By Afeef Nessouli, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Afeef Nessouli is an intern with Fareed Zakaria GPS. The views expressed are his own.
The debate over whether the Iraq War was really all about oil may never be fully resolved in some minds, but one thing is clear – either way, Iraq has yet to really cash in. The country’s GDP may have risen several fold in the decade since the war began, yet its income per capita lags not only oil rich neighbors such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but also relative economic minnows including Botswana, Turkmenistan and Albania. This is despite the fact that it sits upon the world’s fourth largest oil reserves and could double its production in the next few years.
The question, then, is will Iraq be able to meet its oil potential?
By Kenneth Roth, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Kenneth Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch. You can follow him @KenRoth. The views expressed are his own.
What is there to show for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 10 years ago? Many are quick to insist that Iraq is better off than it was under Saddam, but that is a low bar, given Saddam’s genocide against the Kurds, mass slaughter of Shia who rose up against him, and unspeakable brutality against anyone perceived to challenge his rule.
Sadly, one cannot say a lot more. Despite the massive military and financial commitment, and the sacrifice of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, the United States left Iraq a weak foundation for democracy.
It is not as if no effort was made. The U.S. government helped to draft legislation and a new Constitution, trained judges and lawyers, and supported civil society and independent media. But that enormous effort could not overcome the negative precedents set during the U.S. military deployment. From the brutality of Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, to the repeated use of excessive force to protect American troops and contractors, to the creation of Iraqi security units that allegedly tortured and abused with impunity, the U.S. military left the impression that achieving its goals took precedence over such niceties as respect for international rights standards.
By Lowell Schwartz, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Lowell Schwartz is a political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense on arms control and European security in 2009-2010. The views expressed are his own.
Ten years after the Iraq war started, violence may persist as the shift from Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime to one dominated by nationalist Shiites continues – a point underscored by a string of bombings overnight. Yet despite much pessimism, the new order survives, without U.S. assistance. And it is a lot less fragile than it often appears.
Back in 2003, when U.S. forces arrived in Baghdad, they were shocked by the complete disintegration of the Iraqi state – U.S. analysts had failed to comprehend the tremendous impact international sanctions and international isolation had had on Iraq’s economy and society.
The extreme erosion of the Iraq state, meanwhile, had two profound consequences. First, once the regime was unseated, power rapidly filtered down to the regional and tribal level. Second, a new national political order had to be built from scratch.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Fareed speaks with Paul Brinkley, for U.S. Deputy Under Secretary former Business Transformation with the Department of Defense, about his efforts to get major American companies to set up in Iraq. Watch the video for the full interview.
Iraq seems like it should be a very rich country. It has, depending on how you count it, the fourth, fifth, sixth largest oil reserves in the world. When you go there, it still seems very poor. Why?
…I was just in Baghdad last week. The day-to-day life experience in Baghdad is one of heavy, heavy – we would be familiar with it as Americans – heavy traffic, streets filled with people, construction underway everywhere.
And so you do see a broad-based economic uplift in most of the country. There are areas of the country that are at risk of being left behind, and I think that does pose a risk in terms of the long-term stability of the country.
Donald Trump says we should’ve taken Iraq’s oil. There are people who said that we went there for the oil. The repugnant thing to many Americans is we went there, not only did we not get any oil, but it turns out that the Chinese are the ones with the big oil companies in there. Why is that?
I think this comes down to economics. And so, again, another challenge for us as Americans is sometimes we don’t see the history of a place and understand how history’s very real in these parts of the world. There’s a very strong memory in Iraq and in the region of how Western oil companies engaged in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s. And they were very restrictive in their first oil contracts in terms of just the financial incentives that they offered. And the amount of profit that an oil company can make on an oil field in Iraq is very low relative to what they make in many other parts of the world.
For state-owned companies in places like China, command economies that aren’t as profit-motivated, they’re not worried about profitability as much as access to the oil resource. So they’re willing to forgo profitability, where a private company, a Western company, has to consider that, has to consider its shareholders.
By Fareed Zakaria
The American public has lost interest in the Iraq war. A topic that was at the center of the national political debate is now barely mentioned in passing. The country has decided to move on, rather than debate whether the war was worth it - though for the vast majority of Americans, the answer to that question would be a decided, “no”.
Yet, it was the most significant military conflict that the United States has been in since the Vietnam War, and so it is worth asking – ten years after it began - what lessons might be learned from the war, aftermath, and occupation. Here is my list:
Bring enough troops. The Bush administration chose to go to war with Iraq in a manner that would make it relatively easy politically. It drew up plans for a small invading army and insisted that the costs would be minimal – silencing those within and without the Pentagon who suggested otherwise. In the first phase of the war, toppling Saddam’s army, the plan worked fine. But as the mission turned from invasion to occupation, the military’s “light footprint” proved to be a deadly problem. Iraq moved quickly towards chaos and civil war, under the eyes of American troops who could do little to prevent it. The lesson of the Balkans’ conflicts in the 1990s had been to have a much larger force, by some calculations four times larger than the United States had in Iraq. But that lesson was not learned in 2003. The next time, if it’s worth going to war, it’s worth staffing it properly.
By Daniel R. DePetris, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Daniel R. DePetris is a researcher and a contributor to GPS. The views expressed are his own.
Sectarian animosities are nothing new for Iraqis. But what is different this time around is that they are now playing out without some of the players that were once instrumental in enforcing the rules.
While most Iraqis eventually grew tired of U.S. troops patrolling their neighborhoods, the United States was the only force strong enough to bridge sectarian divisions before they spiraled into violence. Aside from the United States, there was Jalal Talabani – a Kurd who continues to hold Iraq’s presidency and who reveled in the role as ultimate mediator of Iraq’s political disputes, often dragging the country’s warring politicians to his residence for some civilized discussion.
But with the United States gone, and Talabani’s health having deteriorated following a stroke, charges of political dominance and sectarian discrimination among Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s opponents have left some wondering whether the country is already facing the new year’s first open confrontation.
By Michael Rubin, Special to CNN
Editor's note: Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School. The views expressed are his own.
Early this morning, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani suffered a stroke. While his spokesman is releasing few details other than to acknowledge Talabani is in stable condition, some around described the president as comatose. Should he not recover, his loss would strike a blow for Iraq.
Unlike his Kurdish rival Massoud Barzani who often strikes diplomats as cold and aloof, Talabani was an affable man with ready humor. A polyglot, he put Americans, Iraqis, and Kurds at ease, maintained relationships with almost everyone, and so became a natural choice for Iraq’s presidency after Iraq held its first free elections in 2005. He would negotiate one day with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Persian, the next day with American diplomats in fluent English, debate Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Arabic, and then instruct his own staff in Kurdish. Few trusted him – his commitments tended only to last until his next meeting, he is said to have leaked American intelligence like a sieve to Iran and vice versa, and he was responsible for a disproportionate amount of pre-war intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons systems – but all talked to him and most liked him. In short, he was the perfect figurehead for Iraq.
By Jonathan Adelman, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Jonathan Adelman is a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. The views expressed are his own.
The rapid rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt after the deposing of Hosni Mubarak last year prompted many observers to see an Islamist Egypt as inevitable. After all, the Muslim Brotherhood was the best organized and most popular political party in Egypt, the opposition was divided, there was little Western support for the secular opposition and the United States welcomed Muslim Brotherhood delegations to meet White House officials. Most recently, it worked openly with President Mohamed Morsy to achieve a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. All this seemed to many to be a rough replay of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Yet, as the mass demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood recently in Tahrir Square and across Egypt have shown, an Islamic Egypt, while still likely, is far from inevitable.
Successful revolutions are usually led by charismatic leaders with strong political intuition – think Mao, Lenin, Tito, Castro and Ayatollah Khomeini. All personified their revolutions and drove the masses on to victory. But Morsy is no Ayatollah Khomeini, who embodied revolutionary mysticism and spent a lifetime steeped in political thought. The reality is that Morsy lacks charisma, and spent his life gaining a PhD and chairing an Egyptian engineering school until 2010. His abrupt and radical moves belie a lack of political savoir faire.
By Michael Rubin, Special to CNN
Editor's note: Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School. The views expressed are his own.
Almost a year after the last American troops departed Iraq, Baghdad is changing. It is still tired and worn down after decades of dictatorship, sanctions and war. But outside the checkpoints and the blast walls that demarcate the International Zone where the American embassy sits, and most Americans and Iraqi politicians live, Iraqis are reclaiming their city.
U.S. efforts to reconstruct and develop Iraq have in many instances failed. Almost a decade after the initial shock and awe, Iraqis still lack steady electricity and drink tap water at their own risk, while poor drainage still leaves sewage running down streets when winter rains come. Still, not all was for naught: two successful projects – keeping the oil industry running and issuance of a new currency – have enabled Iraq to meet its payroll and jump start the economy.
President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney had plenty to discuss at Monday night's foreign policy match-up:
There's an ongoing war in Afghanistan, civil war in Syria and a tense standoff between Iran and Israel. Terrorism is still an issue, as evidenced by the recent embassy attack in Libya. And then there is a perceived threat from China.
But what are the facts behind the claims made by the candidates? Here's a round-up of CNN's fact checks from Monday's debate:
2014 AFGHANISTAN DEADLINE
Obama accused Romney of initially being against a withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan in 2014.
The claim: "In the same way that you initially opposed a timetable in Afghanistan, now you're for it, although it depends," Obama said. FULL POST
By Michael O’Hanlon, Special to CNN
Michael O’Hanlon is senior fellow at Brookings and author of The Wounded Giant: America’s Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity. The views expressed are his own.
Military strikes against the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, together with other possible targets related to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, could last for a single day and single sortie – or they could last for several days or even weeks. The latter possibility of course implies American participation too, and probably requires the use of air bases in one or more Gulf states as well, given the likely U.S. interest in using stealthy planes that at present don’t fly from aircraft carriers (though B-2 bombers could fly from Diego Garcia, for example).
So what is the likely effectiveness, and what are the likely risks, of each possible approach? I’d argue that there is there is significant unpredictability about how well an air campaign by Israel in particular would work – not least in terms of how much of the existing Iranian nuclear infrastructure it would destroy, and how long it might take Iran to recover (and that’s even leaving aside the huge issue of how Iran might retaliate).
By Joost Hiltermann, Special to CNN
Joost Hiltermann is deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. The views expressed are the writer's own.
With all eyes trained on Syria’s unfolding civil war, the only headline-grabbing news to emerge from the former battleground, Iraq, concerned a fresh wave of violence. Last week, well over a hundred Iraqis were killed and several hundred injured in a series of attacks throughout the country that were claimed by Iraq’s al Qaeda franchise, the Islamic State of Iraq. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had warned of what was to come the day before, announcing a “Breaking the Walls” campaign. On Thursday, Islamic State militants battled with security forces for the first time in years, succeeding even in bringing down a helicopter. It looks as if, having been driven out of most of the areas they controlled and dealt a body blow during the U.S. surge in 2007-08, al Qaeda is rebounding and launching its own military surge now that U.S. troops have gone.
Car bombs explode in central Baghdad
It’s easy to be distracted by an uptick in violence in Iraq and ignore the larger political crisis in which al Qaeda, however diminished in its capabilities, can operate with apparent impunity. Despite last week’s events, violence has been at a steady level since 2008 – too high for sure to those caught up in the spasms that occur, but sufficiently low to nonetheless convey a general sense of stability – a vast improvement over the days of sectarian fighting some years ago. Spectacular attacks have punctuated a pattern of declining violent incidents, causing mass casualties even as overall casualty levels have gone down. Shia militias, which mainly targeted the U.S. presence, put their guns back under their beds after the military component of that presence came to an end late last year.
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