The Lesson of Fallujah

by Gerard Emershaw

Al Qaeda affiliate the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has seized the Iraqi city of Fallujah. What lesson can be drawn from this? Neoconservatives are likely to claim that this proves that the United States military should never have withdrawn from Iraq. They will likely blame President Obama for not encouraging—or forcing—the Iraqi government to allow American troops to remain in Iraq following the official withdrawal at the end of 2011. President Obama had every desire to maintain troops in Iraq as part of the continuous Orwellian war that he inherited, embraced, and enhanced, but the Iraqi government refused to sign a new status of forces agreement because it did not wish to grant immunity from criminal prosecution to American soldiers.

Would the sectarian violence that killed 7,818 Iraqi civilians in 2013 have occurred had American troops remained in Iraq? There is no reason to believe that it would not have. The only difference would be that there would have been thousands of American troops that could have been targeted. Would ISIS have taken over Fallujah had the United States remained in Iraq? Perhaps it would not have been Fallujah, but ISIS would have taken over a city somewhere. The United States never sent enough troops into Iraq to fully control that broken nation, so there is no reason to believe that fewer troops would have been able to do the impossible. A situation like Fallujah could easily have reignited the war and led to a new full scale American occupation of Iraq. Had Americans been in the middle of this new wave of sectarian violence, the new death toll would have dwarfed the current one of 4,486.

The true lesson of Fallujah is simple. The United States needs to return to its peaceful and noninterventionist roots. The nation needs to return to following the wisdom of the Founders. Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator. There is no doubt about this. However, he did not attack the United States and was not planning to do so. He was not connected with Al Qaeda. As ugly as it is to believe, the United States would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power. ISIS would not be influential in Iraq, and Iraq would still be providing a good power balance to Iran. Instead of actively supporting Iraq—as the federal government did during the Iran–Iraq War—or attacking Iraq—as the United States fruitlessly did twice—the United States should just have stayed out of situation entirely. Intervention in the Middle East has proven to be nothing but a powder keg of blowback. The lesson of Fallujah should be that the United States needs to stay out of the mess in Syria and avoid creating a new mess in Iran or anywhere else.