The Political Road to War with Iraq

Nick Ritchie, Paul Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134153121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

This volume explores in close detail the events and factors leading up to the second Gulf War in 2003 and considers whether war with Iraq was inevitable.

Nick Ritchie and Paul Rogers argue that after the election of George W. Bush, conflict between Iraq and the United States was probable, and that after 9/11 it became virtually inevitable. They begin by setting the story of Iraq, Bush and 9/11 within the broader context of the importance of the Persian Gulf to enduring US national security interests and go on to examine the intense politicking that surrounded the conflict and still reverberates today.

The authors examine US policy towards Iraq at the end of the Clinton administration, the opposition in Congress and Washington's conservative think tanks to Clinton's strategy of containment, and the evolution of Iraq policy during the first eight months of the Bush presidency and the growing pressure for regime change. They also explore the immediate focus on Iraq after the attacks of September 11 that marked a watershed in US national security policy and chart the construction of the case against Iraq through 2002 and the administration's determination to end Saddam Hussein's regime at all costs.

The Political Road to War with Iraq will be of great interest to all students and scholars of US foreign policy, war and peace studies and international relations.

Part I

CONTAINING SADDAM

1
OIL AND PERSIAN GULF SECURITY – THE CONTEXT OF REGIME TERMINATION

Introduction

In August 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and occupied Kuwait, leading to immediate international condemnation and the rapid formation of an international coalition. This was sufficient to be capable of taking military action to evict the Iraqi forces from Kuwait should diplomatic negotiations fail. Some forces were moved into Saudi Arabia and other western Gulf states almost at once, partly to forestall any Iraqi moves into Saudi Arabia, and US naval forces began to gather in force in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea within a month. Between early September and late December 1990, a force of nearly 600,000 troops and over 1,000 aircraft was amassed, mostly in Saudi Arabia but also on ships at sea.

The force was drawn primarily from the US armed forces, with major contingents from the UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt, but the US forces made up about two-thirds of the total. In any other circumstance it would not have been possible to assemble such a force, and have it ready to take major military action, over 6,000 miles from the continental United States, within four months. Ordinarily, temporary air bases would have had to be established, port facilities upgraded and massive storage depots erected, yet virtually none of this proved necessary in 1990.

The primary reason for this was that facilities were already in place to handle such a crisis. In Saudi Arabia itself, air bases had been constructed for the Royal Saudi Air Force, which had facilities far larger than were needed, and these were able to cope when deployments reached at least four times the peacetime complement. Port facilities were similarly capable of handling the huge logistical problems occasioned by the rapid movement of personnel, munitions and supplies, and a major forward operating base had been constructed over the previous decade on the Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia. This had previously been leased by Britain to the United States, the Illois inhabitants of Diego Garcia and other islands in the group having been summarily removed to Mauritius.

The ability of the United States to mount the Desert Storm operation was a direct result of a military posture that had evolved over the previous 40 years, having its origins in the early 1940s but being boosted by the Cold War con- frontation, primarily in relation to control of the region’s oil reserves. This included the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force at the end of the 1970s, and its expansion into US Central Command (CENTCOM) in the early 1980s. CENTCOM was responsible for the conduct of Desert Storm in 1991 and has been responsible for regime termination in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

The increasing significance of Persian Gulf oil is a key aspect of the underlying context of the Iraq War that started in March 2003, and this chapter outlines its origins and development. It also examines two specific aspects of the 1991 war that have a particular relevance to the drive for regime termination in Iraq before and after the 9/11 attacks. These are the effects of the Iraqi use of medium-range ballistic missiles during the 1991 war and the Iraqi programmes to develop chemical and biological weapons together with delivery systems. While this book is primarily a detailed account of the political road to war in 2003, an appreciation of these factors – oil security and regional weapons proliferation – provide essential insights into the reasons for going to war.

They are essentially long-term issues that may be seen as being above and beyond the impact of the 9/11 attacks and the specific ideology of the Bush administration. Oil security, and its specific link to the Persian Gulf, was an aspect of the US military posture for 30 years before 2003, and Iraq was of concern to the US foreign policy elite well before the Bush election of 2000 and the attacks of 9/11.

Recognising the relevance of Gulf oil

While the world oil industry has its origins in the United States and the Caucasus in the latter part of the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century the Dutch East Indies and Venezuela were also becoming significant.¹ Demand for oil was relatively limited until the First World War, and there was little in the way of a surge during the recession years of the 1920s and early 1930s. By the late 1930s, though, with the industrial recovery under way in Europe and North America, and the rapid economic growth of Japan, demand for oil surged just as reserves began to be discovered in the Persian Gulf.

The United States was, at this time, very well endowed with oil reserves, the early fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio having been greatly overshadowed by the new developments in Oklahoma, Texas, California and later Louisiana. Even so, the sheer demand for oil resulting from the massive war economy of the early 1940s was sufficient reason for the Roosevelt administration to have concerns over long-term sources of supply. At the time the United States had some 20 billion barrels of oil in proved reserves, by far the largest of any country, but such was the wartime demand that this would be exhausted within 13 years.² There was some confidence that more reserves would be discovered, but this was not sufficient to assuage concerns. As a consequence, it was seen as desirable to encourage US commercial oversight of new reserves, and the Persian Gulf region of the Middle East was recognised as the zone of greatest potential. By the late 1940s and early 1950s it was evident that countries such as Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia had substantial reserves and that these countries were either under the influence of the UK and France or, in the case of Saudi Arabia, had close commercial links with major US oil companies.

During the course of the 1950s, the United States consolidated commercial links with the ruling House of Saud in Saudi Arabia and, just as important, established very close political and military links with the Shah of Iran. US influence increased still further following the Suez debacle of 1956, which did much to damage British and French influence across the region. This was also the period when Israel became a close ally of the United States, not least as some Arab regimes such as Egypt and Syria developed close links with the Soviet Union in the wake of the rise of Arab nationalism.

By the end of the 1960s, Persian Gulf oil was established as the world’s major cluster of reserves, far outstripping the reserves of the United States or the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the United States itself had become a modest oil importer in the 1950s, not so much because of declining domestic reserves but because of the ready availability of cheap supplies from Latin America. There were concerns over possible competition with the Soviet Union during the heightened tensions of the Cold War, but these were not central to the US security outlook; the really major oil producers of the Gulf region such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and the Emirates were virtually client states.

OPEC, the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War and the oil weapon

By the early 1970s, US domestic oil reserves were beginning to run down so that the United States was becoming a substantial net oil importer, with every prospect that this would become steadily more significant in decades to come. Although new technologies were becoming available to exploit undersea reserves in the Gulf of Mexico and Arctic reserves in Alaska, these were not going to be sufficient to prevent a growing import dependency. This was still not of great concern, given the low price of oil before 1973, and it was the shock of a series of actions by oil producers towards the end of 1973 that changed the view from Washington substantially.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had been established in 1960, following an earlier failed attempt prompted by Venezuela in 1949.³ It operated throughout the 1960s as a relatively weak producer organisation, comprising initially Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela, but acquired an increasing significance by the end of the 1960s. This was in part due to an increased membership as Nigeria, the Emirates, Algeria and Indonesia joined the organisation, but it was also due to the discovery of major additional oil fields within the boundaries of OPEC member states, in contrast to the slowing down of discoveries in ‘older’ oil-producing states such as the United States. Neither Alaska nor the new North Sea reserves were as significant as the countries concerned believed. Alaska had less than 2 per cent of world oil reserves and the North Sea perhaps 3.5 per cent. Most of the oil was located in OPEC states.

Even by 1973, there were few concerns in North America or Western Europe – the price of oil was low, supplies were plentiful and Iran was an appropriate buffer to any Soviet ambitions in the Persian Gulf. The change was sudden and wholly unexpected. Following Israel’s successful prosecution of the Six Day War in 1967, taking control of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and Sinai, Egypt and Syria regrouped and staged a surprise attack into the Israeli-occupied territories of Sinai and the Golan Heights six years later in October 1973. Despite early successes, within ten days of the start of the war both countries were at the limits of their military advances and Egypt was facing a major Israeli counter-offensive, Israel being much aided by a massive airlift of supplies by the United States.

Before the war, key members of OPEC such as Iran and Venezuela had been pushing the organisation to be more aggressive in its pricing policies, but with little success. Now, the prospect of a defeat for Egypt was sufficient to encourage the members of an inner OPEC group, the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) to use oil as a political weapon in order to pressurise Israel’s allies to gain an early ceasefire. On 17 October 1973, OAPEC announced cuts in production of around 15 per cent, a price increase averaging over 70 per cent and an embargo of oil exports to the United States and South Africa because of their support for Israel and the Netherlands from where oil was shipped to Israel.

The action caused a general rise in oil prices, combining open market speculation with further price rises agreed by the whole OPEC membership, including a 140 per cent rise in December.⁴ Over an eight-month period from October 1973 to May 1974, world oil prices rose by an average of over 400 per cent, holding much of that value for the following two years. Although the major effects of the OAPEC/OPEC actions were economic, causing a profound impact on the world economy and ushering in a period of inflation coupled with economic stagnation, there was also a major impact on the US security outlook. In spite of close links with Middle East oil producers, it was clear that these countries would, when necessary, act in their own interests and were capable of acting in a united manner that had simply not been anticipated.

There was a particular concern in Washington that a more serious crisis might have resulted in a temporary shut-down of oil supplies from key Persian Gulf producers, an action that would have had a far greater impact even than the damaging price increases of 1973/4. As a result of these concerns, studies were initiated into the possibility of engaging in military responses to serious interruptions in oil supplies. While most were classified, one of the most substantial was undertaken by the Congressional Research Service for the Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the House Committee on International Relations and published in August 1975.⁵ Entitled Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study, it analysed the requirements for the US military to take over oil fields in a range of countries, principally in the Middle East and North Africa. Its conclusions were that the United States did not have the means to do so, especially if installations were sabotaged and there was a risk of Soviet intervention:

military operations to rescue the United States (much less its key allies) from an airtight oil embargo would combine high costs with high risks. U.S. strategic reserves would be stripped. Prospects would be poor, and plights of far-reaching political, economic, social, psychological, and perhaps military consequences the penalty for failure.⁶

The Rapid Deployment Force and CENTCOM

A consequence of this and other assessments was the decision of the Carter administration to issue Presidential Directive 18 in 1977 ordering the Department of Defense to identify existing forces that might be tasked for operations in remote areas.⁷ There followed a period of inter-service in-fighting, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff responded with a plan to pool forces from the four branches of the armed forces. They would be based in the United States but trained, equipped and provided with transport for action worldwide. Popularly known as the Rapid Deployment Force, the Joint Rapid Deployment Task Force (JRDTF) was established at the end of the Carter period in 1980, almost at the same time as the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, a new hike in oil prices and the election of Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan administration came to power on a policy of re-arming America and facing down the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union, and most of the subsequent attention of defence analysts was focused on the build-up of strategic and tactical nuclear forces. In practice, though, the new administration had a particular concern with oil security, with some of its supporters advocating an immediate scaling up of the JRDTF into a unified military command devoted directly to maintaining security in the Persian Gulf.

While most of the emphasis was on the perceived Soviet threat, there was also a concern for potential regional crises. One remarkably prescient analysis by Jeffrey Record,⁸ published in February 1981 just after Ronald Reagan had taken office, pointed to the risk of aggression by a regional power, with Iraq being cited as the most likely threat:

The prospect of an Iraqi attack on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia merits particular atte...