I was a journalist in Iraq – these are the lessons we can learn from the war’s failure

In those first days and weeks, the plumes of smoke from the bombed and burning buildings still filled the skies. The initial joy that had accompanied the toppling statues and monuments of Saddam Hussein had already waned. There was restlessness, uncertainty and fear. But many still had hope. Americans, Iraqis and many others on the ground in the country believed there was a chance for the country to find a path to stability, decency and normalcy.

There were cries of joy and ritualised religious chanting in the vast, poor Shia quarter of Baghdad that was quickly renamed Sadr City. Even sullen Sunnis from Tikrit and Fallujah seemed willing to give the Americans and the new order they were about to launch a chance. That is not to mention the Kurdish Peshmerga warriors with whom I was embedded, as they teamed up with US special forces and stormed into northern Iraqi towns.

But all the euphoria ended quickly, and very soon it became clear to everyone but the most naive that the narrative was shifting toward gloom.

In the end, the US invasion 20 years ago plunged Iraqis into unimaginable fear, pain, loss and grief. Perhaps a quarter million people have died violently in Iraq since 2003, and as many as 1 million may have died gratuitously. The war cooked up by cynical Beltway operatives and lobbyists and exploited by politically well-connected contractors also altered the politics of the US and UK for the worse; perhaps permanently.

Thinking back to those early months, I am not sure when it should have become clear that this invasion built on lies would turn out so disastrously.

Perhaps it was August 2003 when insurgents bombed the UN compound in Baghdad and killed Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim im Najaf. I detected glints of the horrors and anguish to come as early as the middle of April, when I spotted US soldiers rounding up any military aged men in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, ordering them on their knees and putting black hoods over their heads. The boys from the exurbs of Phoenix or Gary, Indiana were crude and disrespectful, and I shuddered at what must have been the humiliation and anger of the Iraqis.

Even before that, in Iraqi Kurdistan there was a brutal gangland-style killing of a political figure at a checkpoint that turned out to foreshadow more than anything else the dark years that were to come.

But 20 years later, it is clearer to me than ever that the inevitability of the disaster to follow could have been discerned even months earlier, at the very moment when the US government set its sights on Iraq. As many unheeded Middle East scholars and dissident politicians had warned in the months before the invasion, the war was doomed at inception.

Even the normally staid Arab League issued a statement before the invasion accurately warning that the war “would open the gates of hell.”

American mistakes were plenty, well known and contributed to the severity of the defeats, despair and debacles suffered by millions of ordinary Iraqis and thousands of foreign troops. There was no plan for what to do after the invasion. The occupation leadership abruptly disbanded the Iraqi army. Americans failed to understand the culture.

Then there are the what-ifs; the agonising considerations of how things might have turned out differently at key junctures. If only Americans had secured all those weapons the Iraqis got a hold of once the regime collapsed, before the military bases were looted. If only the US military leaders had kept a closer eye on what was happening inside Abu Ghraib prison, where their colleagues were sexually abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees. If only the Americans had picked a transitional government that was not based on sectarian quotas that set the stage for a dangerous rivalry between Shia and Sunni.

What if Washington neo cons had kept their mouths shut and not warned Syria and Iran they were next on America’s to-do list? Would they have facilitated and financed insurgencies that sabotaged the American experiment for good?

These are questions I and others have pondered for the last two 20 years. For four of those years, I lived as a journalist in Iraq, covering the country’s descent into civil conflict, and I have regularly visited the country since then, reporting on its ups and many, many downs.

To me, at least, it has become clear that none of the questions, mistakes and what-ifs really matter. The Iraq war was doomed to failure. Even if the US and Britain had trained tens of thousands of soldiers to speak Arabic and had worked up and executed a detailed plan to transition to democracy, the entire venture would have ended in spectacular disaster and bloodshed, and Iraq would have imploded.

Soldiers from abroad cannot impose their vision of enlightened governance on a proud country with little tolerance of foreign invaders. Period.

Two decades after the invasion, polls show majorities of Iraqis and Americans view the war as a mistake. Many Iraqis who remember the previous era yearn for the relative stability and security of life under Saddam.

The world has also learned again over the last 20 years the dangerous brittleness of dictatorships with few civic institutions. Whether forced by foreigners or brought about by revolutionaries, abrupt political change almost always carries a huge price in blood, treasure, and crushed dreams. This is a lesson the world should have absorbed since the events that unfolded in late 18th century France. It never has. Many political leaders, activists and thinkers continue to romanticise the fantasies of revolution or liberation – of regime change – over engaging in the hard, grinding work of reform and grassroots political movement building.

The Iraq invasion and occupation had a tremendous impact on the US and Britain, leaving a generation of traumatised and injured military personnel as well as inaugurating an era of mistrust and public anger at the elites who lied to them about Iraq and its non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Many argue there is a straight line between the lies peddled to sell Iraq and the rise of the populist right in the UK and US.

Some analysts say Russian president Vladimir Putin would have never considered launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine if not for a misguided lesson he gleaned from the Iraq war: that great powers violate international norms and launch invasions of sovereign countries.

But Putin failed to discern a far more basic lesson from the American and British invasion of Iraq: Wars of conquest are extremely ugly and inhumane. And unlike, say, the Boer Wars of the 19th century, gore, horror and racist slaughter can no longer be glossed over with tales of glory in an age of live streaming, satellite communications and mobile phones.

Such imperial expeditions impose great material and social costs on the vanquishers as well as the vanquished, regardless of whether the aim is to increase Russian-controlled territory in Eastern Europe or spread Western-style democracy and capitalism to the Middle East.