The Iraq war, as revealed by WikiLeaks

What happened

In the largest leak of secret information in U.S. history, the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks released a trove of nearly 400,000 classified military documents from the Iraq war that portray the U.S. as indifferent to, and often complicit in, the torture and killing of Iraqi civilians. Mostly reports from low-ranking officers, the documents cover a period from 2004 to early 2009 and include hundreds of accounts of Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces—some of them under the direct control of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki—torturing Sunni prisoners, including reports that U.S. soldiers sometimes witnessed the abuse without protest. The reports also detail Iranian involvement in arming and training Shiite militias, and describe incidents of U.S. contractors and U.S. troops firing on Iraqi civilians. Iraq Body Count said the files also document 15,000 previously unreported Iraqi deaths, bringing the total to 100,000.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell called the release of classified information “shameful” and said it “could potentially undermine our nation’s security.” Iraq’s al-Maliki, who has been struggling for eight months to form a new government that will keep him in power, said the timing of the documents’ release was suspicious. “There are some political interests behind the media campaign,” his office said.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What the editorials said

This document dump was “reckless and politically motivated,” said The Washington Post. The leaks mostly confirm what was already reported. We already knew that Iraqi forces abused prisoners, that contractors hired by the U.S. violated rules of engagement in firing on Iraqi civilians, and that U.S. soldiers “sometimes killed Iraqi civilians at checkpoints”—grim stories, yes, but not news. WikiLeaks has done “tangible harm,” possibly derailing Iraq’s attempt to form a government.

In publishing the documents, this newspaper took great care to edit or withhold any that might “put lives in danger or jeopardize continuing military operations,” said The New York Times. The reports’ greatest contribution may be in exposing just how much the Iraq war was outsourced. Private contractors assumed “combat and other duties once performed by soldiers,” and the practice spread to Afghanistan, where contractors now outnumber troops. The more interesting revelation, said Investor’s Business Daily, is the vindication of President Bush. The documents show that “U.S. forces frequently encountered weapons of mass destruction facilities” and small amounts of chemical weapons left over from Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. Bush is “owed an apology.”

What the columnists said

On the contrary, the documents prove the extent of the Bush administration’s “lies,” said Ellen Knickmeyer in The Daily Beast. Again and again, “American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world.” To take just one example, the reports detail the horrific carnage U.S. troops found from a surge of religious violence following the 2006 bombing of the Samarra mosque, with more than 1,000 dead bodies in the streets. At the time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed the piles of bodies were a figment of the media’s “exaggerated reporting.”

No military can function with total transparency during wartime, said Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online. World War II may have had a different outcome if the public had known of the many “operational disasters” in D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, or GI treatment of some Japanese and German prisoners. Yet WikiLeaks head Julian Assange has arrogantly appointed himself judge and jury of U.S. troops, who performed admirably—if not perfectly—under incredibly difficult circumstances.

Nonetheless, the WikiLeaks dump reveals the Iraq war as an extremely ugly episode in our history, said Andrew J. Bacevich in The New Republic Online. Despite the prevailing myth that “the surge” won the war, the reality is that 100,000 Iraqis were killed, sometimes by “trigger happy” American troops; that bitter sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shiites were inflamed by government-sanctioned torture and murder; and that Iran has been the “principal beneficiary” of the whole fiasco. While Assange is “unquestionably an arrogant jerk, on one point he’s absolutely right: With regard to Iraq, there’s a great accounting yet to be done.”