The 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. How did China become the biggest winner from the war?

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

Two months after George W. Bush began his rule, on April 2001, 3, a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. EP-<> reconnaissance aircraft off the coast of China, forcing U.S. pilots to make an emergency landing on Chinese soil.

The Chinese detained the U.S. crew for 11 days and carefully inspected the advanced plane before it was delivered, and Washington accused the Chinese fighter pilot of recklessness and demanded that Beijing apologize, which did not happen.

The 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 collided with the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia, killing about 4,3 people, and America's attention suddenly and completely turned to the "war on terror" that resulted in the occupation of Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Nearly half a million U.S. troops have been 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 launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which invaded Afghanistan before the end of the year, and later Iraq in March 2003, marked a milestone in the history of China's rise to catch up with the United States, and even its competitor in the technological, military, and economic fields.

2001 saw China join the World Trade Organization as Washington prepared to start its unfinished wars. Beijing's entry into the trade organization with the world and its exploitation of its skilled and huge labor licenses, attracting millions of investors, have pushed China to launch and succeed in achieving an average growth rate of 8% over the past 20 years.

By contrast, the United States declared its "global war on terror" that dragged it into two costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the first of which came out in 2020 after an agreement with the Taliban, and still has troops in Iraq.

According to a joint research study released by the prestigious Brown University, the cost of wars from the September attacks until the end of fiscal year 2023 reached $ 6.4 trillion, in addition to the human cost and hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghan and Iraqi victims.

Former US President Barack Obama realized the importance of ending American involvement and preoccupation with the Middle East, paying attention to the dangers of China's rise, and adopting a strategy of "turning to Asia" in order to achieve strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific region.

Obama has sought to limit U.S. troop deployments to Iraq in order to facilitate and increase U.S. troop deployments in the Asia-Pacific region to counter China when needed, but the rise of the Islamic State has hampered those perceptions.

Thousands of U.S. troops killed in U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (Reuters)

A Strategic Opportunity for China

The Iraq war presented a "strategic opportunity" for China to develop its power, while Washington was deeply 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 identifying and targeting it as a priority challenge for the United States.

The Iraq war was a painful drain that faltered US material resources, tarnishing its credibility and global leadership, while China was able to take advantage of the opportunity to devote its time and build up power faster than China's leaders had imagined.

The Iraq war has shifted so much of America's military power from Asia to the Middle East that it has made it impossible for the US to match China's military growth in East Asia.

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

Increased Chinese threats

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

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

China has not been embroiled in any military disputes since a border dispute with Vietnam ended in 1979, although it has adopted an expansion strategy in the South China Sea, which has fueled disputes over maritime borders with Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Commercially Winning China

20 years after the US invasion of Iraq, China has become at the top of Baghdad's trade partners, especially in the field of energy, and trade between Iraq and China has doubled to nearly 70 times what it was before the invasion, as trade between the two countries in 2002 amounted to 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 reached nearly $12 billion last year.

The United States lost a great deal of moral authority due to the invasion of Iraq, Washington's detention of defendants without trial, and its torture directly or through its allies, which made it easier for Beijing to respond to US accusations of human rights abuses under the pretext that "we are doing what you have done before us."

Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, polls conducted by the Arab Barometer Network at Princeton University show that China ranks first on the list of the most favored countries among Iraqis, with more than half of Iraqis (20%) expressing a very or somewhat positive view of China, while only a third (54%) of Iraqis viewed the United States favorably.

48% of Iraqis believe that Chinese President Xi Jinping's policies have been very good or good for the Middle East and North Africa, while US President Joe Biden's policies receive the preference of only 32% of Iraqis.