Bush's 3 Bogus Reasons for War on Iraq
by Michael T. Klare
Dissident Voice
January 31, 2003
The stated
reasons for war on Iraq can be boiled down to three phony assertions, writes
PNS contributor Michael Klare, who examines each in turn and offers one real
reason for the rush to war.
In his State of
the Union Address and other speeches, President Bush has attempted to
articulate the reasons for going to war with Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein.
Stripped of rhetoric, these can be boiled down to three main objectives: (1) to
eliminate Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD); (2) to diminish the
threat of international terrorism; and (3) to promote democracy in Iraq and
surrounding areas.
To determine if
these powerful motives are actually behind the rush to war, each must be
examined in turn.
(1) Eliminating
WMD: The reason most often given by President Bush for going to war with Iraq
is to reduce the risk of a WMD attack on the United States. Such an attack
would be devastating, and vigorous action is appropriate to prevent it.
If the threat of
WMD attack is, in fact, Bush's primary concern, then he would surely pay the
greatest attention to the greatest threat of WMD usage against the United
States, and deploy available U.S. resources -- troops, dollars and diplomacy --
accordingly. But this is not what the president is doing.
North Korea and
Pakistan pose greater WMD threats to the United States than Iraq for several
reasons. Each possesses a much bigger WMD arsenal. Pakistan has several dozen
nuclear warheads along with missiles and planes capable of delivering them
hundreds of miles away; it is also suspected of having chemical weapons. North
Korea is thought to possess sufficient plutonium to produce one to two nuclear
devices along with the capacity to manufacture several more; it also has a
large chemical weapons stockpile and a formidable array of ballistic missiles.
Iraq, by
contrast, possesses no nuclear weapons today and is thought to be several years
away from producing any, even under the best of circumstances.
A policy aimed
at protecting the United States from WMD attacks would identify Pakistan and
North Korea as the leading perils, and put Iraq in a rather distant third
place.
(2) Combating
terrorism: The administration has argued at great length that a U.S. invasion
and "regime change" in Iraq would mark the greatest success in the
war against terrorism so far. Why this is so has never been made entirely
clear. It is said that Saddam's hostility toward the United States somehow
sustains and invigorates the terrorist threat to America. Saddam's elimination
would thus greatly weaken international terrorism and its capacity to attack
the United States.
There simply is
no evidence that this is the case. If anything, the opposite is true. From what
we know of al Qaeda and other such organizations, the objective of Islamic
extremists is to overthrow any government in the Islamic world that does not
adhere to a fundamentalist version of Islam. The Baathist regime in Iraq does
not qualify; thus, under al Qaeda doctrine, it must be swept away, along with
the equally deficient governments in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
It follows that
a U.S. effort to oust Saddam Hussein and replace his regime with another
secular government -- this one kept in place by American military power -- will
not diminish the wrath of Islamic extremists, but rather fuel it.
(3) The
promotion of democracy: The ouster of Saddam Hussein, the administration
claims, will allow the Iraqi people to establish a truly democratic government
and serve as a beacon and inspiration for the spread of democracy throughout the
Islamic world.
But there is
little reason to believe that the administration is motivated by a desire to
spread democracy in its rush to war with Iraq.
First of all,
many of the top leaders of the current administration, particularly Donald
Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, happily embraced Hussein's dictatorship in the 1980s
when Iraq was the enemy of our enemy (Iran), and thus considered our de facto
friend. Under the so-called "tilt" toward Iraq, the Reagan-Bush
administration decided to assist Iraq in its war against Iran during the
Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88.
Under Reagan,
Iraq was removed from the list of countries that support terrorism, thus
permitting the provision of billions of dollars' worth of agricultural credits
and other forms of assistance to Hussein. The bearer of this good news was none
other than Rumsfeld, who traveled to Baghdad and met with Hussein in December
1983 as a special representative of President Reagan.
The Department
of Defense provided Iraq with secret satellite data on Iranian military
positions. This information was provided to Saddam even though U.S. leaders
were informed by a senior State Department official on Nov. 1, 1983 that the
Iraqis were using chemical weapons against the Iranians "almost
daily," and could use U.S. satellite data to pinpoint chemical weapons attacks
on Iranian positions.
Dick Cheney, who
took over as Secretary of Defense in 1989, continued the practice of supplying
Iraq with secret intelligence data.
Not once did
Rumsfeld and Cheney speak out against Iraqi use of these weapons or suggest
that the United States discontinue its support of the Hussein dictatorship
during this period. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the current
leadership has a principled objection to dictatorial rule in Iraq.
Besides, the
United States had developed close ties with the post-Soviet dictatorships in
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan -- all ruled by Stalinist dictators who
once served the Soviet empire. And there certainly is nothing even remotely
democratic about Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, two of America's other close allies in
the region.
Other motives
must be at work. Control of Iraq could give the United States de facto control
over the Persian Gulf area and two-thirds of the world's oil -- an unrivaled
prize in the historic human struggle for power and wealth.
Perhaps these ulterior motives
do justify war on Iraq, even if the three stated reasons do not. If that is the
case, the President should make this claim to the American public, and let us
determine if we want such a war.
Michael T. Klare is
a Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Mass., and the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict
(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2001). He can be reached at: mklare@hampshire.edu