US foreign policy towards Saddam Husseins Essay

US foreign policy towards Saddam Husseins - Essay Example One of the most controversial subjects in the world politics is the invasion of Iraq by United States. The invasion has resulted in considerable losses to both the countries and in fact has resulted in almost complete destruction of Iraq. This is necessary to understand the genuineness of the policies of United States. The present essay is intended to analyze the policies of US for Iraq, which finally resulted in the Invasion. The consequences of the war also would be analyzed based on these policies for interpreting the invasion based on these policies.Under these circumstances it would be ideal to analyze the relations United States had with Iraq before the invasion throughout the history of Iraq.The policy of United States over Persian Gulf is centered on the oil reserves. They also wanted to protect Israel and never had any close relations with Iraq (History of Iraq: Part III US-Iraq Relations, 2003). They always viewed Iraq with a hostile eye. During the Iran-Iraq war US sided I raq not because they had any interest in Iraq, but they were afraid of the Iranian revolution. Thus it could be seen that relation of US with Iraq was never a smooth one.As the economy of US progressed in great pace after the World War II, oil became their priority and wanted to strengthen relations with Middle East so as to protect the oil reserves. For this purpose they maintained a good relation with Iraq and even declared that the interest of Iraq is the same as that of US (Battle, 2003). But during 1950's as Iraq became friendly with Soviets, US turned against Iraq. US had good relations with other countries in Middle East like Saudi Arabia and Iran until the Iranian revolution also called Islamic revolution. This revolution by Muslims frightened US and therefore in the war that followed between Iran and Iraq, US stood with Iraq purely because they felt that Islamic revolution could pose a big danger for them. Although there were against the brutal tactics of Saddam Hussein, they did not have a choice (Background and history on Iraq, 2009). From the above facts it could be assumed that the relation that US has with Iraq was just an opportunistic one intended to get the provision of oil and they never had any common interest. Iraq started production and use of chemical weapons from early 1980's. United States was quite aware of this situation and they had even supplied raw materials for the production of the same secretly. Although almost all of the equipments, which Iraq used against Iran, were US made and were secretly shipped to Iraq by US, this fact is still regarded as a secret. Thus US played a game with Iraq by supporting it to make chemical weapons and then suddenly changed strategies against Iraq blaming them in front of the world, for production of the same weapons (Battle, 2003). This might be the reason why they were quite sure that there were chemical weapons in Iraq even when the inspectors from UN denied this fact (Background and history on Iraq, 2009). September 11 attack fuelled rivalry of US to Iraq. With this event US wanted to destruct all the forces that might poise danger for them, especially the strongest among the Muslim countries, Iraq. Several reasons had been proposed by US for its Iraq Invasion. The most important one is that US believed that Saddam, the arrogant President of Iraq, had great storage of Weapons for Mass Destruction (WMD). On their request United Nations appointed chemical weapon inspectors and Iraq co-operated with them resulting in destruction of all the weapons they had. The continued inspection by UN was denied by Iraq. But UN inspectors had already destroyed those weapons to almost nil (Background and history on Iraq, 2009). US could have believed the results of the inspection by US. But they denied believing because they wanted to destroy that country. Another reason proposed by US was that Iraq was hosting suicide bombers of Al Queida and was encouraging terrorism. But they did not have