Regime Change in the Orient

The longer the war in Iran drags on, the louder the calls for regime change grow — but what do the experiences of the year following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 teach us?

For a long time, the West called it a cakewalk: when American forces marched into Iraq, victory seemed just around the corner. Then came the insurgency — apparently out of nowhere. And all too often, a condescending undertone crept into the commentary: Arabs simply weren’t ready for the noble gift of democracy from the West.

The truth looked very different. American economic policy in occupied Iraq barely differed from that of an oil kleptocracy — first driving the population into poverty, then into open resistance.

To this day, Western publics have done little to reckon with the dynamics that pushed Iraqis into uprising against their American occupiers. Yet already, the next regime changes are on the agenda. This passage is taken from Part 2 of the series The New World Disorder.

The Treasures of Mesopotamia Are Plundered

When the Iraqi state collapsed, the country descended into chaos. Saddam Hussein’s institutions—corroded as they were by corruption and brutal arbitrariness—disintegrated, and no one maintained order in the streets. Looters destroyed libraries, museums, and other cultural treasures of inestimable value. Even the central bank and its cash reserves fell victim to the mob. Seventeen of twenty ministries were plundered. U.S. soldiers merely watched. [108] [109]

“We are all afraid! […] They [the Kurds allied with the Americans] are looting the school. We have children in the school! This is not acceptable—we need a government here. But there is no government here.”

With these words, an Iraqi citizen in Kirkuk summed up the anarchic conditions, the fear, and the insecurity. This lit the fuse for mistrust and discord among Iraq’s ethnic groups. [110]

The soldiers had other priorities: they guarded the Ministry of Oil. Its functionality was crucial, as America’s war costs were to be financed from Iraqi oil reserves.

Gradually, it became clear to Iraqis that the Americans apparently had no plan for the period after the fall of Saddam’s Baath Party. In Washington’s worldview, “democracy” would take care of itself once the country had been conquered.

An American soldier holds men at gunpoint inside the Ministry of Information in Baghdad. He had found a pistol on them. It later emerged that they were in fact Iraqi police officers who had been recalled to duty two days earlier. They had been tasked with protecting the building from looters. They were authorized to carry weapons and had their identification with them—the U.S. forces later apologized. However, matters did not end so lightly everywhere: looters ransacked the Iraqi Museum and its priceless historical collections. Even the central bank fell victim. To restore order, many municipalities formed their own vigilante groups—the seeds of the uprisings to come were thus sown. (Source: Julian Andrews/shutterstock, 2003)

The Denazification of Iraq

For all the talk of democracy, the occupiers did not truly trust Iraqis to manage their newly gained freedom. The Bush administration dispatched Paul Bremer and installed an Iraqi Governing Council. It consisted almost exclusively of exiled Iraqis who had lived for decades in London, the Emirates, or the United States—they had little understanding of Iraq in 2003. Among Iraqis, their names were largely unknown.

Nevertheless, they were allowed to rule the country by decree after the American triumph. Just as Germany had been “denazified” after Hitler’s fall, Iraq was to be “de-Baathified.” All members of Saddam’s party were to be removed from public office. The problem: nearly ten percent of Iraqis were members of the Baath Party, especially those in system-relevant positions. An unworkable undertaking.

The two exile Iraqis al-Chalabi and Nuri al-Maliki led the de-Baathification commission. We will return to al-Chalabi in a later chapter—he played a major role in justifying the U.S. invasion. Critics accused them of abusing their positions for political ambitions. [111] Successfully so: al-Maliki became prime minister in 2006 and, under the watch of the U.S. occupation, established an authoritarian system himself—ironically modeled on Saddam Hussein’s example. [112]

U.S. civil administrator Paul Bremer (second from left) in 2003 with members of the Iraqi transitional government installed by the United States. All members had lived in exile for decades and had little knowledge of Iraqi realities. Yet they were able to present themselves convincingly in Washington, which secured them the appointment (from left to right): Mowaffak al-Rubaie remained in London after studying neurology in 1978. al-Chalabi had lived in the United States and London since the 1960s after fleeing Jordan in the trunk of a car following a 20-million-dollar fraud conviction. Adnan Pachachi had lived in the Emirates since 1971. Adil Abdul-Mahdi had lived in France since 1969. Even before the U.S. overthrew Saddam, these exile Iraqis had drawn up detailed plans for Iraq—including the choice of Linux as the future government’s computer system. The following years, however, went anything but according to plan. (Image source: wikimedia, 2003)

Iraqi Shock Therapy: Breaking Under the American Dream

U.S. envoy Paul Bremer told the Washington Post that his foremost concern was rebuilding the economy and putting Iraqis back to work. Yet Iraqi infrastructure was in a pitiful state: electricity had collapsed, and most government infrastructure lay looted and burned out.

The United States had dramatically underestimated reconstruction costs. Before the war, it budgeted 1 to 1.7 billion U.S. dollars—now it became clear that, after years of sanctions, an estimated 12 billion dollars were needed just to get infrastructure running again. [113]

In banking reform, the Americans followed the—if we recall—not very successful post-communist transformation model. Iraq was to be converted rapidly from years of totalitarianism into a market economy—so rapidly that reforms could not be reversed.

But Iraqi banks had been designed solely to finance Baath Party projects. Their staff had no experience with market-based transactions. They also lacked capital for reconstruction loans.

The result was sobering: in 2004, the country’s two largest banks issued a mere 10 million dollars in loans—a drop in the ocean for more than 20 million Iraqis in 2004. Foreign banks were slow to enter the challenging environment. Primarily Asian institutions ventured in. [114]

The Americans reset Iraq’s traditional and institutional knowledge overnight—much like in Eastern Europe a decade earlier. As if nothing had been learned. The costs of adjustment were borne by the broad Iraqi population, while Americans preferred to engage with a small Western-oriented elite that had little backing among the people.

The IMF Becomes a Benefactor

Contrary to previous practice, the IMF granted one of the largest debt relief packages in history to Iraq, almost without preconditions. Yet reconstruction priorities were determined by the United States, not Iraqis. They extolled the virtues of foreign investment to the transitional government—toward which Iraq had previously been extremely restrictive, especially regarding non-Arab investors. [115]

But who would invest long-term in a country where Americans had opened hundreds of unresolved fronts: security, social, economic, monetary, and ethnic questions—all with uncertain outcomes and zero planning security for entrepreneurs?

The incompetence of U.S. occupiers regarding their own market-radical ideology went further: they interpreted the appearance of foreign goods—washing machines, air conditioners, microwave ovens—on local markets as signs of budding capitalism and flourishing entrepreneurship.

Yet all this was financed from abroad; little was built within Iraq itself—a form of economic policy the IMF had strictly forbidden other countries. In Iraq, it was allowed for opportunistic reasons in Washington: liberalizing the electricity market was rejected because it would have meant sensitive price increases for consumers. [115] Other countries—such as Ukraine in 2014—were not so fortunate with the IMF.

Nevertheless, public dissatisfaction mounted. Many factories that had deteriorated under Saddam but were still operating had to close due to electricity shortages. Power was diverted instead to oil production, where it promised higher export revenues to finance reconstruction. Any economist in their right mind would have advised against such a policy—U.S. economic management thus differed little from petro-autocracies it otherwise liked to criticize.

Moreover, the global markets to which Iraq now opened itself under U.S. diktat produced everything more cheaply and in better quality. The result was high unemployment among young men. Many worked informal day jobs or part-time—so no precise figure could be given. Estimates range from 40 to 70 percent.

Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan Sassaman, who commanded a brigade in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, described the situation solemnly:

“The streets were lined with hundreds, if not thousands, of young men who could no longer provide for their families, […] Not the old ones, but the fittest men in Iraq.” [116]

The Uprising Against the U.S. Occupiers Begins

Sabotage of the electricity supply increased, and security deteriorated visibly. Iraqi security forces had dissolved themselves; practically no functioning police unit remained nationwide. The Americans had additionally demobilized many of them, further swelling the ranks of unemployed young men—looters had free rein.

The occupiers tried to delay the brewing storm of frustrated Iraqis: they postponed comprehensive privatization of state enterprises and introduced job-creation measures. Hundreds of thousands of young men from the former army received one-time payments and scholarships in the double-digit range.

At the same time, insurgent groups began paying 100 U.S. dollars for every killed occupation soldier and 500 dollars for each destroyed military vehicle. Building a new Iraqi army with balanced ethnic and religious composition stalled everywhere. The Iraqi police fared even worse: local militias and insurgents intimidated them, and officers were often involved in illegal activities themselves.

Where once a totalitarian state monitored nearly everything through its security apparatus, suddenly no minimum level of control was maintained. The insurgents were initially loosely coordinated former followers of Saddam Hussein—not radical Islamist groups. The uprising grew rapidly, and security deteriorated dramatically due to weapons flowing across the poorly guarded border from still Baathist-ruled Syria.

Many Iraqis blamed the United States for the chaos and anarchy that befell them. Ninety-four percent of Baghdad residents said the city had become more dangerous since the American invasion. The reinforced concrete walls that now shielded neighborhoods from bomb attacks were mockingly called “Bremer Barriers”—after the U.S. envoy.

Paradoxically, most Iraqis feared even more the anarchy that would descend if the Americans withdrew prematurely. The CIA, however, was more occupied with searching for the weapons of mass destruction promised by President Bush than with analyzing the insurgency.

By the first free elections in 2005, Iraq was already in civil war. The internationally recognized U.S. medical journal The Lancet estimated excess mortality in Iraq under U.S. occupation alone up to 2006 at between 400,000 and 942,000 deaths—56 percent from gunshot wounds. [117] [118]

The graphic shows the number of attacks on military and civilian targets in Iraq. The attacks occurred during the insurgency against the U.S. occupiers and the civil war between 2003 and 2008. From 2006 and 2007 onward, the situation escalated further until the number of attacks declined after a U.S. troop surge. Yet peace was by no means restored. (Source: [113])

How do Iraqi insurgents differ from Kosovar rebels?

Cynically put: one of the justifications for NATO’s attack on Serbia had been its brutal crackdown on guerrilla units—fighters who were barely distinguishable from civilians and who spread terror from difficult terrain such as mountains or densely built cities. From 2003 onward, U.S. and British forces suddenly found themselves in Afghanistan and Iraq facing a strikingly similar situation.

Money, weapons, and jihadists flowed into the country from abroad—fighters who had refined the training they once received in Afghanistan, including from the United States, in wars against Serbian, Russian, Israeli, and Arab forces. Now Americans and Britons adopted comparable tactics for self-protection: they barricaded themselves behind high walls and armored vehicles, far removed from the population, which remained exposed to both insurgent terror and U.S. bombs.

They carried out airstrikes and used white phosphorus to flush jihadists out of suspected hideouts in densely populated areas. [119] In 2019, the investigative platform Middle East Eye reported that even the shooting of unarmed civilians on suspicion had been authorized at the highest levels—they might, after all, have been spying on soldiers. [120] In Australia, the Brereton Report concluded that elite units had initiated rookies by ordering them to execute unarmed Afghans—the so-called “blooding.” [1] [121]

Washington also relied on systematic torture in detention facilities such as Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, or—within the self-proclaimed hyper-moral European Union—even in Romania. So-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”—including waterboarding, systematic humiliation, and electric shocks—proved highly ineffective. Yet authorities concealed this ineffectiveness in order to continue the practice. [122]

The situation deteriorated further with the increased deployment of mercenaries from private companies—Washington was, quite simply, running out of its own soldiers. Even the U.S. military regarded them with hostility, describing them as dilettantish, overpaid, and trigger-happy. They made coordination among armed forces ever more difficult, yet were responsible for numerous civilian casualties. Not only Iraqi civilians, but also an increasing number of their own soldiers were caught in their crossfire. Very rarely did these contractors face consequences for their misconduct—which further inflamed resentment among the Iraqi population. [123]

The International Criminal Court in The Hague concluded at the end of its preliminary examinations: once again, it had been demonstrated that powerful actors on the world stage could get away with torture and murder. [124] The Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya had already declared before the Iraq War in a passionate speech at the American Enterprise Institute:

“In most discussions about Iraq in Europe, the United States, and the Arab world, it was never about those who had to live within this most brutal of all dictatorships [note: Saddam Hussein’s] in modern times.” [110]

By 2015, well over one million deaths had been counted as a consequence of the War on Terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—a conservative estimate, as official records often documented fatalities only inadequately. [125]A few years later, the nation-building project in Afghanistan also collapsed with the ignominious flight of the Western allies from Kabul airport in 2021.

[1] Ironically, it was Russia and China that reminded Australia that only a thorough reckoning with Australian war crimes in Afghanistan—and holding those responsible to account—could contribute to a rules-based international order. Otherwise, it would amount to little more than Western hypocrisy. The Brereton Report, notably, originated from an Australian initiative itself. Yet so far it has resulted in only a single indictment—despite at least 39 documented deaths. [386]