Why are we in Iraq?

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 01:45:00 +0000

As recent memoirs from White House counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke and from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill make clear, key members of the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein well before September 11, 2001. Nationalists like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hoped to avert the threat of a hostile and oil-rich Iraq armed with nuclear weapons tipping the balance of power in the Mideast. Neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz hoped that by replacing Saddam with an elected pro-American government, the U.S. could transform the entire region, overthrowing sheiks and dictators and marginalizing radical Islamic movements that threatened the U.S. and Israel.

But between these hopes and their realization lay an obvious consideration that had deterred the Bush I administration from invading Baghdad in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf War: couldn't invading and occupying Iraq provoke a nationalist reaction uniting the country's Sunnis and Shiites against an American occupying force and leading to disaster in Iraq as well as in the region? For George W. Bush and Rumsfeld, who had expressed qualms about America being involved in "nation-building," this question posed a potentially insuperable obstacle to undertaking an invasion.

Salon.com > John Judis

Why are we in Iraq?