Discuss America's invasion of Iraq through two lenses. 1: How did the American government convince the American public that the invasion was necessary? 2: What was the response of the international community and the UN? Did their response matter?Refer to article posted. 2 pages.
An Excerpt from Chapter 2 of Hegemony or Survival: Imperial Grand Strategy High on the global agenda by fall 2002 was the declared intention of the most powerful state in history to maintain its hegemony through the threat or use of military force, the dimension of power in which it reigns supreme. In the official rhetoric of the National Security Strategy, "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."1 One well-known international affairs specialist, John Ikenberry, describes the declaration as a "grand strategy [that] begins with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor," a condition that is to be "permanent [so] that no state or coalition could ever challenge [the US] as global leader, protector, and enforcer." The declared "approach renders international norms of self-defense (enshrined by Article 51 of the UN Charter) almost meaningless." More generally, the doctrine dismisses international law and institutions as of "little value." Ikenberry continues: "The new imperial grand strategy presents the United States [as] a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary advantages into a world order in which it runs the show," prompting others to find ways to "work around, undermine, contain and retaliate against U.S. power." The strategy threatens to "leave the world more dangerous and divided" and the United States less secure,"2 a view widely shared within the foreign policy elite. Enforcing Hegemony The imperial grand strategy asserts the right of the United States to undertake "preventive war" at will: Preventive, not preemptive.3 Preemptive war might fall within the framework of international law. Thus if Russian bombers had been detected approaching the US from the military base in Grenada conjured up by the Reagan administration in 1983, with the clear intent to bomb, then, under a reasonable interpretation of the UN Charter, a preemptive attack destroying the planes and perhaps even the Grenadan base would have been justifiable. Cuba, Nicaragua, and many others could have exercised the same right for many years while under attack from the US, though of course the weak would have to be insane to implement their rights. But the justifications for preemptive war, whatever they might be, do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an imagined or invented threat, so that even the term preventive is too charitable. Preventive war falls within the category of war crimes. If indeed it is an idea "whose time has come,"4 then the world is in deep trouble. As the invasion of Iraq began, the prominent historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger wrote that The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.5 He added that "the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9-11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism," and even in friendly countries the public regards Bush "as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein." International law specialist Richard Falk finds it "inescapable" that the Iraq war was a "Crime against Peace of the sort for which surviving German leaders were indicted, prosecuted, and punished at the Nuremberg trials."6 Some defenders of the strategy recognize that it runs roughshod over international law but see no problem in that. The whole framework of international law is just "hot air," legal scholar Michael Glennon writes: "The grand attempt to subject the rule of force to the rule of law" should be deposited in the ashcan of history" a convenient stance for the one state able to adopt the new nonrules for its purposes, since it spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on means of violence and is forging new and dangerous paths in developing means of destruction, over near unanimous world opposition. The proof that the system is all "hot air" is straightforward: Washington "made it clear that it intends to do all it can to maintain its preeminence," then "announced that it would ignore" the UN Security Council over Iraq and declared more broadly that "it would no longer be bound by the [UN] Charter's rules governing the use of force." QED. Accordingly, the rules have "collapsed" and "the entire edifice came crashing down." This, Glennon concludes, is a good thing, since the US is the leader of the "enlightened states" and therefore "must resist [any effort] to curb its use of force."7 The enlightened leader is also free to change the rules at will. When the military forces occupying Iraq failed to discover the weapons of mass destruction that allegedly justified the invasion, the administration's stance shifted from "absolute certainty" that Iraq possessed WMD on a scale that required immediate military action to the assertion that American accusations had been "justified by the discovery of equipment that potentially could be used to produce weapons." Senior officials suggested a "refinement in the controversial concept of a 'preventive war' " that entitles Washington to take military action "against a country that has deadly weapons in mass quantities." The revision "suggests instead that the administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability to develop [WMD]."8 Virtually any country has the potential and ability to produce WMD, and intent is in the eye of the beholder. Hence the refined version of the grand strategy effectively grants Washington the right of arbitrary aggression. Lowering the bar for the resort to force is the most significant consequence of the collapse of the proclaimed argument for the invasion. The goal of the imperial grand strategy is to prevent any challenge to the "power, position, and prestige of the United States." The quoted words are not those of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, or any of the other statist reactionaries who formulated the National Security Strategy of September 2002. Rather, they were spoken by the respected liberal elder statesman Dean Acheson in 1963. He was justifying US actions against Cuba in full knowledge that Washington's international terrorist campaign aimed at "regime change" had been a significant factor in bringing the world close to nuclear war only a few months earlier, and that it was resumed immediately after the Cuban missile crisis was resolved. Nevertheless, he instructed the American Society of International Law that no "legal issue" arises when the US responds to a challenge to its "power, position, and prestige." Acheson's doctrine was subsequently invoked by the Reagan administration, at the other end of the political spectrum, when it rejected World Court jurisdiction over its attack on Nicaragua, dismissed the court order to terminate its crimes, and then vetoed two Security Council resolutions affirming the court judgment and calling on all states to observe international law. State Department legal adviser Abraham Sofaer explained that most of the world cannot "be counted on to share our view" and that "this same majority often opposes the United States on important international questions." Accordingly, we must "reserve to ourselves the power to determine" which matters fall "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States"" in this case, the actions that the court condemned as the "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua; in lay terms, international terrorism.9 Contempt for international law and institutions was particularly flagrant in the Reagan-Bush years" the first reign of Washington's current incumbents" and their successors continued to make it clear that the US reserved the right to act "unilaterally when necessary," including the "unilateral use of military power" to defend such vital interests as "ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources."10 But the posture was not exactly new. The basic principles of the imperial grand strategy of September 2002 go back to the early days of World War II. Even before the US entered the war, high-level planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar world the US would seek "to hold unquestioned power," acting to ensure the "limitation of any exercise of sovereignty" by states that might interfere with its global designs. They recognized further that "the foremost requirement" to secure these ends was "the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament"" then, as now, a central component of "an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States." At the time, these ambitions were limited to "the non-German world," which was to be organized under the US aegis as a "Grand Area," including the Western Hemisphere, the former British Empire, and the Far East. After it became fairly clear that Germany would be defeated, the plans were extended to include as much of Eurasia as possible.11 The precedents, barely sampled here, reveal the narrow range of the planning spectrum. Policy flows from an institutional framework of domestic power, which remains fairly stable. Economic decision-making power is highly centralized, and John Dewey scarcely exaggerated when he described politics as "the shadow cast on society by big business." It is only natural that state policy should seek to construct a world system open to US economic penetration and political control, tolerating no rivals or threats.12 A crucial corollary is vigilance to block any moves toward independent development that might become a "virus infecting others," in the terminology of planners. That is a leading theme of postwar history, often disguised under thin Cold War pretexts that were also exploited by the superpower rival in its narrower domains. The basic missions of global management have endured from the early postwar period, among them: containing other centers of global power within the "overall framework of order" managed by the United States; maintaining control of the world's energy supplies; barring unacceptable forms of independent nationalism; and overcoming "crises of democracy" within domestic enemy territory. The missions assume different forms, notably in periods of fairly sharp transition: the changes in the international economic order from about 1970; the restoration of the superpower enemy to something like its traditional quasi-colonial status twenty years later; the threat of international terrorism aimed at the United States itself from the early 1990s, shockingly consummated on 9-11. Over the years, tactics have been refined and modified to deal with these shifts, progressively ratcheting up the means of violence and driving our endangered species closer to the edge of catastrophe. Nevertheless, the September 2002 unveiling of the imperial grand strategy justifiably sounded alarm bells. Acheson and Sofaer were describing policy guidelines, and within elite circles. Their stands are known only to specialists or readers of dissident literature. Other cases may be regarded as worldly-wise reiterations of the maxim of Thucydides that "large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must." In contrast,