The initial Iraq invasion was to enforce Kuwaiti sovereignty and stop Saddam's unilateral aggression which was destabilizing the region. We tried bribing him with aid, but he still invaded, so the U.S. kept true to their promise to enforce agreements. The U.S. helped a small country and protected its image.
The second Iraq war may or may not have been WMD based, but Saddam slaughtered hundreds of thousands of mostly Shi'a and Kurdish civilians. Saddam's badness to ease of defeat ratio was probably the highest in the world, making him an easy target. You never know what will replace a bad dictator, but I can see how it would be hard to stand by knowing the guy has killed so many and do nothing.
(Not a conservative, per se, but I try to understand all sides.)
The Second Iraq War was not based on any altruistic motive. If it was, the US would say so, instead of manufacturing evidence for WMDs. We can safely conclude that the actual reasons for the invasions are something that the US government wanted to hide.
Beyond that, the war in Iraq killed more people than Saddam Hussein's genocide, so that justification simply doesn't fly. It's complete bogus, through and through.
The people behind Iraq invasion were all part of 'Project for a New American Century' which promoted 'Pax Americana' in the Middle East, i.e. a stabilizing occupying force, probably the overthrow of Iraq and Syria.
They envisioned Iraq being a little more like Gulf States i.e. more stable, allies, and a buffer between Israel/Iran/Saudi Arabia.
And some nice construction contracts for Bechtel.
And a geostrategic signal of power.
The WMD thing was a populist narrative justification, the real motivation is literally published for all to see, it's just not what the media war was fought over.
Nobody ever fought a war for purely altruistic motives, it's unlikely the Americans were to have joined WW2 unless they were at risk themselves, but that doesn't mean there can't be motives and actions that are better than others.
Weirdly, the justification for Iraq I think would have been entirely function of historical revisionism given the success or failure. If Iraq was more stable and prosperous then 'it was the right thing to do', if the invasion was a failure, then it 'was a mistake' and that's it. Iraq has $5K/USD per capita GDP now, it has a government, elections, there's progress. Iran has a lot of control and of course Kurds are doing their own thing, but there is baseline order. 'Was It Worth It?' is another question, maybe in 50 years we can understand definitively what the real cost of finally getting rid of a Saddam-like institution was.
Yes, definitely partly, manifestation of that I believe.
But it's complicated though ... the US is a huge part in keeping up that set of dominos that is the international order. But it doesn't mix well with hyper nationalism either, and definitely not military adventurism either.
Sick of hearing these nonsense hidden reasons that are completely without merit. The reasons we went to war were very clear, 'Saddam was stockpiling WMDs and was a threat to world.'. They were wrong, they simply made a colossal mistake.
I'm sick of hearing weak US cope defending a sick crime perpetrated by know fabulators like Rumsfeld and Cheney. They ran a similar creating writing program back during the cold war, inventing the "missile gap" with similarly imaginary facts.
If you look on a map, Iraq and Afghanistan are both border states with Iran, one on either side. Do you think that's just a coincidence?
I'm not saying either was a good idea at the time, and they were both obviously bad ideas with hindsight, but it seems there was possibly a greater strategy at play.
The publicly stated reasons for going to war, and the actual reasons, are different, though obviously related.
Regular citizens generally are not going to buy into complicated arguments or vague, geostrategic issues, they often need clear, more unambiguous line of reasoning. Especially those that align with their supposed values.
The proles need to hear stories about 'Freedom' and 'Democracy' and 'Evil Tyrants' and scary things about 'Masses of Chemical Weapons'.
US leadership wanted to enter WW2 long before the American public could be convinced. It took an attack on American soil, and dead Americans to tilt public opinion.
The US used a 'False Flag' (Gulf of Tonkin) operation in Vietnam to help build public support and credibility for intervention in Vietnam.
George Bush proposed a 'False Flag' UN airplane incident apparently, an idea that was quashed.
This is the case in every war, without getting too controversial, even the US revolutionary war.
It all seems kind of Machiavellian and duplicitous, and it is, but it's also the reality of leadership in ugly scenarios. Imagine that you're the leader of a nation that really, really needs to do something that the plebes don't want to do? It's a weird kind of moral dilemma.
FYI I'm not justifying any of these decisions, just illustrating the incongruity between actual planning, and the marketing / communicating of it.
COVID is an example of that, it's a massive exercise in 'Public Communications' where the stakes are existential. What we are being told publicly i.e. the 'Narrative' isn't a lie by any means, but it's definitely designed to create outcomes.
So:
" The reasons we went to war were very clear, 'Saddam was stockpiling WMDs and was a threat to world.'. "
No, that's just what they said publicly. That's how war was 'marketed'.
Also - they used the term 'Terrorism' a lot with respect to Saddam, i.e. 'War On Terror'. Of course, Saddam was definitely not a radical religious terrorist, he was basically the opposite of that.
Everyone pushing for the war knew that the material evidence for WMD's was pretty weak.
PNAC made several publications before Bush came to power, and the public members of PNAC literally filled the White House.
Those who were against (or more Dovish) on the war i.e. Colin Powell and Condi Rice - were the not part of PNAC.
So imagine if there was this 'Think Tank X' that wanted to push for some thing, 'X' and then when Biden comes to power, more than 1/2 of his Cabinet is literally from this special 'Think Tank X' and then after 1 year, the all push hard for this 'X thing' but communicate it to the public as 'Y'?
You can hardly say it's about 'Y'.
It's about 'X', it's fairly clear.
There were 17 members of PNAC in the White House. And the President's own Brother.
It was oil control. USA now imports almost as much oil from Iraq (6% of total imports) as Mexico (7%). Iraq's oil production has doubled since the invasion. One of the first buildings secured in the last invasion was the Oil Ministry, which had more priority than museums and government offices. Whoever controls Iraq's oil, controls its wealth.
The US had no problem providing Saddam with money, arms, and biological weapons in the 80s[1], even after he used them against Iranians. And of course, the US been involved in Iran since 1953[2] when they overthrew their first and only democratically elected PM because he wanted to nationalize their oil reserves. As long as Saddam massacred the "right" people, the US fully supported him.
As far as instability, the very boundaries of Iraq were purposefully drawn so that the Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis would be locked into the same nation state and easier to control. Saddam was just one of the pawns in the great oil game the US and the western world has been playing there. The fight over access to oil - the singularly important resource that enables modern armies and economies to function - is the underlying cause of the instability in that region, and has been for the last century.
The problem is that none of those answers were provided as a reason to instigate a 2nd war and occupation of Iraq.
Its an attempted justification of a pointless war, an excuse. 'We got rid of the bad guy', If someone bombed your cities, destroyed your power and water supply while going on to occupy your country for years leading to the deaths of 100,000s, would you hail them as liberators?
As for Iraq, its completely destroyed. Saddam was peanuts compared to the unholy inferno the US brought down on Iraq. Good guys don't instigate wars and decimate cities. The US spent 100s of billions to 'fight terror'. How do you fight terror? With terror apparently.
The interest in regional stability is probably rooted in oil. The U.S. hasn't taken any captured oil fields and sold the oil for themselves, as far as I know, so I think they just want the region to be a stable, predicable marketplace for dead dinosaurs.
And blowing up major cities, destroying basic utilities like power and water and creating a situation thats lead to civil war involving factions from neighbouring countries is 'creating stability'. This is some bizarro world logic.
They already had a civil war. Saddam quelled a big uprising among Shi'a and Kurds. Unity among the Muslim factions is stronger than national unity, so your proposed consequence already existed for 1000 years.
Yeah difference being those conflicts didn’t involve raining 1000s of bombs down over major cities. The situation for civil war already existed, so the best option is to light the fuse by bombing the place and leaving a power vacuum? Not a great plan to eliminate terrorism or promote stability. It’s not hard to think of better ways to spend tax dollars and avoid the emotional toll of losing many good people.
“Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.”
Richard Perle, chair
The Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
July 11, 2002
"Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader... and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies."
I've added a second quote that more directly addresses the question. But even the first one clearly points to the role of oil in deciding the invasion: there's no need to price the thing out because Iraq has more than enough oil to pay for any and all reconstruction itself. Of course that's going to be a factor in any invasion decision.
In any case, further quote from the second one:
> To this end, as Whitehall documents obtained by the Independent show, the US and British sought to privatise Iraqi oil production with a view to allow foreign companies to takeover. Minutes of a meeting held on 12 May 2003 said:
"The future shape of the Iraqi industry will affect oil markets, and the functioning of Opec, in both of which we have a vital interest."
> A "desirable" outcome for Iraqi's crippled oil industry, officials concluded, is:
"... an oil sector open and attractive to foreign investment, with appropriate arrangements for the exploitation of new fields."
Interesting. So just oil in a general sense but also Iraq as a destabilizing entity in the area where oil is a primary natural resource. We have to be careful not to be confused with the common conspiracy theory that the US wanted to steal Iraqi oil.
I can buy that. This also needs some context though. Meeting minutes can be seen as brainstorming ideas. Having oil is huge though- having a good natural resource cash cow helps you pay/feed your military and fund an economy- something we see Afghanistan lacked. Good point though, noted. Thanks.
> We have to be careful not to be confused with the common conspiracy theory that the US wanted to steal Iraqi oil
Under Saddam, Iraq's oil was nationalized, and most of the profits went to Iraq's government, with Chinese and Russian companies taking less than 10%. After the invasion, the US pushed for a law that would allow no-bid contracts to western oil companies[1]. It never passed because that would have been the end of Maliki's government.
So, to be fair, we wanted to steal the profits from Iraqi oil production, and secure access to the 3rd largest reserves on earth.
You are forgetting the whole part where Saddam asked/told us he was invading, and the US was silent, giving him tacit permission to invade. All to further US aims in the region. Saddam was our patsy.
I think this is a very fair answer. Additionally, the Clinton admin bombed Iraq for four days in 1998, the same year the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal broke.
You can't retroactively justify the war in hindsight on false reasoning. 'Saddam was a bad guy' is not a justification for war and occupation. If the American people were told they would need to spend 100s of billions and lose countless young lives for the sole purpose of overthrowing a dictator in a foreign country, there would have been no war.
The reasons for going to war were a lie, and claiming that the removal of Saddam was the true victory is an excuse.
> but Saddam slaughtered hundreds of thousands of mostly Shi'a and Kurdish civilians
I'm not saying that this isn't very bad, and worth stopping, but how is it different from what happens all the time on a lot of places on that region? (Is the US planning an invasion of Israel right now? I don't think so.)
Countries normally don't interfere on such things because doing it has a tendency of backfiring and making things worse than they were at the beginning. From my impression many thousands of km away, the US people mostly did held that opinion at the time, and would refuse to allow an invasion if the government didn't lie to them. Also, the WMD focus was such a blatant lie that it's impossible that anybody with any power believed it.
The second Iraq war may or may not have been WMD based, but Saddam slaughtered hundreds of thousands of mostly Shi'a and Kurdish civilians. Saddam's badness to ease of defeat ratio was probably the highest in the world, making him an easy target. You never know what will replace a bad dictator, but I can see how it would be hard to stand by knowing the guy has killed so many and do nothing.
(Not a conservative, per se, but I try to understand all sides.)