ABSTRACT
The Iraq war was launched in March 2003, but US-Iraqi tensions had been building throughout the 1990s. This chapter describes the events leading up to the war and then considers the primary and possible secondary motivations for going to war. Millions of people in the Middle East and around the world believed that the war was about oil. Although 9/11 created a potential strategic rationale for going to war against Iraq, it also allowed the administration to garner public support for war. The perception that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and connections to terrorism further drove the change in American foreign policy away from containment and toward preemption, and preemption became the conceptual basis for invading Iraq. The George H. W. Bush administration's conceptual shift toward preemption and war in Iraq was driven by faulty intelligence on Iraq's WMD and connections to al-Qa'ida.
