U.S. Policy in Iraq: Can It Prevail? An Analysis

Introduction

The war on Iraq — which some would argue was an illegal invasion, conducted without regard for international law and undertaken pre-emptively — began almost one year before the writing of this paper. Despite the U.S. government's efforts to persuade its population that the war is over, by making a show of handing power back to the people of Iraq (although it was not yet known who those people would be, or whether they would agree sufficiently to form a democratic governing body), the war was far from over. Day by day, the number of dead and the number of casualties increased in Iraq, amid bombings and disagreements amongst rival Iraqi groups — most obviously the different Muslim factions, the Shi'as and the Sunnis.

This paper examines the war in Iraq from an in-depth empirical viewpoint and asks whether U.S. policy can prevail. The following eight facets of U.S. policy toward Iraq are discussed in turn: international trade; weapons of mass destruction; democratization; the war against tyranny versus the grab for oil; the "shock and awe" tactics used at the beginning of the war; the U.S. occupation versus liberation; whether the new government of Iraq will be Iraqi-run or whether Iraq will become a puppet state; and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Methodology and Methods

The methods employed in this paper include sourcing relevant literature from political science journals, various U.S. government and Iraqi interim government policy documents, and reports from neutral organizations that have independently examined some of the U.S. claims — in particular the claims about weapons of mass destruction thought to have been present in Iraq and used as a justification for going to war.

Once the most relevant documents had been located — with a deliberate effort to find as broad a range of opinions as possible in order to avoid bias — the sources were studied in depth within the framework outlined in the Introduction. Each document's relevance to the eight facets of U.S. policy was screened, and once its pertinence to the central question was ascertained, the document was studied thoroughly and used as a basis for the necessary empirical statistical analyses. A review of the analysis of each document, in terms of its relevance to the eight policy facets under study, is given in the Literature Review section.

In terms of harnessing statistical information from each document, raw figures are often the most useful — for example, the number of dead in Iraq since March 2003, and economic indicators before and after that date. These raw figures were extracted from the documents during thorough analysis; the statistics, and the conclusions drawn from them with regard to the central question of whether U.S. policy in Iraq can prevail, are presented in the Results and Findings section.