The Long Road to Baghdad

by Ian Boyne

THE WAR IN Iraq is not just about oil as is commonly believed and shouted angrily from placards all over the world.

It is our continuing failure to take ideas and ideology seriously which leads us to this economic reductionistic and deterministic thinking.

One can easily see why so many draw that conclusion. It is the most obvious factor which jumps at you. The United States imports 60 per cent of its oil needs. Persian Gulf oil reserves are twice as large as all of the rest of the world's and some 20 times larger than the dwindling reserves of the U.S.

Iraq alone has nearly five times as much oil reserves as the U.S., including Alaska. The new reserves of oil which are being discovered and developed in the world are most commonly expensive to extract and of relatively low quality.

In his study, Iraq: Consequences of a War, published by the Oxford Research Group (October), Professor Paul Rodgers, notes: "The most promising area for oil prospecting is the Persian Gulf and the oil that appears available there is of a relatively high quality, is easily recoverable so the production costs are low and is close to major sea-lanes".

Besides - and this is critical - the largest exporter of oil, Saudi Arabia, shows increasing evidence of internal instability, has a strong undercurrent of anti-Americanism as well as a strong support for their Palestinian brothers and is, notoriously, the home of Bin Laden.

Says the Oxford Research Group: "Replacing the current (Iraqi) regime with one compliant with U.S. interests would, therefore, involve the substantial bonus of diminishing the importance of Saudi Arabia. This could be seen perhaps as the real al Qaeda link with the Iraq question".

But the reasons for the U.S. attack on Iraq and the promotion of the Bush Doctrine of preventive strike and pre-emption have much deeper roots which we will explore.

The Royal Institute of International Affairs points out in a December 2002 briefing paper, The Future of Oil: Scenarios and Implication,: "If protecting the commercial interests of American oil companies and putting more oil into the market were prime objectives of the Bush Administration, sanctions would be lifted against Iran and Libya."

Besides, this war and occupation is a very expensive venture ­ and, unlike the first Iraqi war of 1991, the major European allies are not in the coalition to defray the costs. And that war cost US$79.9 billion. President Bush this past week asked for US$74 billion to support the war efforts in the first phase.

But in a gloomy article in the March 24 issue of Newsweek on The Unalmighty Dollar it is pointed out that American occupation over the expected 10-year period would cost from US$156 billion to $755 billion.

Some estimates are even running as high as US$3 trillion. America is now running a staggering US$500 billion current account deficit and owes US$2 trillion abroad, 20 per cent of its GDP.

In economic terms, rushing to war unilaterally makes no economic sense. Which leads us to the other issue ­ ideology: a set of ideas which fire the minds of certain policy-makers and lead them to adopt a view of America's role in the post-Cold War world.

IDEOLOGY AND THE IRAQI WAR

Ever since Marxian social science perspectives have been influential ­ even beyond those who profess Marxism ­ there has been the tendency to downplay ideas and values in politics and international relations, and to concentrate on economic motivation. The classic realist-versus-idealist debate in international relations.

The road to Baghdad has been a long and tortuous one. The trek really began at the start of the 1990s as the Cold War came to an end. America emerged the only superpower but was faced by "rogue states" like Iraq which threatened U.S. strategic interests in critical regions.

There is a document that you need to be acquainted with and which is absolutely critical if you are to understand the Bush Doctrine and this Brave New World which the United States is forcing upon all of us, like it or not.

It is a document called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), supervised by super-hawk Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, and contributed to by Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Wolfowitz was then under-secretary of defence for policy.

The view of Wolfowitz, Powell and Cheney was that conflicts had moved from contests between superpowers to regional and other types of conflicts.

It was felt that the strategic doctrine which guided foreign policy thinking since the end of World War II ­ that of containment and deterrence ­ was hopelessly outdated and unable to deal with the emerging realities.

The strategy of the U.S. now that it had conquered the Soviet Union, says the DPG, was to "prevent the re-emergence of a new rival". Achieving this objective would mean that the U.S. should be prepared to "prevent any hostile power from dominating a region" of strategic significance to the U.S.

America's new mission, says the document brazenly, was to convince allies "that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."

Europe, therefore, would be kept in its place; allowed perhaps to be an economic giant but a military dwarf. It was in this document that the doctrine of preemptive strike was enunciated.

It was these ideas which later evolved into the Bush Doctrine. The document said openly that that the U.S. should use military action to preemptively attack countries with weapons of mass destruction.

The DPG says the U.S. "will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests but those of our allies and friends."

In other words, the U.S. will be the hegemon; allies should accept dependence on the U.S. for a security blanket, and those which are perceived as threatening U.S. interests must know that the U.S. reserves the right to unilaterally crush them.

If it sounds like it is a retreat into the law of the jungle, it is because it is. This is what is most frightening about the war in Iraq ­ not that a brutal and despotic tyrant is being removed from power and his oppressed people given a chance to choose a lesser dictator, but that the U.S. has plunged us into a dangerous and unstable world.

Leading U.S. weekly, Time Magazine in its March 31 edition, says: "What is unfolding in Iraq is bigger than regime change or even the elimination of dangerous weapons. The U.S. has launched a war unlike any it has fought in the past. This one is being waged not to defend against an enemy that has attacked the U.S. or its interests, but to prevent the possibility that one day it might do so."

This is exactly the doctrine which the DPG put forward in 1992, but the domestic and international climate was not right for its implementation then. Among the interests that the DPG said the U.S. should address were, significantly, "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles and threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism."

This sounds like a speech from George Bush, the Younger or Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell in 2003, but it was actually written at the beginning of the 1990s.

But the hawks were getting no serious hearing in Washington. Cheney and the others were pushing hard for increases in defence spending and, at the end of the Cold War, Congress and other voices in the Pentagon were not easily sold on hiking defence spending, with the Soviet Union now disintegrated.

But the hawks were insisting that there were still grave danger ­ indeed, more grave dangers after the demise of the Soviet Union which had to exercise a certain responsibility and dignity as a superpower.

In I992, the DPG was leaked to the influential New York Times and there was a furor over its blatant hegemonistic thinking and disregard for European allies and the foundations of post-World War II strategic thinking and Wilsonian idealism.

9/11 AS SCAPEGOAT

In 1996, super-hawk Wolfowitz getting increasingly impatient that his ideas were not winning the day in the U.S. Administration (a liberal Clinton would have none of it) wrote then: "Should we sit idly by with our passive containment policy and our inept covert operations and wait until a tyrant possessing large quantities of weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated delivery systems strikes us?"

But September 11, 2001 was to change all of that.

Time Magazine put it bluntly in its current edition: "By the fall of 2001, Bush and senior policymakers in Washington were scared out of their wits. On October 4 came the first anthrax attacks on New York City and Washington. Again no evidence was found linking Saddam to the attacks. Even if a link to Baghdad could not be proved, this was enough to stiffen the spines of those who thought Saddam's weapons of mass destruction had been left alone too long."

FEAR

Ah! The super-hawks were euphoric ­ the climate of fear and paranoia was enough to scare the Administration into finally accepting their doctrine. At West Point in June last year, Bush officially proclaimed the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Powell-Rumsfeld doctrine as U.S. official policy ­ the Bush Doctrine.

Bush said then: "If we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge."

The hegemonists had won. First stop, Baghdad! The U.S. would now, said Bush at West Point, prevent the emergence of a rival power by maintaining "military strengths beyond challenge". Go back to your DPG.

The DPG had stated quite unabashedly that America should position itself to "act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated". So Old Europe is expendable ­ so are treaties, international agreements like Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

"We once denounced those who tried to rule the world," says David Armstrong in an enlightening article in the October 2002 issue of Harper's magazine. "Our primary objection (at least officially) to the Soviet Union was its quest for global domination. (But) we now pursue the very things for which we opposed it. And now that the Soviet Union is gone, there appears to be no one left to stop us."

But those who were becoming overly optimistic by the prospects of a post-Cold-War, post-communist world and who might have thought that Great Power politics would be a thing of the past would be sobered by reading Professor John J. Mearsmeimer's 555-page recent book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. And many right-wingers have been touting Robert Kaplan's pessimistic, "realistic" book Warrior Politics that glorifies raw military power and conquest.

But, warns Mearsmeimer in his book, "When one state is threatening to dominate the rest, the long-term value of remaining at peace declines and threatened states will be more willing to take chances to improve their security."

Thanks, George W. Bush!