Towards a new regional architecture
By Louise Fawcett
Full professor of Oxford University
In casting the Iraq War of 2003 as a major inflexion point in the making of a new regional architecture, and isolating some of its key effects, this opinion has offered a retrospective on the profound and enduring consequences of the war and its place in the evolving regional security order, highlighting key features of change. This is important, because the significance of the war has frequently been lost in the fast pace of subsequent events and also by the reluctance of its key proponents to acknowledge its consequences fully. Extending the journal’s critical analysis in 2013, this contribution has sought to return the war to the center of analyses of the region and the wider world in the twenty-first century.
One thing is certain: beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq War failed to achieve the key goals anticipated by its major protagonists, notably the United States and Britain, which had sought to promote the war as a liberal crusade against a despotic and dangerous regime with contagion effects that would benefit the region and the wider world. In failing these goals, and in misreading Iraq’s intentions and capacity, the war seriously damaged western interests and credibility. Even regime change, a lesson reinforced by the Libyan intervention, appeared as an increasingly toxic foreign policy tool. It also generated new instabilities and tensions, aggravating fault-lines at domestic, regional and international levels with which peoples and governments across the region are still contending.
Some regional states and actors may, arguably, have been beneficiaries of such changes, but overall, the Iraq War left a trail of unintended consequences, with major security implications, revealing how very poorly judged and mismanaged was the US-led decision to go to war, remove Saddam Hussein and remake the Iraqi state. From the tensions and lessons of the war there have evolved new patterns and practices leading to a changing regional order, even before the Arab uprisings intervened to consolidate those trends.
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