Sixteen years after the United States invaded Iraq and left a trail of destruction and chaos in the country and the region, one aspect of the war remains criminally underexamined: why was it fought in the first place? What did the Bush administration hope to get out of the war? ," asks Ahsen I Butt. Butt has tried to re-examine the motives of the U.S. in invading Iraq: " Put simply, the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to (re)establish American standing as the world's leading power." He has hit the nail once or twice, but he has not explored what this re-establishment of "the world's leading power" consists of. Nor does he he provide the historical conjuncture and context: the domestic sociology in the U.S., the continuation of 1991 invasion and the collapse of the Soviet Union and "globalisation". Reviewing Andrew Bacevich's American Empire , Peter Gowan draws a much better picture of the motives behind the invasion of 200
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51