Egypt which aren’t popular among the people who live there and do terrible things to the people in order to stay in power.
Imagine what would happen if some country came and invaded California. It would destabilize the entirety of America even though it was just California that was invaded. Now imagine if they invaded Wyoming or something. No one would give a shit.
That is what happened with Iraq. Iraq was a player in the region so taking them out affected everyone else.
So it’s super complicated, but I’ll try to sum it up.
It actually started well before the war in Iraq. The US helped put saddam and the Ba’ath party in power in the 1970s, and spent most of the 80s empowering saddam, largely by sending him weapons and helping him against Iran and the Kurdish people in Iraq. After the end of the Cold War, our leaders needed a new “big bad”, and who better than the (legitimately shitty) dictator that we had made dependent on us?
Now, saddam was absolutely a monster, but he had built Iraq into one of the most modern nations in the middle east. He ruled with an iron grip, and killed a lot of dissenters, but the Iraqi literacy rate was above 90%, and most of the country was electrified. However, due to the Iraq/Iran war in the 1980s (during which we were selling weapons to both sides), the country was in a bad spot financially. They had taken out a lot of loans to fund their war effort and purchase weapons from western nations, and the price of oil was too low for the country’s economy to continue to function. To attempt to fix this, he decided to ramp up tensions with his neighbor, Kuwait. Kuwait was a monarchy/dictatorship (as were all of the gulf countries) but our foreign policy held them up as “the good guys” so that we could get domestic and international support for intervention, eventually resulting in an “international” coalition that intervened in the conflict, resulting in the gulf war. Ostensibly, our goal was to oust Hussein, however some of our military leaders were quoted as wanting to “bomb them back to the pre-industrial era”, which we did – [we intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure, destroying 90% of iraqs electrical capacity, targeted food processing facilities, seed storage, water processing, and reservoirs.](https://aldeilis.net/english/physical-destruction-iraqs-infrastructure-gulf-war/). The result of this was essentially that Iraq spent the rest of the 90s in famine with most of the country living on starvation diets, dealing with massive disease outbreaks, and having a fraction of the electrical capacity they had prior to the gulf war. They also couldn’t hope to recover because a) we sustained bombing campaigns even after the war ended, and b) they were under crazy sanctions that would never allow their economy or infrastructure to recover.
Fast forward to dubyah. We had maintained saddam as the “big bad” and were itching for war. Iraq complied with UN inspections, but our leaders had set it up so that we’d cast doubt on them no matter what – if they didn’t comply then they were hiding it, if they did then they were obviously just hiding it really well and trying to get out from under sanctions, the whole time we were amassing troops in allied middle eastern nations and bullying other countries (through threats to withhold aid, threats of sanctions, etc) to join another country. We end up invading and start the process of de-baathification, which was really used as score settling by locals accusing their rivals of being linked to the Ba’ath party, and removing officials from vital posts. Our “nation building” was mostly grift from people who stood to gain from taking over iraqs oil production capabilities (at this point they gain nothing from oil extraction, while multinational corporations take in profits), contracting companies who stood to gain from being an unofficial extension of the American military, and a litany of other individuals and organizations who stood to gain more from a destabilized Iraq than from a stable one. We also sent the entire military home after we took Iraq over – imagine the impact of 10s of thousands of pissed off, armed, and unemployed people.
There’s other factors as well – indiscriminate killing of civilians for decades, stuff like abu grahib (the torture prison run by Americans), Iraqi people killed and imprisoned under suspicion of being baathists and terrorists, all while our leaders lauded the newfound freedom of Iraq.
An economy in the gutter; a total lack of infrastructure; a sudden power vacuum; whole generations traumatized by war, famine, and disease. All of that makes it easier for extremist organizations to organize and recruit. Add in money from states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and arms sales from all sides (including us). Not to mention that the military we installed was ostensibly modeled after our own, which requires technology and infrastructure that’s impossible to maintain without a functioning economy, and you have a situation where the Iraqi government had absolutely no chance to stand up to an organization like isis.
Sorry if this is jumbled. I definitely missed some factors, and I’m probably not exactly correct on everything. It’s a super complicated situation that goes back 50+ years. The long and short is that our actions in the Middle East have never been about promoting peace and stability, or spreading democracy to people living under brutal dictators, but about American political and corporate interests- which is what our foreign policy has literally always been about.
The U.S. removed Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein. This created a power vacuum and made ethnic and religious tensions worse. Also, disbanding the Iraqi army left many jobless and angry. These problems, combined with mistakes in planning, led to chaos, division, and helped extremist groups like ISIS grow.
America props up Saudi Arabia, they use the american money to destabilise most other middle eastern countries by funding fundamentalists factions.
Iraq in 1991 – We wanted Saddam to leave Kuwait. Once he did, that basically ended the war. The powers that be and structure of society generally remained the same, aside from in Iraqi Kurdistan, which got a quasi independence.
2003 – The US was revolutionaries. It turned Iraqi society upside-down. The Baath party had been in charge for over 40 years. Anyone who had any sort of significant role in government or administration had a connection to this political party (Iraq was a one-party state). And the US kicked all of them out of the government and demobilized a very large army. The Sunni sect was in charge before the war, the shi’ite sect was empowered afte this revolution. Also, the result of this revolution was anarchy and a lot of fighting.
New people were empowered through elections and after a lot of fighting, things started to settle down, but lots of years of insurgency led a lot of Sunni fighters or former Baath elite to go to Syria as refugees; when civil war struck there, many of them were involved in forming ISIS.
No invasion of Iraq (or no major revolution after the invasion), no ISIS.
Latest Answers