FIVE YEARS AFTER INVASION OF IRAQ: WHY DID WE DO IT?

So why, exactly, did the U.S. invade Iraq five years ago this week?

By Jim Lobe, IPS NewsPosted on March 19, 2008, Printed on March 19, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/80167/

The official reasons -- the threat posed to the U.S. and its allies by Saddam Hussein's alleged programs of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the possibility that he would pass along those arms to al Qaeda -- have long since been discarded by the overwhelming weight of the evidence, or, more precisely, the lack of evidence that such a threat ever existed.

Liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Hussein's particularly unforgiving and bloodthirsty version of Ba'athism and thus setting an irresistible precedent that would spread throughout the Arab world -- a theme pushed by the administration of President George W. Bush mostly after the invasion, as it became clear that the officials reasons could not be justified -- appears to have been the guiding obsession of really only one member of the Bush team, and not a particularly influential one at that: Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Then there's the theory that Bush -- whose enigmatic psychology, particularly his relationship to his father, has already provided grist for several book-publishing mills -- wanted to show up his dad for failing to take Baghdad in 1991. Or he sought to "finish the job" that his dad had begun in 1991; and/or avenge his dad for Hussein's alleged (but highly questionable) assassination attempt against Bush I in Kuwait after the war.

Because Bush was the ultimate "Decider," as he himself has put it, and because no one who ever served at top levels in the administration has ever been able to say precisely when (let alone why) the decision was made to invade Iraq, this explanation cannot be entirely dismissed as an answer.

Then there is the question of oil. Was the administration acting on behalf of an oil industry desperate to get its hands on Mesopotamian oil that had long been denied it as a result of U.N. and unilateral sanctions prohibiting business between U.S. companies and Hussein?
Given both Bush's and Vice President Dick Cheney's long-standing ties to the industry and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's assertion in his recent memoir that "The Iraq war is largely about oil," this theory has definite appeal -- particularly to those on the left who made "No Blood for Oil" a favorite mantra at anti-war protests in the run-up to the invasion, just as they did -- with much greater plausibility -- before the 1991 Gulf War.

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