International Aspects of the Permanent Crisis in Iraq

Abstract

Since the Ottoman Empire was brought to an end by the First World War, Iraq has stood at the centre of an ongoing crisis in the Near and Middle East, and of attempts to bring a new order to the region. Britain and France attempted for decades to assert their imperial hegemony over the region, sometimes exploiting the pan-Arab and individual Arab nationalisms, and sometimes in conflict with them. During the 1950s, the USA made an unsuccessful attempt to bring Iraq into the net of encirclement of the Soviet Union that spanned the globe (Baghdad Pact). However, it did succeed, along with the two former colonial powers, in playing off against each other the ethnic and state nations of the region, which were beginning to emerge in a painstaking process, and in preventing the creation of a regional great power through armament in doses and occasional political and military intervention. Thus, Iraqi aggression against Iran was supported during the 1980s, while at the same time a victory on the part of Iraq was avoided. With support from almost the entire world, the USA was able to restore the oil-rich, undemocratic monarchy of Kuwait in August 1990 after just a few months following the Iraqi conquest of the country, without the USA and the UN being able to establish a blueprint for lasting peace in the region.

The US government under George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq already had atomic and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and that it was also providing a base for transnational terrorism. However, the USA was unable to persuade the UN Security Council to vote in favour of military intervention, and as a result decided to topple the regime under Saddam Hussein in an alliance with 35 other states through a war of intervention, and succeeded in doing so within a few weeks in the spring of 2003. This victory of the US-led intervention forces over the regular Iraqi troop units merely led to an irregular terrorist war with a high loss of life. Elections legitimised an ethno-religious redistribution of power in favour of the Arab Shiites and the Kurds, without really being able to stabilise the state along federalist-democratic lines or to pacify the region by the time the last US fighting troops were pulled out in August 2010. The basic issues of the West’s policy in the Near and Middle East remain the same: (a) preventing the emergence of a regional great power, and (b) the arsenal of mass destruction that would make this possible, (c) the restoration of western hegemony over the exploitation of oil in the region, (d) the containment of Islamic-Arab terrorism, (e) the stabilisation of the state order, and (f) a sufficient degree of liberalisation and “democratisation” of the regimes in the region.