Abstract
In March 2003, the United States and a number of allied countries launched a highly controversial invasion of Iraq. The Americans justified the attack by pointing to the danger represented by weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the hands of Iraq s dictator Saddam Hussein and the chance that Hussein might provide such arms to international terrorists.
Political realism provides the theoretical framework for the study, but we will not aim at testing realism as such. It is probably better to view political realism as a research program for international politics, and not as a coherent theory that can be tried and rejected.
From five basic realist principles, we deduce that all states fear one another. Therefore, they seek to deter potential aggressors by strengthening their armed forces. However, this arming will make other states feel less secure, and they must consider increasing their military strength. This action will make other states less secure again, and so on. This is the security dilemma: Actions taken by a state to increase its security decrease the security of other states.
This paper seeks to find out whether the security dilemma is an apt instrument to interpret the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. In other words, did U.S. policymakers feel that American core national values were threatened by Iraq developing WMD and having contact with terrorists? Did they therefore judge that deterrence was impossible and that the U.S. would have to invade Iraq and topple the Hussein regime?
In order to ascertain this, we outline three observations that we would expect to make if the null hypothesis the security dilemma is useful to explain the U.S. decision to attack Iraq is true. Prior to the invasion, U.S. policymakers must have been heavily concerned about the following: 1) International terrorism; 2) Iraq developing WMD; 3) Iraq and international terrorists cooperating. We assume that it is necessary to make all three observations to strengthen the null hypothesis.
The conclusion provides limited support for the null hypothesis, but the available evidence makes it impossible to reject alternative hypotheses. There seems to have been considerable concern among administration members of the possibility that America might be targeted by terrorists. However, the study finds only qualified support for the second expected observation and even less support for the final one.