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https://theconversation.com/20-years-on-george-w-bushs-promise-of-democracy-in-iraq-and-middle-east-falls-short-201998>
"President George W. Bush and his administration put forward a variety of
reasons to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In the months before the U.S. invasion, Bush said the looming conflict was
about eradicating terrorism and seizing weapons of mass destruction – but also
because of a “freedom deficit” in the Middle East, a reference to the perceived
lag in participatory government in the region.
Many of these arguments would emerge as poorly grounded, given later events.
In 2004, then Secretary of State Colin Powell reflected on the weak rationale
behind the main arguments for the invasion: that there were weapons of mass
destruction. He acknowledged that “it turned out that the sourcing was
inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading.”
In fact Iraq did not have a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, as Powell
and others had alleged at the time.
But the Bush administration’s rhetoric of building a more free, open and
democratic Middle East persisted after the weapons of mass destruction claim
had proven false, and has been harder to evaluate – at least in the short term.
Bush assured the American public in 2003 that, “A new regime in Iraq would
serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the
region.”
He focused on this theme during the ground invasion, in which a coalition force
of nearly 100,000 American and other allied troops rapidly toppled Saddam
Hussein’s regime.
“The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a
watershed event in the global democratic revolution,” Bush said in November
2003. He also said that the U.S. would be pursuing a “forward strategy of
freedom in the Middle East.”
Twenty years on, it is worth considering how this “forward strategy” has played
out both in Iraq and across the Middle East. In 2003, there was indeed, as Bush
noted, a “freedom deficit” in the Middle East, where repressive authoritarian
regimes dominated the region. Yet, in spite of tremendous upheaval in the
Middle East over the past two decades, many authoritarian regimes remain deeply
entrenched."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
