Why did the US invade Iraq? An informal survey of the top foreign policy and Mideast experts resulted in a big, fat "I dunno". I think this is the first time in human history that no one can come up with a half-plausible reason why a country has spent 4 years at war.
By now you've all seen the 1994 video clip of Cheney in which he lists all the reasons why the US should not invade Iraq and topple Saddam:
Here is the transcript:
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
Based on this interview, I posted a simple question on the Gulf2000 Project discussion list at Columbia University. I've been a member of the list for about a decade and have found the discussions there to be quite illuminating, if only as an insight to how the top "experts" and academics who specialize in the Mideast think (answer: they may be better informed, but they don't necessarily have any better judgment nor critical thinking skills than the rest of us.)
My simple question was this: Since Cheney obviously knew exactly what would go wrong if the US invaded Iraq back in 1994, why oh why did the US proceed to invade Iraq in 2003?
I thought the experts and academics on the Gulf200 list would know something I didn't know -- and guess what? Other than a collective shrug of the shoulders and a couple of rough guesses, NO ONE KNOWS WHY WE ARE AT WAR!
That's a completely mind-blowing thought: here we are, in the fourth year of a war, with over 3000 American soldiers and a million Iraqi civilians dead - and no one give a straight answer to why we're at war.
Initially, a few of the members pointed out that the Cheney video really isn't new and that others had similarly voiced reservations about invading Iraq and toppling Saddam. I responded that yes, others had done so too - but the question is why did we do it anyway?
The reason for the invasion certainly wasn't the WMDs. Except for a couple of die-hards, the members seemed to agree that WMDs were not the explantion for the invasion. There were no WMDS, period. No, they were not secretly removed to Syria, as some of the looney Right would like to think. And yes, the Bush administration knew for an absolute, unquestionable fact that there were no WMDs in Iraq - and they didn't care anyway. In fact they made it clear that the invasion would go forward even in the absence of WMDs. And, the intelligence about WMDs was deliberately "cherry-picked", "stove-pipped" and "sexed-up". That's why references to the disproven "Yellowcake from Niger" were removed from Colin Powell's presentation to the UN, but were re-inserted by Cheney's office. That's why the weapons inspectors were forced out of Iraq by the US, before they had a chance to complete their job. That's why the "aluminum tubes" were misrepresented - all done knowingly. This wasn't an "intelligence error" - this was a pattern and policy of deliberate misrepresentation.
Was the invasion about oil? The Gulf2000 list members seemed collectively pretty sure that it wasn't about oil - many pointed out that the oil companies weren't happy about the prospects of invasion and didn't have much to gain from it.
Was it about Israel? There is no doubt that the Israelis - and Sharon in particular - looked with delight at the thought of toppling Saddam and they actively encouraged the invasion. But, according to some of the experts on Gulf2000, the Israelis came aboard only after it was apparent that the invasion would happen anyway.
To prove our strong-man status and willingness to protect our allies? Sorry, seems to me that getting yourself stuck in a "quagmire" (Cheney's exact description) would be the wrong way to prove any of that.
Was it 9/11? Some on the Gulf2000 list suggested that Cheney was personally affected by 9-11 so he changed his mind about invading Iraq. Poppycock. Cheney is sophisticated enough to know that Saddam and Iraq had no relationship to 9-11; that invading Iraq was actually a distraction from getting the people who were really responsible for 9-11; and that all of this bad predictions about invading Iraq would come true regardless of 9-11. And yet we invaded anyway.
Maybe it was Saddam's support for terrorism? Well, not quite. The only terrorist group that the US could tie to Saddam was in fact a discredited terrorist Islamo-Marxist cult known as the MEK (also known as the MKO) which is opposed to the government in Iran and which has strong support in Washington DC among some Necons:
"Former Clinton administration official Martin Indyk, who served as assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs in 1997, told NEWSWEEK that one of the reasons the group was put on the terrorism list in the first place was part of a 'two-pronged' strategy that included ratcheting up pressure on Saddam. Like the Bush White House, the Clinton administration was eager to highlight Iraqi ties to terrorism and had collected extensive evidence of Saddam providing logistical support to the MKO in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War. (The MKO's headquarters are located on a heavily guarded street in central Baghdad.) But the United States could find no other hard evidence linking Saddam to terror groups, Indyk said. 'That was about all we had on [Saddam] when it came to terrorism,' Indyk told NEWSWEEK."(SOURCE: Ashcroft's Baghdad Connection - Why the attorney general and others in Washington have backed
a terror group with ties to Iraq, By Michael Isikoff, NEWSWEEK Thursday, 26 September, 2002 )
Finally, someone on the Gulf2000 list suggested that perhaps we'll never know the machinations of goverments in choosing to launch wars. True, but that's never stopped analysts and historians from at least trying to figure it out.
Of course plenty of Gulf2000 members didn't choose to answer the question - perhaps the ones who know dont' want to talk - but based on the responses of the people who did answer my question, the answer is: no one knows why we're at war.
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