The United States versus Iraq
The United States versus Iraq
The Gulf and Iraq Wars
This chapter considers two crises between the United States and Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War, the United States adopted coercive strategies which threatened the survival of Saddam’s regime and the Iraqi state. These crises test the limits for what coercion can achieve and examine the tradeoffs between coercive and brute force strategies. In both crises, U.S. administrations chose coercive strategies they did not intend to have succeed in order to then implement the brute force strategies they preferred. These two crises thus provides insight into the key questions addressed by this book as to why the United States so often chooses coercion, why coercion so often fails as weak states resist, and, knowing this, why the U.S decision makers still prefer coercive strategies.
Keywords: Gulf War, Iraq War, brute force, coercion, economic sanctions, war, casus bellum
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