In the face of massive demonstrations around the world against an impending US invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush and other members of his administration gave varied reasons to justify their aggression in March 2003. They claimed that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had close ties with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization. Both charges were rejected by congressional committees and UN inspection teams as unfounded.15
Another pretext for invasion: Saddam had committed war crimes, including the attack against Iran and the gassing of Kurds at Halabja. But the Pentagon’s own study found that the massacre of Kurds was committed by the Iranians, not the Iraqis.16 And in the war against Iran, occurring over twenty years earlier in 1980, Iraq received tactical assistance, helicopter gunships, and chemical and biological weapons from the United States.17
Having seen that the reasons given by the White House to justify an invasion of Iraq were highly questionable, some observers incorrectly concluded that the administration was simply befuddled. Because the Bush policymakers misled the public, it was assumed that they themselves were misled. Never considered was the likelihood that Bush et al. were lying in order to cloak the agenda of their own imperial class. The Iraq War has been of good service for a number of powerful interests.
A little history is in order. In 1958 a revolution in Iraq, led by a broad democratic coalition, kicked out the British and American oil companies and initiated popular reforms and democratic rule. Ten years later, the Ba’ath party seized power, with Saddam Hussein serving as point man for the CIA, torturing and murdering every democrat, reformer, constitutionalist, and communist the Ba’athists could get hold of, including the left wing of their own party. During the years Saddam committed his worst atrocities, he was Washington’s poster boy. All this the US press let slip down the memory hole, never to be retrieved. Ever since the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam has been portrayed as a maniacal dictator as bad as Hitler.18 Why so?
The last thing that US rulers want in the Middle East is independent, self-developing nations that control their own economies and natural resources. The Iraq economy under Saddam was entirely state-owned, a “Stalinist economy,” cried US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Upon coming to power, Saddam Hussein committed the sin of economic nationalism. Instead of acting as a vassal, he pursued policies of national development, even retaining some of the social programs of the earlier democratic government. In fact, “per capita income doubled in the 1970s, and the government spent heavily to improve education and health services.”19 As of 1990, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East.
The empire tries to prevent the emergence of any competing superpower or even any potentially competing regional power charting a course of its own.20 If Iraq would not be a compliant client state, a satellite, then it would have to be targeted as a potential enemy. The country was subjected to years of US-led sanctions and aerial attacks (1990–2003) that wreaked havoc on its economy and people. Months before the March 2003 invasion, the White House put together a committee whose sole purpose was to supervise the impending privatization and deregulation of the Iraqi economy.
After the US invasion, most of that economy was destroyed, shut down, or privatized at giveaway prices. Looters were let loose on Iraq’s government ministries and headquarters; all state-owned factories, hotels, supermarkets, and many hospitals; and most public universities, including engineering and nursing colleges.21 The Iraq Federation of Trade Unions was raided and destroyed by the US military, its leaders and members arrested and imprisoned.22
The invaders also resorted to the systematic destruction of Iraqi culture, by encouraging museums to be looted of their priceless treasures, while libraries were burned, and academics were murdered.23 Poverty and underemployment climbed precipitously, so too the Iraqi national debt as international loans were floated in order to help the Iraqis pay for their own misery. At the same time, depleted uranium weaponry caused a drastic rise in cancer rates in Iraq (as in Afghanistan). The US invasion brought Iraq firmly back into the free market sphere as a destitute satellite state.24
Saddam Hussein had posed other problems. In November 2000 he stopped accepting US dollars as payment for Iraq’s oil exports and started accepting the euro as a reserve currency. Up to then, the dollar had retained its value because it was the international standard in oil transactions. Were more countries to divest themselves of their dollar reserves, the massive glut of dollars on the world market would cause still more countries to switch to euros. US deficits would become unserviceable; the dollar would collapse in value; and the US economy would end in shambles. By conquering Iraq and installing a vassal state, Washington could guarantee that Iraqi oil exports were again dollar valued.25
Another reason for targeting Iraq can be summed up in one word: oil. As of late 2002 Saddam had offered exploratory concessions to several countries other than the United States. The postinvasion puppet régime installed by Washington reneged on those agreements, of course. With a reserve of 113 billion barrels of quality crude, Iraq’s supply comes to many trillions of dollars, potentially the biggest resource grab in history. Vice President Dick Cheney remarked that the nation controlling Middle East oil can exercise a “stranglehold” over the world economy.26
Earlier, during the 1990s, because of the slumping price of crude, US leaders were interested in keeping Iraqi oil off the market. The San Francisco Chronicle headlined a story: “Iraq’s Oil Poses Threat to the West.” If Iraq reentered the international oil market, the Chronicle reported, “it would devalue British North Sea oil, undermine American oil production and—much more important—it would destroy the huge profits which the United States [read: US oil companies] stands to gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production.”27 Direct control of Iraqi oil was the surest way to keep it off the world market when the price was not right, and the surest way to profit from its eventual sale when the price picked up.
The prolonged occupation of Iraq also created a whole new bonanza for US corporate contractors. Billions of dollars in war contracts brought in astronomical profits for hundreds of private companies, augmented even more by brazen corruption. As much as one-third to one-half of the immense funds allocated by Congress for the Iraqi war remained unaccounted for.28
Still another reason for régime change in Iraq was concern for Israel. The neoconservative officials in the Bush Jr. administration— Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, and others—were strong proponents of an expansionist strain of Zionism linked closely to the right-wing Likud Party of Israel. Assisted by the powerfully financed Israeli lobby, they pushed for war with Iraq well before the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.29 Saddam Hussein was Israel’s most consistent adversary in the Middle East, providing political and financial support to the Palestinian resistance.
In sum, the invasion and destruction of Iraq was not a foolish mistake. It certainly was not a quick and easy victory as expected, but overall it served the plutocracy quite well, at a horrific price to the people of Iraq (and a heavy price for the US taxpayer). William Blum sums it up:
The people of that unhappy land have lost everything—their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives. More than half the population [is] either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile. The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium [are bringing] the most awful birth defects. . .. A river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris, through a country that may never be put back together again.30