America and the Iraq war, or thinking “inside out”

“I take guidance solely from the inside out of what is being said. Not the opposite, but the inside out. The inside out…(shows) how things are really made”.

Juan Benet, In the Penumbra

The murderous attacks of 11 March in Madrid reconfirmed the inanity of purely military action against terrorism. These attacks, the most serious in the history of terrorism in Europe, returned the Iraq war to the centre of Spanish political debate. Amid vast anger among Spanish citizens at the deceitful way their government handled information about the attacks, the opposition socialist (PSOE) party won the general election three days later, and the party's leader José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero soon reaffirmed his promise to withdraw all Spanish troops from Iraq.

For openDemocracy’s reports, analysis, forum discussion and online debate among European writers about the Madrid attacks, click here

Thus, the Iraq war - strongly endorsed by José María Aznar’s Partido Popular government, to the overwhelming dismay of Spanish citizens - returned suddenly to the centre of public debate, along with the revelations in its aftermath over the political manipulation of intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD.

Yet as this recent history returns to mobilise citizens and haunt their leaders, it is important to emphasise that the debate over the existence of WMD in Iraq, or about whether Bush, Blair or Aznar exaggerated the threat, follows a false trail which distances us from reality. Such a debate entails the acceptance of an erroneous premise, and suits only those who seek to mislead national and international public opinion.

As Juan Benet warns, it is better to analyse the “inside out” of things to see what they are actually made of – and to avoid being duped by them. In the case of the Iraq war, this entails analysing the WMD question, but also two other aspects related to this war: the role of the United Nations and the division of the European Union.

Let us be clear: it was not the existence of WMD that provoked the Iraq war. On the contrary, it was precisely the absence of these weapons which prodded Washington to the military conquest of Iraq; it is this absence which made the war appear the simplest and least risky way of destroying one part of the “axis of evil” and to anchor the military power of the United States in the Middle East. After all, George Bush and the neo-conservatives who exercise a decisive influence on his foreign policy did not initially charge Iraq with possession of WMD. It was Iraq’s non-respect of Security Council resolutions, and the alleged connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida’s terrorism, that provoked their ire.

Only later did the existence of these arms become a central argument, because this allowed the implementation of the doctrine of pre-emption embodied in the National Security Strategy of September 2002. This doctrine stipulates that neither a UN Security Council resolution nor an imminent military threat is necessary for the United States to launch a strike; it suffices that the American government, unilaterally, allege that the danger be sufficient.

For openDemocracy’s debate on the Bush doctrine and its implications, click here

In the case of Iraq, WMD furnished this “sufficient threat”; to brandish the WMD's existence became necessary to ensure the support of American public opinion and counterbalance the opposition of the British public to the prospective attack. In a controversial interview in Vanity Fair in May 2003, the deputy secretary of state for defence, Paul Wolfowitz, acknowledged that putting WMD at the heart of the argument for military action was a pretext to create harmony between different branches of the American government, rather than a genuine concern.

Another, more recent rationale of the Bush administration for the war launched in March 2003 is the resolve to liberate Iraq from the cruel tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The famous neo-conservative analysts, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, defend a position they call the Bush doctrine, “which reserves the right to put an end to these regimes (which attempt to develop WMD, threaten their neighbours or brutalise their own citizens), be it by diplomatic or military means”. But this argument could neither win universal favour nor create consensus at the heart of the American administration, because the list of countries which fall under such a definition is too long.

Why Iraq?

Thus, if WMD was a belated and insupportable criterion for the Iraq war, what truly lay behind Washington’s decision?

First, the neo-conservatives had always had the goal of installing a “new world order” based on American military power. Richard Perle, one of the best-known representatives of this group, proposes in a recent book (co-authored with David Frum, architect of the phrase “axis of evil”) that the United States should act firmly and immediately against Iran, and cast a death-blow against Syria’s pro-terrorist regime. For the neo-conservatives, the response to terrorism must be the forced imposition of democratic values and free-market systems on enemy countries via the United States’s use of its incomparable military power (it is notable that Bush’s National Security Strategy talks more about the free market than about democracy).

Yet it was not until the impact of 9/11 that the neo-conservatives could attempt to implement their ideas.

Second, then, the brutal attacks of 11 September 2001 presented the American president and his administration with the pressing need to act, to respond, to avoid any accusation of lacking toughness – which, under these circumstances, could have been perceived as a lack of patriotism. Moreover, it was foreseeable to a certain extent that the United States would employ its military machinery, the only area where its superiority is beyond doubt.

But if it is true that armed forces are the classical recourse to conflicts between nation-states, they are not adequate tools for combating terrorism. Precisely because they are aware of this fact, the neo-conservatives recommend attacking “rogue states”, that is to say the countries of the “axis of evil” – a strategy that is not one of fighting terrorism but one aimed at establishing a new world order, founded on the utilisation of American military power.

The third reason for making war on Iraq is related to George W. Bush’s re-election strategy and his desire to avoid the defeat his father experienced, a preoccupation which has been present from the moment he took office. Karl Rove, the principal ideologue of the White House and Bush’s faithful adviser during his tenure as governor of Texas, wagers that “Bush at war” is the best means of achieving this goal.

After the deceptively easy victory in Afghanistan, “Bush at war” returned in the shape of the campaign against Iraq. In fact, as Bob Woodward recounts, Paul Wolfowitz had proposed as early as 15 September 2001 to attack Iraq instead of Afghanistan because this seemed to him a more feasible objective. The former treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, and General Wesley Clark have confirmed that the idea of attacking Iraq was the goal of President Bush’s praetorian guard since the beginning of his tenure; Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial grip on power represented for them a permanent checkmate of the United States.

But this new military action could not remove the unacceptable risks in its execution, epitomised by the possible deployment of chemical or biological weapons by Saddam Hussein against the invader. Thus, an enormous contradiction presented itself: while the American secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, used the WMD argument in an attempt to win the support of the UN Security Council, George Bush’s advisers reached the decision to attack once they could be sure that their troops could not be repelled by chemical or bacteriological attacks.

What United States?

The effort to see things “inside out” which Juan Benet recommends must be extended beyond the question of WMD to wider problems raised by the Iraq war: the future of the United Nations and the division of Europe. A post-war poll by the Pew Research Center (chaired by Madeleine Albright) suggests that the Iraq imbroglio has weakened the UN in the eyes of world public opinion: in none of the twenty countries where the poll was conducted did anyone think that the organisation had played an important role in international conflicts.

This weakness is not an inevitable circumstance, but is also the product of a United States strategy focused on undermining the authority of the UN as a condition for the strike against Iraq. In the American mindset, war is the action to be undertaken when dialogue has come to nothing – when politics or (as in this case) political institutions are exhausted. For neo-conservatives, international institutions and treaties too often simply restrict the American freedom to act.

Richard Perle has written that the United States puts its security in danger if it bends to the authority of the UN. Thus, the weakening of multilateral agencies as a consequence of planned military action is only the obverse of the tenacious desire of the Bush administration to consciously diminish the power of these agencies, in pursuit of its unilateralist strategy.

The same “inside out” principle holds true for the evident division of Europe in the last year: this is not a result of the Iraq war, but rather the goal sought by the ultra-conservative architects of American foreign policy. They have thought for years that a unified Europe would become a counterweight too powerful for the policies they aspire to implement.

Their logic was reflected in the famous (or notorious) pro-Washington “letter of eight” from European leaders, published in January 2003 by the Wall Street Journal. This was in fact an American initiative which the Spanish government hastily adopted and championed to the end. It followed the disdainful comment of the US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, about the division of the continent into an “old” and a “new” Europe – the latter corresponding to those who favoured the US’s new security doctrine.

This forcing of divisions is not simply the consequence of a unilateral attitude, but of a strategy designed to expand America’s room for political manoeuvre while blocking the emergence of unitary European positions.

To my mind, the appropriation of American foreign policy by the neo-conservatives has been an absolute disaster for the international community. In a world where unilateralism is still only a tendency rather than a dominant force, a unique opportunity has been lost to allow existing international institutions to lead the fight against terrorism. The likely result of such an approach would have been necessary reforms in the workings of these institutions, but also their reinforcement, increasingly indispensable in the age of globalisation.

But even this loss of a historic opportunity is exceeded by the damage inflicted by George Bush’s extremist gang after the 9/11 attacks. The unilateral decision to launch a war against Iraq has dealt a serious blow to the existing international order – in whose creation after 1945 the United States played a leading role – and enormously weakened the possibility of a global, efficient fight against terrorism.

Where now?

Here, in turning taken-for-granted explanations and common-sense understandings “inside out”, the real story of the United States and the Iraq war can be discerned. WMD were not the trigger for the war on Iraq, precisely because they never existed; the weakening of the United Nations was not the reason which prodded the Bush administration into action, but a goal of its global strategy; and the division of the European Union is not just the result of its (undeniable) internal contradictions but equally a necessary element in the defence of Washington’s national interests as the dominant neo-conservatives understand them.

The deceit that underlay this project has now been echoed in Europe – in the way that the Spanish government sought to manipulate the information it possessed about the authorship of the 11 March bombings in Madrid. The difference is that, unlike in the United States, the responsible political authorities in Spain paid an immediate and heavy political price.

What Spain demonstrated is that only the ordinary citizens, with their democratic voices and their ability to mobilise, can demand the necessary radical change of political direction which alone can guarantee security for all. Will the United States, and Britain, follow? We shall see.

This article was translated from French by Julian Kramer. A slightly different version was published by the CIDOB Foundation.