The 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq How did China become the biggest winner of the war?

Mohamed Elmenshawy

During the 2000 US election campaign, then-presidential candidate George W. Bush strongly criticized President Bill Clinton's idea of a "strategic partnership" with China, suggesting instead that the US and China are "strategic competitors."

Two months into the Bush administration, on April 1, 2001, a Chinese fighter jet collided with an American EP-3 reconnaissance plane off the coast of China, forcing the American pilots to make an emergency landing on Chinese soil.

The Chinese held the American crew for 11 days, carefully inspecting the advanced aircraft before handing it over, and Washington accused the Chinese fighter pilot of recklessness and demanded an apology from Beijing, which was not forthcoming.

This incident reinforced the Bush administration's view that China was America's next major adversary. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four planes, three of which crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia, killing about 3,000 people. America's attention suddenly and completely shifted to the "war on terror," which resulted in the occupation of Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Nearly half a million U.S. troops are deployed in the Middle East, and the challenge posed by China has been set aside for nearly two decades.

Preoccupation with war

The US war following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan before the end of the year, and later Iraq in March 2003, represented a milestone in the history of China's rise to catch up with the United States, and even compete with it in the technological, military and economic fields.

In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) just as Washington was getting ready to start its unfinished wars. Beijing's entry into the trade organization with the world, its exploitation of the cheap and skilled labor force, and the attraction of millions of investors were factors that pushed China to take off and succeed in achieving average growth rates of 8% over the past 20 years.

In contrast, the United States declared a "global war on terrorism" that dragged it into two costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the first of which it exited in 2020 after an agreement with the Taliban, and it still has troops in Iraq.

According to a joint research study released by the prestigious Brown University, the cost of the wars since the September attacks until the end of fiscal year 2023 has reached 6.4 trillion dollars, not to mention the human cost and hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghan and Iraqi victims.

Former US President Barack Obama realized the importance of ending US involvement in the Middle East and paying attention to the dangers of China's rise, and adopted a "pivot to Asia" strategy to achieve strategic balance in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Obama sought to limit the deployment of U.S. forces in Iraq in order to facilitate and increase the deployment of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific region to confront China when needed, but the emergence of the Islamic State has disrupted these perceptions.

A strategic opportunity for China

The Iraq War provided a "strategic opportunity" for China to develop its power while Washington was severely distracted, and many Chinese strategists argue that Washington's war on terror and its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq gave China two decades of freedom to focus on its development without being identified and targeted as a priority challenge to the United States.

The Iraq War was a painful drain on U.S. material resources and tarnished its credibility and leadership globally, while at the same time China was able to take advantage of the opportunity to devote its time and build its power faster than China's leaders had envisioned.

The Iraq War shifted a huge amount of U.S. military power from Asia to the Middle East, making it impossible for the U.S. to match China's military growth in East Asia.

The United States would not have waited nearly two more decades to identify China as the most important strategic challenge and to engage aggressively in what President Joe Biden now calls "intense competition" with China had the United States not occupied Iraq and, before that, Afghanistan.

Increasing Chinese threats

"China is the only country that has the growing will and ability to reshape its region and the international system to suit its authoritarian preferences, so let me be clear," U.S. Secretary of Defense General Lloyd Austin said last week: We will not let that happen."

Counterterrorism dominated Washington's national security strategy until former President Donald Trump came to power in 2016, the recalibration began in 2017, and by 2021 great power competition, especially with China, had resurfaced and replaced counterterrorism as Washington's top priority.

China has not been involved in any military conflicts since the end of a border dispute with Vietnam in 1979, although it has adopted an expansionist strategy in the South China Sea that has fueled maritime border disputes with Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia, and China repeats its threats to Taiwan to return to the motherland either voluntarily or forcibly if necessary.

China's Trade Winner

Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, China has become Baghdad's top trading partner, especially in the field of energy. Trade between Iraq and China has multiplied to nearly 70 times what it was before the invasion, as trade between the two countries in 2002 was about 517 million dollars, and the volume of bilateral trade between the two countries reached 38 billion dollars by the end of 2022, while the total trade exchange between the United States and Iraq amounted to nearly 12 billion dollars last year.

The United States lost a great deal of moral authority with the invasion of Iraq, and Washington's detention of suspects without trial and torture, either directly or through its allies, made it easier for Beijing to respond to U.S. accusations of human rights violations with the argument that "we are doing what you did before us." This made it easier for Beijing to respond to U.S. accusations of human rights violations with the argument that "we are doing what you did before us.

Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, polls conducted by Princeton University's Arab Barometer Network show that China ranks as the most favored country among Iraqis, with more than half of Iraqis (54%) expressing a very or somewhat favorable view of China, while only a third of Iraqis (35%) view the United States favorably.

48% of Iraqis believe that Chinese President Xi Jinping's policies have been very good or good for the MENA region, while U.S. President Joe Biden's policies are favored by only 32% of Iraqis.

Source: Al Jazeera