Amna Nawaz:
Vali Nasr, what do you make of this idea that Saddam could have reconstituted those weapons, could have posed a greater threat?
Do you believe the U.S. and Iraqis, the world is better off without him in power today?
Vali Nasr, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University: Counterfactual history is difficult to conduct here.
Things might have been very different. Saddam might have died a year later, maybe not, and maybe he would have been a greater danger. But it's difficult to see that the United States and the Middle East are better off.
Firstly, we removed a brutal, dangerous dictator, but we replaced him with chaos. And Iraqis went through hell and back in the aftermath of what transpired. And I don't believe that they feel that they're better off. I was recently in Iraq. And most of the young people, even the Shia young people, have a nostalgia for the Saddam era.
Secondly, by dismantling the Iraqi military, shattering the Iraqi state, we opened the Arab world for a level of Iranian infiltration into the Arab world that was not possible before the removal of Saddam from power. It has been at a scale that we cannot reverse it. We have been for 20 years trying to put the Iranian genie back in the box, and we can't.
The now-much-feared and ballyhooed Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard was a small unit of the Guard before Iraq happened. It was in Iraq, that it became the empire that it is. And, finally, I would say that, regardless of what we argue about the sagacity of going into Iraq, at some point, the war lost the American public, the cost of it, the outcome of it.
It created a sense of aversion to war on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats. At the base of these parties, there is an aversion to war. In the region, but I'm sure farther away, in China, in Russia, the conclusion is that the United States will no longer go to war that easily. We rely on sanctions.
But, essentially, we are far less capable of getting our way on the world stage, because many friends or foes don't see credibility in our use of threat — threat of force. And I think we — American geostrategy, American world standing, particularly in the Middle East, has not recovered from the outcome of the Iraq War.
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