To understand why the US went to war against Iraq, one needs to examine some of the history of US Middle East policies, as well as some of the domestic context in the US. In the Middle East, one should look at the US role in Iran, in particular. For the domestic scene, there is some relevant history, as well, but it is also important to bring to bear events in the US preceding and surrounding the war.
The Gulf War was an extension of the so-called "Cold War," the essential goal of which was for the US to dominate the so-called "Third World," with rationale of fighting "commies" providing the supposed justification. Near the beginning of the "Cold War," shortly after WWII, Mossadegh and moderate, capitalist democracy arrived in Iran. Mossadegh attempted to assert local control over local resources by nationalizing Iran's oil fields. For this crime, his administration was demonized as "communist," and the CIA restored the Shah in the early 1950s. From that time until the Iranian revolution of 1979, the US used its position in Iran as one cornerstone in its policy of attempting to control the oil resources of the region.
When the Iranians finally expelled the Shah again in the 1979 revolution, the US lost one of its key means of dominating the Middle East. The US then started down the familiar path of trying to destablize a target country (Iran, this time) through a combination of economic and military measures and covert destabilizations. The covert operations centered on attempts to engineer a coup by making overtures to elements within the military, in this case through arms sales and transfers, some of which were later revealed in the Iran-contra scandal.
It is important to note that these arms transfers to Iran began when Reagan took office, if not before. However, the Iran-contra committee expressly rejected examining the period before the Lebanon hostages had been taken (i.e., the early 1980s) in order to frame the "Iran" part of the Iran-contra scandal around the question of whether Reagan had been "trading arms for hostages." In so doing, the committee effectively covered up the true function and original purpose of the arms sales. Committee members wanted to hold Reagan's feet to the fire for disobeying Congressional will, but they did not want questions of actual policy to interfere with their power-play with the Executive branch.
However, the arms transfers were not the only front against the mullahs. The central initiative of the direct, military destabilization of Iran was US support and promotion of the prolonged and mutually devastating Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s. In 1979, the US exploited Iraq's desire for a port by encouraging Iraq to attack Iran, not that Iraq needed a lot of coaxing. The history of Iraq's pursuit of a port also brings Kuwait and Britain into the equation. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs summarized the history this way:
In 1871, Germany's defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war intensified the rivalry between the British Empire and Imperial Germany. Becuase of that rivalry, Britain in 1899 placed Kuwait "under British protection," the euphemism employed in those days for what Iraq seeks to do to Kuwait now. Britain's purpose in 1899 was to bar the best salt water port in the area from use as a terminus for Germany's ambitous Berlin-to-Baghdad railway project, which Britain feared would threaten its own hold on India.The US also pressured Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to finance Iraq's attack on Iran, and it was very much in those countries' interests to harass the radical fundamentalists ruling Iran. The attack on Iran was largely enabled by US and West European arms and Saudi and Kuwaiti money. And even when an Iraqi missile struck the USS Stark, the US actively joined the action in the Persian Gulf on the side of Iraq, eventually shooting down an Iranian passenger airliner by "mistake."The seeds of future trouble were sown because Kuwait, then part of Turkey's tottering Ottoman Empire, was governed from Basra, in what later became Iraqi territory. That is the basis for Iraq's claim that British imperialism robbed it of it's "natural port" on the Persian Gulf.
After Kuwait declared its independence in 1961, Iraq publicly asserted its claim to sovereignty over the area. British forces returned to Kuwait, and then were replaced by Arab League forces rushed to Kuwait's protection. Barred from moving its forces into Kuwait, Iraq let its claim lapse.
Kuwait also used the war to jockey for position. First, it used the war as a cover to move its border many miles into disputed territory with Iraq, and pumped out billions of dollars worth of oil. We might note that if Mexico were to move into Texas and start pumping oil, the US would go to war in about ten minutes. And after the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was somewhat dismayed to find Kuwait and Saudi Arabia demanding quick repayment of the massive "loans" they had made to Iraq to finance the war. Iraq would obviously have had to use oil revenues to repay those moneys, but there followed as well a series of Kuwaiti oil market maneuvers that halved the price of Iraq's crude oil, costing Iraq further billions. Iraq protested and tried to negotiate a solution in various high-level meetings and summits during the first half of 1990, virtually until their invasion of Kuwait. For their part, Kuwait was said to be willing to discuss everything but "territorial adjustments," and Iraq broke off talks and invaded.
Kuwait is a small country with a virtually nonexistent military machine, and the historical context of its very existence, let alone claims on additional territory, was one of Western imperialism. Kuwait was clearly not acting alone in antagonizing Iraq, and US pressure helped sabotage its negotiations with Iraq. As Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz commented, "It was inconceivable that a regime, such as that in Kuwait, could risk engaging in a conspiracy of such magnitude against a large, strong country such as Iraq, if it were not being supported and protected by a great power; and that power was the United States."
So Hussein called in US ambassador April Glaspie, and asked her what the US response would be to an Iraqi military action against Kuwait. She repeatedly said that the US had "no opinion on . . . conflicts such as your border disagreement with Kuwait," adding that she had "direct instruction from the President" on this point. In addition, top State Department officials were then publicly stating that the US "was not obligated to come to Kuwait's aid if it were attacked." In diplomatic terms, this was a clear green light for Hussein to invade Kuwait.
I should note at this point that Iraq was hardly blameless in moving towards war with Kuwait, a policy it pursued for reasons strikingly similar to those driving US warmongering, a point to which I shall return. However, the focus here is on US policy and its motivations.
There are two basic reasons that the US used Hussein and then turned on him. First, Hussein started to represent a threat to US hegemony in the region. He asserted local power beyond the gadfly role he'd been assigned, providing a model that the US did not want others to emulate. And by invading Kuwait, a country that is basically a British banking protectorate, he violated one of the cardinal rules of puppetdom: don't harass other puppets with good connections. For US policy makers, the choice between turning on Hussein and creating friction with another friendly imperial power was no choice.
The second reason for the US about-face with Hussein is that the US was shopping for a war in 1990, and Iraq presented itself as a likely candidate. With a tremendous effort of propaganda and international coercion, the US satisfied all its war "needs" at the time by selling, creating, and moving with great deliberation towards a war against Iraq. Why? John Stockwell's insight regarding US covert destabilizations is instructive here. His "In Search of Enemies" thesis suggests that such actions, beyond punishing and making examples of those who attempt to escape US control (the neo-colonialist thesis), are in fact ends in themselves, providing both continuing markets for arms merchants and continuing rationales for the war economy that is bankrupting our nation, threatening nuclear annihilation, devastating the environment, etc.
A few days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, US Senators could scarcely contain their joy in announcing that the B-2 "stealth" bomber could obviously not be scrapped now, as it had a "new mission." Of course, even if the US wanted to incinerate the Middle East with nuclear weapons (the implied "new mission"), the "stealth" bomber would have been utterly superfluous. There was even talk that Hussein's missiles might have been the saving grace of the SDI/"Star Wars" program.
But the retention of particularly vain and extravagant death toys and the promotion of outer space as a new military market weren't the only things in need of a "new mission." As with the Panama invasion and the deployment of US "special forces" and "advisors" in the Andean nations, sending a couple hundred thousand US troops to the Middle East expressed US militarism's panicked search for a new rationale, a frantic grasping for a continuing justification for the US war economy and its fetishes. The "Cold War" emperor wore no clothes, and it was obvious to anyone that there was no reason to continue the high-tech industry's massive state subsidy, otherwise known as "defense spending."
It was hardly a chance occurrence that the end of the Evil Empire pretext for US militarism in the Third World coincided with a rash of renewed militarism involving US troops, in addition to the extension of proxy forces, such as contras, Salvadoran death squads (in and out of uniform), UNITA in Angola, Cambodia's D.K. coalition (including the Khmer Rouge), the Afghani mujahedeen, etc. "Cold" wars, hot wars, drug wars, oil wars, star wars, any wars--the US was and is truly "in search of enemies." It took a few generations, but the Vietnam experience is now rewritten and sanitized history, and "we" are just spoiling for a good bash. Really brings up those ratings on TV, too--just so long as US casualties are low, because body-bags (at least, those with Americans in them) have a way of forcing serious questions.
Another reason for US jingoism in 1990 was that, as one commentator noted at the time, "the Reaganomics bills are coming due." There were massive deficits, the S&L fraud, the Reagan years' colossal shift in wealth from the poor to the rich, etc. The US used the usual warmongering ruse to avoid dealing with severe domestic economic problems. The Middle East action disrupted budget talks, and Bush promptly went on vacation.
Moreover, deployment of US troops is extremely expensive--or lucrative, depending on your point of view. The early estimate was that deploying 50,000 US troops would cost $500 million per month. With the announcement that the US would send 250,000 troops or more, the cost may have risen as high as $2.5 billion per month. That's a lot of school lunches. Imagine spending that much on actual, pressing national emergencies, such as those in health care, education, homelessness, job training for conversion to a functional peace economy, serious protection/extension of civil rights, the environment, etc.
Whence the money was to come was not immediately clear. The fact that funds always seem to be found for militarism, though not so for the real emergencies, is a compelling indicator of which interests our state truly serves. If US taxpayers are to foot the bill for defending oil corporations' interests, perhaps US social programs should get a big cut of those corporations' profits. Enough of this business of socializing costs and privatizing profits. Of course, the investments of Exxon, et al., in the US political system provided a singularly good return in the Gulf War, more than covering costs. And the contributions of Japan and other nations simply made explicit the global protection racket the US heads up for entrenched international capital.
The most intriguing proposed war revenue source was that of further weapons sales to other Middle East countries. The US wanted to "transfer" a billion dollars worth of weaponry to Israel. It was not at all clear how or even whether Israel was to pay; the fact that such doubts would in no way hinder the "transfer" revealed again the warmongering priorities of US policy makers. Israel was said to be in need of the new weapons so as to counter the new Saudi threat posed by the aforementioned bribery sales of advanced US military aircraft to the Saudis!
In this way, US militarism propagates itself, servicing all comers and producing heightened tensions, which will in turn be said to require further US militarism to "protect" us in the dangerous world. And as good little patriots, we must pay no attention to the fact that the US is resolutely making the world more dangerous, not less, as the arms merchants bemoan the tragic necessity of their state subsidy all the way to their banks and to the fundraising parties of their favorite politicians, and as the domestic economy and the environment go down the drain.
Thus does our anti-democratic system produce policies serving the interests of the few at the quite literal expense of the many. This system was similarly revealed by the S&L scam, perhaps the greatest theft in history, for which taxpayers forked over from $1.4 trillion to over $2 trillion to pay off the stratospheric bad debt incurred at the public trough by some of the wealthiest people on the planet, and all to insure their right to steal our savings. Likewise, the Gulf War laid bare the workings of our state, if we care to look closely.
Why did the US respond militarily to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait? Because that response served the elite interests that own and control our state. There are certainly many ways to analyze those interests, as along class, gender, racial, or psychological lines. The Gulf War, for example, brought up certain gender issues, involving deep Western ambivalence regarding stereotypes of Arab masculinity and patriarchal social structures, both inviting and threatening to the Western audience, allowing identification with the Saudis and demonization of the Iraqis. These essays have been concerned with (1) using the example of the Gulf War to show what US foreign policy is not, with debunking the US's self-image of world leadership, morality, world benefaction, selflessness, democracy, economic legitimacy, etc., and (2) offering an alternate interpretation, based on facts, logic, and history instead of dogma.
The plain facts of the Gulf War are these:
The United States encouraged (or, at the very least, did nothing to
discourage) Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and then, turning diplomacy on its
head, used that invasion to conjure a new war where there was no war,
aggressively rejecting any peaceful solutions, including the last-minute
virtual surrender of Iraq; the US then set its high-tech, meat grinder
death machine on maximum kill, slaughtering 100,000 to 200,000 or more
people in a 45-day orgy of blood, and wound up bulldozing mounds of
corpses into mass graves in the desert, in scenes reminiscent of Nazi
death camp footage.
Not unsurprisingly, though there were calls in the US media after the war to apply the Nuremberg principles to Saddam and try him for war crimes, no one here seemed to think of applying those principles a little closer to home.
The US war against Iraq was not a "just war"; it was not a moral war; it was not a war of collective self-defense against aggression. It was an imperialist war of aggression by US leaders who cynically spouted high principle as the rationale for continuing the arms race, dominating the "Third World," and diverting attention from the tremendous domestic problems which the war's billion dollar-a-day price tag only exacerbated.
It is important to see through the propaganda barrage and so to get a clearer picture of the state in which we live. The implications for action seem clear enough.
The Gulf War: Myth and Reality
Sources
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