The West still doesn’t understand Iraq 2025 will be even worse

But Iran, which dominates Iraq through its proxy Shia militia groups, has long wanted us out. In September, the US and Iraq agreed to conclude the formal coalition mission by September 2025, though some troops will remain in advisory roles. The first phase of withdrawal has already begun. A final withdrawal means that Iraq will fall almost completely into Tehran’s grip. My interlocutor was Kurdish and, unsurprisingly, this worries him — as it does millions of Sunnis.

There are, you see, many Iraqis who not only have no problem with Western intervention in their country, but don’t want it to end.

But I was surprised later when a Sunni Arab friend told me that many Iraqis love Trump because, in January 2020, he whacked Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force and the man responsible for so much violence in their country. No matter that Trump brought in a so-called “Muslim ban”, his Western “intervention” in Iraq was more palatable to a section of its people than Iran’s far more localised — and constant — meddling.

This speaks to a broader, unignorable truth: the reality on the ground in the Middle East is often not just merely different to what we read, believe or are told in Oxbridge Area Studies departments, but entirely at odds with it; as is our relationship to the region, and how that is often received by the people there. This put me in mind of the great historian and Middle East scholar Elie Kedourie, an Iraqi Jew who ended up a professor at the LSE in London (and who was also married to my mother’s cousin).

Kedourie, who passed away in 1992, was famous for many books but what stands out is his genuinely iconoclastic 1970 work The Chatham House Version: and Other Middle-Eastern Studies. I still remember reading it for the first time, and being struck not only by its percipience and extraordinary breadth of knowledge, but its literary style; and written in his third language (after Arabic and French, too). It is a forensic dismantling of the “Chatham House” — the informal name for the Royal Institute of International Affairs think tank — analysis of the Middle East. For Kedourie, Chatham House stands as shorthand for an elite British view of the Middle East (and the Arabs in particular) that he argues is based around a mix of sentimentality, guilt, and self-flagellation brought together by a guiding tendency to favour romantic illusion over prosaic reality.

Kedourie was most scathing about the effect of this approach in his homeland of Iraq. He watched the British scuttle out of there, and indeed the region, during the end of empire, and let chaos ensue — and he damned them for it.

According to Kedourie, “The British left behind a region whose political, social, and economic structures were inadequate to sustain the independence they had promised and which they had uncritically imposed.” Add “Americans” alongside “British” and you’ll recognise not only the timeless wisdom of his words, but also the West’s ability to make the same mistakes, timelessly.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a historic mistake. We should not have done it. But we did, and in so doing we removed a brutal and sadistic dictator, but one who nevertheless kept chaos at bay. Chaos that, lest we forget, is built into the Iraqi state, carved illogically from three Ottoman provinces, and filled with a toxic mix of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Iraq was constructed (by us and the French no less) as if it were designed to be a sectarian tinderbox; and once Saddam’s controlling authority was gone, that tinderbox erupted. Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I reported for UnHerd from Baghdad where my fixer Ammar told me something that has lodged, ineradicably, in my mind ever since. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he said. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought.”

And it’s not just Iraq where coalition troops are indispensable, but Syria too. There, they are concentrated mainly in the northeast and comprise a limited but strategic presence focused on counterterrorism, military partnerships with the Kurds, who control an autonomous region in parts of the north and east, and containing Russian and Iranian influence.

Following the fall of Assad — and was not the rapid fall of this supposedly immovable dictator yet another orthodoxy shattered — we hope that Syria is moving toward effective self-governance. But make no mistake, coalition troops are still needed there. The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army is already skirmishing with Kurdish forces, primarily the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are allied with Washington in the fight against Islamic State, but which Turkey views as a threat due to their links to Kurdish groups it views as terrorists. My Kurdish friends are understandably worried. Without US forces on the ground, who knows what the SNA will do.

The situation is made worse through the presence of the terror group Islamic State (IS). Over the first half of 2024 IS claimed responsibility for 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria (almost more than double the total number of attacks claimed in 2023). In that time, US forces along with the Iraqi security forces and the SDF have conducted 196 missions, killed 44 IS operatives and detained 166. According to US CentCom, “these leaders include those responsible for planning of operations outside of Syria and Iraq, recruiting, training and weapons smuggling”.

The Kurds also control Al-Hol Camp, where 10,000 to 12,000 imprisoned jihadist fighters and former IS members are imprisoned (the camp houses around 50,000 to 60,000 people, including family members of IS fighters, one of whom is Shamima Begum). If the Kurds come under sustained SNA attack, they will no longer be able to effectively control the camp, and thousands of Jihadis could go free. These are not just issues of Syrian and Iraqi security, but our own too. And finally, there is the problem of Russia and Iran. Both regimes are now under huge pressure at home and abroad, and they will grasp any opportunity to claim any sort of victory — Iraq and Syria offer them a chance.

We have a responsibility to the people of Iraq whose country we invaded, destroyed and now want to hand over to Iran. We have a responsibility to the people of Syria too, especially the Kurds, who fought with us to defeat IS. If we flee (again), we will abandon the region to chaos: just as Kedourie shows we did over half a century ago. Both US and UK diplomats have admitted to me over recent years the shame and awkwardness they feel because of the failed invasion. They are right to feel ashamed, but it is dangerous madness to leave Iraq, above all for the Iraqis we profess to care about so much.

So, why have we promised that we will? For the same reasons Kedourie identified over half a century ago: loss of nerve born from a failure of confidence. We fear being called occupiers or imperialists while the Iranians and Russians are shamelessly trying to rebuild the empires they have lost. Then there is Turkish President Recep Erdoğan’s drive across Syria, which is led by several geopolitical considerations but also the more far amorphous vision of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire there.

In the name of anti-imperialism, we would hand these countries over to the worst imperialists of our day.

Action can indeed be disastrous, but so can inaction. We invaded Iraq in 2003, and it brought chaos and bloodshed to Iraqis. But in 2011, Barack Obama, haunted by Iraq’s legacy, refused to enforce his own red line and punish Bashar al-Assad for gassing his own people. He failed to act, and it brought chaos and bloodshed to Syrians.

And if we do cut and run, who suffers most in the countries we abandon? Again, we turn to Kedourie who, as a Jew, was always sensitive to the treatment of minorities (that supposedly sacred group in contemporary Western policy-making). He was just 15 when he witnessed, along with most of my maternal family, the June 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud (“Looting”) in which officers of the state murdered over 180 Jewish men, woman children. For Kedourie, two lessons emerge, not just from the Farhud but post-imperial Iraq. The first is that living as a minority under the cosmopolitan Ottoman empire was preferable to a Sunni Iraq, increasingly gripped by notions of nationalism it had imported from the West, but which lacked the institutions and traditions to fully understand or implement. The second, was that, as the author Robert Kaplan has observed, Kedourie understood that Empire provided the kind of Hobbesian Leviathan needed to control a Middle East gripped by incessant turmoil and violence (which he exhaustively detailed in his work) and protect the weak from the strong.

Now I am emphatically not suggesting that the coalition remain in Iraq (nor to a far lesser extent Syria) to act as Leviathan. But when the US crowbarred itself in that role for close to two decades to suddenly abandon Iraq, not to its own people but to the far less palatable Leviathan next door, is not merely inadvisable, it is inexcusable.

All this is so obvious that mere loss of confidence seems inadequate to explain it. In fact, it is compounded by something else that Kedourie identified in the British foreign policy establishment: a deep strain of orientalist fascination with, and fetishisation of, Arab culture (how else to explain its indulgence of that bloviating fraud T.E. Lawrence). This is then compounded by guilt: at the problems caused by their drawing of post-imperial borders and, perhaps above all, the foundation of the state of Israel. Simply put, British officials believed that the Arabs, once freed from the twin evils of Zionism and imperialism, would naturally establish peaceful, stable governments, without recognising the challenges posed by centuries of division and conflict. Once again, add “Americans” to “British” and this book, which was written over half a century ago, could have been written this morning.

Kedourie understood that this was nonsense; he understood that what followed the end of empires was not a halcyon age of “authentic” liberation but often corrupt governance and mass violence; he understood, also, that it is only a “fashionable western sentimentality which holds that Great Powers are nasty and small Powers virtuous”. This phrase should be cast in bronze to hang over the desk of every FCDO and State Department official, and of every foreign news editor. Any temptation to view it as simplistic or exaggerated is swiftly disabused with consideration of the behaviour of many Global South countries towards Russia’s attempted colonisation of Ukraine. Being colonised a century ago may give you an insight into that particular form of suffering, but it clearly doesn’t extend to empathy for countries undergoing similar threats today, and it absolutely does not endow you with any superior ability to analyse contemporary geopolitics.

But most of all Kedourie understood the problem was not Zionism but, as Kaplan observes, that “the Ottoman Empire with its caliphate crumbled, leaving an Islamic civilisation without a recognised religious authority. The result was various groups and factions and ideologies that competed for which one could be the most pure; that is, the most extreme. Today’s problems are old problems, going back to the decades of Ottoman decline, with the realisation that the Middle East, from Algeria to Iraq, has still not found a solution to the final collapse of the Turkish sultanate in 1922.”

Still, though, it was Zionism, or more correctly the State of Israel, which supposedly sat and sits at the centre of orthodox Middle East analysis and reporting today as a source of all instability — a font of original sin in a region that, without its cancerous presence, would surely exist as an oasis of tranquillity. It is notable that directly challenging this orthodoxy has led to the greatest regional breakthrough of the last decade in the region, the 2020 Abraham Accords. That the series of normalisation agreements between Israel and several Arab states were brokered by Donald Trump is extraordinary but perhaps also inescapable.

Only a man so divorced from the Western foreign policy establishment could go so directly against one of its guiding principles, as articulated by then-US secretary of State John Kerry in 2013. “I will tell you that peace between Israel and the Arab world is impossible without a Palestinian peace,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to get it.”

After Hamas committed the October 7 atrocities — which occurred just weeks after another star of the DC foreign policy establishment, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, declared that the Middle East is “quieter than it has been for decades” — Israel launched its war in Gaza. It then launched its war in Lebanon and took out the leaders of both Hamas and Lebanon, while also striking Iran directly for the first time. At each stage the world (most importantly the Americans) told Israel to stop. They told it to make peace. They told it that an extended war would be bad for everyone; and that it would strengthen Hamas. They said, going into Lebanon would be a bloody disaster (as would going to Rafah, where in fact the IDF managed to kill Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar); and that Iranian missiles could destroy large parts of its territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored them on every occasion.

I make no moral judgment on each of these actions, merely on their efficacy, which as of now, is proven. And Netanyahu was able to accomplish everything he has for a variety of reasons (not least that he wants to put off the post-war enquiries over October 7) but above all because he understands that the Middle East that matters is not that the one that triggers undergraduate protestors, or makes the hard Left go misty-eyed, or the one that aging Foreign Office or State Department mandarins fondly imagine.

And in this he follows Kedourie, whose work remains priceless not just because he was intellectually brilliant, but because he understood that what matters is not ideology or politics, but the reality on the ground, viewed without sentiment or, as far as possible, bias. He understood that history is not about ideology but about facts and evidence —as are the highest forms of reporting. As 2025 dawns, we can do a lot worse than look forward by looking back over 50 years to one of the greatest works by one of the great Middle East scholars of the 20th century, and use it to help us navigate the many challenges we face today.

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