What are the Reasons that have Pushed the Americans and the British to Intervene in Iraq - Essay Example

Peace & Conflict Studies What are the reasons that have pushed the Americans and the British to intervene in Iraq? Personal ment [This is an obvious ghostwriting ‘trap’ This will have to be provided by the client, either before submission, in which case the information will be inserted here, or pasted in by the client after delivery - Writer] Topics & Literature It appears that internal politics were the main underlying factor in the disastrous Anglo-American intervention in Iraq - the phrase ‘criminal insanity’ comes to mind. Since, for the reasons outlined below, we are constrained to use secondary sources for this examination of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, the author has decided to use the following works. Blair’s Wars John Kampfner The Free Press (2004) ISBN 0-7432-4830-9 (Paperback) Blowback : The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Professor Chalmers Johnson Little, Brown (2000) ISBN 0-316-85486-7 (Hardback) Democracy Kills Humphrey Hawksley Macmillan (2009) ISBN 978-0-230-744608-0 (Paperback) After the Empire : The Breakdown of the American Order Emmanuel Todd Constable (2004) ISBN 1-84529-058-5 Issues The main problem with the 2003 et seq Iraq War is separating the facts from the rhetoric. To misquote from one of George Orwell’s lesser-known sayings, where the British press is concerned, the facts and the rhetoric do not logically connect. Particularly where Britain is concerned, it will be necessary to disregard the rhetoric (as both sides of what is politely called the debate are equally guilty of distortion) and take the facts and form a picture from them, accepting that what passes for the accepted wisdom is not so much a tissue of lies as a tissue of invention. On the other hand, it has proved most interesting to try and find out the real reasons for the (2003) Iraq disaster and make the most of this opportunity to set the record straight. Hypothesis The fundamental hypothesis that the author wishes to put forward for the 2003 Anglo-American intervention in Iraq is that the ‘intervention’ (disaster would be a better word) took place for internal political reasons. In other words, nothing the Iraqis themselves, UN, EU, Russians, Chinese etc., etc. would or could have done would have prevented the war, as both the British and U.S, metropolitan elites were completely impervious to any outside persuasion. We will start with Todd’s (who, despite his Anglophone name and ancestry, is French) analysis. He cites the main American internal political factors [2004, Pp 207-211 inclusive) as “economic mystification, ideological crisis and denial of reality”. He also introduces “evil, as a central concept”. If the author understands Todd correctly, the Americans (or at least their metropolitan elite) intervened in Iraq in order to perpetuate the actual (as opposed to stated) ideological and psychological aims of using American military power (which, it must be said, looks impressive, even if it isn’t in reality) to ensure that international investment (chiefly the purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds) is then channelled into U.S. domestic consumption. The mechanism appears to be that the funds generated by the bond purchases are used to fund the American imperial military, the money then being channelled through equipment purchases, salaries and base maintenance into the American economy at large - much of the money then being channelled back to the U.S. government through federal taxes. The ultimate expression of this is that wars (what Todd calls “theoretical micro-militarism”) against small countries such as Iraq are much more effective than peaceable military commitments in achieving this, as otherwise the purchasers of U.S. Treasury bonds might start asking awkward questions about where all the money is going. So much for economic mystification. We will now examine Todd’s concept of ideological crisis. Since the end of the “Cold War” (the author prefers the term ‘Grand Area Planning‘, as per Noam Chomsky) the United States, as a political entity, has been at a loss as to what to do with itself. As, a result Todd [2004, P208] states that the United States has become the most ideological state in the world, in that a belief in free markets and the productive power of the stock market (a problem common to Britain, where markets are also regarded as a means of production in themselves, as opposed as a means of exchange) has become the preferredreason for the continued existence of American power. The problems arise when the ‘real world’ as it were, shows U.S. capitalism to be a confidence trick not only on the rest of the world but the United States itself. The result has been what Todd [2004, P208] calls a form of despair, and perhaps even a denial of reality. This denial of reality appears to be a further cause of the U.S. metropolitan elite lashing out at the rest of the world - and various deities help those in the way or on the receiving end! The final U.S. internal political factor that Todd [2004, P208-210 incl.] puts forward is that of “evil as a central concept”. This may be though of as an extreme case of what other commentators have called ‘the mirror image syndrome’, where members of the American metropolitan elite look into the figurative mirror - and see that they are “the evil” ones, as opposed to, for example, the Iraqis or al-Qaeda. Todd’s contention is that this has also contributed to the seeming mass insanity of the American metropolitan elite, which expresses itself in attacks on, for example, Iraq. Lest anyone forget that the forms and level of collective U.S. political insanity so clearly described by Todd are confined to the Bush Junior administration and the so-called neo-conservatives, let is consider the concepts put forward by Prof. Johnson [2000, Chapter 10, The Consequences of Empire, Pp 216-230 incl.). Prof Johnson’s story finishes with the publication of the original U.S. edition of this work in 1999 - and therefore covers the period the Clinton administration. To cut a long story short, Bush Junior and the neo-conservatives were only building on the lunacies of previous post-1945 U.S. administrations, which Prof. Johnson chronicles in detail. Prof. Johnson quotes [2000, P216] another commentator’s description of the United States as “a crackpot superpower with little more than cruise missiles for brains”. the basic long-term problem with the United States, according to Prof. Johnson, is that Americans believe that their role in the world is virtuous ands for the good of others, even when, as with the Iraq intervention, the opposite is the case. The true background, according to Prof. Johnson [2004, P217] is that the United States had largely abandoned reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law and multilateral institutions such as the UN in favour of bluster, military force and financial manipulation. It is against this background that the 2003 Iraq intervention must be seen. Prof Johnson [2004, Chapter 10], makes it clear that the institutional failings of the U.S,. metropolitan elite were a result of the structural characteristics of the Cold War, put in place to achieve the perceived interests of the U.S. Thus resulted in the demise of much of American manufacturing industry and bred a military establishment that was always far too large for the legitimate defence interests of the United States and it’s allies, both NATO, and Far Eastern, and was fast becoming outside political control. Set against this, one wonders whether the Iraq disaster was the result of a failure of political control in Washington rather than any deliberate policy. To speak topically for a moment, President Obama has been publicly complaining about this lack of political control of the U.S. military, particularly in the area of ballistic missile defence. One also wonders about such engineering disasters as the F-22 and F-35 jet fighter projects, and whether the problems are the result of the U.S. military refusing to accept constructive criticism and possible solutions from outside the military-industrial sphere. The situation in Britain proved to be even worse. Since 1945, there have been repeated outbreaks of acute political instability in Britain, two of which coincided with (and may have precipitated) the 1956 Suez debacle and the 1982 Falklands War. It regrettably appears that the British role in the 2003 Iraq war is another such, particularly as it appears that the Bush Administration wanted the British Government (one uses both words advisedly!) to organise the post-conflict reconstruction rather than participate in the war itself. The full story is described within Kampfner [Blair’s Wars, 2004, Chapter 8 ‘Evil Axis’ et seq]. It was apparent from January 2002 at the latest that the Bush (Junior) Administration was going to lash out at someone else as well as Afghanistan (after 9/11). One of Clinton’s final admonitions to Blair before leaving office as to keep as close as possible a relationship with the (incoming) Bush administration, in the hope of avoiding being on the receiving end of a U.S. military intervention (remember the 1983 Grenada fiasco?) and to try and act as a restraining influence on what appeared to ne, at least at the beginning, an unusually fractious Administration. Having read and digested Kampfner’s work, in the author’s opinion, Blair went about this in completely the wrong way, adopting what can only be described as a grovelling attitude towards the Americans and a somewhat dismissive attitude towards the Europeans - a classic ‘suck up, kick down’ exercise, in other words. To put it mildly, the worst possible attitude to take, and one that only a product of a political system than was prone to repeated outbreaks of hysteria and disorganisation would have taken. What should have happened was an attitude of “the Americans are going to have their war, so how to we mitigate the consequences?”. What should then have happened was a proposal for Britain to take charge of the post-conflict reconstruction (which was what the Bush Administration was expecting), bringing the Europeans and other interested parties on board. Given this, the resulting political leverage on the post conflict ‘liberation’ administration must have resulted in certainly a much more effective reconstruction of Iraq and very probably a much lower ‘body count’. Instead, Blair and his associated panicked and went running after the Americans. At the risk of sounding blunt, the collective European foreign policy establishment must have cursed Blair to the uttermost pit of hell. The reader may take exception to such a proposition, but the results, from a semi-historical perspective, appear to merit it. For a more general post-invasion perspective, the author recommends Hawksley [Democracy Kills, 2009, Pp57-154 incl.]. Hawksley’s contention is that the Americans tried to reconstruct a traumatised Islamic society (Iraq) with weak institutions using a blueprint originally drawn up in 1945 for reconstruction of European countries with a tradition of relatively strong institutions, albeit ones temporarily disorganised by a certain Herr Hitler. Fir a variety of historical reasons, the British government should have ‘stood in the door’ over this, and raised the matter at the UN, EU and with anybody else with a stake in a carefully reconstructed and well-run Iraq. Drawing up a causal model will prove impractical on this occasion, as the level of statistical knowledge is simply not available. In other words, we are dealing with “he said/she said” sources and who did what to who and why, rather than statistics Definitions To summarise the above arguments, the U.S. ‘intervened’ in Iraq as a result of institutions and policies designed to ‘fight’ (for want of a better word) the Cold War, and were obviously (to any outside observer) completely unsuited to a post-Cold environment, let alone taking Islamic political and social, structures into account. The British government completely failed, not so much as restrain the Americans (that was impracticable) as to clear up after them. This appears to have been partly a result of the British Labour Party’s traditional foreign policy failings (a story in itself) and a complete lack of moral fibre on the part of Blair. One must also appreciate that neither the British or American metropolitan elites (politicians, media, civil servants etc.) were in any was receptive to any outside influence - they really were living in a world of their own, with the rersults that we see. Survey Design and Methods The survey into the detailed internal political machinations within both the U.S. and British metropolitan elites will have to be a qualitative one, as political debates and behind-the-scenes manipulation are not amenable to quantitative examination, lacking statistical information as they do. Also, the untrustworthy nature of what might be regarded as first-hand sources means that we have to fall back on the best secondary sources (cited above) available. Data Collection The main problem with collecting first-hand information on the Iraq intervention is that it will be impractical to collect ‘clean’ information, that is to say, information that is based in independently verifiable sources and which is free what is charitably called bias. We are therefore constrained to resort to reputable secondary sources, and we are indeed fortunate that Kampfner [Blair’s Wars, 2004] was able to obtain source information on the British angle on the Iraq intervention that would most definitely not be otherwise available to research students and other interested members of the public. Ethical issues The outstanding ethical problem is that, apart from Kampfner’s and Hawksley’s books, British sources must be regarded as tainted, so say the least, as both sides of what passes for the debate have a vested interest in disguising the truth. Read More