Thinking About Iraq: Reflections on the 10th Anniversary of the Second Gulf War
This article originally appeared in issue 3 of The Young Pioneer, an online magazine in 2013. Republished here as this issue has now been archived.
In Ian McEwan’s masterful novel “Saturday” (unquestionably the first great novel about the War on Terror), the main character, Henry Perowne, spends most of that titular day thinking about Iraq. Taking place entirely on February 15, 2003 against the backdrop of the worldwide protests against the upcoming coalition invasion, Perowne finds himself caught in a sort of quasi-ambivalence about the, by then, inevitable war to come. Quasi-ambivalent in the sense that what he thinks about this war varies depending on who he is talking to; dovish in the company of a hawkish American co-worker, more open to the possibility of regime-change with his strongly anti-war daughter. Through his work as a neurosurgeon Perowne met an Iraqi patient who told him of the violence and terror that constituted life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and his crime family, and he understands that such a brutal dictatorship cannot continue. Yet he finds himself unable to become a cheerleader for war; as an educated man he knows that no matter how noble the initial aims and ideals, years of misery and death lie ahead for everyone involved. Thus, all his knowledge and experience are of no help to him in deciding whether the invasion or Iraq is justified, preferable instead to think about something, anything else.
Perowne is truly a man of our times, and in him we see reflected many of our own uncertainties and conflicting views about the US-led invasion of Iraq that began ten years ago. At the heart of this is the contradiction between the robustness of the case for Saddam’s removal, and the feebleness of the case the Bush administration actually mounted. Recall then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s cringe-inducing performance at the United Nations Security Council - holding up an empty glass vial hoping that in the viewers' minds it would be filled with deadly agents and ready for use on the battlefield, to drawings of Saddam’s alleged “mobile biological weapons laboratories” that appeared like something taken from a video game cut scene. Add to this the CIA's equally abysmal performance based on the fabricated intelligence of the mysterious informant Curveball, and you have a political vision of war scrabbling for real world purchase and falling very far short. Within weeks the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” would move from the news desk to the writers’ room on comedy shows.
Protests against the war in London, attended by Daisy Perowne and a million-odd real people.
Even by early 2003 we were all used to such feeble rhetoric limping out of Washington. As Osama bin Laden had recently slipped through the fingers of NATO in Afghanistan, the war there was losing its original raison d’être, and so the justification for the ongoing presence of boots on the ground was beginning an awkward pivot away from eliminating al Qaeda towards more nebulous notions of promoting democracy and protecting the rights of women. The former was greeted very coolly, almost immediately the media began gleefully recalling the history of failure when it came to taming Afghanistan - from Alexander the Great to the British Empire to the Soviet Union, all had been defeated. To the latter, cruel barbs were quickly directed at America’s ongoing love affair with oil-soaked Saudi Arabia, one of the worst places on Earth to be born female, meaning the Bush Administration’s credibility was heading south quicker than the US navy was steaming back towards the Gulf.
On the other side of the ledger, the arguments for the removal of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of Iraq were numerous and strong. Since coming to power in 1979 his rule had been one of almost continual violence and torture at home, and warfare and terrorism abroad. Starting with the infamous genocide against the Kurdish people of northern Iraq using both conventional and chemical weapons that was estimated to have somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds. In addition to the invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War, there was also the Iran-Iraq war which began when Iraqi forces invaded Iran in September of 1980 and dragged on for another eight years. In it, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed and the conflict has the ignoble distinction of being the deadliest war ever fought between two developing nations. There are also Saddam's series of pogroms against Iraq's Shiite majority to consider. Adding up this butcher's bill, Human Rights Watch estimate that somewhere around 250,000 Iraqis died under the Saddam Hussein regime, not counting foreign casualties. Rather than being just the “bad guy” anti-war apologists would sometimes grudgingly acknowledge, Saddam was in fact the 20th Century's last true mass-murdering dictator in the dismal tradition of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot etc.
Saddam’s atrocities can therefore be seen in almost Rumsfeldian terms as a sort of unknown known; that is to say that while knowledge of them was not in any way hidden, discussions about all the blood that had already been shed did not make up the majority of the public discourse about Iraq. Instead the world was treated to the Bush administration's ever escalating yet unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction that could rain down on Europe and Israel and nebulous talk of sponsoring global terrorism. The strong, some would say morally urgent, case for the removal of Saddam Hussein and his vile sons from their iron-fisted ownership of state and its people did not require any connections to, or even mentions of, such weapons. Indeed, the transition to a post-Saddam era in Iraq had been a policy position of the Bill Clinton administration. Yet this was not the story that was sold, and this mistake has since coloured many of the ways in which we think about Iraq.
Despite the claims of many on the anti-war left, this is what the real Iraq under Saddam Hussein looked like.
One group who did very little thinking about Iraq in the lead up to the war was the media, those in America especially. In a recent mea culpa, Howard Fineman - now the editor of the Huffington Post, previously a reporter with Newsweek - tried to explain how almost all of the US media gave the war a free pass, waving it through from conception to fruition with token scrutiny. Fineman recalls President George W. Bush in his first major interview after the attacks of September 11, 2001 saying, “Saddam Hussein is evil” in one of those short declarative sentences, radiant with moral certainty, that typified the Bush style. Yet it seemed he did nothing with this information at the time. Of journalists, lawmakers and appointed officials, Fineman concedes that, “Too few questions were asked, too many assumptions were allowed to go unchallenged, too many voices of doubt were muffled or rejected in a toxic atmosphere of patriotism, ignorance and political fear”. Realising that this is not burnishing the image of his profession, Fineman also proffers the September 11 attacks themselves, hitting as they did the media capitals of New York and Washington, the loss of friends and colleagues, and the natural rally-around-the flag effect that comes after one has watched one's nation assaulted.
However this is where the media's story began to ignore reality in favour of black and white boosterism or opposition as various outlets cleaved along ideological lines. Meanwhile, the real links between the attacks of 2001 and Iraq went almost unmentioned. George Bush and Dick Cheney along with their mouthpieces overseas, such as Tony Blair and John Howard, would mention first 9/11 and then Iraq in the context of the new “war on terrorism”, and let the audience draw the implied connection without having to sully themselves by claiming overtly that Saddam Hussein was a direct supporter of Osama bin Laden and that Iraq was responsible for the September 11 attacks. They knew this was not the case, but they sincerely hoped a majority of their audience would. And, depressing as it may be to recall, this tactic worked.
This was not only galling, it was also totally unnecessary given what was already known at the time. It was true that bin Laden was opposed to the “secular” government of Saddam Hussein in much the same way that Saddam would not have approved of bin Laden's dream of a restored caliphate, but these differences did not mean that Iraq was disassociated from violent jihadism. Incidentally, the Iraqi Ba'ath party Saddam led was nominally secular, but there are good reasons to doubt his personal commitment to the principles of secularism as we know it. To cite but two examples, the Iraqi flag featured the words “God is great” (the motto of jihadis worldwide) in Saddam's own handwriting, and in 1997 he commissioned a copy of the Koran to be written in 27 litres of his own blood; these are hardly the actions of a man concerned with the separation of mosque and state. In his time Saddam patronised many different terrorist organisations; for example during the early days of the Second Intifada in the Palestinian Territories the family of any suicide bomber could expect a bounty of US$25,000 cash from Baghdad.
While bin Ladan never met with Saddam, there remain easily provable links between al Qaeda and Iraq. The name Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is mercifully fading from public conciousness, but before being killed in 2006 he was at the centre of the post-invasion sectarian violence, and before that was running terrorist operations within Iraq's borders. Zarqawi met bin Laden personally in 1999 and the affiliated offshoot group al Qaeda in Mesopotamia he led until his death were responsible for some of the worst violence of the insurgency. And the insurgency was driven in a large part by foreign Jihadis eager to get the opportunity to kill Americans - this rabble, along with various Shia groups, being armed and funded to a great extent by Saddam's old enemy, Iran. In other words, Iraq went from an exporter of terrorism to an importer, yet this too became another unknown known. Even before the worst days of the insurgency, Saddam Hussein's genuine links to international terrorism became lost amongst flying accusations over the long-gone weapons of mass destruction and the elevation of Hans Blix to a household name.
Zarqawi, even more than bin Laden, saw a blood-soaked vision of global jihad years before George W. Bush set his sights on Baghdad.
Let us conceive of an alternative world where Al Gore had been awarded the presidency that he rightfully won, and in this world Iraq was never invaded. Imagine then how Iraq would have fared in the midst of the serial uprisings that began in January 2011 and quickly spread throughout the Muslim world. While the final outcome of the so-called “Arab spring” is yet to materialise (if it ever will), had the regime in Baghdad been left in peace, Iraq was a very likely candidate for chaos. Consider the pre-existing conditions: a repressive dictatorship with a history of violently suppressing political opponents that has been in power for decades? Check. A situation where the ruling family and their lackeys are of a minority group? Check (the Ba'athist leadership were Sunnis whereas 60% of Iraq is Shia, and Saddam was from a tribal minority). A moribund economy that reduced a once prospering middle class to beggary as natural resources were looted by the ruling elite? Check.
To use the cliched, yet oddly apt, language of explosions, Iraq was a powder keg of repressed religious hatred and smouldering resentment against the government that only needed a spark to ignite. In our timeline it was foreign forces, but in the mirror universe where Saddam was left atop his throne of skulls, right now we could be talking about civil war on a scale that would make Syria look like a minor disruption. This is not to exonerate the many failures of the US-led coalition forces once they had committed to invasion. Chief among them are the lack of post-war planning and American administrator Paul Bremer's decision to dissolve the Iraqi army, a move that did more to create the domestic insurgency than any other, by creating a pool of unemployed and armed young men as well as facilitating the further collapse of the social order. A disastrous policy of “de-Ba'athification” of the civil service also helped to antagonise many Iraqis against American forces. While such mistakes have been well documented, alternative scenarios such as a military coup, an internal Ba'ath party struggle for power, or a general uprising all remain well within the realms of possibility in our imagined alternate world.
Colonel Qaddafi may have had solid gold taps on his private jet, but Saddam really was the man with the golden gun. So much that is stupid and sad about this cruel and bloody regime is summed up in this photo.
Back in this world, what of that totemic embalm of America's failure in Iraq; the photographs of the sordid and nauseating scenes inside Abu Ghraib prison? Again, some perspective is required. In his book Among the Dead Cities the philosopher A. C. Grayling examines the morality of arial bombing of civilians during World War 2. While conceding that incidents such as the firebombing of Dresden which killed around 25,000 people was indeed a monstrous act, the question ultimately is how should we think about such numbers when compared to the 6 million dead in the Holocaust? Civilian casualties due to area bombing, while deplorable, did not affect the moral case against Adolf Hitler, and it is widely recognised and accepted that even in “just wars”, the innocent will die along with the guilty. The accidental victims of Iraq whether in Fallujah or inside Abu Ghraib are of course a tragedy, but set against the insane slaughter of Iraqis that occurred pre-invasion and the far more horrific events that took place at Abu Ghraib - the Place of the Ravens - the moral compass those calling for regime change needs no checking. If there remains any doubt, one need only visit the sites of nearby mass graves, where Saddam's victims from the prison were thrown, dozens at a time. This is evil on a scale that will live on in the minds and consciences of humanity long after Lyndie England and her low-IQ collaborators are forgotten.
So in thinking about Iraq, where is are we today? Over the span of a decade has clarity emerged, or are we still like the character in Ian McEwan's novel: able to see all multiple sides of an issue that, like a prism, scatters light rather than concentrating it? The answer to this becomes our third and final unknown known. Depending on your political inclination you can view Iraq as a broken land of freshly turned earth from the graves of victims uncounted, or you can see it as a wobbling but functional democracy working hard to rebuild its economy and the lives of its citizens. Iraq never became the beacon of democracy President Bush hoped for, and the eventual emancipation of the Islamic world from both tyranny and itself could take years or centuries to eventuate. An extremely long and very questionable bow would have to be drawn to link the liberation of Iraq to the Arab spring uprisings of 2011, but as our thought experiment revealed, is is possible from this position to look back and honesty postulate on how much worse things could have gone, a position that one living through the worst days of the insurgency in 2004-07 would have found inconceivable.
2015 addendum:
While I did not foresee the fall back into chaos that has accompanied the rise of Islamic State, I did make the point that such terrorism is more than a simple consequence of the invasion. Indeed, ISIS is just an evolution of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" organisation which survived his death and morphed into the hideous beast we know today, carrying on his evil work. Now more than ever it is crucial to remind ourselves that Iraq was not a peaceful "normal state" before 2003, and violent Islamism was not a by-product of White House and Pentagon policy. And the preservation of a dictatorship would not have saved the Iraqi people, all across the Middle East, most recently in Tunisia, the killings continue regardless of the structure of the individual states. In a few years we may no longer be speaking of Iraq as we know it, there could finally be a Kurdish state, but if so that would be a consequence of the Second Gulf War, so in summary I think the conversation should continue, but the hammer of judgement should be put aside for now and for a long time to come.
In Ian McEwan’s masterful novel “Saturday” (unquestionably the first great novel about the War on Terror), the main character, Henry Perowne, spends most of that titular day thinking about Iraq. Taking place entirely on February 15, 2003 against the backdrop of the worldwide protests against the upcoming coalition invasion, Perowne finds himself caught in a sort of quasi-ambivalence about the, by then, inevitable war to come. Quasi-ambivalent in the sense that what he thinks about this war varies depending on who he is talking to; dovish in the company of a hawkish American co-worker, more open to the possibility of regime-change with his strongly anti-war daughter. Through his work as a neurosurgeon Perowne met an Iraqi patient who told him of the violence and terror that constituted life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and his crime family, and he understands that such a brutal dictatorship cannot continue. Yet he finds himself unable to become a cheerleader for war; as an educated man he knows that no matter how noble the initial aims and ideals, years of misery and death lie ahead for everyone involved. Thus, all his knowledge and experience are of no help to him in deciding whether the invasion or Iraq is justified, preferable instead to think about something, anything else.
Perowne is truly a man of our times, and in him we see reflected many of our own uncertainties and conflicting views about the US-led invasion of Iraq that began ten years ago. At the heart of this is the contradiction between the robustness of the case for Saddam’s removal, and the feebleness of the case the Bush administration actually mounted. Recall then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s cringe-inducing performance at the United Nations Security Council - holding up an empty glass vial hoping that in the viewers' minds it would be filled with deadly agents and ready for use on the battlefield, to drawings of Saddam’s alleged “mobile biological weapons laboratories” that appeared like something taken from a video game cut scene. Add to this the CIA's equally abysmal performance based on the fabricated intelligence of the mysterious informant Curveball, and you have a political vision of war scrabbling for real world purchase and falling very far short. Within weeks the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” would move from the news desk to the writers’ room on comedy shows.
Protests against the war in London, attended by Daisy Perowne and a million-odd real people.
Even by early 2003 we were all used to such feeble rhetoric limping out of Washington. As Osama bin Laden had recently slipped through the fingers of NATO in Afghanistan, the war there was losing its original raison d’être, and so the justification for the ongoing presence of boots on the ground was beginning an awkward pivot away from eliminating al Qaeda towards more nebulous notions of promoting democracy and protecting the rights of women. The former was greeted very coolly, almost immediately the media began gleefully recalling the history of failure when it came to taming Afghanistan - from Alexander the Great to the British Empire to the Soviet Union, all had been defeated. To the latter, cruel barbs were quickly directed at America’s ongoing love affair with oil-soaked Saudi Arabia, one of the worst places on Earth to be born female, meaning the Bush Administration’s credibility was heading south quicker than the US navy was steaming back towards the Gulf.
On the other side of the ledger, the arguments for the removal of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of Iraq were numerous and strong. Since coming to power in 1979 his rule had been one of almost continual violence and torture at home, and warfare and terrorism abroad. Starting with the infamous genocide against the Kurdish people of northern Iraq using both conventional and chemical weapons that was estimated to have somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds. In addition to the invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War, there was also the Iran-Iraq war which began when Iraqi forces invaded Iran in September of 1980 and dragged on for another eight years. In it, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed and the conflict has the ignoble distinction of being the deadliest war ever fought between two developing nations. There are also Saddam's series of pogroms against Iraq's Shiite majority to consider. Adding up this butcher's bill, Human Rights Watch estimate that somewhere around 250,000 Iraqis died under the Saddam Hussein regime, not counting foreign casualties. Rather than being just the “bad guy” anti-war apologists would sometimes grudgingly acknowledge, Saddam was in fact the 20th Century's last true mass-murdering dictator in the dismal tradition of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot etc.
Saddam’s atrocities can therefore be seen in almost Rumsfeldian terms as a sort of unknown known; that is to say that while knowledge of them was not in any way hidden, discussions about all the blood that had already been shed did not make up the majority of the public discourse about Iraq. Instead the world was treated to the Bush administration's ever escalating yet unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction that could rain down on Europe and Israel and nebulous talk of sponsoring global terrorism. The strong, some would say morally urgent, case for the removal of Saddam Hussein and his vile sons from their iron-fisted ownership of state and its people did not require any connections to, or even mentions of, such weapons. Indeed, the transition to a post-Saddam era in Iraq had been a policy position of the Bill Clinton administration. Yet this was not the story that was sold, and this mistake has since coloured many of the ways in which we think about Iraq.
Despite the claims of many on the anti-war left, this is what the real Iraq under Saddam Hussein looked like.
One group who did very little thinking about Iraq in the lead up to the war was the media, those in America especially. In a recent mea culpa, Howard Fineman - now the editor of the Huffington Post, previously a reporter with Newsweek - tried to explain how almost all of the US media gave the war a free pass, waving it through from conception to fruition with token scrutiny. Fineman recalls President George W. Bush in his first major interview after the attacks of September 11, 2001 saying, “Saddam Hussein is evil” in one of those short declarative sentences, radiant with moral certainty, that typified the Bush style. Yet it seemed he did nothing with this information at the time. Of journalists, lawmakers and appointed officials, Fineman concedes that, “Too few questions were asked, too many assumptions were allowed to go unchallenged, too many voices of doubt were muffled or rejected in a toxic atmosphere of patriotism, ignorance and political fear”. Realising that this is not burnishing the image of his profession, Fineman also proffers the September 11 attacks themselves, hitting as they did the media capitals of New York and Washington, the loss of friends and colleagues, and the natural rally-around-the flag effect that comes after one has watched one's nation assaulted.
However this is where the media's story began to ignore reality in favour of black and white boosterism or opposition as various outlets cleaved along ideological lines. Meanwhile, the real links between the attacks of 2001 and Iraq went almost unmentioned. George Bush and Dick Cheney along with their mouthpieces overseas, such as Tony Blair and John Howard, would mention first 9/11 and then Iraq in the context of the new “war on terrorism”, and let the audience draw the implied connection without having to sully themselves by claiming overtly that Saddam Hussein was a direct supporter of Osama bin Laden and that Iraq was responsible for the September 11 attacks. They knew this was not the case, but they sincerely hoped a majority of their audience would. And, depressing as it may be to recall, this tactic worked.
This was not only galling, it was also totally unnecessary given what was already known at the time. It was true that bin Laden was opposed to the “secular” government of Saddam Hussein in much the same way that Saddam would not have approved of bin Laden's dream of a restored caliphate, but these differences did not mean that Iraq was disassociated from violent jihadism. Incidentally, the Iraqi Ba'ath party Saddam led was nominally secular, but there are good reasons to doubt his personal commitment to the principles of secularism as we know it. To cite but two examples, the Iraqi flag featured the words “God is great” (the motto of jihadis worldwide) in Saddam's own handwriting, and in 1997 he commissioned a copy of the Koran to be written in 27 litres of his own blood; these are hardly the actions of a man concerned with the separation of mosque and state. In his time Saddam patronised many different terrorist organisations; for example during the early days of the Second Intifada in the Palestinian Territories the family of any suicide bomber could expect a bounty of US$25,000 cash from Baghdad.
While bin Ladan never met with Saddam, there remain easily provable links between al Qaeda and Iraq. The name Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is mercifully fading from public conciousness, but before being killed in 2006 he was at the centre of the post-invasion sectarian violence, and before that was running terrorist operations within Iraq's borders. Zarqawi met bin Laden personally in 1999 and the affiliated offshoot group al Qaeda in Mesopotamia he led until his death were responsible for some of the worst violence of the insurgency. And the insurgency was driven in a large part by foreign Jihadis eager to get the opportunity to kill Americans - this rabble, along with various Shia groups, being armed and funded to a great extent by Saddam's old enemy, Iran. In other words, Iraq went from an exporter of terrorism to an importer, yet this too became another unknown known. Even before the worst days of the insurgency, Saddam Hussein's genuine links to international terrorism became lost amongst flying accusations over the long-gone weapons of mass destruction and the elevation of Hans Blix to a household name.
Zarqawi, even more than bin Laden, saw a blood-soaked vision of global jihad years before George W. Bush set his sights on Baghdad.
Let us conceive of an alternative world where Al Gore had been awarded the presidency that he rightfully won, and in this world Iraq was never invaded. Imagine then how Iraq would have fared in the midst of the serial uprisings that began in January 2011 and quickly spread throughout the Muslim world. While the final outcome of the so-called “Arab spring” is yet to materialise (if it ever will), had the regime in Baghdad been left in peace, Iraq was a very likely candidate for chaos. Consider the pre-existing conditions: a repressive dictatorship with a history of violently suppressing political opponents that has been in power for decades? Check. A situation where the ruling family and their lackeys are of a minority group? Check (the Ba'athist leadership were Sunnis whereas 60% of Iraq is Shia, and Saddam was from a tribal minority). A moribund economy that reduced a once prospering middle class to beggary as natural resources were looted by the ruling elite? Check.
To use the cliched, yet oddly apt, language of explosions, Iraq was a powder keg of repressed religious hatred and smouldering resentment against the government that only needed a spark to ignite. In our timeline it was foreign forces, but in the mirror universe where Saddam was left atop his throne of skulls, right now we could be talking about civil war on a scale that would make Syria look like a minor disruption. This is not to exonerate the many failures of the US-led coalition forces once they had committed to invasion. Chief among them are the lack of post-war planning and American administrator Paul Bremer's decision to dissolve the Iraqi army, a move that did more to create the domestic insurgency than any other, by creating a pool of unemployed and armed young men as well as facilitating the further collapse of the social order. A disastrous policy of “de-Ba'athification” of the civil service also helped to antagonise many Iraqis against American forces. While such mistakes have been well documented, alternative scenarios such as a military coup, an internal Ba'ath party struggle for power, or a general uprising all remain well within the realms of possibility in our imagined alternate world.
Colonel Qaddafi may have had solid gold taps on his private jet, but Saddam really was the man with the golden gun. So much that is stupid and sad about this cruel and bloody regime is summed up in this photo.
Back in this world, what of that totemic embalm of America's failure in Iraq; the photographs of the sordid and nauseating scenes inside Abu Ghraib prison? Again, some perspective is required. In his book Among the Dead Cities the philosopher A. C. Grayling examines the morality of arial bombing of civilians during World War 2. While conceding that incidents such as the firebombing of Dresden which killed around 25,000 people was indeed a monstrous act, the question ultimately is how should we think about such numbers when compared to the 6 million dead in the Holocaust? Civilian casualties due to area bombing, while deplorable, did not affect the moral case against Adolf Hitler, and it is widely recognised and accepted that even in “just wars”, the innocent will die along with the guilty. The accidental victims of Iraq whether in Fallujah or inside Abu Ghraib are of course a tragedy, but set against the insane slaughter of Iraqis that occurred pre-invasion and the far more horrific events that took place at Abu Ghraib - the Place of the Ravens - the moral compass those calling for regime change needs no checking. If there remains any doubt, one need only visit the sites of nearby mass graves, where Saddam's victims from the prison were thrown, dozens at a time. This is evil on a scale that will live on in the minds and consciences of humanity long after Lyndie England and her low-IQ collaborators are forgotten.
So in thinking about Iraq, where is are we today? Over the span of a decade has clarity emerged, or are we still like the character in Ian McEwan's novel: able to see all multiple sides of an issue that, like a prism, scatters light rather than concentrating it? The answer to this becomes our third and final unknown known. Depending on your political inclination you can view Iraq as a broken land of freshly turned earth from the graves of victims uncounted, or you can see it as a wobbling but functional democracy working hard to rebuild its economy and the lives of its citizens. Iraq never became the beacon of democracy President Bush hoped for, and the eventual emancipation of the Islamic world from both tyranny and itself could take years or centuries to eventuate. An extremely long and very questionable bow would have to be drawn to link the liberation of Iraq to the Arab spring uprisings of 2011, but as our thought experiment revealed, is is possible from this position to look back and honesty postulate on how much worse things could have gone, a position that one living through the worst days of the insurgency in 2004-07 would have found inconceivable.
2015 addendum:
While I did not foresee the fall back into chaos that has accompanied the rise of Islamic State, I did make the point that such terrorism is more than a simple consequence of the invasion. Indeed, ISIS is just an evolution of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" organisation which survived his death and morphed into the hideous beast we know today, carrying on his evil work. Now more than ever it is crucial to remind ourselves that Iraq was not a peaceful "normal state" before 2003, and violent Islamism was not a by-product of White House and Pentagon policy. And the preservation of a dictatorship would not have saved the Iraqi people, all across the Middle East, most recently in Tunisia, the killings continue regardless of the structure of the individual states. In a few years we may no longer be speaking of Iraq as we know it, there could finally be a Kurdish state, but if so that would be a consequence of the Second Gulf War, so in summary I think the conversation should continue, but the hammer of judgement should be put aside for now and for a long time to come.