570 ChaPter^11
Bush’s invasion, amazingly, also led to better relations between Iraq and
Iran, which was, once more, unimaginable given that the two countries fought
one of the bloodier wars in recent times in the 1980s and were sworn enemies,
and Iran, according to Bush himself, posed a grave threat to U.S. security.
Indeed, the fact that Iraq and Iran became allies was staggering evidence of
Bush’s failure. In January 2009, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki visited
Iran [for the fourth time], met with America’s arch-enemy President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and spoke warmly of relations between Baghdad and Iran. “Our
Islamic and humane duty requires that we always stand by the Iraqi nation,”
Ahmadinejad said. Iran and Iraq agreed to increase trade by about $5 billion
and Maliki sought even greater Iranian investment to help Iraq rebuild after
the American invasion and destruction. In a statement that must surely have
made American officials, who had been giving huge reconstruction contracts
to U.S. companies like Halliburton, nervous, Maliki said “after elevating secu-
rity and freeing Iraq from sectarian fighting, it is time to work hard to recon-
struct the country and there is a need for companies from neighbouring
nations to take on reconstruction projects.”At the same time, the “global war
on terror” had surely not eradicated terrorism, and in fact incidents of terror
rose between March 2003 and 2010. The war in Iraq accelerated the number
of attacks by 25 percent in 2006, and a study by at the Center on Law and
Security at the New York University School of Law found a 600 percent rise
in terrorism between the invasion of Iraq and 2007. Perhaps even worse, the
forces unleashed by U.S. actions in the post-9/11 Middle East intensified anti-
U.S. actions elsewhere, most notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have
arguably spilled over into incidents like early 2009 terror attacks in Mumbai,
India. At the same time, a survey of experts on terrorism showed that 70 per-
cent thought that the world was becoming more dangerous for the U.S. than
it had been and a similar 70 percent thought the U.S. was losing the war on
terror. The experts, at 81 percent, also argued that U.S. policy toward Iran had
a negative effect on U.S. security goals, and over half of them believed that
Pakistan was the next grave threat to American interests and safety, and this
was before the Obama-era drone attacks intensified. Indeed, just as U.S. actions
helped broker reconciliation between Iran and Iraq, they also have given
energy to the most extreme groups in Pakistan [and helped reinvigorate the
Taliban forces in Afghanistan]. Islamabad, with its madrassas [terror training
centers], al-Qaeda operatives and supporters, and nuclear weapons, became