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 2003:
There has been a "very powerful, cross-class social constituencies in the US with a direct stake in imperial expansion. It is arguable that something similar may have been at work in the steady escalation."
"The American economic expansionism that used to be expressed as ‘interdependence’ has been rebaptized: ‘globalization’ is essentially a radicalized synonym for this older term ... [A]s Thomas Friedman put it: ‘Globalization-is-Us’.
"Bacevich is right to stress that, in fact, the most complete and fulsome versions of America’s imperial mission in the world were the work of the Clinton regime, which wove its necessary internal and external, economic and military-political dimensions into a smooth whole after the rather lame efforts of its predecessor.
Another motive has been "the opening of overseas economies and refashioning of financial institutions to U.S. advantage, with the requisite cultural trappings; on the other, the projection of military force to keep or restore order abroad, accompanied by diplomatic strategies to discipline the other main power centres of the world.
The U.S. "must also maintain ‘full spectrum dominance’—that is, decisive strategic superiority over all other major powers, to deter them from seeking to balance against the United States."
—Peter Gowan, Instruments of Empire, NLR, May-June 2003
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 2003:
There has been a "very powerful, cross-class social constituencies in the US with a direct stake in imperial expansion. It is arguable that something similar may have been at work in the steady escalation."
"The American economic expansionism that used to be expressed as ‘interdependence’ has been rebaptized: ‘globalization’ is essentially a radicalized synonym for this older term ... [A]s Thomas Friedman put it: ‘Globalization-is-Us’.
"Bacevich is right to stress that, in fact, the most complete and fulsome versions of America’s imperial mission in the world were the work of the Clinton regime, which wove its necessary internal and external, economic and military-political dimensions into a smooth whole after the rather lame efforts of its predecessor.
Another motive has been "the opening of overseas economies and refashioning of financial institutions to U.S. advantage, with the requisite cultural trappings; on the other, the projection of military force to keep or restore order abroad, accompanied by diplomatic strategies to discipline the other main power centres of the world.
The U.S. "must also maintain ‘full spectrum dominance’—that is, decisive strategic superiority over all other major powers, to deter them from seeking to balance against the United States."
—Peter Gowan, Instruments of Empire, NLR, May-June 2003
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