The Ongoing Legacy of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

How are the impacts of the American invasion of Iraq still unfolding in the Middle East? Dr. Tamara Cofman Wittes, former Director of the Office of Foreign Assistance and the U.S. Department of State and senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, explains, "The American invasion of Iraq had a variety of effects, both on its own and in the context of other trends that were going on in the Arab world at the time. So the 2000s was a period when a lot of Arab governments were facing real challenges: economic challenges, social challenges. The old models that they had relied on, which involves using oil income or other kinds of non tax income, to support themselves, those were breaking down. There were large, young populations that wanted greater connection with the world. that were less patient with authoritarian governments who were telling them what to think and what they could watch on TV, and how they could access the rest of the world on the internet. And so those pressures were building. In a way, I think the American invasion of Iraq introduced two new elements. Number one, it toppled a dictator, a horrifically brutal dictator, and demonstrated that the survival of these regimes was not inevitable, and that Iraqis then have an opportunity to try for different kinds of government. But at the same time, the American invasion of Iraq opened up a very nasty sectarian conflict inside Iraq. And it demonstrated that underneath these authoritarian regimes were unresolved social conflicts and grievances, many of those social conflicts exploited by dictators to keep themselves in power. But that left a very, very bitter legacy. And so I don't think that the American invasion of Iraq produced any kind of a positive example, for the rest of the region in terms of what could come after dictatorship. But it certainly did shake up the region. It shook up a lot of governments in the region. And most of all, it landed the United States physically, in a major way, in the heart of the Middle East. And that's a legacy that we are still confronting today."
This interview is from the FPA archives.