Regime Change In Iraq Research Articles

US foreign policy, neo-conservatism and the Iraq war (2003-2011): Critical reviews of factors and rationales

The post-US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has witnessed a dramatic change in the Iraqi political landscape and became the main highlights of geopolitical and security issues in the Middle East. Critics of the war maintained that there were other motives behind the decision of the US government to invade Iraq. This article argues that the US administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was not entirely driven by the desire to introduce democracy and establish security, dubbed the “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in the country, as justified by President Bush, but instead motivated largely by oil-related benefits to the US including its interest to gain control of the oil reserves in Iraq as well as to preserve the US Dollars as the world reserve currency. This factor is supplemented by several other rationales, including the neoconservatives’ influence to bring a regime change in Iraq and the quest for US global hegemony. These three major factors—oil resources, the position of petrodollar’s status quo, and the quest for global hegemony make up a comprehensive and sophisticated motivation to justify why the US administration decided to invade Iraq in 2003, apart from the terrorism and weapon of mass destruction-related issues.

Subverting Peace: The Origins and Legacies of de-Ba’athification in Iraq

ABSTRACT Lustration, as an instrument of transitional justice, determines the extent to which members of the former regime or combatant groups can be reintegrated into a democratizing state. This article examines the effects of de-Ba'athification in the lead up to and following foreign-imposed regime change in Iraq. I demonstrate that exclusive and unconstrained lustration created an institutional mechanism that targeted and excluded key segments of the population as perceived regime collaborators, which subverted peacebuilding during the transitional period of the occupation. I conclude by illuminating the enduring effects of exclusionary lustration on subsequent attempts at state-and peacebuilding in divided, post-colonial societies.

Playing the Diversity Card: Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Policy under the Salmans

ABSTRACTSince the 2003 regime change in Iraq and the 2011 Arab uprisings, the political map of the Middle East has been in flux. Regional actors have taken advantage of emerging windows of opportunity, which have affected the outcome of this process. Saudi Arabia’s role as an aspiring regional hegemon in the region is salient: the country’s assertive course in shaping its neighbourhood coincides with a more independent foreign policy that goes beyond the traditional US alliance and seeks to diversify its international partners. This diversification of Saudi foreign policy since the ascension to the throne of King Salman in 2015 is explained by using the IR concept of hedging.

Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq

Michael MacDonald’s book may not be to everyone’s taste, but it most certainly is to mine. In his opening pages, MacDonald goes through a list of several leading explanations for the American decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, demonstrating that each of them is limited in its ability to capture more than a small part of a much larger story. Thus, he minimizes personal quirks of President George W. Bush (and his relations with his father) or Dick Cheney, geopolitical considerations focusing on Iraqi energy resources or strategic location, the role of the military-industrial complex, or the pressures of the Israel lobby. Ultimately, his primary explanatory vehicle is a kind of groupthink or collective conscience that had come to possess a good part of the foreign policy elite in Washington by the time of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Put simply, with the Cold War over and America’s superpower status unchallenged, the attitude grew that the United States was a power beyond challenge and that it had a blueprint for remaking foreign peoples to its liking—meaning their conversion, should the occasion warrant, into what by the end of the first year of the Bill Clinton administration had become known as the “enlargement” of the zone of “free market democracies.” In other words, liberal imperialism came fully into its own, its “universal appeal” widely acknowledged with the “responsibility to protect” (a concept MacDonald does not discuss), which constituted a new version of “just war.”

Making Sense of "Long Wars" — Advice to the US Army

Most military institutions that experience success or failure in war will seek to understand their recent history so they can make sense of it, and learn intelligently from it. The process is never easy or straightforward; indeed, it is often fraught. Those inside the institution have positions and reputations to defend; those outside it--often anxious to level critiques--may not have enough knowledge to offer sophisticated and informed analyses, or may be so determined to build a good story around goats and heroes they miscast the events and offer far more heat than light. Analyses of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have come in every possible form: journalists' accounts were first on the scene, but they were followed quickly by those of think-tank analysts, academics, defense intellectuals, official historians, and memoir writers. Each of these has its own weaknesses and strengths. Many have echoed the frustration felt by the American people--frustration driven by a belief that while the US seemed to invest extraordinary amounts of time, blood, and treasure in these campaigns, we have little to show for them. The US Army had the biggest investment--and thus the biggest stake--in the long wars. It is unsurprising, then, that the Army should be the service most buffeted by the experience and the institutional effort to make sense of it. After all, the senior leaders of the US Army must continue to hold the trust and confidence of the American people, and justify the resources invested in the organization. They must learn from and adapt to past experience even as they look forward to a future that arrives with unforgiving speed. They must fight ongoing budget battles, maintain force readiness, keep up with new technologies, plan for new weapons systems, and educate personnel even as they try to process and absorb the recent past. Adding to the difficulty of this task is the fact that, of all the services, the Army may have the greatest challenge when it comes to predicting the future and getting ready for it. In many ways, the Army is the utility infielder of the US military: because it can never be sure exactly what the nation will ask of it, it must be prepared to perform a wide range of tasks well. It must be able to transform itself from Retriever to Rottweiler, and back again, quickly and seamlessly. As an institution, the Army is not averse to introspection and self-analysis. But like all institutions, it is susceptible to the pathologies that stem from cognitive bias and sensitivity to criticism. At one moment senior leaders may ignore that which is painful; the next moment they may over-react to it. Similarly, they may miss moments of success that deserve capture and amplification. At present, the Army seems to be in a phase not dissimilar to the one it entered after Vietnam: it does not study the hard problems and failures deeply enough, and it overlooks and forgets the things that deserve positive acknowledgment and reinforcement. As the Army works through its own analyses of the long wars, and responds to external critiques, it must discern which problems were internal, which were external, and which emerged due to frictions and pathologies along the ever-challenging civil-military fault line. While the Army must understand and take responsibility for the ways it contributed to unsatisfactory outcomes, its leaders must recognize these failings were located inside a broader national security framework that must be addressed comprehensively. Simply put, the Army operates within a civil-military system in which both parties are responsible for failure and success. One can hardly argue, for instance, the flawed assumptions embedded in the Bush 43 decision for regime change in Iraq in 2003 stemmed principally from a failure of strategic thinking inside the Army. One can and should argue senior Army officers might have found more effective ways to ask probing questions about the direction of events, and about the theory of victory operative in the minds of those who were driving the decision for war. …

Overreach: delusions of regime change in Iraq

Overreach: delusions of regime change in Iraq

Does the Flaw Lie within Us? Classical Realism and Unrealistic Policy

This paper argues that one of classical realism's most useful contributions may be to explain “unrealistic” behaviour of the sort that structural realists find vexingly contrary to their prescriptions. The paper engages in detail with the writing of two of the primary scholars of the classical realist school, Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, to demonstrate that these theories do not posit simplistically that individuals or states always act “selfishly” in their own interests. Rather, states and statesmen are routinely burdened by what might be called “failures of insight”: an inability to conceive of their own interests and preferences objectively when held alongside those of others. As a result, powerful states are prone to conflating their own particular national interests with universal or systemic interests, hindering their capacity to anticipate or deal effectively with resistance on the part of other actors who insist on defining their own interests in contrary ways. Having established this conceptual framework, the paper provides two illustrations of this phenomenon in action in US foreign policy: President Woodrow Wilson's interventionism in Mexico and George W. Bush's policy of regime change in Iraq.

Embracing Regime Change in Iraq: American Foreign Policy and the 1963 Coup d'etat in Baghdad

Embracing Regime Change in Iraq: American Foreign Policy and the 1963 Coup d'etat in Baghdad

The unravelling of the post-First World War state system? The Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the transformation of the Middle East

Ten years after regime change in Iraq, the Kurdistan Region has emerged as a transformative force in the international affairs of the Middle East. The Kurds have moved to being architects of the new Iraqi state, but have thereby forced an ideational contest between them—as visionaries of a decentralized Iraq—and successive Iraqi governments that favour a centralized authority structure. In addition to this first set of developments, the prominence of the Kurds is also explained by two additional sets of issues. The second concerns the interplay of federalism in Iraq and the management of the country's oil and gas reserves. Kurdistan's expansion of its hydrocarbons industry has been met with opposition from Baghdad that has furthered the polarization and enmity between the two sides. The third issue, which serves to make concrete the gains made by the Kurds, concerns regional geopolitical developments. For the first time in a century, the nationalist interests of the Kurds in Iraq are compatible with the sectarian interests of Turkey and Sunni Arab states. These three issues (domestic development, economic advancement and regional geopolitics) come together to explain the Kurdistan Region's agency in a rapidly transforming regional complex and raise the possibility of an independent Republic of Kurdistan emerging in the near future as an idea that is no longer regarded as impossible.

Regime change and the superego

This article explores the application of Robert Caper's ideas about an archaic superego and Ron Britton's formulations about the therapeutic emancipation of the ego from the tyranny of a destructive superego to thinking about Western interventions to bring about regime change in the Middle East. The author reviews the Kleinian and post Kleinian formulations about the superego. He concludes that problems with the superego are ubiquitous whether because of an archaic superego which can resurface in paranoid schizoid states of mind, or because of an enduring destructive superego. Britton shows how biblical texts reveal a preoccupation with and shed light on the inner struggle for freedom from the superego. The author discusses a similar preoccupation in a piece of popular contemporary literature The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and how, set in the context of the West's attempt to bring about regime-change in Iraq, this novel offers a commentary about the interaction between these internal and external struggles. The power of an archaic or destructive superego derives from a merger of the ego and superego whereby the ego is depleted as a result of projecting into the superego. The therapeutic task is to enable the client to achieve a ‘third position’ from which the ego can be strengthened by a disentangling of the projections, which may also need to involve the therapist's own disentangling from an archaic superego in the counter-transference. Some clinical material by Britton is reviewed to illustrate the disentangling of the projections. The author then discusses the application of these clinical insights to thinking about Western involvement in regime change in Iraq and Libya. He suggests that electorates who have suffered adversities such as ‘9/11’ or the recent financial crisis may be vulnerable to mobilising an omnipotent and idealised archaic superego in their leaders and followers who then need to sustain the idealisation by locating persecutory aspects in cruel dictators elsewhere. He concludes that when the minds of these latter day crusaders and their acolytes are in the grip of an archaic superego they are as enslaved to an internal tyrant as those they attempt to set free from an external one, and that realistic planning and judgement are consequently impaired.

The United States and the Kurds: A Cold War Story

In a prolonged quest for independence after 1945, Kurdish nationalists reportedly sought help from U.S. officials who viewed the Kurdish issue through a Cold War prism and who regarded the Kurds as querulous mountain tribes useful primarily in keeping the Soviet Union and its Arab clients off balance. Recently declassified documents shed new light on three key episodes in this story: first, the secret encouragement provided by Washington to Kurds opposed to Iraq's Abdul Karim Qassim, who tilted toward Moscow after seizing power in 1958; second, the covert action launched by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Iraqi Kurdistan after Saddam Hussein allied himself with the USSR in 1972; and third, the half-hearted U.S. attempts to foment regime change in Iraq in the early 1990s. In each case, the U.S. government stirred up anti-Arab resentments among the Kurds, helped ignite an insurrection, and then pulled the plug when events spiraled out of control. U.S. duplicity plus Kurdish factionalism equaled tragedy in the mountains of Kurdistan.

US Policy and the Geopolitics of Insecurity in the Arab World

In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush downplayed traditional ‘realist’ security concerns by defining America's goal as countering threats generated by the internal characteristics of Arab societies. Bush advanced a strategy of regional transformation based on regime change in Iraq and economic, social, and political reform across the Arab world. This strategy, however, failed to address the security interests of regional governments while generating insecurity for Arab societies. To explain these results, the article develops a framework for understanding the Middle East regional system that recognises the role of societal discourses of insecurity and the system's multipolar structure. The framework is used to suggest an alternative strategy for US Middle East policy. Rejecting both a renewed project of regional transformation and a return to neorealism, the paper outlines a strategy based on managing a multipolar, pluralist system.

Review: The Return of History and the end of Dreams

THE RETURN OF HISTORY ANDTHE END OF DREAMS Robert Kagan New York: Knopf, 2008. 116pp, $22.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0307269232)The controversial author of this short book - really an extended essay -rejects label but has long advocated a muscular, typically neoconservative US foreign policy founded on, and justified by, America's unique combination of and righteousness. Kagan worked in State Department during Reagan administration, co-founded (with William Kristol) Project for New American Century in 1997, pushed Clinton administration to adopt a policy of regime change in Iraq, and was one of most prominent defenders of President George W. Bush's invasion of that country in 2003. He has therefore been held co-responsible for a shift in American foreign policy that many regard as a disastrous error fuelled by arrogance and ignorance.The long and difficult trajectory of Iraq war and failure of its stated justifications (Saddam's non-existent WMDs) caused many neocons to reassess their previous positions. Perhaps most telling recantation was that of Francis Fukuyama, whose book America at Crossroads: Democracy Power, and Neoconservative Legacy, singled out Kagan in particular as a champion ofthe idea of benevolent American hegemony. Fukuyama argued that neocons, having misattributed fall of Soviet Union to a virile show of American strength, wrongly assumed that virtuous progress of history toward democracy could be accelerated by aggressive American agency. The misadventures of Iraq, he wrote, gave lie to this, and future administrations would have to persuade world, first, that America was good and, second, that it could be wise in its application of power, emphasizing military less and soft power more.The very title of Kagan' s book suggests a riposte to Fukuyama, whose most famous work is The End of History. Kagan rejects pusillanimous revisionism and adopts attack as best defence. An extract from this book in New Republic caused a furor accompanied by accusations that he is merely repackaging old positions. He argues that the great fallacy of our era - an old Enlightenment one revitalized by collapse of communism is a deterministic belief in progress of liberal ideas and institutions, an unwarranted confidence in humanity's inevitable forward march toward peaceful and prosperous coexistence (102). Recent developments - in particular rise of China and turning away of Putin's Russia from western-style democracy - have revealed this pleasant vision to be a mirage. History has returned with a vengeance, propelled by ambition, pride, and fear of competitive, mutually suspicious, and potentially hostile nation-states. In an anarchic world, such states are not reliably restrained by international laws and institutions, or even by growing economic interdependence, and naturally seek enhanced security in military preparedness. Moreover, an excess of inevitably breeds discontent with status quo and a desire for greater influence in world, as well as for respect and honour that great always commands. Witness Iran with its nuclear ambitions, or even democratic India whose economic transformation has caused the of to be displaced by the argument of power (42).This sounds perfectly realist, yet Kagan argues that it is not just differentials of that matter. Values do, too. Ideological competition may be a thing ofthe past, but world continues to resist convergence in value terms because some ofthe major players are autocracies. The leaders of China and Russia and nations that take heart from their example are not merely cynical autocrats; they believe in autocracy. Democratic factionalism, they claim, is dangerous to stability, and so-called universal liberal values are merely impositions of western power. The international liberal order does not imply progress for them but oppression, for it questions the fundamental legitimacy of governments, which for autocracies can be a matter of life and death (67). …

Who's Afraid of Saddam Hussein? Re-examining the ‘September Dossier’ Affair

The controversy surrounding the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction has been pivotal in the decline of trust in the New Labour Government. The absence of a comprehensive, detailed and diachronic analysis of this episode therefore stands out as an issue that needs to be addressed. In doing so, this paper diverges from conventional narratives of the ‘September dossier’ affair in several respects. It argues that New Labour's desire for regime change in Iraq pre-dated the rise of the neo-conservative Bush administration and the events of 9/11; that the British Government were fully willing and active participants in the policy of regime change and that the production of the dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed to achieve this aim.

Japan's policy towards the Iraq War

This article discusses Japan's pro-US position in the Iraq War of 2003. This was an anomaly in Japanese Middle East policy, which is normally characterized by its balancing between Middle East oil interests and its alliance with the United States. The article explains why the US tie was prioritized over links with Iraq and other Middle East states, why Japan actively promoted US war policy and how Japanese policy-makers overcame public opposition and constitutional constraints in deploying Japanese troops in Iraq. It argues that Japanese policy-makers' perceptions of unchallengeable US international dominance and the expectation of US success in regime change in Iraq determined their preferences, while the personal popularity of the Japanese prime minister was important in allowing them to prevail.

US bureaucratic politics and the decision to invade Iraq

Why did the second Bush administration decide to invade Iraq in 2003? This article suggests that the question can usefully be addressed by looking at the ways in which regime change in Iraq became part of bureaucratic politics within the US government – under successive administrations – following the unsatisfactory termination of the first Gulf War in 1991. It is contended here that the limitations on bureaucratic politics within the second Bush administration were important in that the path toward a presidential decision for invasion was cleared by the failure of the higher echelons of the national security bureaucracy under Bush to work effectively in exercising core functions of challenge and debate.

Dangerous Conflation?: A Review of Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

32 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 Dangerous Conflation? A Review of Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century Frank Ninkovich Robert Kagan is best known as the author Of Paradise andPower (2003), an analysis of American and European views of international relations that features the much-quoted tag line, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." As one of the signers of the Project for the New American Century letter to President Clinton inJanuary 1998 that recommended forcible regime change in Iraq, he is also known as a neoconservative advocate of a muscular foreign policy. With the recent appearance of DangerousNation:America's Foreign Policyfrom ItsEarliestDays to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 2006), the first volume of his revisionist history of U.S. foreign relations, the word on the historical grapevine is that the book is a rebuttal to liberal internationalists who view the Bush administration's foreign policies as a historical aberration. Though it could easily be interpreted in diis way, I will try to review the book on its merits as a work of history. Kagan's ambitious goal is to demolish the narrative of discontinuity, the leap from isolationism to world power that has become second nature in the way we think about die history of U.S. foreign relations. Specifically, he wants to dismande "the pervasive myth of America as isolationist and passive until provoked." His book is "more about expansion and ambition, idealistic as well as materialistic , than about isolationist exemplars and cities upon hills." From earliest colonial times, he asserts, Americans were involved actively in a career of expansion —commercial, cultural, territorial, and ideological —so much so that the die was cast by die time of the Revolution. "By 1776," he says, "the ambitions driving Americans toward their future overwhelming global power were already in place." If anything, these appetites were enhanced by the universalist ideology upon which the republic was founded, which assured that "foreign policy and national identity were intimately bound togetiier." This propensity to aggressive idealism did not rule out hardheaded calculations of national interest whose net effect was isolationism. But isolation and nonentanglementwere merely tactics that could not be upgraded to basic principles because "American liberalism was inherendy entangling." This argument combines and recasts elements of older interpretive traditions. William Appleman Williams and the Wisconsin School of diplomatic historians long ago articulated a continuity thesis diat portrayed the U.S. as an ideologically driven expansionist republic, though in their telling it was a story of imperialism in which the nation was propelled outward principally by economic "open door" motives . Kagan does not neglect economic factors or material pursuits; indeed, he often highlights the imperatives of the marketplace. But economic growth is forced to compete for space in his story with even more potent and mutually reinforcing drivers of expansion : idealism and power. Kagan's emphasis on power and principle also has interpretive precursors in the realist tradition that Kagan's ambitious goal is to demolish the narrative of discontinuity, the leap from isolationism to world power that has become second nature in the way we think about the history of U.S. foreign relations. first emerged among diplomatic historians in the 1950s. He would agree with the realists that the desire for power is universal, but he parts company with their tendency to see American idealism as a regrettable congenital defect whose symptoms, left untreated , flare up from time to time and needlessly inflict much pain and suffering. For Kagan, idealism is integral to the nation's identity. Thus Americans conceived of themselves from the get-go not only as the rightful heirs of the British Empire, but also as a universal nation whose ideological principles "transcended blood ties and national boundaries ." Though future American conflicts would trumpet America's attachment to ideals, he acknowledges that at times this tendency "cast a harsh glare upon the hypocrisies of a nation that proclaimed universal rights yet did not universally honor them." This criticism, which is repeated in a number of places, suggests that practice should have been squared with principle, in contrast to the...

IDP and Refugee Return to Northern Iraq: Sustainable Returns or Demographic Bombs?

Regime change in Iraq has opened the door to the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), the majority of whom were expelled from Kirkuk and other areas in northern Iraq. The Iraqi case presents three broad, readily identifiable categories of displaced persons: refugees in Iraq's neighbouring states, internally displaced persons, and refugees and migrants in third countries further afield. The first two categories include the largest numbers of displaced people as well as the majority of those with a great desire or pressing need to return to their homelands in Iraq. Although some of those displaced have succeeded in making a good life for themselves in their new new homes, those who did not manage well after their displacement generally long to return to their original towns and homes. However, the following general problems, in order of gravity, impede the success and sustainability of returns to northern Iraq: (i) sectarian competition over political structures and power distributions in post-Saddam Iraq; (ii) increasing lack of security in Iraq; (iii) insufficient preparations and slow policy implementation by the former CPA and Coalition Forces; (iv) insufficient financial resources to deal with the full magnitude of the displacement problem in Iraq; and (v) high expectations of returnees vis-a-vis continuing lack of opportunities and the slow rate of positive developments in the social, economic and political situation in Iraq. However, the emerging political contests over the future of the new Iraq greatly complicate effective and comprehensive return programs; the ultimate test of success and sustainability of return to Iraq will depend on the future of post-Saddam Iraq itself.

‘The Sardinian, the Texan and the Tikriti: Gramsci, The Comparative Autonomy of the Middle Eastern State and Regime Change in Iraq’

To be persuasive, explanations of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 need to discuss the evolution of United States foreign policy but also the economic and political development of the Middle Eastern state. Antonio Gramsci's notions of the war of manoeuvre and the war of position are key to understanding both the resort to violence but also its failure. For the Bush administration, as it set about applying its new doctrine in the aftermath of 9/11, the Baathist regime in Baghdad was a glaring example of the previous limits of US hegemony. The autonomy built up by the regime over 35 years of rule allowed it to defy the institutions of the international community and resist the application of 13 years of coercive diplomacy. The invasion signalled the Bush administration's shift from a war of position back to one of manoeuvre. If the Iraqi regime could be removed, if the full force of US military might could be displayed in one of the most important states in the region, then the rest of the Arab regimes could be made to submit fully to US hegemony. The need to deploy coercion was indicative of the geographic limits of ideational hegemony. The Middle East became such a central concern for the administration, and ultimately Iraq was invaded because the region had retained a comparative autonomy from neo-liberal policy prescriptions and the United States' promotion of polyarchy.

The Security Council, Democratic Legitimacy and Regime Change in Iraq

This article examines the political transition in Iraq from the perspective of international law, which regards forcible democratic regime change as unlawful. The concern is to establish the extent to which the relevant Security Council Resolutions, 1483 (2003), 1511 (2003) and 1546 (2004), necessary to give legal effect to the fact of regime change, may be regarded as a legitimate exercise of the political authority provided to the Security Council under the Charter of the United Nations, and consequently a lawful exercise of that authority. The article will argue that Security Council resolutions enjoy ‘democratic’ political legitimacy to the extent that they are consistent with the constitutional framework provided by the UN Charter and wider international law, and that they accord with the practice of the Security Council in ‘like’ cases, or the Council is able to demonstrate sufficient justification for the exercise of political authority in the particular case. The article first reviews the process of political transition in Iraq, examining the role of Security Council resolutions. It concludes that the process involved a violation of the right of the Iraqi people to political self-determination, creating a conflict between the Security Council resolutions adopted under chapter VII and an international norm of jus cogens standing. Rejecting arguments that the resolutions should be regarded as void, or that they should command absolute deference, the work outlines a model of constitutional adjudication in cases of conflict between these ‘higher’ forms of obligations in accordance with a deliberative understanding of the nature of the system of international law.