As the US pulls out, what did the Iraq war achieve?

Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration.

For the promised American pull-out from Iraq starts today. US forces start pulling out of urban areas in the country on what the Iraqi government has declared to be National Sovereignty Day.

This is not the end of the US-led occupation, merely the beginning of the end. 131,000 US forces remain and will do so until the cessation of combat operations in September 2010 and the eventual pull-out in 2011.

And the US and her allies leave amid an alarming upsurge of bomb attacks (200 dead in a week). Is it too fanciful to suggest that this horrifying adventure spells the last of such “wars of choice”?

Nonetheless, a military adventure which displaced some 4 million Iraqis, killed and wounded as many as a million (we shall never know the true figure), and reduced the country’s precious oil output to the point where, even today, it remains below that of Saddam’s final year in power, is coming to an end.

That adventure also shredded the reputation of Tony Blair at home and divided Europe as never before. This is before we even begin to estimate the financial costs of the war, which run into trillions of dollars.

So what were the Iraq war aims? To safeguard oil supplies? To remove Saddam? To instil a new democracy in the heart of the Middle East? To find and destroy weapons of mass destruction? To provide a bulwark against, and to reduce the power of, Iran?

Six new oilfield contracts are to be auctioned today, but production is still stagnant and the oil law is still stuck in the Iraqi parliament. Saddam has been replaced by an upsurge in radical religiously backed parties that threaten civil war at any turn.

Democracy has delivered a factional parliament and, in the prime minister, the firm hand that Iraq has grown used to. Water and power supplies remain inadequate. And Iran, despite recent events, is stronger than at any time since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Perhaps Iraq enjoys a greater collective spirit of hope than at any recent time. But that hope has come expensively, and there is still a ways to go.

It is hard to imagine that history will smile on the two men, Bush and Blair, who decided to take the world in to this war – although it isn’t beyond the wit of Europe to reward one of them (who defied the majority of EU leaders on the war) with its presidency.