Why Bush Went to War

By Patrick Doherty, TomPaine.com. Posted August 5, 2004.

As the nation begins debate on how to reform the intelligence community, it is essential to remember that the Iraq war was not driven by bad intelligence, per se. As Bush's former director of policy planning admitted, this was a "war of choice." Intelligence was not used to make a decision for war, it was manipulated to mislead Americans into backing a war already planned.

Publicly, President Bush offered four rationales to justify the invasion: the presence of WMD, Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda, the possibility of giving WMD to Al Qaeda, and bringing democracy to Iraq. Since the invasion, numerous commissions have shown the first three to be plainly false. The lack of post-war planning, the elevation of Iyad Allawi and the pervasive corruption among U.S.-funded contractors has put the lie to the fourth rationale.

So just why did Bush choose war?

From the evidence before us today, there is no one single reason. Rather, there are three converging and tightly interwoven reasons: oil, Israel and military transformation. The Cheney energy strategy required Iraqi oil; AIPAC and the Christian right wanted to weaken the Arab world to strengthen Israel; and Don Rumsfeld wanted to expedite the transformation of the U.S. military.

Reason #1: The Cheney Energy Policy

The first rationale underlying the Iraq invasion can be found in two recommendations from the vice president's task force on energy policy, delivered in May 2001: "The NEPD Group recommends that the President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy; The NEPD Group recommends the President support initiatives by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Qatar, the UAE, and other suppliers to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment."

America gets its oil from the global market, not from individual countries. But in the 1990s, oil-producing countries took a holiday from expanding production capacity, while demand grew steadily. With the supply/demand balance extremely tight, oil-producing states did not have the financial or engineering capacity to build the additional capacity, meaning the national oil companies in many OPEC states were faced with the need to open their fields to foreign investment. They resisted and prices rose.

In the post-Cold War era, the demand increase is coming from Asia. Chinese export success is raising the living standards of the 200 million Chinese consumers. That means elevated demand for energy, raising prices around the world. But unlike Cold War-era supply shocks, rising demand has the threefold effect of reducing American economic growth, creating price incentives for alternative energy sources and strengthening the political influence of the rising Asian consumers. Add OPEC's production quotas and the situation looked grim—at least to the task force.

That the U.S. government thinks about the security of global oil supplies is nothing new. America has had an explicit policy for the last 24 years—the "Carter Doctrine"—which states:

"An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Iraq, with the second-largest conventional oil reserves but lacking the capacity to exploit them, looked like the lynchpin in increasing oil production, countering rising Chinese influence and reducing OPEC's pricing power. But with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, the only option would be to seize and privatize Iraqi oil. That goal was conspicuously absent in the task force recommendations, but revealed in former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's memoir. O'Neill stated that in February 2001,  the National Security Council staff was already drafting a document detailing how the U.S. government should divide up the Iraqi oilfields among the major western oil companies after a U.S. invasion.

This helps to illumintate why the Bush administration had declared early in its tenure that China was a strategic competitor. What most commentators did not realize, however, was that the theatre of that competition would be the Persian Gulf. 

Reason #2: Strengthen Israel, Weaken Arabs

The Bush administration has a complex relationship with Israel. The president owes his election in large part to Christian conservatives. Christian Zionists, led by Tom DeLay in the House, want to see the State of Israel control all the biblical lands. President Bush is also indebted to AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby. AIPAC is staunchly backing the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who rejects the longstanding policy of "land-for-peace." In addition, the neoconservatives who dominate Bush's foreign policy architecture view negotiations with Arafat and the PLO to be morally equivalent to Chamberlain negotiating with Hitler in Munich.

Patrick Doherty is associate editor at TomPaine.com, spent 10 years working on conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and the Caucasus and holds a Master's degree in security studies from the Fletcher School.

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