[Peace-discuss] Bush's war motives

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 The Coming War With Iraq: Deciphering the Bush Administration's Motives

By Michael T. Klare
January 16, 2003

Editor: Tom Barry, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)

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Global Affairs CommentaryThe United States is about to go to war with
Iraq. As of this writing, there are 60,000 U.S. troops already deployed in
the area around Iraq, and another 75,000 or so are on their way to the
combat zone. Weapons inspectors have found a dozen warheads, designed to
carry chemical weapons. Even before this discovery, senior U.S. officials
were insisting that Saddam was not cooperating with the United Nations and
had to be removed by force. Hence, there does not seem to be any way to
stop this war, unless Saddam Hussein is overthrown by members of the Iraqi
military or is persuaded to abdicate his position and flee the country.

It is impossible at this point to foresee the outcome of this war. Under
the most optimistic scenarios--the ones advanced by proponents of the
war--Iraqi forces will put up only token resistance and American forces
will quickly capture Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein from office (by
killing him or placing him under arrest). This scenario further assumes
that the Iraqis will decline to use their weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) or will be prevented from doing so by U.S. military action; that
civilian casualties will be kept low and that most Iraqis will welcome
their "liberation" from Saddam; that a new, pro-U.S. government will
quickly and easily be put into place; that fighting between competing
ethnic factions will be limited and easily brought under control; that
anti-American protests in other Muslim countries will not get out of hand;
and that American forces will be withdrawn after a relatively short
occupation period of six months to a year.

It is not difficult, however, to imagine less optimistic scenarios. In
these scenarios, the Iraqis could put up stiff resistance and conduct
house-to-house fighting in Baghdad, thereby producing significant U.S.
casualties and leading, in turn, to heavy U.S. air and missile strikes on
populated areas, resulting in high civilian casualties. Under these
scenarios, the Iraqis will use their chemical and biological weapons in a
final spasm of self-destruction, producing untold civilian and combatant
casualties. The surviving Iraqis will turn against their American
"liberators," resulting in constant sniping and acts of terrorism. The
Kurds and Shiites and Sunnis will fight over the spoils of war, producing
widespread carnage and trapping U.S. forces in the middle. American troops
will remain in Iraq for a generation, or more, producing hatred and
resistance throughout the Muslim world and increased levels of terrorism
elsewhere.

Which scenario will prevail? Nobody can be certain at this point. Those
who favor a war with Iraq tend to believe that Iraqi resistance will be
light and that the rest of the optimistic scenario will fall into place.
But no one can guarantee that any of this will come to pass, and there are
many experts who believe that the likelihood of things going awry are very
great. For example, the CIA has indicated that Iraq is most likely to use
its WMD in the event that Iraq is attacked and defeat appears likely. In
weighing the relative merits of going to war with Iraq, therefore, one
should reckon on the worst possible outcome, not the best. One must ask:
are the purported benefits of war so great as to outweigh all of the
possible negative repercussions?

And this leads to the most fundamental question of all: WHY are we going
to war? What is really motivating President Bush and his senior advisers
to incur these enormous risks?

In their public pronouncements, President Bush and his associates have
advanced three reasons for going to war with Iraq and ousting Saddam
Hussein: (1) to eliminate Saddam's WMD arsenals; (2) to diminish the
threat of international terrorism; and (3) to promote democracy in Iraq
and the surrounding areas.

These are, indeed, powerful motives for going to war. But are they
genuine? Is this what is really driving the rush to war? To answer this,
we need to examine each motive in turn. In doing so, moreover, it is
necessary to keep in mind that the United States cannot do everything. If
we commit hundreds of thousands of American troops and hundreds of
billions of dollars to the conquest, occupation, and reconstruction of
Iraq, we cannot easily do the same in other countries--we simply don't
have the resources to invade and occupy every country that poses a
hypothetical threat to the United States or is deserving of regime change.
So a decision to attack Iraq means a decision to refrain from other
actions that might also be important for U.S. security or the good of the
world.

(1) Eliminating weapons of mass destruction: The reason most often given
by the administration for going to war with Iraq is to reduce the risk of
a WMD attack on the United States. To be sure, a significant WMD attack on
the United States would be a terrible disaster, and it is appropriate for
the President of the United States to take effective and vigorous action
to prevent this from happening. If this is, in fact, Bush's primary
concern, then one would imagine that he would 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
is this what Bush is actually doing? The answer is no. Anyone who takes
the trouble to examine the global WMD proliferation threat closely and to
gauge the relative likelihood of various WMD scenarios would have to
conclude that the greatest threat of WMD usage against the United States
at the present time comes from North Korea and Pakistan, not Iraq.

North Korea and Pakistan pose a greater WMD threat to the United States
than Iraq for several reasons. First of all, they both possess much bigger
WMD arsenals. Pakistan is known to possess several dozen nuclear warheads
along with missiles and planes capable of delivering them hundreds of
miles away; it is also suspected of having developed 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 one, even under the
best of circumstances. Iraq may possess some chemical and biological
weapons and a dozen or so Scud-type missiles that were hidden at the end
of the 1991 Gulf war, but it is not known whether any of these items are
still in working order and available for military use. Equally important
is the question of intention: how likely are these countries to actually
use their WMD munitions? Nobody can answer this with any degree of
certainty, of course. But there are a few things that can be said.

To begin with, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has publicly stated
that he was prepared to employ nuclear weapons against India last year
when New Delhi massed its forces on Pakistan's border and threatened to
attack unless Pakistan curbed the activities of Islamic militants in
Kashmir. This does not mean that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons
against the United States, but it does indicate a readiness to employ such
weapons as an instrument of war; it is also easy to imagine a scenario in
which someone else comes to power who is far more anti-American than
Musharraf.

Just as worrisome is the fact that the North Koreans have declared that
they would consider any move by the United States and the UN to impose
economic sanctions on North Korea as punishment for its pursuit of nuclear
weapons as an act of war, to which they would respond accordingly, turning
the United States into a "sea of fire." Again, this does not mean that
they would actually choose to use their nuclear weapons, but it is not
hard to imagine a scenario in which war breaks out and the North Koreans
use their WMD in a desperate bid to stave off defeat.

On the other hand, the CIA has concluded that Saddam Hussein will not
choose to use his country's WMD capabilities against the United States so
long as his regime remains intact; it is only in the case of imminent U.S.
conquest of Baghdad that he might be tempted to use these weapons.

The Bush administration has also indicated that war with Iraq is justified
in order to prevent Iraq from providing WMD to anti-American terrorists.
The transfer of WMD technology to terrorist groups is a genuine
concern--but it is in Pakistan where the greatest threat of such
transference exists, not Iraq. In Pakistan, many senior military officers
are known to harbor great sympathy for Kashmiri militants and other
extremist Islamic movements; with anti-Americanism intensifying throughout
the region, it is not hard to imagine these officers providing the
militants with some of Pakistan's WMD weapons and technology. On the other
hand, the current leadership in Iraq has no such ties with Islamic
extremists; on the contrary, Saddam has been a life-long enemy of the
militant Islamists and they view him in an equally hostile manner.

It follows from all this that 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. But this is
not, of course, what the administration is doing. Instead, it has
minimized the threat from Pakistan and North Korea and focused almost
exclusively on the threat from Iraq. It is clear, then, that protecting
the United States from WMD attack is not the primary justification for
invading Iraq; if it were, we would be talking about an assault on
Pakistan and/or North Korea, not Iraq.

(2) Combating terrorism: The administration has argued at great length
that an invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein would constitute
the culmination of and the greatest success in the war against terrorism.
Why this is so has never been made entirely clear, but it is said that
Saddam's hostility toward the United States somehow sustains and
invigorates the terrorist threat to this country. It follows, therefore,
that the elimination of Saddam would result in a great defeat for
international terrorism and greatly weaken its capacity to attack the
United States.

Were any of this were true, an invasion of Iraq might make sense from an
anti-terrorism point of view. But 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 and replace it with one that does. The
Baathist regime in Iraq does not qualify as such a regime; thus, under Al
Qaeda doctrine, it must be swept away, along with the equally deficient
governments in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. If follows from this 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.

In addressing this matter, moreover, it is necessary to keep the
Israeli-Palestinian struggle in mind. For most Arab Muslims, whatever
their views of Saddam Hussein, the United States is a hypocritical power
because it tolerates (or even supports) the use of state terror by Israel
against the Palestinians while making war against Baghdad for the same
sort of behavior. It is this perception that is fueling the anti-American
current now running through the Muslim world. An American invasion of Iraq
will not quiet that current, but excite it. It is thus exceedingly
difficult to see how a U.S. invasion of Iraq will produce a stunning
victory in the war against terrorism; if anything, it will trigger a new
round of anti-American violence. Hence, it is very difficult to conclude
that the administration is motivated by anti-terrorism in seeking to
topple Hussein.

(3) The promotion of democracy: The ouster of Saddam Hussein, it is
claimed, will clear the space for the Iraqi people (under American
guidance, of course) to establish a truly democratic government and serve
as a beacon and inspiration for the spread of democracy throughout the
Islamic world, which is said to be sadly deficient in this respect.
Certainly, the spread of democracy to the Islamic world would be a good
thing, and should be encouraged. But is there any reason to believe that
the administration is motivated by a desire to spread democracy in its
rush to war with Iraq?

There are several reasons to doubt this. First of all, many of the top
leaders of the current administration, particularly Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney, were completely happy to embrace the Saddam Hussein
dictatorship in the 1980s when Iraq was the enemy of our enemy (that is,
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. As part of this
policy, Reagan removed Iraq 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 Donald Rumsfeld, who traveled to
Baghdad and met with Hussein in December 1983 as a special representative
of President Reagan. At the same time, 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 November 1, 1983 that the Iraqis
were using chemical weapons against the Iranians "almost daily," and were
aware that U.S. satellite data could be used by Baghdad to pinpoint CW
attacks on Iranian positions. Dick Cheney, who took over as Secretary of
Defense in 1989, continued the practice of supplying Iran with secret
intelligence data. Not once did Mssrs. Rumsfeld and Cheney speak out
against Iraqi CW use or suggest that the United States discontinue its
support of the Hussein dictatorship during this period. So there is no
reason whatsoever to believe that the current leadership has a principled
objection to dictatorial rule in Iraq--it is only when Saddam is
threatening us instead of our enemies that they care about his tyrannical
behavior.

There is another reason to be skeptical about the Bush administration's
commitment to democracy in this part of the world, and that is the fact
that the administration has developed close relationships with a number of
other dictatorial or authoritarian regimes in the area. Most notably, the
United States had developed close ties with the post-Soviet dictatorships
in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Each of these countries is
ruled by a Stalinist dictator who once served as a loyal agent of the
Soviet empire: Heydar Aliyev in Azerbaijan, Nursultan Nazarbaev of
Kazakhstan, and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. Only slightly less odious
than Saddam Hussein, these tyrants have been welcomed to the White House
and showered with American aid and support. And there certainly is nothing
even remotely democratic about Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, two of America's
other close allies in the region. So it is hard to believe that the Bush
administration is motivated by a love of democracy, when it has been so
quick to embrace patently undemocratic regimes that have agreed to do its
bidding.

So, if concern over WMD proliferation, or the reduction of terrorism, or a
love of democracy do not explain the administration's determination to
oust Saddam Hussein, what does?

I believe that the answer is a combination of three factors, all related
to the pursuit of oil and the preservation of America's status as the
paramount world power. Ever since the end of the cold war, American
policymakers (whether Democratic or Republican) have sought to preserve
America's "sole superpower" status and to prevent the rise of a "peer
competitor" that could challenge U.S. paramountcy on anything approaching
equal terms. At the same time, American leaders have become increasingly
concerned over the country's growing dependence on imported oil,
especially oil from the Persian Gulf. The United States now relies on
imported oil for 55% of its requirements, and this percentage is expected
to rise to 65% in 2020 and keep growing thereafter. This dependency is the
"Achilles heel" for American power: unless Persian Gulf oil can be kept
under American control, our ability to remain the dominant world power
would be put into question.

These concerns undergird the three motives for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The first derives from America's own dependence on Persian Gulf oil and
from the principle, formally enshrined in the Carter Doctrine, that the
United States will not permit a hostile state from ever coming into a
position where it can threaten America's access to the Gulf. The second is
the pivotal role played by the Persian Gulf in supplying oil to the rest
of the world: whoever controls the Gulf automatically maintains a
stranglehold on the global economy, and the Bush administration wants that
to be the United States and no one else. And the third is anxiety about
the future availability of oil: the United States is becoming increasingly
dependent on Saudi Arabia to supply its imported petroleum, and Washington
is desperate to find an alternative to Saudi Arabia should it ever be the
case that access to that country is curtailed--and the only country in the
world with large enough reserves to compensate for the loss of Saudi
Arabia is Iraq. Let us examine each of these three factors in turn.

First, on U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf oil and the Carter Doctrine.
Ever since World War II, when American policymakers first acknowledged
that the United States would someday become dependent on Middle Eastern
petroleum, it has been American policy to ensure that the United States
would always have unrestrained access to Persian Gulf oil. At first, the
United States relied on Great Britain to protect American access to the
Gulf, and then, when Britain pulled out of the area in 1971, the U.S.
chose to rely on the Shah of Iran. But when, in 1979, the Shah was
overthrown by Islamic militants loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini,
Washington decided that it would have to assume responsibility on its own
to protect the oil flow. The result was the Carter Doctrine of January 23,
1980, which states that unrestricted access to Persian Gulf is a vital
interest of the United States and that, in protection of that interest,
the United States will employ "any means necessary, including military
force."

This principle was first invoked in 1987, during the Iran-Iraq War, when
Iranian gunboats fired on Kuwaiti oil tankers and the U.S. Navy began
escorting Kuwaiti tankers through the Gulf. It was next invoked in August
1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and posed an implied threat to Saudi
Arabia. President Bush the elder responded to that threat by driving the
Iraqis out of Kuwait, in Operation Desert Storm; he did not, however,
continue the war into Iraq proper and remove Saddam Hussein himself.
Instead, the U.S. engaged in the "containment" of Iraq, entailing an air
and sea blockade.

Now, President Bush the younger seeks to abandon containment and pick up
Operation Desert Storm where it left off in 1991. The reason being given
for this is that Saddam is making more progress in the development of WMD,
but the underlying principle is still the Carter Doctrine: Iraq under
Saddam poses an implied threat to U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil, and so
must be removed. As noted by Vice President Dick Cheney on August 26,
2002, in his important speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "Armed
with these weapons of terror and a seat at the top of 10% of the world's
oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of
the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's
energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the
region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear
blackmail." Stripped to its essence, this is a direct invocation of the
Carter Doctrine.

To underscore this, it is useful to compare Cheney's VFW speech to his
comments 12 years earlier, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, before
the Senate Armed Services Committee: "Iraq controlled 10% of the world's
reserves prior to the invasion of Kuwait. Once Saddam Hussein took Kuwait,
he doubled that to approximately 20% of the world's known oil reserves....
Once he acquired Kuwait and deployed an army as large as the one he
possesses [on the border of Saudi Arabia], he was clearly in a position to
dictate the future of worldwide energy policy, and that gave him a
stranglehold on our economy and on that of most of the other nations of
the world as well." The atmospherics may have changed since 1990, but we
are still dealing with the Carter Doctrine: Saddam must be removed because
of the potential threat he poses to the frae flow of oil from the Persian
Gulf to the U.S. and its allies.

The second administration objective springs from the language employed by
Cheney in his 1990 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee:
whoever controls the flow of Persian Gulf oil has a "stranglehold" not
only on our economy but also "on that of most of that of the other nations
of the world as well." This is a powerful image, and perfectly describes
the administration's thinking about the Gulf area, except in reverse: by
serving as the dominant power in the Gulf, WE maintain a "stranglehold"
over the economies of other nations. This gives us extraordinary leverage
in world affairs, and explains to some degree why states like Japan,
Britain, France, and Germany--states that are even more dependent on
Persian Gulf oil than we are--defer to Washington on major international
issues (like Iraq) even when they disagree with us.

Maintenance of a stranglehold over Persian Gulf oil is also consistent
with the administration's declared goal of attaining permanent military
superiority over all other nations. If you read administration statements
on U.S. national security policy, you will find that one theme stands out
above all others: the United States must prevent any potential rival from
ever reaching the point where it could compete with the United States on
something resembling equal standing. As articulated in "The National
Security Strategy of the United States of America" (released by President
Bush in September 2002), this principle holds that American forces must be
"strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military
build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United
States."

One way to accomplish this, of course, is to pursue advances in technology
that allow the United States to remain ahead of all potential rivals in
military systems--which is what the administration hopes to accomplish by
adding tens of billions of dollars to the Department of Defense budget.
Another way to do this is maintain a stranglehold on the economy of
potential rivals, so that they will refrain from challenging us out of
fear of being choked to death through the denial of vital energy supplies.
Japan and the European countries are already in this vulnerable position,
and will remain so for the foreseeable future; but now China is also
moving into this position, as it becomes increasingly dependent on oil
from the Persian Gulf. Like the U.S., China is running out of oil, and,
like us, it has nowhere to go to make up the difference except the Gulf.
But since WE control access to the Gulf, and China lacks the power to
break our stranglehold, we can keep China in a vulnerable, subordinate
position indefinitely. As I see it, then, the removal of Saddam Hussein
and his replacement by someone beholden to the United States is a key part
of a broader U.S. strategy aimed at assuring permanent American global
dominance. Or, as Michael Ignatieff put it in his seminal essay on
America's emerging empire, the concentration of so much oil in the Gulf
"makes it what a military strategist would call the empire's center of
gravity" ("The Burden," The New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003).

And finally, there is the issue of America's long-term energy dilemma. The
problem is as follows: The United States relies on oil to supply about 40%
of its energy requirements, more than any other source. At one time, this
country relied almost entirely on domestic oil to supply its needs; but
our need for oil is growing all the time and our domestic fields--among
the oldest in the world--are rapidly being exhausted. So our need for
imported oil will grow with each passing year. And the more we turn to
foreign sources for our oil, the more we will have to turn to the Persian
Gulf, because most of the world's untapped oil--at least two-thirds of
it--is located in the Gulf area. We can of course rip up Alaska and
extract every drop of oil there, but that would reduce our dependence on
imported oil by only about 1-2 percentage points--an insignificant amount.
We could also rely for a share of our oil on non-Gulf suppliers like
Russia, Venezuela, the Caspian Sea states, and Africa, but they have much
less oil than the Persian Gulf countries and they are using it up faster.
So, the more you look into the future, the greater will become our
dependence on the Gulf.

Now, at the current time, U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf oil means, in
all practical terms, American dependence on Saudi Arabia, because Saudi
Arabia has more oil than everyone else--about 250 billion barrels, or
one-fourth of world reserves. That gives Saudi Arabia a lot of indirect
influence over our economy and our way of life. And, as you know, there
are many people in this country who are resentful of the Saudis because of
their financial ties to charities linked to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
More to the point, Saudi Arabia is a major backer of OPEC and tends to
control the global availability of oil--something that makes American
officials very nervous, especially when the Saudis use their power to put
pressure on the United States to alter some of its policies, for example
with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For all of these reasons, American leaders would like to reduce America's
dependence on Saudi Arabia. But there is only ONE way to permanently
reduce America's reliance on Saudi Arabia: by taking over Iraq and using
it as an alternative source of petroleum. Iraq is the ONLY country in the
world with sufficient reserves to balance Saudi Arabia: at least 112
billion barrels in proven reserves, and as much as 200-300 billion barrels
of potential reserves. By occupying Iraq and controlling its government,
the United States will solve its long-term oil-dependency dilemma for a
decade or more. And this, I believe, is a major consideration in the
administration's decisionmaking about Iraq.

It is this set of factors, I believe, that explain the Bush
administration's determination to go to war with Iraq--not concern over
WMD, terrorism, or the spread of democracy. But having said this, we need
to ask: do these objectives, assuming they're the correct ones, still
justify a war on Iraq? Some Americans may think so. There are, indeed,
advantages to being positioned on the inside of a powerful empire with
control over the world's second-largest supply of untapped petroleum. If
nothing else, American motorists will be able to afford the gas for their
SUVs, vans, and pick-up trucks for another decade, and maybe longer. There
will also be lots of jobs in the military and in the military-industrial
complex, or as representatives of American multinational corporations
(although, with respect to the latter, I would not advise traveling in
most of the rest of the world unless accompanied by a small army of
bodyguards). But there will also be a price to pay. Empires tend to
require the militarization of society, and that will entail putting more
people into uniform, one way or another. It will also mean increased
spending on war, and reduced spending on education and other domestic
needs. It will entail more secrecy and intrusion into our private lives.
All of this has to be entered into the equation. And if you ask me, empire
is not worth the price.

(Michael T. Klare <mklare at hampshire.edu>, author of Resource Wars: The New
Landscape of Global Conflict and a professor of peace and world security
studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., is a military affairs
analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org).)