US soldiers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division patrol Baghdad's Haifa Street district on January 30, 2005. Photo: Charles Onians/AFP.
By Research Unit for Political Economy – June 26, 2025
In December 2002, we brought out a special issue titled Behind the Invasion of Iraq (later published by Monthly Review Press as a slim book under the same name). The actual invasion took place three months later, but it was clearly imminent as we wrote. Behind the Invasion probably gained a wider readership than any of our other publications. That in turn was due to the great ferment of protest worldwide at the time. Giant demonstrations were taking place around the world, including in India, against the impending invasion.
We mention Behind the Invasion today because it seems that there was much better understanding at the time than now on what lay in store for the region. As the process unfolded, one would have expected even greater clarity on the nature of the process, but the reverse seems to be the case. And so it is worth reiterating some of the points made 23 years ago.
It is just six months into Trump’s presidency, and he has waged direct military assaults on two countries, Yemen and Iran. Many of Trump’s supporters were surprised by this, for he had campaigned on a platform of ending US involvement in foreign wars. Online pundits affirm that Trump was following Netanyahu’s orders, not US interests.
Now Trump has declared a ceasefire (on June 24) and publicly expressed annoyance at “Israel.” Many commentators have seized on this as confirmation of the divergence between “Israeli” and US aims. They claim that Trump has now woken up to the fact that he has been dragged into the war by Netanyahu, hence his outburst. However, little credence can be given to what Trump says: he repeatedly uses deceptive remarks to lull his adversaries. We have seen this with regard to Gaza; and just a few days ago, Trump made a show of negotiating with Iran even as he gave “Israel” the green signal to start bombing.
In fact, the US’s direct aggression on Iran is merely the latest move in a sequence played out over more than two decades. It is part of a policy formulated in Washington, not in Tel Aviv. Trump’s war policy is in line with the war policy of his predecessors.
Amnesia
Western media discussion of the war (which also dominates coverage of the war in countries such as India) has centered on Iran’s nuclear programme, as if the US and “Israel” are principally motivated by their determination to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Now some commentators predict that, after the US bombs failed to destroy Iran’s fortified nuclear sites, Iran might now be spurred to make nuclear weapons, as protection against attack. Some indeed worry that more countries might “go nuclear” after witnessing Iran’s fate.
This view requires amnesia regarding events of the last 23 years. The US has been engaged single-mindedly in re-shaping the entire region in its imperialist interests. Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump have waged war on Iraq, Syria, and Libya; “Israel,” a US proxy, has waged war on Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, not to mention Gaza and the West Bank. Different pretexts were employed for each invasion: The US waged aggression on Iraq to stop it from possessing weapons of mass destruction; on Libya to defend human rights; on Syria to prevent the growth of ISIS; and today on Iran to prevent it acquiring nuclear weapons. On each occasion the dominant western media have focussed on the pretext. The pretext is discarded after the invasion has achieved its real purpose.
Had the US’s main priority been to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, it would have implemented the 2015 nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—whereby Iran gave up the right to nuclear enrichment in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. However, Trump’s first administration unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018; and while Biden had during his campaign promised to reinstate the JCPOA, his administration instead chose to continue the policies of Trump I. Trump II has picked up the baton and run further. There is perfect continuity.
From 2002 to today
Let us cast our minds back to the year 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. Much of the region was governed by forces that refused, to one extent or the other, to submit to US imperialism. Muammar Qaddafi was the president of Libya; Bashar al-Assad was the president of Syria; Saddam Hussein was still the president of (a greatly weakened, but unsubmissive) Iraq; Iran under the Islamic Republic was on the steady path to recovery after the war with Iraq; and in Lebanon Hezbollah wielded great influence and prestige, having just liberated the south of their country from “Israeli” occupation two years earlier. The Second Intifada was still under way in Palestine, and Saudi Arabia and other states of the Gulf Cooperation Council were unable to openly reconcile with the “Israeli” regime for fear of opposition by their own people.
In order to reassert its control over the region, US imperialism needed to remove these obstacles, foster sectarian divisions, and crush popular resistance. Indeed its ultimate target was to break the long-standing defiance of the people of the region. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was merely the first step in this programme.
Today, US troops are stationed in Iraq, and the Iraqi government cannot exercise sovereignty; Libya is in an impoverished and chaotic state; in the centre of a ravaged Syria, a pro-US Islamic fundamentalist regime reigns, while swathes of the country are occupied by the US and “Israel;” Hezbollah has been dealt terrible blows, and is on the defensive, while the US ambassador dictates Lebanese politics like a Roman proconsul, and Israel continues to attack Lebanon at will; “Israel” is waging wholesale genocide in Gaza, while the Mahmoud Abbas-led Palestinian Authority operates as a wing of the “Israeli” occupiers in the West Bank. A number of Arab governments in the region have signed agreements to normalise relations with “Israel,” despite overwhelming opposition to this among the Arab masses.
Two decades of aggression and subversion by the US and “Israel” have brought about terrible regression in the entire region. To isolate discussion of the current assault on Iran from this background requires a remarkable propaganda effort by the imperialists.
Project for a New American Century
The argument made in Behind the Invasion of Iraq was broadly as follows (the purpose of the following long summary will, we hope, become clear when we return to the present). US imperialism at the start of the 21st century was only seemingly all-powerful; in fact, its economic strength was in decline. The US rulers sought to shore this up by recourse to their military might. One reflection of the US’s declining economic status was its yawning trade deficits, which it funded by borrowing from the rest of the world. The US could do so as the dollar was the world’s leading international currency, and thus the world’s prime way to store wealth. Global investors and central banks bought up US Treasury bonds and other US financial assets, and thereby funded the US’s debt. (Larry Summers approvingly summed up this parasitism: “If China wants to sell us things at really low prices… and we give them pieces of paper that we print… I think that’s a good deal.) However, this endless supply of golden eggs depended on the US remaining the supreme imperialist power, and the dollar remaining the dominant international currency. In fact, the latter status depended on the former.
The US was wary of the EU’s potential to emerge as a rival, and the euro as a rival currency; in Asia, it feared a challenge from China over the medium term. A section of US capital felt it necessary to pre-emptively strike at such potential challenges, and thereby to consolidate and extend US global dominance. This was reflected in the setting up of the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC), a think tank from which emerged the foreign policy team of George W. Bush. (These policies later found embodiment in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, released in September 2002.)
The PNAC’s 2001 report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New American Century” stated frankly that “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The PNAC report said that this would be required “even should Saddam pass from the scene,” as “Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has.”
The PNAC did not pretend that all this was needed for the good of the world; it supported a “blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” Many well-known critics of US foreign policy today, such as John Mearsheimer, explicitly share this objective of preventing the emergence of great power rivals; they differ merely on where the focus should be. For instance, in Mearsheimer’s view, US involvement in Ukraine and West Asia is a distraction from directly targeting China, which he considers to be the principal threat.
The events of September 11, 2001 provided an opportunity to bring the PNAC’s plan into action. US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told journalist Nicholas Lemann that she called together the senior staff of the National Security Council and asked them to think seriously, “how do you capitalize on these opportunities” to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th? The target was soon broadened from preventing “terrorism” to preventing the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction “in the hands of irresponsible states.” That pretext served for Iraq then, and for Iran today.
Behind the Invasion argued that: “The United States plans to use the invasion of Iraq as a launching pad for a drastic re-shaping of West Asia. The Bush administration is actively considering invading various countries and replacing regimes in the entire region—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Lebanon are among the countries to be targeted. This is to be accompanied by “Israel” carrying out some form of ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian question—whether in the form of mass eviction or colonisation.”
As Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s vice-president, remarked, what the US wanted was not just “regime change” but “region change.” The course of events in the past two decades has broadly borne this out.
Securing US supremacy
The US’s capture of West Asian oil, Behind the Invasion argued, was intended to secure its supremacy among imperialist powers. Among other things, it would ensure that the bulk of petroleum trade would be in US dollars, and thus ward off challenges to the dollar’s supremacy. “In a broader sense, [the US] believes that such a re-assertion of its supremacy (in military terms and in control of strategic resources) will prevent the emergence of any serious imperialist challenger such as the EU.”
At the same time the US believed that direct control over the region’s petroleum resources would give it another important lever to use against China, which was set to become considerably more dependent on petroleum imports during the next decade. Thus China and Russia had formed a security platform called the “Shanghai Five” (later Six), consisting of China, Russia and certain Central Asian states, in order to counter US moves in the region.
“Israel” accorded key role
Behind the Invasion argued that “Israel” had been accorded a key role in US plans for occupying and policing the region. “Israel” would seek a suitable opportunity to mobilise its military force and expel the Palestinians into Jordan. If this action provoked opposition from neighbouring countries, that would merely provide “Israel” a welcome opportunity to employ its overwhelming military might on them and crush them. “’Israel’s’ attack on the Palestinians and then the Arab states would thus complement the United States’ invasion of Iraq and some other state(s). ‘Israel’ would hold military sway in the region as the local enforcer of American power.”
“Israel” would also urge the US to attack Iran; an analyst is cited as saying that “Iran will be severely pressured to dismantle its nuclear and missile programs or face attack by US forces…At minimum, the US will encourage an uprising against Iran’s Islamic regime, replacing it with either a royalist government or one drawn from US-based Iranian exiles.”
The Empire’s Strategic Failure: How the US-Israeli Assault on Iran Accelerated Imperial Decline
Transformation abroad and at home
In line with its broader aims in invading Iraq, the US “now openly declared the death of the UN system, for what it was worth: this was the content of Bush’s speech to the UN, where he declared that it would be irrelevant unless it rubber-stamped US supremacy. The new doctrine is contained in the US National Security Strategy document, which declares the right of American pre-emptive strike against ‘emerging’ or potential threats, and warns that it is willing to act unilaterally if other imperialist powers do not follow its lead.”
The invasion of Iraq, though a costly and risky gamble, was not a personal project of George Bush; it was a project of the US ruling classes: “Although some voices of caution were sounded at first among senior strategic experts and political figures in the US, there now appears to be broad consensus among the US ruling classes regarding this extraordinary adventurism and unilateral aggression…It is significant that despite recession and economic uncertainty, despite deepening budget and balance of payments deficits, the US is willing to foot the bill for a massive, open-ended military operation. Evidently US corporations believe the potential reward will justify the war; or that the failure to go to war will have grave consequences for them.”
The broader project of transforming the region in order to extend the life of US hegemony would require direct occupation of some countries—potentially calling forth fierce resistance from the occupied peoples. “At the same time, the internal repressive apparatus is being strengthened in the US and panic, submission to authority and other elements of fascism are being manufactured.”
Behind the Invasion concluded: “The simultaneous emergence of worldwide popular opposition and resistance, opposition from other imperialist powers, and profound weakness in the US economy suggest that events will not develop as US imperialism wishes.”
Looking back
As will be evident by now, the purpose of this long summary is to show that recent developments in Palestine, Syria, and Iran are not isolated events, nor are they to be ascribed to individuals such as Trump and Netanyahu, any more than the Iraq war was the brainchild of George W. Bush alone. Rather, these events represent the further unfolding of a plan based on US imperialist interests in a changing world—the struggle for “economic territory in general.”
As it emerged later, the European Union was unable to consolidate itself politically and economically, and thereby to pose a challenge to US imperialist supremacy. France’s Chirac and Germany’s Schröder, who opposed the invasion of Iraq, were succeeded by Sarkozy and Merkel, both of whom restored subordinate relations with the US. It was China and Russia that emerged as a more troublesome challenge. (The Shanghai Five security platform later developed into the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, which may emerge at some point as a rival to NATO).
The question of dollar supremacy has been brought to the forefront repeatedly by Trump himself. He has repeatedly threatened countries who are considering promoting alternatives to the dollar as international currency with massive tariffs. Nevertheless, the first six months of his second term have in fact been marked by: widespread discussion in the media regarding the future of the dollar’s international status, Moody’s downgrading of US Treasury bonds’ credit rating, and greater volatility in the market value of the dollar and US Treasuries. A leading expert on finance concludes that while Moody’s small downgrade may not have an immediate effect on US government finances, it “does carry symbolic weight, another indicator that US exceptionalism… is coming to an end.”
“Forever wars,” as Trump derided them in his election campaign, do not come cheap, The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates that the post-9/11 wars have cost the US $8 trillion in direct budgetary costs. US spending on “Israel’s” military operations and related US operations in the region in the period October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024 are conservatively estimated by the Watson Institute at a minimum of $22.76 billion, and counting. All such spending, of course, has in effect been funded by the same means, namely, US government borrowing, in turn funded by the rest of the world.
While the US has sought to head off potential challengers to its hegemony, its military rivals or potential rivals have so far steered clear of directly opposing US and “Israeli” aggressions. Even as they criticise “Israeli” and US attacks on Iran, Russia and China have restricted themselves to offering to mediate between the two sides. The US and “Israel” have been able to act with extraordinary impunity.
Resistance to the US hegemonic project has been mounted by relatively poor governments and the popular militia of the Third World. Despite the vast inequality of means between the two sides, the US has not been able to have its way. Thus it took the US years of bloody operations to stabilise its hold on Iraq, and even now that hold requires a continuing military presence. It was unable to maintain its occupation of Afghanistan, which ended in humiliating flight. US-backed fundamentalist forces in Syria took 14 years to oust even an Assad government greatly weakened by lethal US sanctions. The US proxy Saudi Arabia failed to suppress the Ansarallah government in Yemen despite large-scale US military support and US weapons. Recent direct attacks by the US and “Israel” have proved unable to dislodge Ansarallah or make it submit. Iran, like Syria before it, gave sustained assistance to other forces of resistance in the region, even in the face of decades of relentless sanctions. And now the Iranian missile programme has significantly retaliated against “Israel.”
Further afield, it is the ordinary people of many countries, including of the US itself, who have protested on the streets and in colleges in the face of repression, undertaken defiant actions against weapons manufacturers, and carried out thorough exposure of US imperialism’s propaganda.
In brief, the US’s recent direct aggression on Iran is neither on account of Iran’s nuclear programme as such, nor is it the result of Netanyahu duping Trump, nor of the power of the “Israel” lobby in the US. Rather, it is a further step in the project of trying to restore US hegemony over the region, as a key part of shoring up its global hegemony.
However terrible may be the devastation the US and its proxies inflict on the people in its course, that project is doomed. As we concluded Behind the Invasion:
History does not, cannot, repeat itself; for all the actors and the political context have changed in the course of historical development. The enduring legacy of the great anti-colonial struggles is the anti-imperialist consciousness of the people of the world, who refuse—whatever the weaknesses of their organisation—to submit to subjugation.
- RUPE’s own edition went through two reprints. The book was translated into Tamil, Norwegian, German, and Turkish, and parts were translated into Greek, Portuguese, and Swedish, among other languages. The web version received over 200,000 visits in a short span of time.
- A representative sample: “Andrew Napolitano: What is the real reason, in your understanding, why Donald Trump bombed and attempted to destroy a lawful, inspected, and approved uranium enrichment program in a sovereign country? Jeffrey Sachs: Well, because Benjamin Netanyahu told him to. So the President followed his orders.”—Interview, June 23, 2025
- The US also funded an armed insurgency against the Assad government, and imposed economic sanctions so brutal that they were comparable to a war, in order to defend human rights in Syria.
- The fact that the Obama administration concluded the JCPOA in 2015 indicates that ruling circles in the US were at one point weighing different options on how to tackle Iran. However, the policies finally adopted by the successive Trump and Biden administrations marked the final decision for direct confrontation.
- Whatever compromises some of these forces may have made with imperialism over the years did not satisfy US imperialism in the new situation, which demanded complete submission. So high was the bar set that even the thoroughly compromised Arafat had to be besieged and finally done away with.
- After the great popular uprising which overthrew the Shah of Iran, the US and its allies saw Iran as a threat to their control over the region, and so engineered the Iraq-Iran war. Iran emerged unbowed, though it paid a heavy price in lives and economic hardship.
- “Tariffs, Decline and the Promise of AI: A Conversation between Larry Summers and Niall Ferguson,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy-fn5MWFIk
- Emphasis added.
- Like some present-day commentators, Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theoretician of the period before World War I, claimed that imperialism was a “policy” favoured by finance capital, not a necessity, and that “imperialism must not be ‘identified’ with ‘present-day capitalism.’” It was Lenin who argued that imperialism was a compulsion of the present stage of capitalism, one which involves “the struggle for the sources of raw materials, for the export of capital, for spheres of influence, i.e., for spheres for profitable deals, concessions, monopoly profits and so on, economic territory in general.” An essential feature of imperialism, he argued, “is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony.”—Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
- Russia did initially aid the Assad government in Syria, since it had an important naval base there. However, it recently played a dark role during the capture of power by Islamic fundamentalist forces.
