America's War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew J. Bacevich

Author:Andrew J. Bacevich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

Why did the George W. Bush administration choose to invade Iraq in 2003? For our purposes, drilling down on this question is essential for two reasons. First, doing so situates the Third Gulf War of 2003–2011 within the larger context of America’s War for the Greater Middle East. Second, appreciating what Bush actually meant to achieve in Iraq reveals in full the magnitude of the failure that the United States sustained there.

Of course, many answers to that question already exist. The official one offered by the Bush administration itself and seconded by many of the war’s most ardent supporters cited the putative threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Yet in reality, this was a cover story. As Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged, WMD offered “the one issue that everyone could agree on,” implying the existence of other, more germane motives.1

When the claims of this smoking gun/mushroom cloud school turned out to lack substance, its adherents insisted that good intentions should count more than mere veracity.2 Rumsfeld subsequently dismissed the emphasis on WMD as “a public relations error.”3 Carping on erroneous or falsified intelligence reports amounted to pointlessly rehashing issues that the ongoing march of events had rendered moot. More or less simultaneously, Bush loyalists reverted to a ready-made fallback position. Liberating oppressed Iraqis now became the advertised war aim. Pressed by a reporter to explain what had happened to the mushroom cloud hypothesis, White House press secretary Scott McClellan neatly summarized the administration’s revised position. “We’re not going to relitigate the reasons why we went into Iraq,” he huffed. That was little history; what beckoned was Big History, in the form of “spreading freedom in the broader Middle East.”4

Rejecting the official line, critics of Bush’s War advanced a number of alternatives. When Iraq’s WMDs turned out not to exist and liberating the oppressed proved unexpectedly arduous, these alternatives gained added credibility. Among the explanations floated were these: The United States invaded Iraq to “get the oil,” funnel money to the military-industrial complex, provide an excuse for defunding the welfare state, remove a threat to Israel, or allow President Bush the psychic satisfaction of completing a job—deposing Saddam Hussein—his daddy had left unfinished.

Unlike the explanations offered by Bush and his minions, these alternatives had one pronounced advantage: None were self-evidently false. Indeed, each likely contained at least a morsel of truth. Yet neither separately nor in combination do they suffice, for this simple reason: They understate the magnitude of the administration’s actual ambitions.

In reality, the Bush administration invaded Iraq in order to validate three precedent-setting and mutually reinforcing propositions. First, the United States was intent on establishing the efficacy of preventive war. Second, it was going to assert the prerogative, permitted to no other country, of removing regimes that Washington deemed odious. And finally, it was seeking to reverse the practice of exempting the Islamic world from neoliberal standards, demonstrating that what Condoleezza Rice called “the paradigm of progress”—democracy, limited government, market economics, and respect for human (and especially women’s) rights—was as applicable to the Greater Middle East as to the rest of the world.

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