A few days ago, I men­tioned I would pub­lish my thoughts on the real rea­sons for the Bush administration’s drive to attack Iraq. My apolo­gies for the delay. I’m a one-man oper­a­tion here and some­times I have to do other stuff, like sleep.
There are sev­eral the­o­ries float­ing around about the need to attack Iraq, some com­ing from the White House and oth­ers com­ing from var­i­ous sources. The most com­mon argu­ment for attack­ing Iraq, that given by the admin­is­tra­tion, is a mish-mash of wor­ries about weapons of mass destruc­tion, dis­re­gard for U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil res­o­lu­tions, ties to al Qa’ida and Saddam’s wicked­ness. Of these rea­sons, the WMD ratio­nale seems to have gained the most trac­tion in the minds of many Amer­i­cans. This is hardly sur­pris­ing, as the White House has been relent­lessly on mes­sage regard­ing Saddam’s weapons pro­grams until recently, when Osama bin Laden (remem­ber him?) con­ve­niently popped up to exhort Mus­lims to defend their Iraqi broth­ers through mar­ty­dom oper­a­tions against West­ern inter­ests world­wide if the United States assaults Bagh­dad.
Despite bin Laden’s sneer­ing ref­er­ences to Sad­dam as a “social­ist” and an “apos­tate,” the White House lept upon the tape as proof that Sad­dam and bin Laden were play­ing foot­sie when the West wasn’t look­ing. White House spokesman Ari Fleis­cher said bin Laden’s ref­er­ence to “our mujahideen broth­ers” inside Iraq and his appeal to Mus­lims to pre­pare for jihad sug­gested a “strong state­ment of alliance” between Iraq and al Qa’ida.

“If that is not an unholy part­ner­ship, I have not heard of one,” he said. “This is the night­mare that peo­ple have warned about, the link­ing up of Iraq with al Qaeda.“
Offi­cials refuse to see the tape for what it is — an attempt by bin Laden to use war against Iraq to bol­ster his lead­er­ship, just as most Arab lead­ers have cyn­i­cally used the Pales­tini­ans to bol­ster them­selves against Israel. In other words, the tape is a trap that Wash­ing­ton is about to blun­der into. To the White House, the bin Laden tape shows not an attempt by bin Laden to tap into world-wide Mus­lim anger against the United States, but a bona fide announce­ment of an active, strate­gic part­ner­ship that has existed for years.
Any­way, back in the real world, other the­o­ries have abounded, with the anti-war left and the Arab world invok­ing the siamese-twin spec­tors of impe­ri­al­ism and colo­nial­ism as the main rea­sons for war. “No blood for oil!” is the clas­sic retort from the left, sim­pli­fy­ing a com­plex array of domes­tic pol­i­tics, inter­na­tional rela­tions and geopo­lit­i­cal goals into a four-word slo­gan that doesn’t do jus­tice to what I believe are the real rea­sons. Yes, this war is about oil, but it’s not just about oil. And yes, it’s about impe­ri­al­ism, but not in the way that the left­ists believe. The real rea­sons are to secure a con­tin­u­ous sup­ply of oil for Europe and Japan, pres­sur­ing Saudi Ara­bia into cut­ting off fund­ing to the con­ser­v­a­tive clergy and thus fuel­ing the worst of the ter­ror net­works, secur­ing a sta­ble envi­ron­ment for regional ally Israel and encir­cling Iran in the hope of sweep­ing the ayatollah’s from power.
Backon Nov. 14, I wrote the fol­low­ing:

I’m con­vinced that the rea­son given by the left for the U.S.‘s drive to top­ple Sad­dam — mainly con­trol of Iraq’s oil fields — is much too sim­plis­tic to give the whole pic­ture. And I don’t trust the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion that Iraq poses a clear and present dan­ger, with Sad­dam being this­close to field­ing nukes on magic unmanned drones that could take out Amer­i­can cities. And the Butcher of Bagh­dad isn’t so stu­pid that he would give weapons of mass destruc­tion to an ele­ment that he couldn’t con­trol, such as al Qa’ida. So what gives? Why the push on Iraq when al Qa’ida poses a clear and present threat and Pak­istan has been help­ing North Korea with its nuke pro­gram. (The impli­ca­tion is that if Pak­istan has ele­ments that would help the North Kore­ans, there are likely ele­ments in the gov­ern­ment that would help al Qa’ida in a sim­i­lar man­ner.)
This report from the Insti­tute for National Strate­gic Stud­ies’ National Defense Uni­ver­sity might offer some clues. The main thrust of the report is that Amer­ica has long real­ized the strate­gic value of the Per­sian Gulf, and fully intends to keep a mil­i­tary pres­ence there regard­less of any out­come in Iraq. “The United States will need to diver­sify its depen­dence on regional bas­ing and for­ward pres­ence, as well as reduce the vis­i­bil­ity and pre­dictabil­ity of its forward-deployed forces,” reads the report.
Why is this nec­es­sary? Because way back in 1990, the the Bush White House, part first , announced a defense pos­ture that called for “adult super­vi­sion” of the world. And the most recent iter­a­tion of the National Secu­rity Strat­egy of the United States calls for the globe’s sole super­power to suf­fer no rivals mil­i­tar­ily or eco­nom­i­cally, impos­ing a pax amer­i­cana . So the United States is in the Gulf to guar­an­tee the sup­ply of oil not for itself, but for Europe and Japan, which get most of their oil from the Mid­dle East. (Sur­pris­ingly, the United States gets most of its oil from Canada, Venezuela and Mex­ico; Per­sian Gulf sources sup­plied only 11 per­cent of America’s oil in 2000, accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Energy.) The United States Marines safe­guard the Per­sian Gulf because Europe and Japan might re-arm and secure the oil sources for them­selves if we didn’t. And as I said, the United States does not intend to suf­fer rivals gladly.
So we are going to be in the Gulf for a long time. As the INSS report says, “There is no escap­ing the U.S. role as a guar­an­tor of Gulf sta­bil­ity. Thus, the United States needs a viable con­cept for its future for­ward pres­ence that can be sus­tained over the long haul.” Saudi Ara­bia is not the secure base that we need for such a pres­ence, as the pres­ence of infi­del troops so close to the holy sites of Mecca and Med­ina directly under­mines the legit­i­macy of the House of Saud, which came to power in the 1920s as the fam­ily that would pro­tect Islam’s holi­est shrines. The pres­ence of the troops inflames the faith­ful, such as bin Ladin, and leads the Saudi royal fam­ily to pay off the rad­i­cal cler­ics that wield much influ­ence in the king­dom. In essence this is the rea­son rad­i­cal Islamists with pos­si­ble access to nukes are “funded” by Saudi Ara­bia — the Saudis are buy­ing them off and point­ing a loaded gun away from their own head and toward some­one else’s. If the House of Saud falls, which it could do at any­time, a big rea­son will be resent­ment over its invi­ta­tion of Amer­i­can GIs.
The solu­tion is to get the 5,000 or so Amer­i­cans off the Ara­bian penin­sula. But the United States can’t pull out with Sad­dam in power; the troops are there to con­tain Sad­dam. So the solu­tion to the solu­tion is to remove Sad­dam from power, in the process diver­si­fy­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of Amer­i­can troops in the region and remov­ing a provo­ca­tion to rad­i­cals. (Once they get over being pissed at the sub­ju­ga­tion of Iraq, that is.)
Some would argue that this will just pre­serve Saudi legit­i­macy. Oth­ers may argue that a friendly regime in Iraq would under­cut the Saudis and bring oil prices down as the two coun­tries (which con­trol the largest and second-largest known reserves of oil on the planet) com­pete for mar­kets. There is evi­dence that the Saudis are hew­ing to the sec­ond view, doing every­thing in their power to impede the United States’ war plan­ning, includ­ing a mas­sive loan to Rus­sia — inter­est free! — if the Bear had only vetoed UNSCR 1441. Alas for the Saudis, this didn’t hap­pen, and they are caught between Iraq and a hard place.
So the goal of the United States is to main­tain a pres­ence in the Per­sian Gulf so that Europe and Japan don’t re-arm. In order to main­tain a pres­ence and decrease depen­dency on an unre­li­able ally, Saudi Ara­bia, Wash­ing­ton has to lighten the mil­i­tary foot­print in the region by remov­ing the cause for the heavy foot­print — Sad­dam Hus­sein. Once that is accom­plished, the for­ward forces can be dis­trib­uted out of Saudi Ara­bia and a friendly Iraq can help pres­sure the Saudis to keep oil prices low. As a bonus, Wash­ing­ton would no longer have to go easy on the Saudis in its war against al Qa’ida since Iraq would be the bul­wark in the Gulf.

Since I wrote that, sev­eral other writ­ers have come to the same con­clu­sions. Anthony Lane at the New Yorker, ana­lyzises “A Clean Break: A New Strat­egy for Secur­ing the Realm,” co-authored by Richard Perle and David Wurmser in 1996. The doc­u­ment, from the Insti­tute for Advanced Inter­na­tional Stu­i­dies, instructs the United States to actively work to secure a sta­ble sup­ply of oil and make the Mid­dle East safe for Israel. Wurmser, also the author of “Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Fail­ure to Defeat Sad­dam Hus­sein,” (1999) sees the main enemy as the ide­ol­ogy of Pan-Arabism, which for Wurmser is a form of Mid­dle East­ern total­i­tar­i­an­ism. He places Sad­dam and the Assad fam­ily of Syria squarely in the Pan-Arab nation­al­ist camp, so bring­ing down Sad­dam would under­mine the Ba’athist regime in neigh­bor­ing Syria. And a post-Saddam Iraq with “mean­ing­ful par­tic­i­pa­tion” of the Shi’ite major­ity would under­mine the claims of Iran’s mul­lahs that they rep­re­sent the only legit­i­mate power cen­ter for the region’s Shi’ia.
By delig­timiz­ing the Syr­ian regime and putting pres­sure on Iran, Hezbol­lah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and other ter­ror groups, would lose their source of sup­port. As a bonus, as Syr­ian becomes more pro-American, so, too, would Lebanon, end­ing the base of oper­a­tions for Hezbol­lah. The Pales­tin­ian Author­ity, with no allies remain­ing in the region, would be forced to renounce ter­ror­ism (for real, this time) and sue for peace on Israel’s terms. Perle’s doc­u­ment makes ref­er­ences to the Hashemite monar­chy con­trol­ling Iraq again, and there have been sin­siter whis­pers that Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ariel Sharon is just look­ing for an oppor­tu­nity to expel not just Yas­sir Arafat, but all Pales­tini­ans from the West Bank and Gaza into Jor­dan. As ambi­tious as Perle and Wurmser are in their chess­board think­ing, it’s not incon­ceiv­able that they could be envi­sion­ing Jor­dan as the new Pales­tine with Iraq given to Jordan’s King Abdul­lah Hus­sein in com­pen­sa­tion for the loss of his king­dom.
Other the­o­ries have been put for­ward and there’s no sim­ple answer to any of this. The United States’ inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Iraq is not just about oil, colo­nial­ism or empire build­ing. But nor is it not about those things either. I’ve tried to map out what I believe is the administration’s think­ing based on reports, research and balance-of-power analy­sis (which I do from a gut level rather than game the­ory) and oth­ers have echoed sim­i­lar thoughts. War­blog­ging has a good entry today on John Bolton, U.S. under­sec­re­tary of state for arms con­trol and inter­na­tional secu­rity, and the Administration’s plans to “deal with” Iran, Syria and North Korea, apres Iraq. Do these plans include mil­i­tary action or do they echo the thoughts of Perle and Wol­fowitz that an occu­pied Iraq would pres­sure Iran and Syria to change their ways if not their regimes? We don’t yet know.