منتدى قالمة للعلوم السياسية
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم .. أخي الزائر الكريم ..أهلآ وسهلآ بك في منتداك ( منتدى قالمة للعلوم سياسية ) إحدى المنتديات المتواضعة في عالم المنتديات والتي تزهو بالعلم الشرعي والمعرفة والفكر والثقافة .. نتمنى لكم قضاء أسعد الأوقات وأطيبها .. نتشرف بتسجيلك فيه لتصبح أحد أعضاءه الأعزاء وننتظر إسهاماتكم ومشاركاتكم النافعة وحضوركم وتفاعلكم المثمر .. كما نتمنى أن تتسع صفحات منتدانا لحروف قلمكم ووميض عطائكم .. وفقكم الله لما يحبه ويرضاه , وجنبكم ما يبغضه ويأباه. مع فائق وأجل تقديري وإعتزازي وإحترامي سلفآ .. والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته . المشرف العام
منتدى قالمة للعلوم السياسية
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم .. أخي الزائر الكريم ..أهلآ وسهلآ بك في منتداك ( منتدى قالمة للعلوم سياسية ) إحدى المنتديات المتواضعة في عالم المنتديات والتي تزهو بالعلم الشرعي والمعرفة والفكر والثقافة .. نتمنى لكم قضاء أسعد الأوقات وأطيبها .. نتشرف بتسجيلك فيه لتصبح أحد أعضاءه الأعزاء وننتظر إسهاماتكم ومشاركاتكم النافعة وحضوركم وتفاعلكم المثمر .. كما نتمنى أن تتسع صفحات منتدانا لحروف قلمكم ووميض عطائكم .. وفقكم الله لما يحبه ويرضاه , وجنبكم ما يبغضه ويأباه. مع فائق وأجل تقديري وإعتزازي وإحترامي سلفآ .. والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته . المشرف العام
منتدى قالمة للعلوم السياسية
هل تريد التفاعل مع هذه المساهمة؟ كل ما عليك هو إنشاء حساب جديد ببضع خطوات أو تسجيل الدخول للمتابعة.


 
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 American Hegemony after the Iraq War

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الدولة : ALGERIA
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تاريخ التسجيل : 01/12/2013

American Hegemony after the Iraq War Empty
مُساهمةموضوع: American Hegemony after the Iraq War   American Hegemony after the Iraq War Emptyالإثنين يناير 05, 2015 2:01 pm

AMERICAN HEGEMONY AFTER THE IRAQ WAR
Since 1979, American policy towards Iraq has been central to a wider effort to restore and maintain the hegemonic position of the United States in the Persian Gulf, an effort determined in turn by the importance of the Gulf to the international oil system and the importance of American hegemony in the international oil system to its wider global hegemony.
Iraq became an American preoccupation as a result of two developments in the Persian Gulf regional sub-system. Firstly, the Iranian Revolution transformed America’s regional proxy into a direct threat to the latter’s regional predominance, completely undermining the ‘twin pillar’ strategy upon which American regional hegemony then rested. That development was soon followed by Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Iran, a decision whose unforeseen repercussions forced the Reagan administration to ‘tilt’ towards Iraq in order to prevent an Iranian victory in the resulting war. Over time, and with the growing influence of the ‘pro-Arab’ faction within the Reagan administration, that initial tilt was transformed into a more ambitious attempt to co-opt Iraq into the camp of pro-American, ‘moderate’ Arab states and, in doing so, to secure American hegemony on a more permanent basis. The policy of co-optation reached its peak during the first year of the administration of George H. W. Bush, but was then overthrown by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Saddam acted in an attempt to ensure his own survival and in the belief that the United States would not respond to his annexation of Kuwait. In doing so he underestimated the threat his action posed to American hegemony at all levels and the consequent willingness of the Bush administration to go to war.
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America’s crushing military victory in the resulting war, legitimated as it was by UN resolutions, supported by the vast majority of the international community, and demonstrating starkly the dependence of both core states and the Gulf oil monarchies on American military power, seemed to cement American regional hegemony. Saddam’s survival, however, led the Bush administration to adopt an ad hoc strategy of containment, centred on a combination of sanctions and weapons inspections, which was ill-constructed for long-term use. Moreover, despite both having been degraded by major military conflicts, the United States now faced not one but two implacable opponents in the Gulf. The Clinton administration responded to this problem by renaming the policy it had inherited ‘dual containment’ but otherwise continued the effort to contain Iraq through a combination of sanctions, inspections and the threat and/or use of force. That policy was undermined, however, by the contradiction between a commitment to regime change in Iraq before containment could be lifted and an inability and/or unwillingness to take the measures needed to achieve that objective. The compromise that containment thus represented was unsustainable in the long term because of the absence of international support for the permanent exiling of Iraq from the community of nations and the suffering that the policy inflicted on Iraqi civilians.
By the end of the 1990s, therefore, American hegemony in the Gulf was once again beginning to fray at the edges. Iran remained unreconciled to America’s regional influence and apparently bent on the development of nuclear weapons, whilst the containment of Iraq was crumbling by the day. With inspections already suspended and sanctions seemingly likely to follow, Saddam would soon be free once more to revive his WMD programme and pursue his goal of regional hegemony. Meanwhile, the combined suffering of the Iraqi and Palestinian people, for which most Arabs held the United States largely responsible, in combination with Washington’s continued support for regional despots, was fuelling a toxic brew of antiAmericanism and radical Islam which manifested itself in the form of terrorist attacks and a growing threat to both the United States and its regional allies.
George W. Bush therefore entered the White House at a time when American regional hegemony appeared precarious. He also entered it aware that the varied strategies of his predecessors, from power
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Publication information: Book title: The United States and Iraq since 1979: Hegemony, Oil and War. Contributors: Steven Hurst - Author. Publisher: Edinburgh University Press. Place of publication: Edinburgh. Publication year: 2009. Page number: 225
balancing, to co-optation, to containment, had failed to resolve that problem. Bush was different from his predecessors, however, in representing, both in his own person and in his appointments, the apotheosis of the ‘conservative ascendancy’ which had first manifested itself in Reagan’s 1980 election victory. The significance of this development was that it meant the United States was now governed by an administration which saw rogue states armed with WMD as a mortal threat to America’s global predominance, and one ideologically inclined to see unilateral military solutions as the most efficacious solution to that danger. The only thing the administration lacked was a plausible justification for military action against Iraq, and that was then provided in the form of the events of 11 September 2001.
George W. Bush was thus committed to regime change in Iraq from the moment he entered office, and 11 September was in that regard simply a facilitator to a pre-existing goal. Nevertheless, it is also clear that, between September 2001 and March 2003, some members of the administration, and most crucially the president himself, began to see regime change in Iraq as more than simply the means to eliminate a threat to America’s ability to project its power in the Gulf. In addition, they came to see regime change in Iraq as the potential catalyst for the spread of market-democracy throughout the wider Middle East and thus as an opportunity to place American regional hegemony on a more stable, consensual, footing.
Such an objective was never likely to have been achieved in anything less than decades, given the manifold obstacles to its achievement both in Iraq and in the wider region. The chances of success were significantly reduced, nevertheless, by the Bush administration’s deeply held antipathy to the concept of nation-building and the blithe, ideologically driven assumption of senior policy-makers that it would be possible to simply graft a new regime onto the still functional torso of the Iraqi state, hold elections and leave (apart from the forces who would remain under a SOFA), having created a grateful, pro-American market-democracy. Instead, when the United States invaded, the Iraqi state collapsed, leaving the Bush administration facing a massive task of state-building for which it was completely unprepared. The administration’s response was to take a series of decisions, and implement a number of policies – including the reversal of the commitment to a swift transfer of sovereignty, the first two Coalition Provisional Authority orders, the attempted
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economic ‘shock therapy’, the sectarian construction of the Iraqi Governing Council and the failed reconstruction effort – which compounded the collapse of the Iraqi state and the fragmentation of the Iraqi polity, alienated Iraqis of all stripes and fuelled both the Sunni insurgency and sectarianism. When the administration subsequently abandoned Bremer’s plans for a long occupation in favour of a return to a swift transfer of power, it found itself outmanoeuvred by Ayatollah Sistani and promoting a series of elections and referenda which cemented both the sectarian divide and the hold on power of the unpopular exile parties. Simultaneously, the administration responded to the growing insurgency by denying coalition military commanders the forces necessary to fight an effective counterinsurgency war. Only when Iraq descended into full-scale civil war in 2006 did the administration review its policy, after which the combination of the Surge and the Awakenings drew Iraq back from the brink.
By early 2009, nearly six years on from the American invasion, Iraq was certainly a good deal more peaceful than it had been in 2006. Nevertheless, it remained an extremely dangerous and violent country, with civilian deaths still running at approximately 500 per month. Moreover, many of those deaths were caused by al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia which, despite a series of setbacks, was still capable of launching twenty-four attacks in November 2008 alone.1 Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths ranged from an implausibly low 43,000 to anywhere between 426,000 and 793,000. The United States itself had lost 4,211 dead and 60,000–80,000 injured. Approximately 2 to 2.5 million Iraqis had fled into exile since the invasion and a further 2.7 million had been internally displaced. A fifth of the Iraqi population had thus been physically uprooted as a consequence of the war and subsequent events.2
Iraq also remained a deeply impoverished country in which five years of reconstruction had hardly begun to reverse the effects of two decades of war and sanctions. In early 2008, food rations were half what they had been under Saddam. Five million Iraqis remained dependent on those rations but half of them were unable to receive them because they had been displaced from their homes. Threequarters of all doctors, nurses and pharmacists had fled abroad and even basic medicines were in short supply or non-existent. By the end of 2008, fuel supplies were at three-quarters of the government’s
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target level, which was no better than in 2003. Electricity was still only available for half a day on average and unemployment rates remained unchanged at between 25 and 40 per cent.3
On 29 August 2002, George W. Bush had signed a National Security Directive entitled ‘Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy’:
US goal: Free Iraq in order to eliminate weapons of mass
destruction, their means of delivery and associated programs, to
prevent Iraq breaking out of containment and becoming a more
dangerous threat to the region and beyond. End Iraqi threats
to its neighbors, to stop the Iraqi government’s tyrannizing of
its own population, to cut Iraqi links to and sponsorship of
international terrorism, to maintain Iraq’s unity and territorial
integrity. And liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny, and assist
them in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and
democracy.4
Unstated in the NSD, but also prominent in the minds of policymakers, were the objectives of facilitating a resolution of the IsraeliPalestinian peace process, coercing Iraq into foregoing its nuclear programme and spreading market-democracy across the wider Middle East.
Given that set of objectives, and viewed from the perspective of early 2009, the American invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq would appear to represent ‘a defeat of historic proportions for US foreign policy’.5 The most immediate and long-standing of the administration’s objectives had been the elimination of the threat posed to American regional hegemony by a WMD-armed Iraq. That threat, however, turned out not to exist. The combination of sanctions and inspections had worked. Iraq had been disarmed and Saddam had been unable to reconstitute his WMD programmes. Had the Bush administration not been so fixated on the goal of regime change, and so theological in its certainty that Saddam did have WMD, the return of the inspectors would likely have demonstrated that fact. Post-war investigations also confirmed that Iraq had no significant connection to al-Qaeda and nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of 11 September.
The Iraq War was thus based on a false premise. Nevertheless, there were other objectives, and as it became clear that WMD would not in
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fact be discovered, so ‘creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy’ became Bush’s principal justification of choice for the war. In this regard, at least, the administration could find some crumbs of comfort. As it left office in early 2009, Iraq was indeed a democracy, of sorts, having managed to hold elections in January and December 2005 and again in January 2009. Moreover, whilst the first two elections had only deepened Iraq’s sectarian divisions and fuelled the spiralling violence, some observers saw cause for optimism in the more recent provincial elections.6 The elections took place with little violence, and the result was a significant victory for Maliki and his ‘State of Laws’ coalition which took 38 per cent of the vote in Baghdad and 37 per cent in Basra, as well as coming first in seven other governorates. Moreover, whilst Maliki had run on a relatively secular platform, the openly theocratic ISCI did badly, taking just 5 per cent of the vote in Baghdad and 12 per cent in Basra. The Sadrists, for their part, were virtually eliminated as a significant political force. In the Sunni provinces, parties running on secular and nationalist platforms did better than the Islamist parties.7
Nevertheless, there remained good reasons to be sceptical about the future of democracy in Iraq. The peacefulness of election day was only achieved through extraordinary security measures, with private vehicles banned from the roads and a curfew on anyone leaving their home except for the sole purpose of voting. Moreover, the supposed triumph of secularism in the elections was easily over-stated. Maliki may have been less overtly theocratic than ISCI but he was still committed to a state in which Islam played a central role and continued to consult Ayatollah Sistani before all major decisions. Voting, moreover, continued to be done on sectarian lines. Maliki’s wins were all in Shiadominated provinces in which he simply took Shia votes from ISCI and the Sadrists. Sunnis, meanwhile, voted for Sunni nationalist parties. The two genuinely secular parties, Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi List and the Citizens’ Coalition, made little headway.8
The pattern of voting thus reflected the fact that sectarian divisions remained deep in Iraq and that political reconciliation was still a long way from becoming a reality. Shia had voted for Shia and Sunni for Sunni. Kurds would no doubt also have voted for Kurds had growing tensions between them and Arab Iraqis not forced the postponement of the elections in the Kurdish governorates. Moreover, whilst Sunnis did engage with the political process rather than reject it, their objec
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tive in doing so was, for the most part, to drain power from the Maliki government and to secure the maximum degree of autonomy from Baghdad for their provinces.9 The absence of legislation on the constitution, an oil law and the status of Kirkuk also confirmed the failure to achieve a cross-community consensus on fundamental political questions. Moreover, the security which had been achieved over the previous two years remained fragile and had, moreover, been bought at the cost of the physical segregation of the different ethnic and sectarian groups. The relative tranquillity of Baghdad came at the cost of the carving up of the city into religiously homogenous zones separated by concrete blast barriers and razor wire.
Whilst Iraq may have managed to maintain the electoral infrastructure of a democratic society, the pluralism, tolerance, secularism and other aspects of a democratic political culture which are equally, if not more, important to the development of a genuine liberal democracy, remained noticeable chiefly by their absence. Whilst Iraq did manage to score 5.05 out of 10 on the Index of Political Freedom, placing it equal fourth in the Middle East, it came 158th out of 173 on Reporters without Borders’ Index of Press Freedom and 178th out of 180 in Transparency International’s Annual Corruption Perceptions Index, suggesting that it still had a long way to go.10 Iraqi society remained, to a great extent, both sectarian and tribal in nature. One of the most oft-stated objectives of both Bush and Bremer had been to create a society in which women’s rights were respected and observed yet, if anything, those rights had been reduced as conservative Islamic parties and militias had gained in power and imposed ‘traditional’ norms on those areas they controlled. The election law for the 2009 provincial elections required that 25 per cent of the candidates were women, but the main problem for the parties was persuading women to stand in an environment in which to do so was to incur intimidation and death threats.
Iraqi democracy thus existed in a precarious state, with many of the preconditions for democratic development still non-existent or barely out of infancy. Iraqi society, moreover, remained riven with fault lines, all of which contained the potential to plunge the country back into violence. Even one of the developments largely seen as positive, namely the electoral victory of Maliki’s coalition and the consequent strengthening of the central government, contained its own seeds of conflict, given the perception of ISCI, the Kurds and many Sunnis that
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Maliki was bent on creating a dictatorship. Nor were their concerns entirely unfounded, given Maliki’s clearly demonstrated tendency to utilise the growing power of the state to bolster his own position and to crush political opponents such as Sadr and the Awakenings leaders. If he continued down that path whilst also trying to recentralise political power in Iraq, there was a real possibility of conflict with the Sunnis and/or an ISCI-Kurdish alliance.
If the future of Iraqi democracy thus remained uncertain, the Bush administration might have tried to claim more success for the advance of the market. As security improved, so foreign direct investment increased, from less than $10 million per month in 2007 to $100 million per month in 2008.11 More significant, however, were the terms under which Iraqi oil was being brought back into the global market. The production sharing agreements (PSAs) signed by the Iraqi government with the major oil companies marked a significant deviation from post-nationalisation norms whereby all ‘upstream’ activities were controlled by state-owned oil companies and the oil majors had had to confine their activities to marketing and selling. The PSAs, in contrast, gave the latter a share of the profits from production in return for investment in new productive capacity. The agreements thus provide the companies with benefits similar to those they used to receive from direct ownership of oil concessions.12
Nevertheless, the continued advance of the market, and the integration of the Iraqi economy into the WCS on the United States preferred terms both depend on continued stability and security in Iraq. Any renewed descent into violence will lead to the withdrawal of both the oil majors and FDI. Moreover, even if Iraq does remain stable, the leading role of the oil majors in Iraqi oil production is likely to depend on continued American influence in Baghdad. The PSAs were negotiated at a point at which the Iraqi regime was wholly dependent on the United States for its continued survival. If, in future, it is able to increase its autonomy from the United States, it may well seek to revisit the terms of the PSAs, or even renounce them, as the Russian government, the only other major oil producer to sign such agreements, has done.
If the future of market-democracy in Iraq was uncertain at best, that made its prospects a good deal brighter in that country than they were in most of the rest of the region. As far as the objective of making Iraq the catalyst for the spread of democracy in the rest of the region was
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concerned, the failure of American policy was unequivocal. Indeed, after having promoted the idea in 2004–5 by publicly calling on Arab regimes to reform, and creating the Middle East Partnership Initiative to help fund that process, the Bush administration soon began to retreat from its own vision, returning to the established mantra that Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the other Gulf monarchies were ‘moderate’ friends. That change of course reflected the administration’s recognition that democracy might not turn out to be quite the panacea it had hoped. Elections in Lebanon, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA) all saw gains for radical Islamist parties fiercely opposed to the American presence in the region. Those gains, and a failing policy in Iraq which appeared to be empowering Iran, led the Bush administration to abandon the democracy agenda in favour of a return to propping up reliable Sunni autocrats as the best means to contain Iran and maintain regional stability.13
One of the hoped for side-effects of the spread of marketdemocracy was to have been the isolating of Iran and the encouragement of democratic reform in that country. Even in the absence of that development, however, the administration believed that regime change in Iraq would put it in a position to coerce Iran into abandoning its nuclear programme and its challenge to American regional hegemony. Instead, however, in the view of most observers, ‘of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching’.14 In defeating both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration removed two of Iran’s key enemies and, in the case of the latter, its most powerful regional rival. Iraq is now militarily weak and, thanks to the democratic process fostered by the United States, run by a Shia-dominated government with close ties to Tehran. The possibility that the United States might use military force to eliminate the Iranian nuclear programme was rapidly discounted by the entrapment of the United States in Iraq and Iran’s consequent ability to make the American position in that country untenable. Iran is consequently in a stronger regional position after the Iraq War than it was before it.
Nevertheless, the fear of some that Iraq will become some kind of Iranian cats-paw in the region is surely over-stated. Nationalism is a powerful phenomenon, as was demonstrated in Eastern Europe under communism, and opinion polls show that 65–70 per cent of Iraqis view Iran in an unfavourable light.15 Any Iraqi government will
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therefore pursue its own perceived interests and will have no desire to do Tehran’s bidding where it conflicts with its own objectives, nor would it be politically wise for it to do so. Iran, in any event, does not seek to control Iraq, nor does it need to. It certainly desires to have influence in Baghdad, and more influence than the United States, but its main strategic objective, a weak and friendly Iraq, has already been achieved.
Many in the Bush administration (though not in the State Department) also believed that the road to an Israeli–Palestinian peace ‘ran through Baghdad’, whether through the evolution of democracy in the PA or simply because the elimination of a strong rejectionist state would demonstrate to the Palestinians that they had no choice but to accept whatever terms Israel was prepared to offer.16 That this has not occurred hardly needs saying. Elections in the PA brought Hamas to power and rendered the Palestinians incapable of acting as a coherent interlocutor in any negotiating process. Israel, meanwhile, continues to show little interest in offering the Palestinians anything approaching a viable state and, as of early 2009, peace looked to be as far away as ever.
The Bush administration believed that regime change in Iraq would lead to the radical transformation of the Middle East and the reestablishment of American regional hegemony on a consensual basis. A decisive act of coercion would remove one WMD-armed rogue state and cow another into submission. It would also act as the catalyst for the spread of market-democracy across the region and the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, developments which would in turn lead to a reduction in anti-American sentiment and terrorism and a consequent drawing down of the US military presence in the region.
Six years, and several hundred thousand deaths later, none of those goals had been achieved. The one ray of light was the possibility of democracy taking hold in Iraq, though a collapse into sectarian violence or evolution into a dictatorship looked equally likely. Whichever outcome did result, however, America’s regional hegemony would remain precarious. Iran was strengthened and emboldened, and as unreconciled to America’s regional presence as ever. Meanwhile, far from facilitating the spread of norms and values that would allow for hegemonic leadership to be exercised in a consensual fashion, the Iraq War had made anti-American sentiment more virulent than ever. The Zogby Poll of Arab public opinion in 2008
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found that 83 per cent of respondents viewed the United States negatively and 70 per cent had no confidence in the United States. Another poll found that just 12 per cent of Saudis viewed Bush positively, putting him behind Osama bin Laden.17 Far from eliminating the roots of terrorism, the Iraq War had poured fuel on the fire. The conclusion of the American intelligence community in April 2006 was that ‘the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives’ and that ‘the Iraq conflict has become the “cause célèbre” for jihadists, breeding deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement’.18
Those ‘jihadists’ were a potential threat to the United States, but far more so to its regional allies, whose security, far from being enhanced by the removal of Saddam Hussein, was now more endangered than ever. In many cases they now faced increased domestic threats from angry populations and a new generation of terrorists. Leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and elsewhere responded by reviving security systems that had been relaxed in the late 1990s and by ruthlessly stamping out dissent. Any tentative moves toward more democracy were abandoned or gerrymandered. Externally, these states now viewed with alarm the strengthening of Iran and significant advances for its Hizbollah allies in Lebanon, fearing that Sunni power in the Gulf was eroding. The Iraq War thus fuelled Sunni-Shia conflict in the wider region, as was seen clearly in Lebanon and also in Palestine where Fatah was backed by the Sunni states, the US and the EU and Hamas by Hizbollah, Syria and Iran.19
The American invasion of Iraq had thus strengthened the regional position of Iran and increased the hostility of most Arabs to the United States and its troop presence in the Arabian Peninsula. It compounded the security dilemmas of the United States and its regional allies and exacerbated the problems it was supposed to solve.20 The Bush administration’s response was to return to established norms and practices. In June 2007, it announced a $20 billion arms deal for Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states in order to counter the rising power of Iran.21 The overall effect of the Iraq War was therefore to force the United States to maintain a direct military presence in the Gulf and the security relationships with the oil states that it was hoping the invasion would allow it to downgrade. In 2009, American policy was right back where it had started when the Bush administration
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Publication information: Book title: The United States and Iraq since 1979: Hegemony, Oil and War. Contributors: Steven Hurst - Author. Publisher: Edinburgh University Press. Place of publication: Edinburgh. Publication year: 2009. Page number: 234
came to power, and America’s regional hegemony was as problematic as ever.
 
NOTES
1. Toby Dodge, ‘Despite the optimism, Iraq is close to the edge’, The Observer, 21 December 2008.
2. Fischer, ‘Iraqi civilian deaths estimates’, Table 1, p. 3; Brookings Institution, Iraq Index, December 2008, pp. 16, 32.
3. Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr, pp. 240–1; Brookings Institution, Iraq Index, December 2008, pp. 40–2; Dodge, ‘Seven questions’.
4. Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 154–5.
5. Dodge, ‘Causes of US failure’, p. 87.
6. William Shawcross, ‘Democratic dawn in Iraq’, The Guardian, 3 February 2009.
7. Tim Susman and Monte Morin, ‘Maliki’s party gains victory in Iraqi provincial elections’, Los Angeles Times, 6 February 2009; Patrick Cockburn, ‘Iraq’s voters show faith in Maliki regime’, The Independent, 6 February 2009.
8. Michael Jansen, ‘Counting of ballots under way as elections pass off peacefully’, The Irish Times, 2 February 2009.
9. Mark Chuvlov, ‘Violence and intimidation mark run-up to Iraqi elections’, The Guardian, 30 January 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2009/jan/30/iraq-elections-violence-intimidation.
10. Brookings Institution, Iraq Index, December 2008, p. 36.
11. Ibid. p. 46.
12. ‘Blood and oil: how the West will profit from Iraq’s most precious commodity’, The Independent, 7 January 2007.
13. Carothers, ‘The democracy crusade myth’.
14. Galbraith, ‘The victor?’, p. 6.
15. Woodward, The War Within, p. 426.
16. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 322–3.
17. Rami G. Khauri, ‘America through Arab eyes’, International Herald Tribune, 21 April 2008; Robin Wright, ‘US plans new arms sales to Gulf allies’, Washington Post, 28 July 2007, p. A1.
18. US, CIA, Declassified key judgements of the National Intelligence Estimate, ‘Trends in global terrorism’.
19. Pelham, A New Muslim Order, pp. 215–23.
20. Alterman, ‘Iraq and the Gulf States’, p. 13.
21. Wright, ‘US plans new arms sales’.
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American Hegemony after the Iraq War
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 مواضيع مماثلة
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»  A War Too Far : Iraq, Iran and the New American Century (2006) Paul Rogers
» The War Hegemony Debate
» The Iraq-Israel Deterrence Relationship
» Iraq and the Gulf War: Decision-Making in Baghdad
» War in the Gulf, 1990-91: The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications Majid Khadduri, Edmund Ghareeb

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