In Search of Interest. How Much Hypocrisy Was There in America and Britain's Invasion of Iraq in 2003?

Academic Paper from the year 2019 in the subject Sociology - War and Peace, Military, grade: N/A, Queen Mary University of London, language: English, abstract: This dissertation will seek to evaluate the hypocrisy that dominated the rationalization of war in Iraq, through an evaluation of Anglo-American justifications for war in direct comparison to the rhetoric espoused by the coalition prior to the invasion. The invasion of Iraq was initially lauded to be mission of humanitarianism, one in which the US-UK coalition would liberate the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. It has since proven to be a demonstrably superficial claim. War in Iraq had been justified on the basis of both international security, as the question of WMDs dominated policy discourse, and by the supposedly altruistic motives of freeing a nation from despotism. It was these elements that rationalized the war to governments that supported it. Nonetheless, contemporary understandings of the conflict has since interpreted the actions of the US and UK to be primarily motivated by self-interests, thus exposing the hypocrisy of the invasion. The respective governments of the US and the UK held significant stake in removing Saddam Hussein, whose regime was hostile to Anglo-American policies in the Middle East-illustrated by the First Gulf War. Moreover, interests in oil and private industries by the US and UK was the motivation for a sustained campaign in Iraq, as the actions of the Central Provisional Government later indicated.