So was Poland a sucker when it supported the US in Iraq?

Vice President JD Vance shocked many across the Atlantic when in a recent interview with UnHerd he argued that Europe should have done more to stop the war against Saddam Hussein more than two decades ago. According to the vice president, standing by the United States when it was in particular need had been a mistake.

This offers an important signpost for U.S. allies charting their futures.

Much of Europe was rightly skeptical of the idea that democracy could be introduced by armed intervention in Iraq, believing war could only turn a rogue state into a failed state. Although a failed state is better than a rogue state that has weapons of mass destruction, Baghdad did not, as it turned out, possess such weapons. This upended all earlier calculations. Especially when the world learned that the new failed state had become a breeding ground for pathologies such as terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking and illegal migration.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld contrasted the “old Europe,” which under the leadership of French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was building an anti-American alliance, with the “new Europe,” which supported the United States. The French president said at the time that Poland had wasted an opportunity to “sit silent” — and Vance has now agreed with him.

Although Polish public opinion viewed the intervention in Iraq dimly, Poland’s political elite saw it as a way to strengthen the alliance with the U.S. and the country’s international standing. An “instinctive Atlanticism” prevailed, regardless of which party was in power. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was not far from the truth when he labeled Poland the most pro-American country on the globe, including even the United States.

Poland sent a contingent of 2,500 troops to Iraq in 2003. After Denmark’s refusal, the Poles took command of the Multinational Division Central-South — MND-CS, taking responsibility for the South-Central-Zone, inhabited by nearly 4 million Iraqis. The Polish-led sector included 8,500 troops from 22 countries. Nor did Polish forces in Iraq avoid losses: 28 Poles lost their lives and 150 were wounded.

Participation in the Iraq operation was assessed by the Polish establishment as a military success, a political draw and an economic failure. The experience gained in logistics, operations and command over a significant multinational force was applied to the reform of the armed forces and the introduction of a professional army. Poland’s political independence and agency on the international stage were also strengthened. However, hopes for economic benefits in the form of lucrative contracts for Polish companies did not materialize.

Thus, until recently we believed that — in the overall — we had been right to support the United States at the time. Vice President Vance, however, argues that we joined the wrong side: that by engaging militarily in Iraq as a U.S. “vassal” we contributed to a strategic disaster. In other words, we were suckers: we should have opposed Washington along with “old Europe.”

But the vice president’s take is ahistorical. In 2003 no force existed that could have prevented the administration of President George W. Bush from invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein. The U.S. would have launched military operations even without its allies, no matter the diminished legitimacy of such a war. It was not until years after the invasion of Iraq that the enormous costs (human, financial, political) became apparent and turned the American public against the whole enterprise.

The vice president suggests to America’s allies that they should actively oppose those U.S. moves they deem questionable or misguided. If they fail to do so, they will be declared co-responsible for the strategic disasters of U.S. policy such as the one in Iraq. But was this in fact JD Vance’s intended message?

Jacek Czaputowicz was Poland’s foreign minister from 2018 to 2020. He is professor at the University of Warsaw.