Abstract
Obama was an ardent critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies. It was a key factor in his presidential bid. Obama wanted to end the ‘dumb’ war in Iraq and recoup and concentrate on rebuilding the United States, its economy, its political and social well-being. Despite the internal US logic to this position, conditions within Iraq had changed dramatically. The Maliki government was exclusive and authoritarian; al Qaeda had become a presence. Obama presided over the US withdrawal and metaphorically the nation switched off the war. If Iraq was not the center of gravity in 2003, it had become so after 2010. By 2014, ISIS directly challenged US interests by capturing key cities in the northwest of Iraq and advancing on Baghdad. Obama was forced to reconsider.
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Notes
See Mark Evans, ‘Balancing Peace, Justice and Sovereignty in Jus Post Bellum: The Case of “Just Occupation”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2008), 535; Mark Evans, ‘Moral Responsibilities and the Conflicting Demands of Jus Post Bellum’, Ethics and International Affairs (2009), 147–148.
David Ryan, Frustrated Empire: US Foreign Policy 9/11 to Iraq (London: Pluto, 2007).
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Barack Obama, National Security Strategy, The White House, Washington, DC, May 2010; Toby Dodge, Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2012).
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See for a more general discussion: Mark Evans, ‘Balancing Peace, Justice and Sovereignty in Jus Post Bellum: The Case of “Just Occupation”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2008), 535.
John McCain paraphrased by Lloyd Gardner, Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare (New York: The New Press, 2013), 18.
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Toby Dodge, ‘Iraq and the Next American President’, Survival 50, no. 5 (October/November 2008), 38; Barack Obama, ‘My Plan for Iraq’. The New York Times, July 14, 2008.
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© 2014 David Fitzgerald and David Ryan
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Fitzgerald, D., Ryan, D. (2014). Obama and Iraq: The ‘Dumb’ War. In: Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428561_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428561_2
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