The Rationale For The Invasion Of Iraq

Shock And Awe Makes A Clean Sweep Of Things

There is an argument that the second invasion of Iraq is a coverup of things that were left over from the first invasion and the failed effort to establish a base of US operations in the Middle East. This European take on that argument--and its variants--outlines the real rationale for invading Iraq and the ideology behind the efforts.

The events of 11 September 2001 killed thousands, left many thousands more bereft, and horrified countless millions who merely bore witness. But for a few, 9/11 suggested an opportunity. In the inner circles of the United States government men of ambition seized on that opportunity with alacrity. Far from fearing a ‘global war on terror’, they welcomed it, certain of their ability to bend war to their purposes. Although the ensuing conflict has not by any means run its course, we are now in a position to begin evaluating the results of their handiwork.

To that effort, this very fine book makes an important contribution. A decade ago, Michael Gordon, a reporter with the New York Times, and Bernard Trainor, a retired US Marine Corps lieutenant general, collaborated on The Generals’ War, still perhaps the best narrative history of the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Cobra II, a worthy successor, is packaged as an account of the planning and conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It should be read as a study of the politics of war. Although Gordon and Trainor describe in stirring detail the celebrated ‘march on Baghdad’, their real contribution has been to identify the confluence of factors that inspired the march, shaped it, and produced consequences very different from those expected.

One point above all stands out: the rationale for the war had next to nothing to do with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Weapons of mass destruction offered little more than a convenient pretext for a war conjured up to serve a multiplicity of ends. Neither the Baath Party regime nor the Iraqi army, crippled by defeat and well over a decade of sanctions, threatened anyone other than the Iraqi people. The hawks in the Bush administration understood this quite well. They hankered to invade Iraq not because Saddam was strong and dangerous but because he was weak and vulnerable, not because he was implicated in 9/11 but because he looked like an easy mark.

For the war’s architects, ‘Iraq was not a danger to avoid but a strategic opportunity,’ less a destination than a point of departure. In their eyes, 2003 was not 1945, but 1939: not a climax but the opening gambit of a vast enterprise largely hidden from public view. Allusions to Saddam as a new Hitler notwithstanding, they did not see Baghdad as Berlin but as Warsaw – a preliminary objective. For the war’s most determined proponents – Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz – toppling Saddam was the first phase of what was expected to be a long campaign. In Iraq they intended to set precedents, thereby facilitating other actions to follow. Although Bush portrayed himself as a reluctant warrior for whom armed conflict was a last resort, key members of his administration were determined that nothing should get in the way of a showdown with Saddam. ‘In crafting a strategy for Iraq,’ the undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith insisted to one baffled US general, ‘we cannot accept surrender.’ The object of the exercise was to demolish constraints on the subsequent employment of American power. Merely promulgating a doctrine of preventive war would not be enough: it was imperative actually to implement that doctrine.

The principal players in this game had their eyes fixed on two very different fronts. First, the Persian Gulf. As the Bush administration hawks saw it, the weak and feckless Clinton administration had allowed the once dominant US position in the region to slip in the course of the previous decade. Taking down Saddam promised to restore US pre-eminence, yielding large economic and political benefits. In the short term, a demonstration of American assertiveness would ease concerns about access to the energy reserves on which the prosperity of the developed world depended. A ‘friendly’ Iraq would reduce the need to cater to Saudi Arabia, whose friendship was looking increasingly problematic given that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers had been Saudis. In the longer term, Iraq could serve as a secure operating base or jumping-off point for subsequent US efforts to extend the Pax Americana across the broader Middle East, a project expected to last decades. American power would eliminate the conditions that bred and sustained violent Islamic radicalism. That was the ultimate strategic rationale for war.

By planting the Stars and Stripes in downtown Baghdad, Gordon and Trainor write, the advocates of war intended not only to ‘implant democracy in a nation that had never known it’ but to ‘begin to redraw the political map of the region’. As ‘a demonstration of American power for Syria and other wayward regimes’, Operation Iraqi Freedom would show the consequences of defying the world’s only superpower. Even beyond the Middle East, Saddam’s demise was likely to have salutary effects, letting ‘other adversaries know they should watch their step’.

None of this could be done, however, until certain domestic obstacles had been removed. This was the second front, in many respects more challenging than the first. As Bush’s more bellicose lieutenants saw it, the principal constraints on the use of American power lay within the US government itself. In a speech to Defense Department employees only a day before 9/11, Rumsfeld had warned of ‘an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America’. Who was this adversary? Some evil tyrant or murderous terrorist? No, Rumsfeld announced: ‘The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.’ But the internal threat was not confined to this single bureaucracy. It included Congress and the Supreme Court, each of which could circumscribe presidential freedom of action. It extended to the CIA and the State Department, which the hawks viewed as obstructive and hidebound. It even took in the senior leadership of the US military, especially the unimaginative and excessively risk-averse Joint Chiefs of Staff. All these were capable of impeding the greater assertiveness that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had yearned for well before the events of 9/11. Everyone had to be neutralised. In other words, unleashing American might abroad implied a radical reconfiguration of power relationships at home. On this score, 9/11 came as a godsend. The hawks, citing the urgent imperatives of national security, set out to concentrate authority in their own hands. September 11 inaugurated what became in essence a rolling coup.

Nominally, the object of the exercise was to empower the commander-in-chief to wage his global war on terror. Yet with George W. Bush a president in the mould of William McKinley or Warren Harding – an affable man of modest talent whose rise in national politics could be attributed primarily to his perceived electability – Cheney and his collaborators were engaged in an effort to enhance their own clout. Bush might serve as the front man; but on matters of substance, theirs would be the decisive voices. Gordon and Trainor describe the operative model this way: ‘The president would preside, the vice-president would guide, and the defense secretary would implement’ – with Wolfowitz and a handful of others lending the enterprise some semblance of intellectual coherence.