The Doctrine of Preemption and Going to War in Iraq

The Bush administration clearly had their minds set on invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussain’s regime. The Bush administration framed intelligence to support their agenda of invading Iraq. Several pieces of intelligence were used while know to be of suspicious backgrounds or completely false. The administration knew it needed to create a threat of Iraq using weapons of mass destruction to legalize a means for a preemptive war. In the State of Exception by Agamben he discusses that when nations are in exceptional times the citizens turn to their leader and to make decisions. People also give up their rights to the government in times of exception to the government for protection in the state of emergency. In both Counter Jihad and Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there is discussion of the use of intelligence to portray the need for an invasion into Iraq. Falsified papers claiming a sale of five hundred tons of Yellow Cake Uranium from Niger to Iraq were used as a key argument for U.S. involvement. President Bush however talked in his State of the Union address in January 28, 2003, that the sale of the uranium was a solid and true piece of intelligence. Bush used several other pieces of intelligence that were either false or from questionable sources as justification for an invasion of Iraq. In The Downing Street Memo, British intelligence officer stated that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” meaning that the Bush administration already had an agenda but was using specific intelligence to support their predetermined agenda. The citizens of America in this state of exception looked to their leader for guidance. In these cases, the people saw that their leader was calling for action because America was supposedly threatened. Bush also cultivated a good vs evil narrative with speeches such as his state of the Union Address in January 29, 2002 in which he states that America is “in the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek, chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world.” In this speech he is lumping the stateless terrorist group of Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Bush once again lumps Hussain with Al Qaeda in his speech at West Point in which he claims that the spread of weapons of mass destruction is a threat to the United States and he calls for preemptive action before a threat fully emerges. Also, he states “We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.” This bundling of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussain into this general category of evil that America needs to fight creates a melodramatic political discourse that is discussed in Anker’s Orgies of Feeling. It allows America to fulfil the role of victim that needs to act against these terrible forces. The combination of these speeches, and the crafting of intelligence to support a political agenda create a state of exception in America in which the citizens looked to their leader for unilateral action against a two headed enemy of Al Qaeda and Hussain’s Iraq.