The Iraq War and the Bush Doctrine: Embarrassment to U.S. Foreign Policy or the Rational Choice?

The False Invasion? The prevention of the proliferation and use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) by an unstable regime Replace a dictatorship with a democratic government The invasion was needed to save the lives of innocent Iraqis Secure the Persian Gulf’s oil supplies

The Rebuttal… No WMDs have been found; before or since the invasion of Iraq

Many other nations in the region were, and remain non-democratic, including several US allies Saudi Arabia, for example, remains a monarchy with 4 princes whom financed the attacks and was the home to a few of the 9/11 Hijackers.

The humanitarian argument, would have been far more compelling during the first Gulf War when the Iraqi regime were massacring Shiite refugees and the Kurdish people. In 2003 however, though the Iraqi people did not enjoy many fundamental freedoms, they were not suffering from the same threats as they did 10 years previous that warranted the initial war.

Oil is a fungible good that is guaranteed to reach the market, and is thus not in need of being “secured”

The Bush Doctrine “ Deterrence – the promise of massive retaliation against nations – means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can secretly provide them to terrorist allies ”

The Strategies: Preemptive Attack - Preemptive attack brings the fight to the terrorists directly, and is intended to effectively eliminate them from existence. This protects all potential targets, both those of the attacking state and other targets all around the world and thus may be seen as providing a public good Deterrence Choice - Deterrence calls for the state to increase specific security measures, and improve defensive strategies (eg. Dept. of Homeland Security, formation of the Transportation Security Administration etc.) Increased defensive measures in one country may shift attacks to another country all together since it is less protected and chances for success are higher.

Powerful preemptive attack has already been shown to not be truly effective in eliminating terrorism as it may instead create anger amongst the local population and thus send the terrorists new recruits Thus the costs of preemptions are drastically increased and we assume that the costs of preemption exceed the associated benefits, thus c > B. Given this inequality, we then must assume that B > 2B – c. In addition, as these strategies are made under the imminent threat of terrorism, a choice of mutual preemption in eliminating terrorists clearly grants higher payoffs than mutual inaction where both choose to do nothing, so 2B – c > 0. An evaluation of these payoffs shows that 2B > c*> B and uphold the characteristics of a PD game The deterring strategies generate a similar result as the public costs of allowing a large-scale attack befall on another country or similar deflection consequences of deterrence are greater than the private benefits of preventing a domestic attack; 2C > b* > C For the country that is preempting, it would receive the public benefits of its preemptive war, but must also burden the private cost of waging that war as well as the public cost of deflection due to the deterrence choice. Conversely, the deterring player would receive the public benefits of preemptive attack and the private benefits of a strong defensive policy and would only have to shoulder the public costs of the deferring policy; naturally B + b* - C > B – c* - C.

Mutual preemption will be maintained as long as the present value of preemption is greater than the payoffs gained from deterring in the first period and then receiving the punishment payoff of mutual deterrence in the second period.

Conclusions This model explains why the United States was not satisfied with only increasing its defensive capabilities by creating new executive departments and federal agencies that brought a technologically more advanced barrier against terrorists. Since the United States is the target of more than 40% of transnational attacks, this paper shows alterations in the payoff benefits that dramatically alter the Nash Equilibrium. Such a change causes the United States to strongly prefer a policy of directly attacking the enemy and upholding the Bush Doctrine.