Iraq War: Gary Hart on the problems of empire

Former Colorado Senator Gary Hart has summarized concisely the dilemmas of an imperial policy.  He concludes, essentially by process of elimination, that the Iraq War represented Bush's acceptance of the "neoconservative" grand strategy of revolutionizing the Middle East into a set of pro-American powers through a series of wars of liberation: The new Caesars Salon.com 08/19/04.

A careful review of the statements of President Bush and his administration up to the declaration of victory in Iraq yields little evidence of the true purpose of America's invasion. The world is now familiar with the arguments: Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction; Iraq has or will soon have a "nuclear capability"; Iraq harbors and supports terrorists planning attacks on the United States; Iraq itself is a threat to U.S. national security. All have proved untrue and are no longer offered as justification for America's "preventive" war on Iraq, an action with precedent in U.S. history possibly only in the Philippines more than a century ago.

Today the president and his team offer the rationalization that deposing Saddam Hussein was necessary to achieve peace in the Middle East. This argument was never used in the run-up to war for the simple reason that it condoned an act of empire. Leave aside the fact that the argument is severely flawed, as subsequent history has shown. The United States is now bogged down in urban warfare against indigenous militias, a style of warfare for which it is largely unprepared and that causes unsustainable levels of civilian casualties. The war has substantially contributed to anti-American sentiments throughout the region and possibly throughout the Islamic world. Peace in the Middle East is now farther in the distance, not closer. (my emphasis)

Hart also addresses the important question of "preemption" in Iraq:

Had the international legal standards for preemptive warfare been met, it could plausibly be argued that America's invasion of Iraq was not imperial in nature. That traditional standard permits preemptive action where a threat is "immediate and unavoidable," a standard clearly not met where Iraq is concerned. So, much else is at work here: the fanciful, but not idealistic, notion that the United States can invadeand occupy a nation situated in the center of the complex and troubled Middle East, install a favorable democratic government, and use its position as friendly military occupier to condition the behavior of neighboring nations, introduce "democracy" at the point of a bayonet if necessary, and bring Middle Eastern combatants to the bargaining table.