Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Gangale
In a recent assignment for a class on foreign policy, I was tasked to analyze the US decision to invade and occupy Iraq from two theoretical perspectives in international relations: realism and progressivism. Since this was an academic exercise, the views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the author. Then again....
The Realist Perspective
The United States invaded Iraq as a last resort. The Saddam regime had ended its cooperation with United Nations weapons inspections teams, in violation of UN resolutions and the 1991 terms of cease-fire. With the UN inspectors out of the country, Iraq continued its clandestine program to develop weapons of mass destruction, with the goal of acquiring nucular [sic] and biological weapons and to rebuild its stockpile of chemical weapons. With these weapons in hand, Saddam intended to intimidate his neighbors and to change the balance of power in the Middle East, a region of vital American interest as a major supplier of petroleum to the West. Saddam had already proven his willingness to use WMDs, having employed chemical weapons against Iran and against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq. Saddam had already proven his willingness to use missiles against Israel. Prior to the American invasion of Iraq, the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Niger.
In addition to Saddam's overt threat to the Middle East, his regime had links to Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization that killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Al Qaeda had some links to Iraq dating back to the early 1990s. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who continues to orchestrate terrorist attacks against Americans in Iraq, and even against Iraqi civilians, is the best evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda affiliates in Iraq and the global Al Qaeda terrorist organization.
Besides which, Saddam is a guy that tried to kill my daddy.
The Progressivist Perspective
The industrial core states of the capitalist world-system seek to control and appropriate the natural resources and labor of the less-developed semi-periphery and periphery. Additionally, since the late 1930's, the American economy has been in large part a war economy. It is these two factors that explain the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The global petroleum market has always been denominated in US dollars. Since the capitalist world-system runs on gasoline and other petroleum products, the global denomination of crude oil in US dollars assures the dollar's position as the global hegemonic currency. Saddam sealed his fate when he switched the denomination Iraqi oil on the world market from US dollars to euros. This action presented a direct challenge to the global hegemony of the US, since, if other key OPEC states had followed suit, this might have destabilized the dollar and the American economy.
Additionally, the American economy is far from being an entirely free-market economy, despite the hegemonic discourse of free markets and free trade; rather the private-sector economy is supplemented by a state-controlled war economy. Laissez-faire capitalism collapsed in 1929, and a decade later, capitalism had failed to revive itself. The National Socialists succeeded in rebuilding the German economy by restructuring it as a war economy. As the US followed suit by rearming itself, it also began to rise from the Great Depression. A few short years later, at the end of the Second World War, a nation that had suffered through 25% unemployment during the Great Depression, now accounted for half of the world's economic output. However, with the war over, the key products of the US economywarships, military aircraft, tanks, guns, and munitionswere no longer being consumed. The US faced the prospect of a decline in the production of these products and a return to severe economic depression. The Soviet Union's desire to protect itself by installing friendly buffer-state regimes on its borders created a convenient pretext for the Cold War. The US now had the excuse it needed to continue its war economy. However, one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism is that its continual drive for greater efficiency periodically results in overproduction, and it is this that gives rise to the business cycle. Military products were consumed at accelerated rates whenever necessary by resorting to limited, protracted wars such as the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
The collapse of eastern European communist governments in 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 threw the US economy into crisis. It is no coincidence that the US suffered its most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression immediately following these events. The Pentagon closed hundreds of military bases, reduced troop levels both at home and overseas, and the decline in defense contracts forced a flurry of mergers. Long-standing defense contractors such as McDonnell Douglas, Martin Marietta, Grumman, and General Dynamics were absorbed by their competitors. The Clinton administration enjoyed a brief period of success in managing the reduction of the military-industrial complex as the civil-sector economy rebounded, but this economic program proved to be unsustainable. Once again, capitalism eventually proved to be too efficient to sustain itself, overproduction resulted in a decline in demand, and a new economic recession was underway by 2000. The US economy needed a new, 50-year, global threat to justify the re-expansion of its war economy to Cold War levels.
Conveniently, less than a year into the new recession, the 9/11 terrorist attacks provided the required pretext for expansion of the military-industrial complex. However, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan could be defeated in a few months mostly by aiding indigenous forces; likewise, the US could defeat the Saddam regime in a few months. The problem was to not achieve the decisive victories of which US forces were so clearly capable, but rather to create an environment in which to inculcate the new, 50-year, global threat: radical Islam. It is as though grand strategists in the Bush administration read Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations not as a warning, but as an opportunity. Thus, President Bush used the word "crusade" to characterize the invasion of Afghanistan. Thus, the US invaded Iraq on the flimsy pretexts of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link and weapons of mass destruction. Thus, US occupation force levels were a mere fraction of those insisted on by retired generals and other military experts outside of the Bush administration, who testified before the war, as required to secure Iraq and prevent it from spinning into anarchy. Thus, the plan for the pacification of Iraq and the rebuilding of its government and infrastructure changed capriciously from month to month in the first year of the occupation, despite the retired generals' pointing out that the success of the post-Second World War occupations of Germany and Japan were preceded by two years of planning. Thus, resistance to US occupation forces was encouraged by their initial failure to subdue Fallujah. Thus, American occupation forces patrol Iraq in insufficiently-armored vehicles and often without body armor, making them softer targets for resistance forces. Thus, the Bush administration created an administrative environment permissive of the outrages that occurred at Abu Graib and Guantanamo. Everything that could possibly encourage resistance in Iraq and inflame the Muslim world has happened.
Occam's Razor states, "Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler; the simplest answer is usually the correct answer." Either we must accept that the US was blind to the Al Qaeda threat prior to 9/11, that the US blundered into war with Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence, that it has bungled the occupation of Iraq in countless ways, and that the systemic abuse of prisoners and repeated insults to Islam are "isolated incidents," or we can choose the simpler explanation: that there is a single, coordinated plan that has set in motion, as defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld now describes it, "The Long War."
The United States has a capitalist amalgam of a private-sector consumer economy and a military-industrial complex that drives its foreign policy. In its essentials, it is the same type of economy that National Socialism built in Germany to bring it out of the Great Depression. But, whereas German National Socialism did not survive the Second World War, its American war-economy counterpart did; it continued to flourish via the Cold War, and it has now designed a new "Long War" to sustain itself in the coming decades. This policy simultaneously provides for the continuation of American hegemony over the global petroleum market, and by extension, the capitalist world-system, in which the core industrial states exploit the natural resources and labor of the semi-periphery and the periphery.