--- On Thu, 7/2/09, Europus <europus at gmail.com> wrote:
> > James Mann (Rise of the Vulcans) makes a point that
> Iraq was re-fighting the Vietnam war by a bunch Nixon era
> hawks who got pushed aside by Kissinger and his approach to
> foreign policy. This explanation sounds
> > plausible, because foreign policy is perhaps the only
> policy area where
> > the administration can pursue a course of action
> without Congressional
> > meddling. Sad but true.
>
>
> I've also heard that it was about the oil, and I agree that
> the oil
> theory doesn't hold - err, oil. Especially in light of
> recent events.
> Also, that it was about Hussein-Iraqi threats to begin
> selling oil in
> Euro units instead of Dollar units, which I've not seen
> debunked in
> any serious way. But that it was about Nixon era hawks
> refighting
> Vietnam? If we stipulate that, the next question has to be:
> Why.
> Because underlying the why, is something like oil, or euros
> v dollars,
> or etc. Unless it was really about vengeance/revenge, in
> which case
> it really is sad - for all of us outside of the conspiracy.
> Because
> what were they getting revenge for, really? Being dissed in
> the late
> 60s-early 70s? Wow.
[WS:] It is an excellent question, indeed - worth posting to the list. Of course, I have no first hand knowledge about the motives of these people, but I can speculate. I do not think it was just "revenge" but rather a very brilliant political maneuver. As I said, foreign policy is perhaps the only arena where the administration has considerable latitude in pursuing their own course of action without first clearing it with that "chatterbox on the Potomac" aka Congress. And history demonstrates that the Congress is a very conservative force in the sense of effectively blocking any radical departure from the status quo either to the left or to the right.
So if your objective is to push domestic agenda sharply in any direction - to the right in Bush & Co case, you need to bypass the Congress somehow. Foreign policy offers you the best chance of doing so, so you want a foreign policy action that is most likely to have a "spillover effect" on domestic policy - and launching a war is one of them.
Mann argues that the Vulcans had both foreign and domestic policy agendas that were stalled by Kissinger and Carter but never abandoned. Bush presidency gave them an unprecedented opportunity to pursue it - and they did with vengeance.
>From that point of view, the Bush presidency esp. the war in Iraq should be viewed not as a "failure" but as a great success - perhaps the greatest political success since Kennedy of even FDR. By success I mean the ability of the administration to circumvent the stifling effect of the Congress and purse a radical policy agenda. Of course, they moved the policy in a direction that I find deplorable, but I have to admit that they were very successful - in a tactical sense of the word - in it.
To sum it up, I think that one of the motivation behind Iraq invasion was a tactical move to move the domestic political agenda radically to the right, which would not be possible through ordinary political means i.e. passing these changes through the Congress. Tactically, the Bush administration executed that move brilliantly.
I would also want to underscore that I do not think that it there was a single motive behind the Iraq war. Different groups and factions had different motives - oil industry, military-industrial complex, Israeli lobby to name just the most obvious ones probably found enough in this adventure for themselves to jump on the bandwagon.
Wojtek