United States–Iraq Relations

United States–Iraq Relations, as presented by Noam Chomsky, are defined by a striking reversal: the United States supported Saddam Hussein while he committed grave atrocities, then imposed policies that Chomsky says devastated Iraqi society while leaving his regime stronger. The relationship serves as a central example in his wider argument that the language of war, counterterrorism, and humanitarian concern often conceals the consequences of state power—and that the same moral standards should apply to allies and adversaries alike.

Support, occupation, and political memory

Chomsky argues that public understanding of the relationship is divided sharply from the perspective common in the Middle East. Many there saw U.S. policy toward Iraq over the preceding decade not as a simple effort to oppose Saddam Hussein, but as a policy that had devastated society while reinforcing his power. The apparent contradiction mattered: the United States had given him substantial support at the time he was committing some of his worst atrocities, including the 1988 gassing of Kurds. In Chomsky’s account, those facts were familiar to people in the region even when Western audiences preferred a different story.

This political memory shaped how people heard Osama bin Laden’s broadcasts across the region. Chomsky notes that many listeners distrusted bin Laden, but could still understand the grievances he invoked. Those grievances were not reducible to the identity or aims of the person voicing them; they drew force from remembered U.S. support for repressive governments and from the contrast between Washington’s treatment of Iraq and its treatment of Israel’s military occupation. Iraq thus appears not as an isolated policy dispute, but as part of a larger perception that the rules governing occupation and force changed according to who wielded them.

The same contrast informs Chomsky’s discussion of the 2000 Camp David summit. He rejects the reassuring American description of the proposals as generous and magnanimous, observing that people in the Middle East did not share that account. His point is not merely that policy was misunderstood abroad: he argues that accounts of U.S. conduct were themselves filtered by myths and by a limited public record. Iraq’s experience consequently figures in a larger problem of political authority—who has the power to define an occupation, an atrocity, or a policy’s effects, and which facts remain outside dominant discussion.

Sanctions and civilian consequences

Chomsky describes sanctions against Iraq as a policy that ruined civil society while strengthening Saddam Hussein. He invokes Madeleine Albright’s response to an estimate that half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of the sanctions: she acknowledged that such consequences were the price of a difficult choice and said that her administration considered the price worthwhile. For Chomsky, the significance of the exchange lies in the moral standard it exposes. Civilian deaths caused by a policy do not cease to matter because officials describe them as an accepted cost, or because the policy is directed at an enemy government.

He sets that argument against a broader test of consistency. Crimes attributed to adversaries, he says, are not normally excused by speculating that institutional structures produced them without a personal intention to kill. The famine in China from 1958 to 1961, for instance, is not dismissed as irrelevant because Mao may not have intended the deaths that followed. Nor, in Chomsky’s analogy, should the consequences of U.S. policy be waved away as an institutional error or explained by speculation about Bill Clinton’s private motives. The relevant measure is the harm suffered by those affected, not whether the policy’s architects intended every death.

This principle also shapes his comparison between sanctions and other state actions. Chomsky objects to a moral vocabulary that scrutinizes the violence of official enemies but treats the suffering caused by U.S. policy as regrettable background. A policy that devastates a society while claiming a legitimate political purpose must be judged by its actual consequences as well as by its stated rationale. In the case of Iraq, the human cost and the reinforcement of Saddam Hussein’s power sit together in the account: the punishment of the population did not amount to the removal of the ruler.

Language, force, and the rules applied to allies

Chomsky places Iraq within a critique of how governments name military action. The 1991 Gulf War was openly called a war, while NATO’s bombing of Serbia was presented as a humanitarian intervention. In his view, such labels can perform political work: they make force sound exceptional or benevolent, even though declarations of humanitarian purpose do not establish that purpose or settle what the action did. The question must be tested against the circumstances and consequences, not answered by the label alone.

The same scrutiny applies to claims about counterterrorism. Chomsky argues that calls to reject every argument that might explain terrorism can also shut down discussion of the policies behind violence, especially when the speaker supports the states being criticized. His example concerns Michael Walzer’s defense of Israeli political assassinations of Palestinians described by Israel as supporters of terrorism. Chomsky points to the unequal treatment of evidence and civilian deaths in those cases, then connects that pattern to the devastation of Iraqi civil society under U.S. policy. The comparison is not an assertion that the cases are identical; it is an insistence that a standard used to condemn violence should not disappear when the perpetrator is an ally.

He frames that demand as a principle of moral universality: if an action is wrong when others do it, it is wrong when the United States does it; if it is permissible for the United States, it must be permissible for others. Power, in this account, cannot substitute for a reasoned judgment about whether an action is right. The Iraqi case matters precisely because it makes the disparity visible: official language can foreground the wrongdoing of an adversary while placing the consequences of one’s own policy beyond ordinary scrutiny.

Strategic interests and the post-September 11 order

Chomsky interprets the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks against a background of domestic and international interests. He argues that governments answer to powerful national constituencies, while also responding to popular pressures, and predicts that the crisis would be used to advance militarization, weaken social programs, redirect attention from the harms of globalization and environmental problems, and transfer more wealth to a small number of people. His account therefore links foreign policy to the domestic use of emergency: the crisis could expand military power while narrowing debate and contestation.

Energy and strategic access form part of his explanation of the wider regional setting. Chomsky identifies the principal energy reserves as lying mainly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, with significant resources also in Central Asia. Afghanistan, he says, was a minor piece of that larger board, though pipelines through the country had been discussed for years as part of efforts to control Central Asian resources. His analysis places policy toward Iraq within a regional landscape where access to markets, energy, and strategic resources mattered alongside the stated purposes of military action.

He argues that the coalition assembled after September 11 was unlikely to mark a substantive turn toward multilateral decision-making. The formula used by the Clinton administration in 1993—acting multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary—had, in his view, already captured the established approach. Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen reiterated versions of that position, including the assertion of unilateral military power to defend U.S. interests and ensure access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources. The new coalition might soften the rhetoric, Chomsky suggests, without changing the underlying policy: partners were expected to support Washington, not to share in deciding its actions.

The resulting relationship is presented as both historical and ongoing: earlier support for Saddam Hussein, later sanctions with devastating social consequences, and a post-September 11 politics that Chomsky saw as likely to preserve strategic priorities rather than correct past harms. Iraq is not treated as a self-contained case. It is the clearest test in the account of whether states will apply to themselves the moral rules they invoke against others—and whether the people bearing the costs of policy count as fully as the purposes claimed on their behalf.