Justifications For War

Justifications for War

My college roommate recently got orders to deploy to Iraq for one to two years. I hope and pray every day that he will make it through without any injury, and just as much I hope he doesn't have to go through the horrible atrocities so commonly associated with war. I know that the odds of his getting injured are very good. The worst part about his deployment is that the reasons for the war are clouded to this day. The Bush Administration's initial arguments for the invasion of Iraq were falsified to create popular support while the real goal was to secure U. S. global hegemony.

The ties between the United States and Iraq have long been a controversial topic. To better understand the entire situation in Iraq we must first understand the relations between Iraq, the U. S., and the United Nations (U. N.) as they pertain to this topic. In August 1990, Iraq, led by President Saddam Hussein, illegally invaded and occupied the neighboring country of Kuwait. The U. N. then moved to take action against this violation of international law. The U. S. and various other U. N. member countries teamed up to make a coalition army and commenced Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait and to push the Iraqi army back within its borders. At the time Iraq was aggressively developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons that could be used to decimate large populations. The act in itself was illegal under international law, and the U. N. set into place various resolutions to address this problem.

Scott Ritter, former head of the U. N. Special Commission on Monitoring (UNSCOM) that dealt with weapons inspections in Iraq and a Marine who fought in the Gulf War, wrote a book called Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America. In this book he states that U. N. Security Council Resolution 678 set forth the legal groundwork for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. A mandate for international intervention with use of force on Iraq in the event that the cease-fire was breached was also set into place with U. N. Security Council Resolution 687. The legal basis for the weapons inspections was also set forth in Resolution 687 (13). Further U. N. mandates set forth the largest weapons inspection team in history. Between 1991 and 1998, the U. N. and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conducted biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons inspections within Iraq. Ritter states that "Iraq, during the nearly seven years of continuous inspection activity by the United Nations, had been certified as being disarmed to a 90 to 95 percent level" (31). He also mentions that the other 5-10 percent unclaimed didn't necessarily mean they had any weapons capabilities. Most likely the 5-10 percent in question were destroyed without proper documentation (31). It seems odd that Iraq, after being disarmed at such a high rate, would attempt to continue to possess the agents that were under such strict scrutiny. Nevertheless, further inspection was called for in the form of the U. N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) after Saddam Hussein's non-compliance.

In 1999 (UNMOVIC) was founded to reestablish the inspections in Iraq, as Hans Blix, chairman for this operation, states in his book Disarming Iraq (3). According to the U.S. State Department, on 19 December 1998 Iraq declared for a final time that UNSCOM would not be allowed back in Iraq. By 2002 the U. S. was pushing very hard for the U. N. to do something about Iraq since the U. S. felt that Iraq could be an international threat. We all know that the U. S. is a world leader economically, militarily, and politically. The U. N., like any other political body, is subject to influence by such a powerful actor like the U. S. In September of 2002, Iraq agreed to resume U. N. weapons inspections unconditionally, in large part due to the Bush administration's push for military action against Iraq over this very issue (Blix 115). Shortly after the re-admittance of the inspection teams, the Bush administration began preparing its case for war to present to the world.

The U. S. led invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq has been at the forefront of national and international politics since the Bush administration started its case for war over three years ago. In late September of 2002, the public began seeing the foundation by the Bush administration for the justifications to invade the sovereign state of Iraq. In the official government report by the 9/11 Commission, there are numerous accounts of statements by top level officials in the Bush administration in 2001 that indicate interest in military action against Iraq because of their possible link to Al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The document shows that Bush ordered intelligence officials to try and find a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 235). For the administration's story to work, they needed to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In a press conference on 27 September 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued that the link between Saddam and Al Qaeda was "bulletproof" (Schmitt A8). The American public believed these statements by the Bush administration. Many Americans thought that these statements must be true if they were coming from government officials. However believable the story was at the time, the case needed further proof and backing by other government officials and possibly the world leaders in the U. N. For legal measures to be taken against Iraq as in the past there needed to be a resolution passed in the U. N.

Through American influence, Resolution 1441 was put forth for vote in the U. N. Security Council to intervene in the government of Saddam Hussein in the interests of global security. Secretary of State Colin Powell was faced with the task of selling this resolution and the need for military intervention to the world. The U. S. then went on a campaign to conjure up allied support for an invasion of Iraq. In a direct report by CNN, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the following points to the U. N. Security council as the Bush administration's justifications for the use of force in Iraq for non-compliance with Resolution 1441 of the U. N. Security Council. First, that Iraq illegally possesses WMD's, and secondly, that they are involved in terrorist activities such as the ones carried out by Al Qaeda on 9/11. Many American citizens viewed this report as the truth and began to fall into the ideological trap set by the Bush administration. In the event that these claims were true, the U. N. would have had to intervene with either diplomatic or military means since there would have been a violation of international law. The majority of the countries