Empire and exceptionalism: The bush administration's criminal war against Iraq

ON MARCH 19, 2003, the United States and Great Britain, in conjunction with several inconsequential members of the "coalition of the willing," launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq and subsequently inaugurated a formal military occupation of that once sovereign nation. The Bush administration's legal and political justifications for this attack migrated from the eradication of weapons of mass destruction, to the advancement of democracy, to fighting terrorism, and back to the advancement of democracy. Economic and geopolitical motives, such as controlling Iraqi oil, reconstructing Iraq's economy into a radical free market system, or establishing permanent military bases in the heart of the Middle East, were publicly disavowed as goals of the invasion by the administration.