Last week, President Obama announced that nearly all American troops would return from Iraq before the end of 2011; if this withdrawal takes place as planned, it would effectively end a war that has sharply divided public opinion since 2003. American Public Opinion on the Iraq War, then, is especially timely, giving context to the public relations campaigns and partisan conflicts that helped shape how America viewed the conflict. The author, Ole R. Holsti, is George V. Allen Professor of Political Science (Emeritus) at Duke University. He is a recipient of the International Society of Political Psychology's Nevitt Sanford Award for distinguished professional contributions to political psychology as well as distinguished lifetime achievement awards from the ISPP and the American Political Science Association. His previous titles with University of Michigan Press are To See Ourselves as Others See Us: How Publics Abroad View the United States after 9/11 (2008) and Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (revised edition, 2004).
American Public Opinion on the Iraq War is available now
The University of Michigan Press: After your introduction, you begin the book with an overview of America's history with Iraq. You paint a thorough picture in the book itself, but, more briefly, how did the unique dynamic between the two countries develop?
Ole R. Holsti: Viscount Palmerston, a 19th century British Prime Minister, once declared, “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies.” The dynamics of relations between Washington and Baghdad provide ample support for that dictum: lack of diplomatic relations, a quasi-alliance, and two wars.
More specifically, Iraq broke relations with the U.S. following the Yom Kippur War and Washington listed Iraq as supporter of terrorism. After Iraq’s invasion of Iran--by now a fundamentalist Islamic regime--the Reagan administration took a number of steps to restore relations with Baghdad. By removing Iraq from the terrorist list, it permitted the sale of “dual use” equipment to that country, including chemicals that were used in warfare against Iran and Iraq’s own Kurdish population. Combined with the military intelligence provided to Baghdad, Iraq was able to avoid defeat by its larger and more populous neighbor.
In 1990 the Saddam Hussein regime invaded Kuwait, perhaps assuming that the U.S. would turn a blind eye to the aggression. In fact the George H.W. Bush administration demanded an immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces and, when Iraq failed to do so, it took the issue to the U.N. Security Council. Supported by a series of S.C. resolutions, the U.S. led an impressive coalition of 34 countries, including many Islamic regimes, that invaded Iraq and forced the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Not wanting to control Iraq, President Bush ordered the invading forces to stop short of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein later recognized Kuwait’s independence, but Iraq fell short of complying with demands that inspectors be allowed to determine if it was in compliance with postwar prohibitions against weapons of mass destruction.
When the George W. Bush administration came to office in 2001, it was committed to dealing with Iraq and what it assumed was Iraq’s possession of WMDs. The September 11 terrorist attacks, which most top administration officials assumed were linked to Baghdad, put Iraq at the top of the Washington’s foreign policy agenda. An invasion of Afghanistan by U.S. Special Forces expelled the Taliban regime from Kabul and were shortly thereafter withdrawn to prepare for the invasion of Iraq.
U.S. forces, aided by those from the UK, invaded Iraq in 2003. The stated rationale was to remove a regime that possessed WMDs and had links to the al Qaeda terrorists who had conducted the 9/11 attacks. Two expert teams of American inspectors who had been allowed into Iraq had been unable to find any WMDs, but President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed that the invasion would nevertheless take place.
The invading forces captured Baghdad in less that three weeks, but the following years saw a near civil-war in Iraq that resulted in almost 4,500 U.S. military deaths. At the end of 2008 the outgoing Bush administration signed an agreement with Iraq’s al-Maliki regime, subsequently approved by the Obama administration, that would result in the withdrawal of American forces by the end of 2011. A plan to leave a small contingent of U.S. forces in Iraq past 2011 is, at this writing, very much in doubt as the al-Maliki government has stated that those forces would not be granted immunity.
Recent Comments