Twenty years after the start of the Iraq War, one question remains difficult to answer convincingly. Just why did the United States, under President George W Bush, invade and occupy Iraq? Answers from academics and think tanks range from the need to safeguard oil supplies held by a rogue state that had taken over Kuwait and now controlled a fifth of the world’s oil reserves, through to Iraq supporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Such answers may be plausible enough and include a degree of truth, but we still have to ask: why go to war then? It was barely a year since the US and a few partners had terminated the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The US had defeated and dispersed the al-Qaeda movement behind the 9/11 attacks, so if the so-called ‘war on terror’ was over, why take on Iraq?
The US domestic political context is important here. Democrat president Bill Clinton had served two terms from 1993 to 2001, and over that time a hard-right vision had emerged within the Republican Party.
