Five Years After Invasion of Iraq: Why Did We Do It?

By Jim Lobe, IPS News. Posted March 19, 2008.

So why, exactly, did the U.S. invade Iraq five years ago this week?

The official reasons -- the threat posed to the U.S. and its allies by Saddam Hussein's alleged programs of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the possibility that he would pass along those arms to al Qaeda -- have long since been discarded by the overwhelming weight of the evidence, or, more precisely, the lack of evidence that such a threat ever existed.

Liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Hussein's particularly unforgiving and bloodthirsty version of Ba'athism and thus setting an irresistible precedent that would spread throughout the Arab world -- a theme pushed by the administration of President George W. Bush mostly after the invasion, as it became clear that the officials reasons could not be justified -- appears to have been the guiding obsession of really only one member of the Bush team, and not a particularly influential one at that: Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Then there's the theory that Bush -- whose enigmatic psychology, particularly his relationship to his father, has already provided grist for several book-publishing mills -- wanted to show up his dad for failing to take Baghdad in 1991. Or he sought to "finish the job" that his dad had begun in 1991; and/or avenge his dad for Hussein's alleged (but highly questionable) assassination attempt against Bush I in Kuwait after the war.

Because Bush was the ultimate "Decider," as he himself has put it, and because no one who ever served at top levels in the administration has ever been able to say precisely when (let alone why) the decision was made to invade Iraq, this explanation cannot be entirely dismissed as an answer.

Then there is the question of oil. Was the administration acting on behalf of an oil industry desperate to get its hands on Mesopotamian oil that had long been denied it as a result of U.N. and unilateral sanctions prohibiting business between U.S. companies and Hussein?

Given both Bush's and Vice President Dick Cheney's long-standing ties to the industry and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's assertion in his recent memoir that "The Iraq war is largely about oil," this theory has definite appeal -- particularly to those on the left who made "No Blood for Oil" a favorite mantra at anti-war protests in the run-up to the invasion, just as they did -- with much greater plausibility -- before the 1991 Gulf War.

The problem, however, is that there is little or no evidence that Big Oil, an extremely cautious beast in the global corporate menagerie, favored a war, particularly one carried out in a way (unilaterally) that risked destabilizing the world's most oil-rich region, especially Saudi Arabia and the emirates.

On the contrary, the Rice University Institute that bears the name of former Secretary of State James Baker -- a man who has both represented and embodied Big Oil throughout his long legal career -- publicly warned early on that if Bush absolutely, positively had to invade Iraq for whatever reason, he should not even consider it unless two conditions were met: 1) that the action was authorized by the U.N. Security Council; and 2) that nothing whatever be done after the invasion to suggest that the motivation had to do with the acquisition by U.S. oil companies of Iraq's oil resources.

That is not to say that oil was irrelevant to the administration's calculations, but perhaps in a different sense than that meant by the "No Blood for Oil" slogan. After all, oil is an absolutely indispensable requirement for running modern economies and militaries. And the invasion was a forceful -- indeed, a shock- and awe-some -- demonstration to the rest of the world, especially potential strategic rivals like China, Russia, or even the European Union, of Washington's ability to quickly and effectively conquer and control an oil-rich nation in the heart of the energy-rich Middle East/Gulf region any time it wishes, perhaps persuading those lesser powers that challenging the U.S. could well prove counter-productive to long-term interests, if not their supply of energy in the short term.

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Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service.