Todd Purdum - A Time of our choosing

Résumé du document

?A Time of Our Choosing: America's War in Iraq', written by political correspondent Todd Purdum, was first published in 2003. As it title indicates, it deals with the American military intervention in Iraq, and covers all its aspects such as its causes, its conduct and, eventually, its consequences. Although the book was written after the end of the formal war, that is, after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. troops were still present in Iraq when it was published, and they still are. This I feel is important to keep in mind when analyzing and reviewing Todd Purdum's book. He wrote it in the midst of the events that he is accounting for. In other words, he discusses the causes and consequences of the conflict with little hindsight of it.

Extraits

[...] All in all, I firmly believe that his book is very useful to understand the U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, all the more so as Purdum qualifies his point of view and presents every aspect of the stakes raised by the Iraq War. As a conclusion, though, I would say that it might have been interesting to link the Iraq War with the Vietnam War, since I feel that this analogy is tremendously useful for understanding the American intervention in Iraq. [...]

[...] Furthermore, Purdum raises the very interesting question of the legitimacy of imposing democracy. One of the “official” purposes of the U.S. intervention was to change the Iraqi political regime. But is that only possible? Isn't democracy a Western concept, inapplicable as such in foreign cultures? It could be argued that the whole idea of establishing democracy in Iraq results from sheer ethnocentrism. Purdum also questions the legitimacy of the two main rationales at the heart of the American military intervention, that is to say the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and its so-called ties with Al-Qaeda. [...]

[...] Indeed, “having been determined to wage war largely alone, the US now being forced to win the peace largely alone, (p.265), and has thereby bitterly discovered the high price of unilateralism. Again, this resulted in massive discredit of the Bush Doctrine. Thus, America's position has been weakened both at the national level and worldwide, respectively making Americans realize that U.S. power isn't unlimited, whilst reinforcing anti- American feelings against the US, depicted as an imperialist hawk throughout the world. This has serious consequences at the Iraqi level, too. Indeed, U.S. [...]

[...] Colin Powell was sincere when he defended the American case before the UN Security Council: he sincerely wanted the approval of the UN, so as Tony Blair for instance. But the fact remains that the absence of international consensus didn't keep the US from intervening in Iraq. Therefore, diplomacy (which had cf. p.77) was only seen as a formal, official and optional cover for what the US had decided to do anyway. This vision of inexorable unilateralism is very interesting in that it helps to understand the recent developments of the U.S. foreign policy in Iraq. [...]

[...] The American accusations toward Iraq weren't new: they had been going on since 1991. Thus, Saddam Hussein was suspected of illegally developing weapons of mass destruction and maintaining close ties with Al-Qaeda, but had never been directly threatened by the US until 09/11. The dramatic attacks led to the advent of the Bush Doctrine, advocating preemptive action against states that supported terrorism or that threatened U.S. interests and national security. Accordingly, Bush determined which States he said to be part of the “Axis of in which he included Iraq. [...]