Chaos and Human Tragedy

On October 26, 2015, CNN reporter Fareed Zakaria set out “to answer who is responsible for the chaos in Iraq” in a one-hour special, Long Road to Hell: America in Iraq. CNN used a flashy title and explosive imagery of U.S. troops on the streets of Baghdad along with footage of looters but failed to answer the question first posed on the CNN Blogspot.

Zakaria interviewed several former Bush administration officials: Richard Clarke, Douglas Feith, and Paul Bremer, all of whom continued the dated finger pointing while Ambassador Richard Haas and General David Petraus gave thoughtful analysis of the past and current events in the Middle East. The use of historic video from 1991 and 2002 showed how Vice President Dick Cheney changed his position on regime change in Iraq. Cheney in 1991, after the success of Operation Desert Storm, advised against removing Saddam. He stated it would result in the country sinking into a “quagmire” but then in 2002 he advised there was no recourse but to remove Sadam.

The interviews of Petraeus and Haas genuinely added to the discussion. Petraeus postulated that he did not know if leaving a contingent in Iraq would have made a difference but he would have liked to have tested the proposition. Haas admitted the U.S. was guilty of both omissions and commissions but also argued that there is a level of local responsibility for what has happened in the Middle East. In contrast, Clarke argued that there would be no ISIS without the Iraq war.

It was interesting that CNN avoided the religious aspects of al-Qaida and ISIS’s goal to reestablish a caliphate, which predates the 9/11 attacks. Recently, four books (ISIS Apocalypse, Under the Black Flag, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, and The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal about Al-Qa’ida) were published that are must reads for anyone that wants to understand al-Qaida and ISIS.

In the end, Zakaria did a personal inventory and compared his personal support for invading Iraq in 2003 to his current position that the invasion was a mistake, describing it as “chaos and a humanitarian tragedy.” However, the show did little to explain the rise of ISIS or shed any new light on the Bush administration’s handling of the war that was not already widely known.

Zakaria did show how Republican presidential candidates Trump and Graham support using U.S. troops against ISIS and Democratic candidate Sanders does not support U.S. troop involvement. But, didn’t we already know that?

For full disclosure, I served on the intelligence staff of U.S. Central Command Forward Headquarters in Doha, Qatar on March 19, 2003, the night the Iraq war started. I later served in Iraq as a civilian analyst for over three years. After leaving Iraq, I completed my Master’s thesis, Creating Enemies: Stabilization Operations in Iraq that was critical of the planning and execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom especially during Phase 4 stabilization operations. These are my personal observations and do not represent any branch of the U.S. government.

Dave Mattingly is a writer and national security consultant. He retired from the U.S. Navy with over thirty years of service. He is a member of the Military Writers Guild, NETGALLEY Challenge 2015 and a NETGALLEY Professional Reader.