ABSTRACT
The early justifications for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 were several and shifting: to pursue terrorists and those who supported them (the original argument of the George W. Bush administration was that Iraq had had contacts with al-Qaeda and therefore was somehow behind the attacks of 9/11); to fight the terrorists “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight them “over here”; and to destroy Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD) before they could be used against the United States. Those rationales became discredited—there was no official Iraqi contact with al-Qaeda, and therefore no indication that Iraq had any connection to 9/11; al-Qaeda and other terrorist and insurgent groups did not establish themselves in Iraq until the chaos following the US invasion; no WMD were ever found in Iraq—so the justifying arguments shifted to the need to remove a dictator in order to promote democracy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. James DeFronzo suggests that a likely reason underlying the invasion was the strategic but surreptitious decision to safeguard American access to the vast oil reserves of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, and he sketches the manifold consequences of the war. In addition to the many thousands of lives lost and the total economic cost of trillions of dollars, over 2 million Iraqis became refugees in their own country, and another 2 million left for other countries, mainly Syria and Jordan. The future of Iraq itself is uncertain, as it threatens to divide into federated or even independent Kurdish and Arab states—or Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shiite Arab states. Middle Eastern outrage against the prolonged US occupation of Iraq tended to focus on Israel and contributed to the increased strength of militant movements such as Hamas among the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon as they battled Israel. Bush’s condemnation of neighboring Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” led some Iranians to fear that they were the next target for an American invasion, a concern that weakened the relatively moderate administration of that country and contributed to the election of the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. DeFronzo also calls attention to the disparity between American rhetoric about promoting democracy and the American fear that genuine democracy would bring to power groups antagonistic to American interests in 210the region—a contradiction already evident in the enduring US support of nondemocratic but friendly and oil-rich regimes.
