Leaving aside the manufactured justifications, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to reassert U.S. power in the Middle East and reduce the influence of Iran. It wasn’t terrorism or yellow cake or even Saddam Hussein’s appalling human rights abuses that motivated one of the most tragic of U.S. foreign policy blunders.
It was geopolitics, stupid.
According to the fevered imaginations of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and their neocon compatriots, Saddam would be the first domino to fall, followed by other autocrats (Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya) until, boom, democracy upended the ayatollahs in Iran as well. They even imagined, by the mere inclusion of it in an “axis of evil,” that North Korea too would soon experience a Pyongyang Spring.
Saddam did indeed fall. And then Iraq fell apart, thanks to the failure of the Bush administration to develop a coherent post-war reconstruction plan.
But democracy did not take hold in the region, much less in North Korea. Some autocrats have squeaked by, in the case of Assad by ruthlessly suppressing a civil uprising, while others have emerged like Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt and Abdelmadjid Tebboune in Algeria. And several putative democrats, like Kais Saied in Tunisia and Benjamin …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
