Bush Administration Decision to Invade

¶ … Bush administration decision to invade Iraq in early 2003 was one of the most important shifts in international politics since the 9/11 attacks and the Balkan Wars. It created a new set of rules imposed to the international community not by consensus between the UN Security Council states but by the power of a single country. How was morality and ethics affected by this decision? Is there such a thing as morals in international politics? Should and could it be? These are some of the questions that scholars, international law makers and governments are asking themselves after the invasion of Iraq.

A closer look at the 1991 Gulf War reveals the motivation for the first Iraq international intervention: it was a "response to blatant aggression by a nation ruled by an oppressive leader who had not hesitated in the past to slaughter thousands of his countrymen" (Berman, 2010) the second intervention in Iraq did not have the same type of motivation but, the essence is the same: removal of the oppressive leader; which means regime change. Armed intervention and involvement in the internal affairs of a state, without UN clearance, is not allowed, so neither is any type of regime change by using force. The 2003 decision comes opposite of this, once universal truth of international politics. A member state of the Security Council and the main supporter of its rules, has bended them by creating a context that would be enough ambiguous as to build what could be called an ethical-free dilemma. As soon as the war of terrorism started with the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration started building up a strategy to create the necessary conditions for overthrowing the Saddam Hussein government and replacing it with a pro-Western one, changing the entire country from an authoritarian regime to a democracy. The U.S. claims revolved around four main axes: the failure of Iraq to commit to UN sanctions; the support offered to international terrorist organizations; illegal development of weapons of mass destruction and the humanitarian reason.

The question of ethics appears instantly as according to international norms, the Bush administration acted against them. One conclusion would be that this action was un-ethical. Yet from a humanitarian point-of-view -- the dreadful actions that the Hussein regime had over the Kurdish and other populations in Iraq, the serious break of basic human rights -- the Bush administration acted in a moral way. As President Bush argued, the intervention set forth a mission to "to bring freedom to the Middle East, a freedom that wasn't "America's gift to the world," but "God's gift to mankind." (Smoltczyk and Zand, 2010)

The dilemma appears from the fact that morality seats on rules, and these were not respected. If one would take as fair and moral for states to invade others that do not preserve international human rights, for example, the international system would transform itself into an anarchy. There is no higher authority that can identity those that are meant to exercise power over others as all is a matter of perception and information. If no such higher power exists, the international system has to adapt and create new types of morals. An ethics of nation building and re-building might be a solution, as episodes like the Iraq invasion might happen again. As Noah Feldman argues, the international system would need, in such cases a "nation builder [that] exercises temporary political authority as trustee on behalf of the people being governed, in much the same way that an elected government does." (Feldman, 2004)