The Iraq War was undoubtedly one of the most important policy actions, foreign or domestic, of the United States government in the 21st century. In terms of global impact, it was likelyAmerica’s most consequential war since Vietnam. In the domestic sphere it was financially and politically costly and memory of the invasion has remained a live wire into the present. The invasion of Iraq both signaled and helped cause a major geopolitical shift from the (U.S.-led) multilateral international order of the post-Soviet era, into today's more unilateral and contentious global equilibrium.
For such a consequential event, our collective understanding of why the war started remains somewhat fuzzy, and, as it slips into history, there is a new generation understanding the causes as much through memes as factual memory. In the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the recent conflagration of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the questions surrounding unilateral invasions, oil politics, and international order are only becoming more relevant. The goal of this article is to explore the reasoning of the U.S. government, especially the Bush administration, in the buildup to the Iraq War.This article may not settle the debate, but its goal is to give a sense of its contours and suggest some of the flaws in common narratives that center economic or extractive motivations for war. Ultimately, this article is meant to take aim at the claim that the Iraq War was mostly “about the oil.”
Evaluating the causes of the war raise a couple of questions: First, why engage in a war at all? Second, why a war in Iraq in particular, rather than, say, Iran or North Korea? Finally, why a war at that specific moment? The oil explanation provides an incredibly obvious answer to the first question. The United States has a bonafide history of facilitating regime change in the pursuit of energy security, often with disastrous consequences. One such case is the ouster of Mohammad Mossadeq, the Iranian Prime Minister who was attempting to nationalize Iranian oil. (This, for a time, did protect the interests of Anglo-American producers, though it also became a cause of the Iranian revolution.)
The hard version of the oil argument is something like: The U.S. invaded Iraq because it wanted access to oil fields and resources that would facilitate the profits of American businesses and the consumption of American citizens. This argument sometimes mobilizes Dick Cheney’s relationship to Halliburton and Bush Jr’s abortive time as an oil man. The soft version of the argument hedges much more: The invasion of Iraq would not have occurred absent American oil interests which had created a long diplomatic and interventionist history in the region and which provided a strategic reason to invade Iraq that was not present in other hostile regimes.
While on its face the hard oil argument is not out of the question, I think it overweights the general importance of direct resources extraction to foreign policy and also ignores the particular incentives of the Bush administration at that moment in time. As a general matter, while there are examples like Mossadeq, there are also many more examples where the U.S. subsumes economic interests to strategic or ideological ones. Its support for Israel during the Six Days war and Yom Kippur war led to major cuts to American oil imports, in the latter case causing the most notorious energy crisis in American history.
That strategic and ideological motivations for war dominate is not because the U.S. is particularly virtuous but simply because it is universally rare, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, for states to invade one another purely for resources. This was less true in previous eras where incredible technological divergence could make the costs of wars low enough to be viable even when resource extraction was minimal, such as in British invasions of the Gold Coast. Yet, even in the colonial era, ideological and strategic considerations were often necessary as “push factors” in invasions. In our postcolonial (though not post-exploitation) era, most wars are incredibly costly in purely economic terms for the invading party, so the benefits of resource extraction must be enormous. The Department of Defense directly spent $757 billion on the Iraq war and the indirect and opportunity costs were much higher. In addition the U.S. had plenty of less costly options for oil acquisition. Iraqi oil reserves are large, making up about 8% of the global total, but more than 50% of global oil reserves are held by the United States and countries with whom it has long-term, friendly relations. Further, if the war was primarily about oil, the U.S. could have chosen to invade Iran which has an even larger reserve.
The soft oil argument, however, has merit. It is definitely true that U.S. interests in the Middle-East are entangled with oil and many of the factors that made Iraq attractive for invasion were part of that history. The 1991 Gulf War was one such precedent, but even that is complicated as it was not just about protecting Kuwaiti oil fields; it was also about reifying the international order that was being built in the wake of the cold war. This is a kind of goal that fits under a “hegemony” explanation for war, and it is an idea to which we will return. The soft version’s major flaw is simply that it does not explain enough, either the timing of the war or the choice of target. In general it is fair to say that oil was an important context of the war, but it is entirely insufficient as its driving purpose. The soft position simply does not amount to much in terms of practical use.
Both soft and hard versions ignore the extent to which there was genuine fear of Iraq (as well as other regimes) at the time. There was Colin Powell’s now famous trip to the United Nations defending the evidence for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and Condoleezza Rice’s claim that without an invasion the world risked “the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud”. Of course, no WMDs were ultimately found, and there is considerable reason to believe that both Rice and Powell were acting cynically. Doug Feith, an under secretary of Defense, would later say that “the rationale for the war didn’t hinge on the details of this intelligence even though the details of the intelligence at times became elements of the public presentation.” All that being said, the presence of WMDs was certainly considered plausible at the time. Part of this was that the prevailing mood in general was enormously paranoid and indeed 66% of Americans erroneously believed that Saddam Hussein had helped in the 9/11 attacks. A further 77% believed that if WMDs were present it would be a ‘very important reason’ to go to war.
It remains unclear whether the Bush administration was more motivated by a genuine (but misguided) belief in security threats posed by Iraq or by a desire to assert U.S. hegemony in a case it viewed as convenient. The latter view has plenty of evidence. 9/11 left many rattled about America’s solidity as a global leading power. Further, there is evidence that George Bush Jr as well as Dick Cheney had long been interested in revisiting the Gulf War and going further than George Bush Sr had in exerting liberal democracy and regime change in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld himself, Secretary of Defense at the time, said on 9/11 that “we need to bomb something else [other than Afghanistan] to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks.” These sentiments are certainly an important, perhaps determinative, piece of the puzzle.
Regardless of the balance of importance between security and hegemony concerns, neither centered on oil politics or economic arguments of any kind. The larger lesson is that purely economic explanations of war are almost always insufficient. This fact is exemplified by both Ukraine and Gaza where aggressor states were strongly motivated by ideological concerns. Attention to culture, history, and information problems will remain key in trying to anticipate and prevent conflict.