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iran was the only real winner in the Iraq War, according to a new study of the conflict, which concludes that U.S. efforts were hampered by inadequate ground forces and misjudgments by military officers and politicians. The unvarnished two-volume analysis, published by the U.S. Army, pinpoints errors made by American leaders in hopes that future commanders can learn from them.

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Iran was the only real winner in the Iraq War, according to a new study of the conflict, which concludes that U.S. efforts were hampered by inadequate ground forces and misjudgments by military officers and politicians. The unvarnished two-volume analysis, published by the U.S. Army, pinpoints errors made by American leaders in hopes that future commanders can learn from them.

The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, which examines U.S. military operations in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, was commissioned by now-retired General Raymond T. Odierno. He told its authors, "We never wrote an operational history of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, and we spent the first years of the Iraq War re-learning many of the same lessons. We cannot do that again," recalled retired Colonel Frank Sobchak, a co-editor of the study who is now a Ph.D. student at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.

A Green Beret who served in Iraq in 2005, Sobchak spent five years on The U.S. Army in the Iraq War before his 2018 retirement closed his twenty-six-year Army career. The study involved examining tens of thousands of pages of classified documents and conducting hundreds of hours of interviews, including conversations with President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretaries of Defense Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, and every theater commander for the war.

Ironically, despite Odierno's call for a no-holds-barred investigation of what had happened, the publication was almost shelved by the military following Odierno's retirement, Sobchak said. After two years of delays, it was published by the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute this January-in part, he said, because of an October 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal that asked why the Army was stymying its own study.

"All of a sudden I started getting phone calls from the Army, and it was 'How soon can you finish?'" Sobchak said. "The beauty of the First Amendment and a free press is in action right there."

While the missteps of the Iraq War cannot be undone, Sobchak found analyzing them cathartic, and believes the lessons learned have value for the future. "There's a debate going on right now, particularly with the Trump administration, which has signaled that they believe fighting irregular wars, counterinsurgencies, is a thing of the past," he said. "I think it's naïve to put blinders on and think we're not going to do this again."

Tufts Now recently spoke with Sobchak to understand what went wrong in Iraq and how the U.S could do better.

: In your concluding chapter, you write that as of 2018, "an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor" in the Iraq War. Can you elaborate on that?

Frank Sobchak: In early 2003, when we were effective in dismantling the Saddam regime quickly, I think Iran was worried. But quickly they realized, "The U.S. is stuck; they're having some problems." At that phase, they looked at it as an opportunity: "We fought an eight-and-a-half-year war with Iraq. It's been the regional bulwark against us that both the U.S. and other Sunni states have used as a barrier against our expansionism and our regional goals. We now have an opportunity to change that calculus." I think they were effective in changing that calculus.
Is that because they now have a great deal of influence with the Iraqi government? When did that start?
It's important to make sure that other regional actors are not manipulating elections. We didn't really do that. Iran had a motive to toy with the elections of their arch enemy, who killed hundreds of thousands of their people. There were clear instances of Iranian interference in elections, from destroying ballot boxes to voter intimidation. It was bad in 2006 and it got worse in 2010. As we got closer to our withdrawal date and our involvement decreased, Iranian adventurism increased. Iraq had been a counterbalance to Iran, and now we don't have that really. In many ways, elements of the political class in Iraq are beholden to the Iranians. Some members of insurgent groups who trained in Iran are elected to Iraq's Parliament now.
U.S. commanders believed that the 2005 Iraqi elections would have a "calming effect," but instead they made ethnic and sectarian tensions worse. Were the military leaders naïve to think that democracy would bring stability?
There's this assumption that if you just have free and fair elections, that will tamp down an insurgency, because the people will say, "We elected them." If it's a unified nationalist insurgency, it logically makes sense an election would have some calming effect, but particularly by late 2004, early 2005, there were signals of a latent sectarian conflict, if not low-grade civil war, already apparent.

One element of that ethno-sectarian competition-the Sunnis-chose to boycott the first election. They ended up winning 3 or 4 percent of the vote, under-represented by an order of five. Consequently, when the constitution was written, there were almost no Sunnis in the constitutional convention, so that further inflamed sectarian tensions.

"Trump is a clear byproduct of the isolationist fervor that I think is partially a byproduct of the Iraq War," said Frank Sobchak. "The war will have a residual impact that is quasi-isolationist, as well as this desire not to be involved in long-term experiments in nation-building." Photo: Alonso Nichols

The next election, which was a parliamentary referendum, the Sunnis came out in droves, because the constitution had effectively been written against them. The U.S. was like, "Look, voter participation is up. This is awesome! The Sunnis are finally participating. They figured out democracy!" The problem was that they voted 95 percent against the constitution. Then when the constitution was approved, they were like, "Well, OK, that means I pick up the rifle again, because elections aren't working for me, I'm not being represented." Each event ended up being more of an irritant than a salve.
Iraq held three elections in 2005: the parliamentary election to create a transitional government to write the constitution in January; the referendum on the constitution in October; and the election for a permanent four-year government in December. Should the U.S. have slowed down this process?
Originally the transfer of sovereignty and elections were going to happen a lot later. But somewhere in 2004, it was moved up. Many generals told us that partially the decision was made because of the November 2004 election that President Bush was facing, to show progress. I personally think that while it would have been very difficult, we probably should have done our best to delay the elections to allow more of a grassroots effort of democracy. That would also have given time for reconciliation potentially.

If you hold an election right on the cusp of regime change where a minority has horrifically oppressed other ethno-sectarian elements of the population, that's not necessarily the best environment to hold an election in, unless you get really lucky and you get someone like a Mandela or a Martin Luther King, Jr. Iraq ended up with sectarians who won the elections, who used power to cudgel and get revenge against those who had oppressed them previously.

In that postponement of the elections, we should have grown democracy from the bottom up, starting at the city and town level, then moving up to the provinces and the national level. That is an important lesson to take for other traumatized, post-conflict societies-that the end goal needs to be free and fair elections, but what is critical as part of those elections are minority rights and minority protections, as well as enough time to reconcile the horrific things that have occurred during the period of oppression.
The Iraq War broke with U.S. political traditions, because it was pre-emptive. How do you think that has affected American politics and public support of future potential foreign intervention by U.S. forces?
I think it makes us a lot more leery of interventions, especially anything that is pre-emptive or even has the sense of pre-emption. Given what has transpired-in terms of the sense of losses, financial costs, and international prestige, the sense of waste, all the Iraqi losses-it is going to serve as a cautionary tale for American politics. Trump is a clear byproduct of the isolationist fervor that I think is partially a byproduct of the Iraq War. The war will have a residual impact that is quasi-isolationist, as well as this desire not to be involved in long-term experiments in nation-building.
The U.S. military was in such need of troops during the Iraq War that the National Guard had to deploy in a large-scale conflict for the first time since the Korean War. In fact, half of all brigades in Iraq at the time of the 2005 elections were Guard units. Was that effective?
In 2005 the Guard had significant challenges. At the tactical level, the very ground troop level, they performed admirably. When they had to integrate at the battalion, brigade, and higher level, things really came unglued. The insurgency was in high swing and areas of the country were horrifically dangerous. In a couple cases, you ended up throwing Guard brigades into buzz saws, and they did not perform well.
What would have been better than relying on the National Guard?
2005 was a particular challenge-that year the Marines and the Army literally ran out of troops, given the commitments in Afghanistan, Korea, Kosovo, and other locations around the globe. At the same time, the Army was going through a process called transformation, which fundamentally changed the Army brigade, which is anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 people.

To do that transformation took a year and they had to take three brigades off line and put three Guard brigades into Iraq. The problem was, that was the year that three elections took place, as well as the year that Al-Qaeda in Iraq ramped up the sectarian conflict. There were car bomb attacks on Sunni civilians to incite civil war. I wholeheartedly believe we would have been better served by pushing off transformation and deploying active brigades during that time period instead.
Why didn't-or couldn't-the U.S. develop self-reliant Iraqi forces who could effectively take over security in Iraq?
That is one of the worst train wrecks of the entire conflict. It happened for a variety of reasons, some of our own causing and some frankly caused by the Iraqis. On our side, one of the challenges was that we constantly fought the war as if it was going to end or as if we were going to be drawing down significantly our boots on the ground within eighteen to twenty-four months. You don't build an army overnight. It is a multi-decade project. If you're constantly trying these short-term solutions, you're not going to end up with a viable force.

We also resourced it poorly. We sent military transition teams of ten to twelve Americans who had never worked with each other before, who were not specially selected. We kind of threw people together ad hoc, thinking it was going to work.
What were the challenges on the Iraqi side?
In many cases, but not all, we created ethno-sectarian units. We'd create a unit that was 90 percent Kurdish, 5 percent Sunni and 5 percent Shia, even though the demographic makeup of Iraq is roughly 20 percent Kurd. We would create other units that were almost all ethnically Shia. They were not a true national army.

The Iraqis contributed to that because they looked at the conflict as a competition between the various ethno-sectarian groups for power. They saw the army and security forces-ministry of the interior, federal police forces-as part of that competition. So when they started creating units, they'd be effectively militias who then went out and contributed to sectarian conflict.

Also there was a culture of corruption. It was rampant. By 2010, there were some viable Iraqi army units that were capable, but when Prime Minister al-Maliki won the disputed election in 2010, he effectively purged all the senior leadership of the Iraqi army and removed anyone who had been perceived as working with the Americans and replaced them almost exclusively with Shia, except for a token Sunni here or there. He also replaced experienced battlefield commanders with sycophants and political supporters. He cut the guts out of units that had finally been starting to get their legs.
Would the solution be not to hand over sovereignty, and say we are going to retain control for a decades-long process of security sector reform?
Politically it would have been untenable to retain control for decades. We recommended to push the transfer of sovereignty as far as politically tenable to allow institutions that have minimal corruption to grow under the protection of international oversight. What we did in Iraq-transferring sovereignty in April of 2004, one year after we did regime change and disbanded the army and the Baath Party, basically tore the guts out of an authoritarian state-that's not the way to do it.

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Iran was the only real winner in the Iraq War, according to a new study of the conflict, which concludes that U.S. efforts were hampered by inadequate ground forces and misjudgments by military officers and politicians. The unvarnished two-volume analysis, published by the U.S.

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As the 19th anniversary of Operation Iraq Freedom approaches, there are roughly 2,500 troops still in Iraq, playing a strict advise-and-assist role at the invitation of the Iraqi government.

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About six months after the U.S. ended its longest war, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command hinted that U.S. involvement in Iraq is probably going to go on even longer.

As the 19th anniversary of Operation Iraq Freedom approaches, there are roughly 2,500 troops still in Iraq, playing a strict advise-and-assist role at the invitation of the Iraqi government.

"As we look into the future, any force level adjustment in Iraq is going to be made as a result of consultations with the government of Iraq," Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie told Military Times on Friday. "And we just finished a strategic dialogue a few months ago ― we believe that will continue."

The result of that dialogue was a formal end to the U.S. combat mission there at the end of 2021, though the thousands of troops who have been rotating into the country since 2014 as part of Operation Inherent Resolve haven't led combat operations for years.

Going forward, McKenzie said, the role will look a lot like it does now, as the Iraqi government comes together to make another go at strengthening the defense of its sovereignty.

"So we're watching that with great interest and wish them well, despite the many roadblocks that are being thrown up by Iranian-based proxy groups," he said. "They're proceeding, you know, maybe not the way we would do it. Maybe slower than the way we would do it. But nonetheless, that moving forward in the long term, we would like to have a normalized security cooperation agreement and posture with Iraq."

That could look like continued training of local forces, advising military leadership and providing weapons to Iraq to help its security forces remain effective.

"You want to get to the state where nations, and security elements in those nations, can deal with a violent extremist threat without direct support from us," McKenzie said. "Right now we have the Iraqis doing the fighting. We're still helping them. Over time you'd like for them to take a larger share of all the enabling that we're doing now."

If this sounds a lot like what U.S. military leaders said for the better part of a decade in Afghanistan, after the U.S. combat mission ended in 2014, that's because the goals are identical. Commanders consistently touted progress in wresting control of the country from the Taliban, though in reality, Afghanistan's defense forces remained dysfunctional.

The difference in Afghanistan was that the political situation changed, and it became a key presidential campaign platform to end the U.S. presence there.

When President Donald Trump laid the groundwork for a full Afghanistan exit, the understanding was that the U.S. would continue to arm and fund the Afghan military, and possibly look for opportunities to keep training troops outside the country.

President Joe Biden then set the 20th anniversary of 9/11 as the hard deadline for pulling all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. The same political groundswell for a complete departure from Iraq hasn't materialized.

That could be because Iraq's major security challenges are of great interest to the US: ISIS, which has shown its eagerness to attack on U.S. soil; and Iran's funding of militias in Iraq, part of its larger role in state-sponsored terrorism.

McKenzie has often repeated that the Iraqi government really wants U.S. troops in its country, though of course, so did the Afghans.

"Let me emphasize, whatever we do in the future is something we'll jointly arrive at with our partners: with the government of Iraq; and again, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO ― very significant, important and growing presence in Iraq, again at the explicit request of the of the Iraqi government," McKenzie said.

Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.

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U.S. troops will likely be in Iraq for years to come, Central Command boss says

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About six months after the U.S. ended its longest war, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command hinted that U.S. involvement in Iraq is probably going to go on even longer. As the 19th anniversary of Operation Iraq Freedom approaches, there are roughly 2,500 troops still in Iraq, playing a strict advise-and-assist role at the invitation of the Iraqi government.

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how many lives were lost in the Iraq war

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how many lives were lost in the Iraq war

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between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019.

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Iraqi men mourn a relative, likely the victim of sectarian killing, who was found shot dead with 14 other people in May 2005. Witnesses reported seeing the men being arrested by interior ministry commandos at a market near Baghdad before being driven away. (AFT PHOTO/ALIAL-Saddi/AFP/Getty Images)

No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 280,771-315,190 have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through March 2023. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing. Many civilians have also been injured.

Because not all war-related deaths have been recorded accurately by the Iraqi government and the U.S.-led coalition, the numbers are likely much higher. Several estimates based on randomly selected household surveys place the total death count among Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands.

Several times as many Iraqi civilians may have died as an indirect result of the war, due to damage to the systems that provide food, health care and clean drinking water, and as a result, illness, infectious diseases, and malnutrition that could otherwise have been avoided or treated. The war has compounded the ill effects of decades of harmful U.S. policy actions towards Iraq since the 1960s, including economic sanctions in the 1990s that were devastating for Iraqis.

Despite more than $100 billion committed to aiding and reconstructing Iraq, many parts of the country still suffer from lack of access to clean drinking water and housing.

Key Findings

Life-threatening damage to Iraqi health care and other infrastructure has not been repaired: civilians are still dying in significant numbers.

Recommendations

The U.S. government should ensure that civilian deaths and injuries are included in public reporting of war deaths and should include a tally of children killed.
(Page updated as of March 2023)

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The Costs of War Project is a team of 35 scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians, which began its work in 2011. We use research and a public website to facilitate debate about the costs of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

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Iraq War Song- I DON'T WANNA TALK ABOUT THE WAR- Listen in HQ for Best Sound!

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their patrolling the palm grove, in search for weapon cashes, insurgents. in turn the marines were positioned to the 1st battalion 23rd regiment.

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U.S. Marines patrol in a palm grove outside Hadithah, Iraq, searching for insurgents and weapons caches on Jan. 27, 2005. The Marines are assigned to the 1st Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment.

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U.S. Marines patrol in a palm grove outside Hadithah, Iraq.

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U.S. Marines patrol in a palm grove outside Hadithah, Iraq, searching for insurgents and weapons caches on Jan. 27, 2005. The Marines are assigned to the 1st Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment.

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1st Battalion, 23rd Marines is one of 32 infantry battalions in the United States Marine Corps, and one of only eight battalions found in the reserve.

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0:00 / 31:42•Watch full video

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2003 Invasion of Iraq (Full Documentary) | Animated History

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Fallen Soldiers

Men lost to more than just death

lost to the pain that lives inside

inside their minds, their hearts.

The pain of those who survived

with the memories of those who didn't,

the memories that haunts

that never heals, that never leave.

That live within ones soul

always wanting out

but never really getting there.

As they try to fight their way back

to what they once knew

to those they once loved.

They slip further and further away

into the ghosts of their past.

The screams echo through the emptiness

of the holes left by the guns and bombs.

With every BANG! they fill less and less,

almost unrecognizable to them selves

and all the rest they once knew.

With the return of those who fought

comes more sadness from all that love them.

After all is done

they are never as they were before.