Daily Times

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a huge disaster. The war left behind chaos and destruction and the American administration appeared totally clueless about how to cope with the violence and extreme polarization that it unleashed.

It is therefore appropriate to analyze the factors and causes that engendered a response from the US that was counterproductive and whose real outcomes were at complete variance with the results envisioned by the Bush administration.

Two questions warrant an informed answer in this regard. One, why did the US deem it necessary to invade Iraq in the first place? Two, what did the Bush administration expect to get out of it?

One of the foremost premises that were held forth by Washington in justifying the intervention was the weapon of mass destruction programme of the Saddam Hussein government. The assumption that Iraq would “fairly soon” have nuclear weapons was sold as a major threat to the world peace that necessitated urgent measures. No weapons or evidence of a programme were ever found. Even before the war begans, the American administration was mired in deep uncertainty as to how to substantiate the claim that Iraqis were “six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon”. There was no evidence beyond the words of Bush officials.

The Bush administration backtracked on two vital decisions at critical junctures. First, before the war was decided on, Bush stated that the US government was “looking at all the options” to dissuade Iraq from developing weapon and resolve the issue peacefully.

As little as five days later his vice president Dick Cheney delivered a forceful speech, stating that the only feasible and available option was to go to war. If this was the case then what were the options President Bush was looking at. Second, the flip-flop was more evident in the opinion Bush held about “regime change”. On April 4, 2002, Bush said that he had made up his mind “that Saddam needs to go… The policy of my government is that he goes”. In a volt-face, he told the United Nation on September 12, he was laying down five conditions (including inspections) compliance with which could lead to peaceful settlement of the issue at hand. Unexpectedly, four days later, Iraq agreed to open itself to an independent inquiry into its military installations. At that point, Bush said he saw no other option than regime change. This indicated a lack of adequate information and a clear-headed policy.

The assumption that Iraq would “fairly soon” have nuclear weapons was sold as a major threat to the world peace that necessitated urgent measures

According to recent research, the Iraq invasion had little to do with fear of WMD or democracy spreading. It was about demonstrating the US military might.

Why did America feel the need to demonstrate its power to the world in the absence of a rival great power? Having triumphed over the Soviet Union, US decision-makers had abandoned “realism” – a hard-nosed approach to foreign policy that guided America through most of the Cold War period and drove its rise to great power – and embraced a grand strategy – liberal hegemony – that steered the US from a path of hard-hitting policy that sought the preservation of security and prosperity at home and maintaining a balance of power in key regions abroad to a path of ambitious policy that required the US to undertake a task of promoting democracy and liberal values in foreign countries.

The term ‘unipolar world’ referred to the unique position the US occupied after the collapse of the Soviet Union that was characterized by the absence of super power rival. When the USSR disintegrated, the US found itself, as the former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft put it in 1998, “standing alone at the height of power… with the rarest opportunity to shape the world”.

The thinking seems to have lived on into the tenure of George Bush. His first term was characterized by a unilateralist, take-no-prisoners approach to foreign policy. It is now easy to assume that America was riding the crest of its unmatched power when it decided to topple the government of Saddam Hussein and install a democratic dispensation.

Against the backdrop of 9/11 which hurt the economic and political power of the US, Washington decided that it needed to do something to rehabilitate its image. Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defence, considered the ouster of Saddam as vital to “enhance the US credibility and influence throughout the region”. He also advised Bush that “we need to bomb something else to prove that we are, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks”. It is clear from these statements the American administration was not satiated with the deployment of troops in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 but was also looking for other ventures to reestablish American standing as the world leading power.

It is unsurprising that when American army was dispatched to Iraq it swept it in less than a month. Instead of standing up to a formidable army, the Iraqi military decided to melt away and prepare for a long guerilla war. Later, the fault-lines within Iraqi polity quickly came to the fore along sectarian lines with the initiation of a never-ending schism between the Shia and the Sunni populations, providing a ripe ground for the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

The writer is a international relations scholar at Quaid-i-azam University