The Untold Story of the Iraq War

—by Odysseus

In the many words, articles, and books written about the invasion of Iraq, this author does not believe that the complete overview has been either explained or perhaps exposed.

A great many of the voices that were opposed to the war to begin with have shifted their criticism to how the war was conducted, and then to how the aftermath was handled. In reality, they could be found in opposition to the war at every step and, if one listened carefully, one could hear the dismay and sorrow in their tone at every success. Though there has never been a full acknowledgement of these principles, the true history of the overarching aims and strategic incidents of the war are as follows. They have been previously hidden to avoid diplomatic and intelligence “awkwardness” with allies and existing foreign leaders.

In September of 2001, the United States suffered a truly devastating attack, launched by Islamist terrorists. Though the US had been suffering from Islamist terror attacks for over thirty years, the official government organs and security apparatus had determined that, in the greater analysis, these attacks were a mere nuisance and posed no strategic threat. Though the casualties were unfortunate and sad for the victims’ families, they did not constitute a large enough threat to warrant any action by the western powers that would result in a shift of strategic posture. There had been instituted a policy of “denying” terror events, and covering them up so as to take away the terrorists’ incentive to commit such acts, which had been the publicity. This policy probably began during the Reagan administration, after frustrated officials watched terrorists conduct interviews with the international press from the cockpit of a hijacked TWA 747 on the airport runway in Beirut. The daily spectacle where a thug with a Browning High-Power 9mm pistol held to the head of a pilot  could command as much attention as the speech of the head of a nation-state conducting diplomacy was unacceptable. If terror attacks could be swept under the rug, it was internally argued that it would actually reduce terrorism by stealing any publicity gain that was its object. A less noble aim of the policy was that denying the events ever happened did away with any pressure from a public to take retaliatory actions that the governments saw as bearing great cost for very little strategic gain. The conspiracy of silence came to a cataclysmic end on September 11th, 2001, when the Al Qaeda Islamist terror network achieved an attack too large to be denied, a goal the Islamists had been pursuing for at least twenty years.

President George W. Bush more or less acknowledged this scenario in his speech following the attacks. In his inimitable Texas way, he drew a homespun analogy. He told the world that the terrorists were like a rat problem that had grown so large that it could no longer be ignored. He said that we had long known that the rats were coming from a certain swamp. He told us that he aimed to drain that swamp. The leaders of the United States security apparatus knew that the global terrorist network was being sustained by various regimes and individuals in the Islamic world. Angry at their own relative lack of position in the global structure and still imagining themselves to be the rightful leaders of the world since their civilization-wide retrograde into obscurity, the Arab world struck out at the West through terrorists. Most of the Islamist regimes and/or individuals within those governments provided the global Islamic terror network with the “three Rs”, resources, recruits, and refuge. Money went under the table as “charities” to buy weapons, explosives, supplies and sustenance. Eyes were turned aside, allowing the terror groups to freely recruit new members inside the various Arab regimes’ societies. Finally, several countries were actively hosting known terrorists and allowing training camps to be run within their sovereign territorial confines, providing refuge for training and recovery time. While they publicly denied this close role, they had become the sponsors of terror, much as the old Soviet Union had been the sponsor of many of the terror groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Diplomatically, this was a conundrum, as many of these state sponsors of terror claimed to be allies or at least pretended to be cooperating in the global effort to curtail terror. The denials were intentionally thin and delivered with a sly wink, as Saddam Hussein was holding ceremonies handing over-sized bounty checks to the families of suicide bombers, Iranian anti-tank mines were being found in the hands of Palestinian groups, Saudi princes were making telephone calls and giving large sums of money to known terror organizations, and other terror organizations were building clinics and basketball courts in Egypt. Libya was protecting its intelligence agents responsible for the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing and Saddam Hussein was hosting Abu Nidal in Baghdad. Other examples are too numerous to list in the space of this analysis.

9/11 changed the game in the eyes of George W. Bush and his government. His announcement of his intent to drain the swamp was clear to those with the knowledge to truly understand what was going on. Afghanistan had to be first, as it was militarily the weakest of the Arab states that sponsored terror and it was the proximate source for the actual attacks of 9/11. However, merely dealing with that one source would not alleviate a problem that had suddenly proven itself to be of a strategic level. The Bush administration aimed to “drain the swamp” so Afghanistan would be merely the first strike. His often criticized statement that “you are either for us, or against us” was neither a misstatement nor unduly provocative. He was informing the silent sponsors of terror that the game was over, we were going to be playing by new rules. He hoped that they would accept the opportunity he was giving these various regimes to abandon the dangerous double game they were playing with terrorists and, if they were unwilling to change their ways, they would be replaced. If the toppling of Afghanistan was necessary retaliation, the take-down of the Saddam Hussein regime was “Exhibit A”. That the U.S. could (and would) take down a longstanding Arab potentate and could not be deterred militarily, diplomatically, or economically, horrified the Arab world. The ice water bath was delivered that they must change their ways or be personally toppled, the only deterrent they actually feared. This plan was working quite well initially, and resulted in some progress with Iran and a sea-change in the behavior of Muammer Quaddafi (to be analyzed at greater length in a separate article).

The original plan by the Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney team was that Iraq would fall quickly, leaving U.S. forces positioned on both sides of Iran, thought to be the central heart of the Islamist problem. If Afghanistan and Iraq could both be taken within one year, U.S. forces would be positioned to encircle Iran. Complete regime change could have been effected in Iran within Bush’s two terms and it was very likely that the global Islamist terror network would have been forever broken, its most dedicated facilitators dead and its other supporters too terrified to continue providing sustenance.

However, the war in Iraq ran into an unanticipated snag that caused it to take longer and become more difficult than otherwise conceived. The problem in Iraq was not the country, but a single man and his closest family/friends. The country lived in terror of Saddam and would have gladly accepted new leadership so long as they could have been guaranteed that he could not return to seek vengeance. His hold of terror on the country had been complete. To assure the Iraqis and make a successful transition, Saddam himself and his sons would would need to be definitively captured or killed. The U.S. knew that Saddam would flee to the area where he held the greatest support, the so called “Sunni Triangle” just north of Baghdad. He would either hide there or make his way out of the country to hide in Syria. Diplomatic and military threats were imposed on Syria to prevent Saddam from being able to remain there, (though his wives and less political family did retreat there to stay in a luxurious compound, well guarded by Syrian Special Forces soldiers).

There was a great deal of criticism for Secretary Rumsfeld for not “having a large enough force” to accomplish the mission, however, this is unwarranted. In fact, the plan was to prevent Saddam from being able to retreat up into the “Sunni Triangle” by rapidly occupying that area before he could flee Baghdad. This task was to be accomplished by the new, fast moving 4th Infantry Stryker Brigade. Their speed and relative silence would have saturated the area before Saddam’s forces were able to respond, as they would be flowing south from the Turkish border while the other allied elements were slamming their way north (the invasion route and forces that actually happened). It was a classic “hammer and anvil” plan with the Stryker Brigades serving as the “anvil”. However, a NATO member refused to allow the 4th Infantry Divisions Stryker Brigades to cross its territory and, instead, held them at the docks at Iskenderun. Turkey was responsible for the strategic failure of the Iraq war’s primary objective.