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| Source: georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov |
We recently passed the ten year mark since the start of the
Iraq War. And so it seems appropriate for me to finally comment on the origins
of that controversial event. The general consensus among political scientists and
the rest of the foreign policy elite is that the war was a major US
blunder, misguided both in origin and execution. Basically, I agree with this fundamental
assessment but differ in how I understand the origins of this war from many of
these thinkers, many of whom seem content merely to explain US actions as
stemming from an arrogant imperialistic mindset or as due to an ideological
crusade on the part of a Republican administration. In other words, much of the
analysis has been, well, not really analysis but instead has struck me as a sort of "competition of condemnation."
The passionate and partisan nature of this debate about the
origins of the Iraq War is a major reason why I’ve been reticent about giving
my opinion on the matter. Again, I agree with most in declaring this a huge misstep
in US foreign policy that has had many adverse consequences. But I’m not merely
satisfied running around self-righteously berating the policy makers involved.
Instead I’m much more interested in a level headed analysis of the origins of
the war. It is certainly a much more fruitful exercise to determine why and how
this ill-advised war began than to simply prattle on about how bad and wrong
it was.
At any rate, there are, in addition to the imperialist and
ideological motivations mentioned above, many theories about the origins of the
Iraq War. One of the more popular is that the war was started by a group of
well-placed neoconservative advisers (who are supposedly by disposition quite
hawkish) who deftly and sinisterly steered the various policy makers in the
administration to war. Sometimes linked with this view is that the neo-cons
teamed up with AIPAC (the Israeli Lobby) and some members of the Israeli policy
making body to create a war as a means
of diverting the world from the rapidly deteriorating situation then occurring in
the West Bank (the second Intifada was by this point in full swing). Closer to
the conspiracy theory sphere are those that assert that Bush ’43 personally
engineered the war as a means of vengeance against Saddam Hussein for his
actions against his father, Bush ’41 (or something inane like that) or that the
war was started by a military cabal or that it was begun to secure Middle
Eastern oil (Desert Shield/Storm was actually more about oil than the Iraq War)
or whatever.
Besides being rubbish what all of these theories have in
common is the attribution of a pernicious and malevolent element to US
geopolitical actions that I don't think existed. However, I’m not going to spend this blog post addressing this matter or any of
these other theories. Rather, I want to put forth my own theory. Well, not my own per
se since there are a few academics who share a similar viewpoint to mine such
as Melvin P. Leffler of the University of Virginia.
The first thing that I need to point out is something that
often gets downplayed or outright ignored in much of the discussion surrounding
the origin of the Iraq War, namely the place of Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the
national security policy of the United States before 9/11. This is crucial because many act as if after the 1991
Gulf War Saddam was of little to no concern in the making of American national
security policy, that after the US “whipped” Saddam he basically minded his own
business thereafter until the son of his adversary decided out of nowhere to peremptorily
finish the job. But the reality is that Hussein remained a major problem, still
continuing to top the list of threats that are given in the President’s daily
national security brief. What to do about Saddam, who repeatedly was in
violation of the no-fly zones, blocked UN weapon inspectors, circumvented the
Oil for Food Program, continued to viciously crackdown on the minorities of his
country (the Shia and Kurds especially), and more, was of principal concern to the Clinton administration which
actually fired ballistic missiles at Iraq in 1998 and continually considered
regime change as a proper course of action worth pursuing. The point here is that
right up until 9/11 Iraq featured prominently in the discussions and concerns
of United States national security policy.
Then 9/11 happened. Now I’ve suggested before that at least
in the long term calculus I don’t think 9/11 was all that transformative. But
for a brief moment it certainly had a profound effect on American foreign
policy in that the paranoia created by the 9/11 attacks caused the US to magnify and exaggerate all other
threats, especially those that had been brewing for quite some time. Moreover,
9/11 sent policy makers into such a panic that these major threats which were
previously considered contained to one degree or another were instantly
transformed into threats that urgently needed to be extinguished. And topping
this list was Iraq.
So my thesis is as follows:
1.)
Iraq continued to be a major national security
concern of the United States after the Gulf War and up to the 9/11 attacks.
2.)
The sudden 9/11 attacks created a state of paranoia
that caused the US to egregiously augment prior threats from containment to
necessary extinction.
3.)
Saddam Hussein was considered chief among these
threats
4.)
Therefore, the United States invaded Iraq to
eliminate what it perceived as an immediate threat to its national security.
My position then is that the origins of the Iraq War can be
found in legitimate national security concerns that were unfortunately blown
out of proportion because of the 9/11 attacks. The sense of urgency that this
paranoia created caused policy makers to see connections that did not exist
such as the dubious linking of Hussein with Al Qaeda. (The same could be said
of the case made for Saddam having WMDs though what often gets overlooked here
is the fact that just about EVERYONE, including most of the UN member nations,
even France, as well as UN weapon inspectors, believed Saddam did possess WMDs
before the war so I find much of the discussion surrounding the WMDs to be
quite disingenuous.)
Now I don’t normally dabble in counterfactual history, but a
further view of mine is that had Gore been elected I believe it is highly
likely that the Iraq War would still have occurred. There are two key
assumptions that I’m making here:
1.)
Though the rhetoric may be different between
Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy issues, when it comes to actually
making foreign policy both parties act similarly. Therefore, I think a Gore
administration would have fell victim to the same paranoia that the 9/11
attacks caused.
2.)
The personality of decision makers may matter a
lot less than I used to previously believe. The more and more I have studied
the history of foreign policy the closer I’ve come to a sort of fatalistic
viewpoint. And so in this sense the Iraq War, because of 9/11, might have
ultimately been inevitable.
Topics worth pursuing more fully at a later time perhaps.
