A WAR OF CHOICE

Every single argument the Bush administration made to justify the invasion of Iraq has turned out to be false. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, posed no imminent threat to the United States, and had no connection to al-Qaeda or to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Iraq was attacked not because it had weapons of mass destruction, but because it did not (a fact that has not been lost on other potential targets of U.S. intervention). U.S. soldiers were not greeted as liberators, and the occupation has not paid for itself, or required few troops, or been quickly concluded. Nor has the occupation made the world safer or reduced the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, it has made Iraq, the Middle East, and the world far more dangerous.

None of these facts should be a surprise. They were all publicly predicted by the antiwar movement, which the media systematically ignored. On every substantive point, the antiwar movement has turned out to have been right in its analysis, and the Bush administration has turned out to be wrong.

The collapse of the Bush administration’s case for war has been so complete that the establishment media have had to retrospectively question their overly credulous coverage of the administration’s claims about the war. On May 26, 2004, more than a year after the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times ran an article from the editors titled “The Times and Iraq,” which noted, “We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged—or failed to emerge.”¹ Unlike the many front-page stories, with banner headlines, warning about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the note was buried on page ten and did not single out any New York Times reporters for criticism. Most notably the article makes no mention of Times reporter Judith Miller, who had become a bullhorn for prowar propaganda fed to her by the Bush administration and Iraqi exiles.²

The Washington Post similarly concluded, with numerous qualifications, that its coverage “in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.”³

“The paper was not front-paging stuff,” said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. “Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?”...

Across the country, “the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones,” [executive editor Leonard] Downie [Jr.] said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to the minority.”⁴

Former Washington Post assistant managing editor Karen DeYoung put the matter the most succinctly: “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power.”⁵

Almost without exception, the explanations for the enormous gap between Bush administration rhetoric and the reality on the ground in Iraq have rested on a shared and utterly baseless assumption: that President Bush acted in “good faith,” or perhaps with “an excess of idealism,” in the pursuit of the objectives he announced to the world.⁶ The White House may have erred by using “bad intelligence” in planning the war, or may have been duped by Iraqi exiles who wanted to trick the United States into mounting an invasion, but it acted with noble intentions.

The reality, however, is that the administration consistently manipulated intelligence to engineer popular support for a “war of choice,” to use the expression of one of its main supporters, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.⁷ The neoconservatives at the heart of the Bush strategy to invade Iraq even set up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon specifically to circumvent the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency.⁸

Bush and his top aides were determined to invade Iraq for reasons they concealed, knowing they could rely on a pliable media that would not seriously challenge the case for war but would “frontpage” their claims and a Democratic Party that would crumble under the threat of appearing unpatriotic or weak on “homeland security.” The White House used the Iraqi exiles not only to build the propaganda campaign for the war but in the hope they would become part of a new government in Iraq dependent on U.S. power for survival and therefore properly subservient to U.S. interests, a model with a long colonial pedigree.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, provided the pretext the Bush administration needed to portray an offensive war to reshape the Middle East as a defensive measure to protect the people of the United States. The Bush administration saw the horrific events of September 11 as an opportunity to carry out plans that long predated the attacks, and immediately set to work to target Iraq, despite the fact that the country had no link at all to the hijackings.

Indeed, leading members of the Bush administration were open about describing the post–September 11 moment as an “opportunity.” After September 11, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser and later secretary of state, asked senior national security staff to think about how to “capitalize on these opportunities,” which were “shifting the tectonic plates in international politics” to U.S. advantage. “I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947,” she told Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker. “And it’s important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions and all of that before they harden again.”⁹

Bush invoked al-Qaeda and the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks repeatedly in his public speeches on Iraq, as the administration consciously set about selling the war to a skeptical public audience, eventually creating the false impression among a majority of the population that Iraq was connected to September 11.¹⁰

But the invasion of Iraq was not about terrorism, al-Qaeda, or September 11. It was about oil, an essential component of the world capitalist system, vital for production and transport in every essential industry, including the military, and it was about maintaining the popularity and agenda of a “war president,” as Bush fancied himself, and parlaying that into a second presidency for an otherwise unpopular president.¹¹

Had Saddam Hussein been a brutal dictator in some less strategically located country, for example in East Africa, or if he had been willing to follow orders from the White House, as he once had during the years of his worst crimes, his regime would certainly still be in place. But after his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, he no longer served U.S. interests and was a threat to the stability of the Middle East. For neoconservatives close to the Bush administration, the fact that Hussein remained in power after the 1991 Gulf War fostered “a lack of awe” for the United States.¹² A number of Bush advisers felt that the standing of the United States as the “indispensable nation”—a phrase coined by President Bill Clinton and echoed often by Madeleine Albright, his United Nations ambassador and secretary of state—depended on creating a stable regime in Iraq.¹³ Others envisioned that “regime change” in Iraq could begin a process of “rollback” in the Middle East, serving as a springboard for further changes in the region that would ensure U.S. hegemony. “By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad,” George Packer wrote in the New York Times Magazine, in “a new domino theory.”¹⁴

At first, members of both the Clinton and Bush administrations sought to achieve “regime change” in Iraq by supporting an internal revolt, hoping for a more palatable Hussein-like figure to emerge from within the ranks of the military and the Baath Party. When that strategy failed, U.S. planners increasingly turned to a model of regime change through outside intervention.

Washington wanted a subservient regime in Iraq for a simple reason: Iraq has approximately one hundred and twelve billion barrels of proven oil reserves (only surpassed by Saudi Arabia and perhaps Iran) and oil of high quality that is relatively easy and cheap to extract. As the Financial Times explains, “Unlike the [oil of the] Caspian region—the ‘great new frontier’ of the 1990s—Iraq’s crude oil is easier to access and to export. Iraq has the added advantage of being able to transport much of its output through the Mediterranean via a pipeline to Turkey—a flexibility other Middle East producers lack.” ¹⁵ Iraq also sits in a region with large, increasingly important natural gas reserves.¹⁶

For decades, Washington has been committed to ensuring that it alone can use oil as a weapon against other countries, particularly economic and political rivals in Asia and Europe, by controlling the supply and flow of oil.¹⁷ This objective has only grown in importance in recent years as leading economic and political competitors have become more dependent on importing Middle Eastern energy resources and as global oil reserves have declined, making it a much more expensive commodity and greatly increasing competition over access to supplies. Japan currently imports more than 85 percent of its oil from the Middle East; the United States imports only 13 percent from the region.¹⁸ China and India also project rapidly increased energy imports in the near term, as their economic growth rates push them into greater competition with the United States.¹⁹

As political scientist Michael Klare rightly noted at the time of the March 2003 invasion, “The removal of Saddam Hussein and his replacement by someone beholden to the United States is a key part of a broader United States strategy aimed at assuring permanent American global dominance” in the Middle East.²⁰ The United States, he writes, has extended the Carter Doctrine—that the United States will defend its “vital” interest in Persian Gulf oil “by any means necessary, including military force”—to the global stage:

Today, the Carter Doctrine stretches far beyond the Persian Gulf. It is the blueprint for the extension of U.S. military power to the world’s other oil-producing regions. Just as existing U.S. policy calls for the use of military force to protect the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, an extended Carter Doctrine now justifies similar action in the Caspian Sea region, Latin America, and the west coast of Africa. Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.²¹

“George W. Bush’s Iraq War, while duplicitous in many respects,”

Klare adds, is actually the culmination of twenty-five years of U.S. policy to ensure continued domination of the Persian Gulf and its prolific oil fields. In fact, it was a natural expression of the Carter Doctrine.... Seen in this light, Bush Jr. was merely applying the doctrine when he invaded Iraq in 2003.

He’s not the first. President Reagan cited it to justify U.S. intervention in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988 to help ensure the defeat of Iran. President Bush Sr. invoked it to authorize military action against Iraq in 1991, during the first Gulf War. And Bill Clinton, though not explicitly citing the doctrine, adhered to its tenets.

So the use of force to ensure U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil is not a Bush II policy or a Republican policy, but a bipartisan, American policy.²²

Control of Iraqi oil gives the United States tremendous leverage and influence vis-à-vis competing economic and political powers that are dependent on Middle Eastern energy resources. “The reemergence of Iraq will be of historic significance,” observed energy analyst Daniel Yergin, “because of the scale of the resources and because of the realignment it may portend among the major oil exporters.”²³

In their more candid moments, Bush administration apologists have acknowledged that U.S. interests in Iraq are about straight power politics. “An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein— and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States,” asserted former Bush speechwriter David Frum, “would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”²⁴

U.S. planning for the invasion of Iraq, which was otherwise so haphazard, laid out in considerable detail the “quick takeover of the country’s oil fields.”²⁵ Indeed, the first areas seized by the invading troops in southern Iraq were named Forward Operating Base Exxon and Forward Operating Base Shell.²⁶ Iraqis were also quick to note that in the chaos following the invasion, U.S. troops secured the interior and oil ministries, but stood by while museums, weapons caches, and even sites with nuclear-related materials were looted.²⁷

Yet another rationale for the war advanced by the Bush administration centered on human rights abuses by the Iraqi regime. Sad-dam Hussein “used chemical weapons on his own people,” President Bush declared in his State of the Union address motivating the invasion of Iraq.²⁸ True, if we set aside the objection that the Kurds are hardly Hussein’s “own people.” But we can learn how much this atrocity really concerned the political establishment by examining the history of U.S. actions in its immediate aftermath. Take, for instance, the most commonly cited example of an Iraqi chemical attack, the massacre of some five thousand Kurds in Halabja in March 1988. The brutal attack, part of a much broader government campaign of ethnic cleansing, was repeatedly referenced in 2002 and 2003 as a pretext for invading Iraq, but when the story broke in March 1988 the Reagan administration preferred to downplay or discredit it. Some in Washington encouraged the idea that Iran had actually carried out the attacks.²⁹

“The issue is extremely sensitive because the Reagan Administration has moved closer to Iraq in recent years,” the New York Times explained.³⁰ “Iraq, which has the second-largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia, is an important American trading partner. The United States buys an average of 447,000 barrels of Iraqi oil a day, amounting to about $2 billion a year. Last year, the United States exported $1 billion in agricultural products, including rice, wheat and meat to Iraq,” the Times added, just six weeks before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, when Hussein suddenly switched from an ally to a hated enemy.³¹

When news of Halabja broke, the State Department issued a rote condemnation, but Washington continued its courtship with Iraq. “Washington’s friendship for Baghdad is likely to survive one night of poison gas and sickening television film,” Jim Hoagland rightly predicted in the Washington Post in March 1988. “TV moves on, shock succeeds shock, the day’s horror becomes distant memory. The Kurds will stay on history’s margins, and policy will have continuity.”³²

“Iraq has not paid much of a diplomatic price for its actions,” the Christian Science Monitor observed at the time.³³ Indeed, on September 8, 1988, when Secretary of State George Shultz met with Saadun Hamadi, Iraq’s minister of state for foreign affairs, in Washington, he expressed only “concern” about Halabja. “The approach we want to take is that, ‘We want to have a good relationship with you, but that this sort of thing makes it very difficult,’ ” explained one State Department official.³⁴

In fact, the U.S. government continued to provide aid to Iraq, giving the country hundreds of millions of dollars in export credit guarantees through the Agriculture Department’s Commodity Credit Corporation and the Export-Import Bank. In June 1989, a delegation of U.S. businesspeople representing “twenty-three U.S. banks, oil and oil-service companies, and high-tech, construction, and defense contractors, with cumulative annual sales of $500 billion” visited Iraq and had “high-level” talks with the Baathist regime.³⁵ Then, on April 12, 1990, five U.S. senators “arrived in Baghdad on a trip that...received little notice” at the time. “The senators carried a private message from President Bush that the United States wanted to improve relations with Iraq ‘notwithstanding the record of President Saddam Hussein.’ ” Three of the five— Bob Dole, Howard Metzenbaum, and Frank Murkowski—returned to lead the campaign to protect Iraq from U.S. sanctions for its use of chemical weapons.³⁶

All of this soon changed, however, after Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In entering Kuwait, Iraq crossed a line, threatening the stability of the Middle East and U.S. control over its energy resources. The Halabja massacre suddenly became a source of outrage for politicians who wanted to sell the 1991 war.

Ten years later, when building the case for another war on Iraq, Bush administration officials repeatedly invoked the invasion of Kuwait and the threat Iraq posed to its neighbors, though none of Iraq’s neighbors seemed to take that threat seriously at all, realizing how much an already battered Iraq would lose if it dared cross any international boundaries. Indeed, before the Bush administration kicked in its public relations campaign to “market” the war, to use the expression of White House chief of staff Andrew Card, both Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell dismissed the idea that Iraq threatened its neighbors.³⁷ On February 24, 2001, Powell said that Hussein “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”³⁸ Rice, meanwhile, told CNN in July 2001, “We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”³⁹

Indeed, though it was almost never acknowledged, the United States and its junior partner, Britain, had spent thirteen years repeatedly bombing Iraq, degrading its infrastructure, before the invasion in March 2003. In clear violation of international law, British and U.S. planes sharply escalated the number of attacks on Iraq in the months before the invasion. The attacks were not conducted to protect Kurds in northern Iraq or Shias in southern Iraq, as the United States claimed, but to provoke a retaliatory strike that could provide a pretext for war and to ensure that the country would be even less able to defend itself during the planned invasion. As Michael Smith, the London Times journalist who obtained the “Downing Street” memos on British preparation for the invasion of Iraq, writes,

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of ten tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial “spikes of activity” didn’t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn’t retaliate. They didn’t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.⁴⁰

In addition, the United States had for years flown planes and drones over Iraq, surveying every inch of its territory, further throwing into question Bush’s claims about Iraq’s hidden weapons of mass destruction.

By intervening in Iraq, the Bush administration hoped not only to entrench its control of the Middle East but to more firmly establish the right of the United States to intervene anywhere that it perceives as a potential threat to its imperial interests. The Bush administration, with the Democrats safely in tow, intended the war in Iraq, like its war in Afghanistan, to have a “demonstration effect,” signaling to other states that the U.S. government

(i) has the right (which on a limited basis it may extend to allies, such as Israel) to engage in “preemptive strikes” against any country it chooses;

(ii) will defer to the United Nations and other international bodies only when it suits its ends, and will dismiss them as “irrelevant” otherwise; and

(iii) will allow no challenge to the “credibility” of U.S. imperialism.

As one unnamed “hawk” quoted in the New York Times put it, “By setting up our military in Iraq...we can set an example to other countries: ‘If you cooperate with terrorists or menace us in any way or even look at us cross-eyed, this could happen to you.’ ”⁴¹

Copyright © 2007 Anthony Arnove