Malene Melvold Hordvik
This
paper explores the reasons for the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The main argument
is that the US adopted rhetorical tools such as “fighting terror” and
“liberating Iraq” to disguise its real policy objectives of national interests;
namely to control and protect the Persian Gulf region’s excessive oil reserves;
to guard the interests of US ally Israel; and the broader desire of a US global
hegemony.
The
paper is organised into two main sections, in which the first section focuses
on the official reasons given by the Bush Administration for invading Iraq in
2003. It highlights how the events of 9/11 changed the discourse to a “War on
Terror” and was used to justify the invasion, by highlighting the Saddam
regime’s alleged support for terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs),
and the urgent need to change regime and liberate Iraq. This section also
points out the inconsistencies in the evidence given for invading Iraq, and
identifies that there must have been a hidden rationale behind fighting terror
and implementing democracy in the Gulf region.
Hence
the following section reveals the real US foreign policy objectives for
invading Iraq. Through the implementation of Goldstein’s realist model, it
reveals that there is continuity in foreign policy objectives through the
Clinton and Bush Administrations, however tactics changed from Clinton’s policy
of ‘containment’, to Bush’s unilateral approach and regime change in Iraq.
Thus, the tactic change helped preserve the national interests of oil, Israel
and hegemony, at least in the short term.
On
11 September 2001, global militant Islamist organisation al
Qaida carried out a series of coordinated attacks on American soil, commonly
referred to as the ‘9/11’ attacks. As a direct
response, president George W. Bush launched the global ‘War on
Terror’, with a clear message to the international society, ”We will pursue
nations that provide aid and safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every
region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists.”[1]
Twelve days later, the President signed the Executive Order 13224, which
authorised the US government to block foreign individuals and entities that
commit, “or pose a significant risk of committing” terrorism, as well as those
who “provide support, services, or assistance to, or otherwise associate with,
terrorist and terrorist organizations.”[2]
Whilst
the Order legitimised the invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, intending to
overthrow the Taliban government who supposedly hosted al Qaida, it became evident
that the Order also would apply to the future invasion of Iraq. The policies
that led up to the invasion were spelled out in a series of presidential
speeches and statements, namely at the UN General Assembly on 12 September
2002, when Bush addressed his National Security Strategy, which “declared the
right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global
hegemony, which is to be permanent.”[3]
The security strategy also authorised the US to act preemtively and, if necessary,
unilaterally for national security reasons.
As
a result, Iraq became the epicentre of the War on Terror. Iraq had since early
2002 been part of Bush’s Axis of Evil[4],
which consisted of "the world's most dangerous regimes"[5]
who supposedly sponsor actions of terrorism and threaten the US with WMDs.
Furthermore did US government officials, most noteworthy Vice President Dick
Cheney, make a connection between Iraq and al Qaida, consequently manufacturing
Iraq as a key to the war on terrorism.[6]
The result was a joint Iraq Resolution passed by the US Congress in October
2002, justifying the pre-emptive military action against Iraq that would take
place on 19 March 2003:[7]
"Our cause is just, the security of the nations
we serve and the peace of the world. And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq
of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism,
and to free the Iraqi people."
President George W. Bush discusses Beginning of
Operation Iraqi Freedom, 22 March 2003.
Despite
the crystal clear agenda, UN inspectors installed in Iraq since November 2002[8]
had still failed to discover Saddam’s alleged WMDs by May 2003, when the war
was considered officially over.[9]
Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission report of 16 June 2004 concluded there was
"no credible evidence that Iraq and Al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against
the United States.”[10].
No link had been found between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden: the two
actors were, in fact, bitter enemies: "Each would look to control the
future of the Muslim world, bin Laden conceivably for the greater glory of Allah
and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power."[11]
Only
by pointing out Iraq on the map, it quickly becomes evident that Operation Liberate
Iraq was not in the national interest of the US. If the global superpower had
been truly concerned with democracy, it would not have turned a blind eye to
the human rights abuses in Iraq’s neighbouring country Saudi Arabia, which
govern according to the controversial Sharia law; nor would it ignore the fact
that 15 out of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks were found to hold Saudi
passports,[12]
whilst none were of Iraqi origins. As Heradstveit and Hveem (2004: 2) noted,
“Washington’s new desire to introduce democracy in
Iraq is merely a rhetorical device to maintain and strengthen the legitimacy of
US policy in the Gulf – a kind of psychological warfare ultimately as
transparent as the code-name for the war, “Operation Liberate Iraq””.
Thus, the true intentions and formulations of US foreign policy
are revealed through the implementation of Goldstein’s
Foreign Policy Objectives model, which illustrates how national
interests, capabilities, threats and opportunities of the US shape foreign
policy objectives. Evidence also proves how the four factors have remained essentially
the same throughout the Clinton and Bush administration, however tactics
changed from Clinton’s policy of containment towards Iraq to Bush’s desire for
regime change.
When
Bush was elected the US President in 2000, he inherited
Clinton’s policy of containment towards Iraq; however the sanctions that had lasted throughout the 1990s were
costing the US excessive prestige.[13]
The Clinton administration also left to Bush the foreign policy agendas concerning
the promotion of democracy, free trade and market economies, human rights, and
weapons proliferation, as well as other “related issues intersected to promote
continuity as well as change in American foreign policy.”[14] Whilst
Bush continued to promote the Western ‘liberal’ agenda, Condoleezza Rice,
Bush’s first-term national security advisor and second-term secretary of state,
mediated for a new realist approach to US foreign policy, arguing that the administration
should “refocus the United States on the national interests and the pursuit of
key priorities.”[15]
Thus, the events of 9/11 served as Bush’s gateway to intervene and change the
course of action towards Iraq, hence end the era
of containment.
The previous paragraph confirms how the capabilities available
to the US for pursuing its foreign policy objectives remained unchanged through the two presidencies.
The current unipolar system[16] left the two presidents with the opportunity to act unilaterally,
however, it is evident that Clinton and Bush viewed their
roles as president remarkably different. Whilst the Clinton doctrine (mostly)
concerned the promotion of multilateralism and UN peacekeeping, President Bush
used the unipolar structure and his capabilities as the US president to act unilaterally.
Furthermore, it is evident that not only the capabilities of US foreign policy
objectives remained unchanged throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations
(and even before), but also the threats and opportunities to US national
interests. The external threat of ‘international terrorism’, for instance, was
adopted already in the Reagan administration as a new pretext to defend the
need for a huge military budget after the Russian threat was eliminated, and to
protect the Middle Eastern ‘defence industrial base’ (what Chomsky calls a
euphemism for “high-tech industry”).[17]
Iraq
under Saddam Hussein had been an "immense risk" to US national
security ever since the Gulf War.[18]
With Saddam in power, American companies were left outside Iraq whilst Asian,
Russian and European oil companies were welcomed in.[19]
Being the world’s biggest oil consumer and importer, America has an
overwhelming dependence upon oil[20]
that can only be sustained by controlling 67% of the world's proven oil
reserves "that lie below the sands of the Persian Gulf."[21]
Thus, the best solution for the Bush Administration was to stop Clinton’s
decade-long tradition of containment in Iraq and rather turn “a ‘friendly’ Iraq
into a private American oil pumping station”[22]
by invasion. It is also important to note that representatives of the
international oil, construction, security and armaments industries gained huge
profits from the Iraq war, not to mention interests within the domestic sphere.
As invasion in Iraq commenced, neoconservatives in the Pentagon were mediating
with Vice President Cheney and President Bush to "funnel reconstruction
contracts to firms in which they both had stakes."[23]
Another significant threat to US national interests, and thus a
vital rationale for the invasion of Iraq, was the alleged threat that Iraq
posed on US close ally Israel. Israel has been in conflict with
Iraq since it was founded in 1946, and as Mailer (2003: 97) argues, "If a
war with Iraq ends with Americans installed there, Israel would feel more
secure for decades to come." Mearsheimer and Walt (2006) even suggest that
the “centrepiece” of US Middle East policy is its close ties with Israel. In
their critically acclaimed The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer
and Walt reveal that the ‘Israeli Lobby’, which is a “convenient
short-hand term for the loose coalition of individuals and organizations”[24]
within the US, including pro-Israel neoconservatives with close ties to the
Likud party[25],
in large part motivated the Iraq war. The group was already determined to have
Saddam removed long before Bush became President[26],
however they were unable to achieve their objective until after 9/11.[27]
Whilst Saddam’s Iraq posed a significant threat to US’ foreign
policy objectives concerning the possession of Iraqi oil and its ally Israel, the invasion and
regime change also opened up other opportunities, in which Mailer (2003: 50-51) proclaim,
"behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge
military presence in the Middle East as a stepping-stone to taking over the
rest of the world." In his renowned book Hegemony or Survival:
America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), Chomsky portrays the American
Grand Strategy of ultimate hegemony, which is achieved by injecting US
policy into world politics, concurrently maintaining military and economic
supremacy. Realist theorists argue that a hegemon works solely to pursue its
own interest, which observably match the manoeuvres of the US in the aftermath
of 9/11. Hence, a key to the US hegemonic project was to shift from the policy
of containment to a preventive war on Iraq, in
which 9/11 served as the catalyst “needed to make Bush's grand
strategy come alive"[28].
It
is evident, indeed, that the American “imperialist agenda”[29]
started long before 9/11. Already in 1997, Kristol and Kagan founded The
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an American think-tank aiming
“to promote American global leadership.” The founding statement of the neoconservative
agenda was based on Kristol and Kagan’s article in Foreign Affairs in 1996, Toward
a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, which argued that America should become a
“benevolent global hegemony” rather than reducing its international role in the
post-Cold War world. They also stressed that the US must enhance its “strategic
and ideological predominance” by, namely, strengthening America’s security,
advance its interests and promote its principles globally.[30]
The PNAC proved considerably influential in affecting military and foreign
policies within the Bush administration, most noteworthy the policies of national
security and the war in Iraq.
To summarise, this paper has revealed the real multicausal
rationale of the US invasion of Iraq, which were predominantly to protect and access the
Iraqi oil fields, protect
the Iraqi threat towards Israel and enhance and strengthen the US global
hegemony. This paper has demonstrated that there is continuity in foreign policy objectives
through the Clinton and Bush administration, in which the national interests, capabilities, threats and
opportunities remained essentially the same. There is, however, a change in
tactics used to achieve such goals, as Bush ended Clinton’s policy of containment towards Iraq and changed the regime,
justified by the rhetorical War on Terror and Operation Liberate
Iraq. Despite the rhetorical tools, it has
later become clear that the threat of terrorism was “not a firm foundation on which to build a grand
strategy”, although the “foreign and national security policies of the George W. Bush
administration rest heavily on its threat.”[31]
Bibliography
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Experience. Harvard University Press. USA.
Hart, G. (2004) The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for
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York, US.
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Jervis, R. (2003) A Grand Strategy for America.
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Trade Paperbacks, New York, US.
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the Middle East in Proper Perspective. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 1
November from: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139106/richard-n-haass/the-irony-of-american-strategy
Mearsheimer, J. J. & Walt, S. M. (2006) The Israel Lobby
and U.S. Foreign Policy. Retrieved 22 October 2013 from: http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0040.pdf
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An Assessment. Retrieved 28 October 2013 from: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub603.pdf
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War on Terror? Delivered at Harvard University. Retrieved 3 November 2013
from: http://www.chomsky.info/talks/200202--02.htm
Chomsky,
N. (2001) Clash of Civilizations? Retrieved 12 November 2012 from: http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/509/509%20noam%20chomsky.htm
CNN (21 September 2001) Transcript of President Bush’s
Address. Retrieved 4 November 2013 from: http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/
Kristol, W. & Kagan, R. (1996) Toward a Neo-Reaganite
Foreign Policy. In Foreign Affairs July/August 1996. Retrieved 9
November 2013 from: http://carnegieendowment.org/1996/07/01/toward-neo-reaganite-foreign-policy/1ea
Governmental sources:
President
Discusses Beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. (22 March 2003) Retrieved 24
October 2003 from: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030322.html
Address
to the United Nations General Assembly President George W. Bush (September 12,
2002) Retrieved 26 October 2013 from: http://www.state.gov/p/io/potusunga/207557.html
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Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. (2
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Order 13224 (September 23, 2001) Office of the Coordinator for
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from: http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/122570.htm
[4] Burman, 2007: 108: The Axis of Evil was coined by
President Bush in his 29 January 2002 State of the Union speech. He named North
Korea, Iran, Iraq, whilst John R. Bolton added Cuba, Syria and Libya.
[7]
Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,
2 October 2002.
[8] Fawn & Hinnebusch, 2006: 3: On 8 November, the UN
Resolution 1441 became the compromise between the US and those
"unconvinced of the danger posed by Iraq", which admitted UN
inspectors to Iraq to investigate if Iraq still possessed the alleged WMDs.
[9]
Hinnebusch, 2006: 3, 309-10: By the end of December 2002, the UN inspectors in
Iraq had visited 150 sites and made surprise visits to 13 sites in one month,
but had discovered no WMDs.
[10] Hinnebusch, 2006: 309-10: There were
multiple evidence that there were no WMDs in Iraq, for instance:
1)
United Nations Monitoring, Verification and
Inspection Commission UNMOVIC "did not find evidence of
the continuation or resumption of programs of weapons of mass
destruction."
2)
The report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the
supposed Iraqi WMD capabilities were not at all a threat. Iraqi's nuclear
program had already been suspended, whilst the chemical weapon production had
been destroyed and dismantled due to effective international constraints,
sanctions and weapons inspections.
3)
John S. Duffield noted in Oil and the Iraq War that Saddam would never
dare supplying WMDs to Al-Qaida, because if such weapons were used, they would
most definitely be traced back to Saddam himself.
[13]
After the Gulf War (1990-91), Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program
had been investigated by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), which
also worked on the post-war disarmament of Iraq. UNSCOM concluded that the program
had stopped completely after the war, in which US and its allies responded to
by maintaining the policy of ‘containment’ towards Saddam’s regime. However,
the policy, which included various sanctions, has been widely criticised for
causing the Iraqi people excessive damage, namely high rates of malnutrition,
lack of medical supplies and diseases from lack of clean water.
[16] Critics, however, argue that the bipolar system of
the Cold War changed into a multipolar
system after the fall of the Soviet
block in 1991. Despite this, it is undeniable that the US remained the largest
and strongest power.
[18] Hinnebusch, 2006: If Iraq had annexed Kuwait during
the Gulf War (1990-1) and gained Kuwaiti and Saudi oil fields, it would have
possessed 40% of the world’s oil reserves – without a ‘helping hand’ from
America.
[19] Hinnebusch, 2006: 289: For instance, French oil and
gas company Total "signed a letter of intent for oil development with the
Saddam regime."
[20] Burman, 2007: 26-8: The US imports 60% of the oil it
consumes; a number projected to rise to 75% by 2030.
[23] Burman, 2007: 30: One example of the internal links
between business corporations and US foreign policy making is seen in the case
of Halliburton, one of the world's biggest oil-services companies. The link
between Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney, previous CEO of Halliburton, and
Halliburton’s post-war oil production and rebuilding of Iraq is conspicuous.
[26] Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006: 33: On 20 September
2001, for example, a group of neoconservatives published an open letter to the
President, stating “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11]
attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors
must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”
[27]
Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006: 33: In the aftermath of 9/11, the lobby
established two organisations with the intention to manipulate intelligence
information and portrait Saddam as an imminent threat to US security. One of
the organisations, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, was ordered to
find links between Iraq and al Qaida “that the intelligence community supposedly
missed”.
[29]
Historian John Lewis Gaddis (2004) also noted that the Bush Administration’s
emphasis on unilateralism, pre-emption and hegemony is in fact a recreation of
America’s 19th century foreign policy.
[30] Kristol and Kagan (2006) also argued that Washington needed to “spend about $ 60-$ 80 billion more
each year in order to preserve America's role as global hegemon.”
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