Why Did the United States Invade Iraq?

Jane Cramer, A. Trevor Thrall, Jane K. Cramer, A. Trevor Thrall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136641503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

This edited volume presents the foremost scholarly thinking on why the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in both modern US foreign policy and international politics.

In the years since the US invasion of Iraq it has become clear that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was not as urgent as the Bush administration presented it and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with either Al Qaeda or 9/11. Many consider the war a mistake and question why Iraq was invaded. A majority of Americans now believe that the public were deliberately misled by the Bush administration in order to bolster support for the war. Public doubt has been strengthened by the growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion that suggest the administration was not candid about its reasons for wanting to take action against Iraq.

This volume begins with a survey of private scholarly views about the war's origins, then assesses the current state of debate by organising the best recent thinking by foreign policy and international relations experts on why the US invaded Iraq. The book covers a broad range of approaches to explaining Iraq – the role of the uncertainty of intelligence, cognitive biases, ideas, Israel, and oil, highlighting areas of both agreement and disagreement.

This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.

1 Introduction

Why did the United States invade Iraq?

Jane K. Cramer and A. Trevor Thrall

On March 22, 2003, President George W. Bush told the United States that “Our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam’s support of terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” In the first year after the invasion of Iraq, evidence showed that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), nor was there any intelligence to support the claims Saddam Hussein was connected with Al Qaeda or the 9/11 hijackers. These revelations led the majority of Americans to believe that invading Iraq was a mistake and that they had been misled before the war.¹ Revealing documents like the Downing Street Memo seemed to confirm for many observers that the Bush administration had intentionally misled the public. Indeed, the secret British memo stated that “military action was now seen as inevitable” by US administration leaders and that the “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington in July 2002, well before President Bush presented the possib-ility of invading Iraq to Congress and the UN in September 2002, and long before Bush declared publicly that he reluctantly made the decision to invade in March 2003 (Danner 2006).

In the years since the invasion, the debate over why the United States invaded Iraq has not abated, but it has progressed. This volume is aimed at bringing together the leading arguments to date about why the United States invaded Iraq. Like other scholars, we began studying the run-up to the Iraq War as it happened in 2002. We first focused on discerning how war came about politically—we tried to unravel and explain the intersection of events, intelligence failure, presidential leadership, threat manipulation, congressional acquiescence and international resistance and cooperation—in short, the process and politics of threat inflation that led the United States as a whole to go to war (Thrall and Cramer 2009).

In the spring of 2006, the debate over why the Bush administration chose to push for war came into sharp focus. Two leading realist scholars, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, came out publicly arguing that Bush administration leaders had been convinced after 9/11 to invade Iraq by the now famous neoconservative advisers within the administration including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and others. Mearsheimer and Walt argued the neoconservatives successfully led the broader “Israel Lobby” to press for regime change in Iraq within the administration, with Congress, and the public (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007). They further proposed few other experts would openly support their claims about the importance of the Israel lobby for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, even though they believed many experts privately agreed with them.² Our own impression at the time was that Mearsheimer and Walt were correct on this latter point, but we could only guess at the breadth of support for this Israel lobby thesis.

In addition to the Israel lobby argument, informal conversations with many of our colleagues who study foreign policy and international relations indicated that there were many other significant hypotheses experts would not raise publicly for fear of damaging their professional reputations and being labeled conspiracy theorists. For example, we noticed that many international relations experts linked the US invasion of Iraq with geopolitical interests in oil while only a very few US scholars were publicly examining this important realist hypothesis. We also heard many scholars quietly propose that private US corporate interests in oil-related or warrelated profits were the likely primary motives behind the war. These colleagues seemed to focus much less on the neoconservative advisers and much more on the leading role of Vice President Cheney. At the same time, we heard many other interesting permutations of explanations for the invasion, and yet these rich hypotheses were not being publicly analyzed.

After noticing the disconnect between vibrant private scholarly discussions and restrained public analysis, we decided in the fall of 2006 to launch an online survey of scholars and other foreign policy experts with the purpose of exploring the question: why did the United States invade Iraq? This survey had three purposes. First, we saw this survey as hypothesis-generating, a way to reveal the large number of complex and interesting hypotheses about the main drivers—actors and motives— behind the war. Second, we also hoped to investigate the tendency among our colleagues to publicly and professionally support and analyze “safe” hypotheses, while often privately supporting “conspiracy” type hypotheses. In particular, we noticed many scholars publicly taking politicians at their word, or at least giving politicians the benefit of the doubt, while privately being more cynical and questioning the sincerity of politicians’ rhetoric, and believing politicians are likely motivated by factors they do not discuss openly. Third, we saw this survey as providing an historical “snapshot” of scholarly thinking at the time, which would prove interesting to compare with future understandings of this war.

In this introduction we offer the rich findings of this 2006 survey as the starting point for this volume. By presenting the various intricate hypotheses generated in considerable detail here it becomes clear how complex it is to analyze the multiple possible motives behind the invasion. For example, the survey found more than 63 percent of our expert respondents believed oil was a highly important factor for Vice President Cheney who was ranked by 93 percent of our respondents as the most important decision-maker behind the decision to invade Iraq. Thus, privately, a strong majority of experts revealed to us they believed that oil was an important factor in the decision for war even though decision-makers repeatedly flatly denied the oil motive, and almost all scholars publicly summarily dismissed the “oil hypothesis” without analysis. Further, our survey found the neoconservatives were overwhelmingly ranked as the second most influential (84 percent) decision-makers behind the decision to invade (above Rumsfeld and Bush), and the neoconservatives were privately viewed by more than a majority of our respondents as highly motivated by “Defending Israel/Israeli interests”—in sharp contrast with other key leaders. We believe this finding largely confirmed the views of Mearsheimer and Walt at the time: many experts privately agreed with them that Israeli interests had a significant influence on the decision to invade. It should be remembered that Mearsheimer and Walt were widely condemned and rarely defended for attempting to discuss this theory at the time, even though our results show that many experts privately agreed with them in significant respects. Thus, supported by survey evidence that expert opinion privately gives more weight to such “conspiratorial” hypotheses, this volume seeks to make the debate over them more public.

In the end, we argue the results of this survey help to demonstrate that real progress has been made in this debate. We still do not know why the United States invaded Iraq, just as the debate continues about the causes of World War I, for example. But this volume demonstrates that through careful analysis much can be known about why the United States invaded, even without being able to get inside the minds of the top decision-makers. Final and complete answers will never be possible, but we believe that after reading what experts were thinking in 2006 and then comparing it with the arguments and analyses in the rest of this volume, it becomes quite clear that close analysis of this question has led to an evolution in thinking on this question of “why did the U.S. invade Iraq?” We believe the survey demonstrates an interesting “first draft” of history, very much focused on the centrality of the neoconservative advisers. Most of the chapters in this volume have largely moved on from this focus on the neoconservatives to a “second draft” of history, much more concerned with understanding the top leaders of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush, including their strong desires to invade Iraq prior to 9/11.

The broad expert consensus of 2006: US dominance was central (not WMD, terrorism or 9/11)

The level of broad expert agreement we found on key issues in 2006 surprised us. Not only is it rare to find so much agreement about controversial foreign policies, but we thought it was striking to find experts very broadly agreed that the Bush administration’s stated justifications for war were not in fact the most important motivations for the invasion. The majority of experts surveyed did not believe that WMD were a central motive and saw little to no connection between the Iraq War and the war on terrorism or the events of 9/11. As one respondent put it, “[T]he gap between the Administration’s publicly stated reasons for the war and the real reasons behind this decision is the widest ever as well in the history of American wars.”

The survey findings reveal these agreements in several ways. The online survey began with and centered on four open-ended questions which allowed respondents unlimited space to respond.³ The survey also included three more multiple-choice type questions about the administration’s decision-making process, which also allowed additional space to comment in open-ended fashion. The first question on the survey began with President Bush’s quotation that opened this chapter in which he stated his declared reasons for invasion, and then it simply asked respondents, “As of today, over three years later, why do you think the US invaded Iraq?” While the tabulation of the open-ended responses in Table 1.1 does not adequately capture the rich debate revealed by this question which we discuss at length below, it nonetheless reveals that respondents were about twice as likely to identify broader foreign policy goals as the reason for the war than they were to mention the threat of Iraqi WMD, or the need to

Table 1.1 Factors behind the decision to invade Iraq

Reasons for US invasion of Iraq	Number of mentions	% of respondents mentioning
Reshape/influence democracy in Middle East	112	50.45
Oil interests	62	27.93
Iraqi WMD threat	60	27.03
Oust Saddam/save Iraqi people	52	23.42
Israel security/interests	30	13.51
Exert/enhance US power/hegemony	30	13.51
Neoconservative ideology	30	13.51
Terrorism	30	13.51
Easy victory	23	10.36
Bush’s psychology	21	9.46
Unfinished business	18	8.11
US domestic politics	17	7.66
General democracy promotion	12	5.41
9/11 worldview change	11	4.95
General economic interests	5	2.25

Question: on March 22, 2003, at the very beginning of the US invasion of Iraq, President Bush told Americans that: “Our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam’s support of terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” As of today, over three years later, why do you think the United States invaded Iraq?

depose Saddam. Further, the specific threat of terrorism or any connection to 9/11 were even much less likely to be mentioned by our respondents, except in the negative. On the other hand, oil interests, though never discussed by the administration, ranked as the second most often mentioned factor. These broad findings are only suggestive, and we elaborate below at length, but these findings are striking considering both President Bush and our question wording specifically listed disarming Iraq’s WMD, ending Saddam’s support for terrorism, and freeing the Iraqi people as the reasons for the war, and yet our respondents chose not to echo these reasons but largely to provide wholly different reasons.

Second, as Table 1.2 more specifically shows, the vast majority of respondents did not believe that the administration truly believed that Iraq represented an urgent WMD threat. A simple count of these openended responses makes it appear that about 45 percent believed there was some type of WMD threat—either short term or long term. However, a simple count understates the level of doubt about this motive as a real reason for war because even those respondents who granted that the administration might have believed there was possibly...