The real reasons for the invasion of Irak

At the White House, President Bush II was initially surrounded and protected from the outside world by his neoconservative Pretorian Guard, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney and deputy secretary of defense Wolfowitz. (Pretorian guard refers to the guard which protected the Roman emperor from his surroundings). Fortunately, since the 2006 midterm debacle, the pretorian guard has shrunk and their power has wilted. Obvious signs, among many, were the demise of feldmarechal von Rumsfeld immediately after the debacle,the failed reappointment of Bolton as ambassador to the UN, the Wolfie scandal at the World Bank, and Scooter Libby's conviction for perjury. The latter scandal, leakage of the name of CIA secret agent Valerie Plame involved vice-president Halliburton Cheney and Karl Rove at the WH.

Paul Wolfowitz, defense deputy secretary	Richard Halliburton Cheney, Vice-president	Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense
Karl Rove, senior political adviser to the president	George Bush, President	Richard Perle, defense policy adviser
Douglas Feith, defense policy undersecretary	Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser	Lewis Scooter Libby, chief of staff to the Vice-president

'Pax Americana' is clearly related to the official ' National Security Straregy of the USA' of September 2002, which revealed the imperial motivations of the Neocon team which dominated White House international policy decisions. Reading this NSS and its ancestors makes clear that the invasion of Irak was only a small piece of the Neocon Middle-East policy. Its aims were:

(1) Reinforcing American military presence in this part of the world. 'This is the more important', as Paul Wolfowitz, the brain behind the US imperial policy, mentioned in passing during his Vanity Fair interview in May 2000, '... that the U.S. and the Saudi government mutually agreed on the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there ... has been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. ... one of bin Laden's principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina.'

(2) Securing the US mid-east oil supplies. The first gulf war has been fought to prevent Saddam's control over Kuwaiti oil and potentially over Saudi Arabian oil. The present war had as one of its goals the pre-emption of the Russian-French-German efforts to master some of the mid-east oil through contracts signed with Irak. A glance over the Mid-East and Asia map shows the Afghanistan war to be part of the same design. In the late 90's Unocal, formerly 'Union Oil Company of California', negotiated with the Talibans and several former republics of the soviet bloc (Turkmenistan, Ouzbekistan etc.) the establishment of oil pipelines between Afghanistan and the Caspian sea and Pakistan. Formal contracts were rapidly signed by Unocal with the newly US-appointed president of Afghanistan Karzai (ex-consultant for Unocal and ex-CIA operative in the war of the Taliban against the USSR!!!), after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Control of the oil supplies is an important element of world 'hegemony'.

(3) Establishing a new world (dis)order. Invading Irak without the OK of the UN, 'going it alone', was a clear message to the international community that from now on the US was ruling the world to spread democracy, freedom, and neoconservative free market economy ('Nation Building' ) throughout the world. For the Neocons, democracy is the Troyan horse of the US multinationals leading to the rule of money over the banana democracies.

One important reason for the decision to invade Afghanistan and Irak, rarely mentioned elsewhere, was dissuasion . Paul O'Neill received a memo from R. Rumsfeld: "What are we trying to achieve? ...dissuade nations from challenging our interests ... by 'asymmetric' responses" (this means in Rumsfeld's jargon: nuclear, chemical, biological and other non-conventional weapons). Among the targeted nations "China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea" are listed. O'Neill concluded about Rumsfeld memo: 'It described how everything fit together. "The focus on Saddam Hussein made sense only if the broader ideology" (that of the neocons, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and cohorts)... "of a need to dissuade others from creating asymmetric threats - were to be embraced. That was the why".

Niall Ferguson argues in 'Colossus' that the US had little choice invading Irak because of the inept behaviour of the UN Security Council. But how can one further democracy in nations by establishing a US dictatorship over these countries, with the help of dictators like Pakistan's Musharaf, and against the public opinion of most allies, e.g. Spain, Italy, Britain? In my opinion, this can only be achieved through international democracy using a reorganized UN where no individual country but a majority of member states decide.