Iraq and the New Regional Security Dynamic

Abstract

When the United States went to war in Iraq in March 2003, the professed goals were to end the repressive rule of Saddam Hussein’s regime, uncover the long-hidden weapons of mass destruction that had eluded a decade of UN-led inspections, and prevent further cooperation between Baghdad and the Islamist extremists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Less mentioned, but by no means absent, was the intention of introducing real democratic values and institutions to Iraq and making the fledgling successor government a beacon for the region to emulate. Some representatives of the Bush administration, dubbed neoconservatives or “neocons,” claimed that the war would be quick, that the Iraqis would welcome the Americans as liberators, not conquerors, and shower them with rose petals and rice, and that the Iraqis, as the region’s staunchest democrats, would quickly turn the new Iraq into a democratic showplace that was the envy of the region. In the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was equally determined to make the war in Iraq a showcase of what a transformed military force could accomplish with smaller deployments and greater mission integration. The war of shock and awe was to illustrate a twenty-first-century response to a twenty-first-century threat: the asymmetric warfare of terrorism.