Japanese economist Sakanashi: The war in Iraq was the beginning of the gradual weakening of the USA

TOKYO, March 20 – RIA Novosti, Ksenia Naka. The war in Iraq was the beginning of the gradual weakening of the United States, this view was expressed to RIA Novosti on its twentieth anniversary by Sati Sakanashi, deputy director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Japan Energy and Economics Research Institute. From the US invasion of Iraq.

“Looking back at today, we can say that this war is the reason America’s “arm span” is so large, and therefore it is gradually starting to weaken,” Sakanashi said. said.

The scientist believes that the initial goals and final results of this war were different. “The objectives of the war in Iraq were identified as the ‘war on terror’ or the ‘war for the democratization of Iraq’, and as a result it became clear that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and also that the armed overthrow of the dictatorship caused more disorder and chaos than democratization,” he said. .

The war in Iraq cast doubt on US accuracy and also showed that not all political goals can be achieved by armed means. “During the war in Iraq, even ordinary people began to think, “Was America overestimating its forces when the war started?” What can be resolved by force is actually limited,” Sakanashi said.

Continuing from this theme, he noted that one of the factors affecting the world and the region in the war in Iraq was the understanding that the effectiveness of the use of force was limited. In his words, “in general, the war in Iraq has shown the world that there are limits to the use of force and that there are many political goals that cannot be achieved even with the greatest military force.”

The military operation “Shock and Fear” (Shock and Fear, later “Freedom of Iraq”, Iraqi Freedom) of the anti-Iraq coalition with joint forces of the United States began on March 20, 2003. The official reason for the invasion was Saddam Hussein’s regime’s connection to international terrorism and the later unconfirmed information from the CIA about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The operation was carried out without UN approval.

The campaign ended with the last column of US troops leaving Iraq on December 18, 2011.

There is no exact data on civilian casualties during the time American forces and their allies were in Iraq, data varies, figures of several hundred thousand people have been called.