Why is the Iraq War Commonly Seen as a More Divisive Event in Transatlantic Relations Rather than the Global War on Terror?
Transatlantic relations have been formed in the shared bond of common threats. From a joint participation in both World Wars to the fighting the ideological front against Communism in the Cold War, the Transatlantic relationship has developed from a military alliance into one of the strongest partnerships on the globe, united by shared values, cultural similarities and economic relations. This powerful alliance now faces another shared threat: terrorism. The global “war on terror”, otherwise known as the GWOT,[1] is an international effort to fight the forces of terrorism around the world. For the purpose of this essay, we will narrow the focus of the GWOT to mean the transatlantic efforts in the GWOT. The Transatlantic partners have been known to diverge on high profile issues, such as food, gun control and governance systems. However, an overwhelming amount of scholars, journalists and laypeople point to the 2003 Iraq War as a key divisive event in their union. In this essay, we seek to examine three key questions: Why do we speak about Iraq War as the great divide? What evidence points to Iraq War as the great divide? If we do qualify Iraq War as the great divide, why does transatlantic cooperation within the GWOT still exist? In answering these questions, we seek to establish why the Iraq War is commonly viewed as a more divisive event than the rest of the global “war on terror”.
The Iraq War is often named as the most significant division within the Transatlantic relationship because it represents more than just a differing opinion on policy issues. It demonstrates a huge divergence between the partners “in their belief in what should be the basis for foreign policy vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis third parties in the post-September 2001 security environment” (Flockhart 2004: 396). These divisions have been expressed in the form of diverging discourses. We seek to problematize these discourses and examine how the construction of the GWOT went from being cohesive in the initial reaction to September 11, 2001, to outright opposition at the time of initial US engagement in Iraq as a second front of the GWOT. In examining this changing discourse, we can see why we speak about Iraq as the great divide. Additionally, the Iraq War was constructed as a split between “us” and “them”, reducing the complex situation down to a simply binary of “good” and “evil”. This divisive binary, as well as the American neglect of the conditions of Just War, the doctrine of military ethics, present two key areas of evidence as to why the Iraq War is commonly viewed as more divisive than the GWOT as a whole. Finally, the transatlantic powers have continued to cooperate, both outside and within the framework of the GWOT. We can see this continued cooperation in the form of continued economic relations, diplomatic partnerships and intelligence collaboration in counter-terrorism efforts. How do we explain this re-convergence after the divisive Iraq War?
Why Do We Speak About the Iraq War as the Great Divide?
The Beginning of the GWOT
On September 11, 2001, four coordinated attacks were launched by al Qaeda terrorists in the form of airplane hijackings, causing devastating damage and loss of life at the Twin Towers at the World Trade Centre in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the attacks, and the security environment of the post-Cold War world was forever changed. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Europeans rallied together in condemning the acts and in offering their support to the Americans. The famous Le Monde headline of the 13th of September, reading Nous sommes tous Américains, effectively captured the spirit of unity and sympathy in the wake of the tragedy. In the months following this shocking violence, the declarations of support became more weighted: Article 5 of NATO, stipulating that an attack against one is considered an attack against all, and allowing the right of individual or collective self-defence, was invoked for the first time in the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Evangelista 2003: 15; Allin et al 2007: 19). When the United States engaged in war in Afghanistan in response to the Taliban refusing to extradite Osama bin Laden, the Article 5 endorsement, as well as pervasive disgust against the 11 September attacks, meant that the international community recognised their actions as self-defence and legitimized the intervention in Afghanistan, deeming it a lawful war with support from their transatlantic allies (Jentleson 2009: 64; Allin et al 2007: 19).
However, when the United States engaged in a war in Iraq as a second front of the GWOT, the allies’ reaction was notably different to their support in 2001. The Iraq war was constructed as a unilateral turn that excluded allies and violated well-developed customs of international law. Here, the united discourse on a shared enemy disappears, and instead many European actors criticize the United States’ involvement. What is the position of the scholarship on this highly controversial issue?
Debates in the Scholarship – Michael Cox and Vincent Pouliot
A central debate on the importance of the Iraq War on the transatlantic security community is between Michael Cox and Vincent Pouliot. To Cox, the public divisions over the decision to go to war bring into question the assumption that the transatlantic relationship would survive whatever came its way, calling it a “tipping point” within their relationship (Cox 2005: 227). In contrast, Pouliot asserts that the recent strains in their relationship do not demonstrate the demise of the relationship but rather how “alive and well” their security community is (Pouliot 2006: 119). Pouliot declares that the strength of a security community is demonstrated not through the absence of conflict, but rather the peaceful resolution of such a conflict. This significant debate provides a framework within which we can understand how different players interpret the severity of the divergences between the transatlantic powers. We will address this debate once more when we come to evaluate the importance of the division of the Iraq War in the context of the GWOT. For now, we turn to an examination of the construction of the GWOT, and how this can explain the divergences in the transatlantic partnership.
How Was the Global War on Terror Constructed?
We use the term “Global War on Terror” as if we know and understand what it means, but in reality, we know very little about how the discourse of the GWOT influences divisions in the Transatlantic relationship. We can begin by firstly rooting the divisions in the rhetoric of the global “war on terror”. The Europeans believe that the rhetoric of war is unhelpful in creating a cohesive and effective counter-terrorism strategy, mainly because they believe the framing of war “over-emphasizes the military dimensions and neglects the social, economic, and cultural root causes that have to be addressed in dealing with jihadist extremism” (Kaiser 2007: 421). In contrast, the Americans have a history of using the rhetoric of war, which has been employed in other policy issues, such as the War on Drugs or the War on Crime (Fusman 2013: 140). This rhetoric of war is employed to give a direction and a sense of purpose to policy, and has been explicitly used in order to create a sense of urgency and fear to legitimize action that may not have been otherwise allowed.
Acts of terrorism have been constructed in the European security agenda as criminal acts, meaning “the appropriate response is to gather evidence, correctly determine the culpability of the individual or individuals responsible for an incident, and bring the perpetrators to trial”, as was the policy for finding those responsible for the London bombings of July 7, 2005 (Jenkins 2003: 216; Zucca 2009: 236). This criminalization approach was similarly followed by the United States, using the FBI’s extensive authority to investigate terrorist crimes across the world, up until the September 11 attacks when discourse began to shift after the incident was declared ‘an act of war’ by President Bush (Jackson 2005: 38). In the days following the attacks, there was a notable change in the national response to the threat of terrorism, “a linguistic shift that signalled a policy shift” (Jenkins 2003: 219). Within this already divisive framing of the GWOT, the Iraq War was even more divisive for discursive, legal and normative reasons, as will be explored in the following section.
Finally, it is important to note that the concept of the ‘Iraq War’ does not exist outside the concept of the ‘GWOT’. Notably, we can turn to the Copenhagen School’s securitization framework to explain how security threats can be socially constructed. The concept of securitization stipulates that speaking security does something; meaning that identifying a referent object as an existential threat moves that object into a different realm of action, thereby allowing the object to be managed by exceptional practices. In the case of the GWOT, the attacks on 11th September 2001 were securitized by Bush Administration, who used language to convince the American public of an existential threat and thereby elevated the threat to be managed by emergency practices (Waever 1998). The securitization of the GWOT and the Iraq War are intimately linked; the reports of chaos and instability in Iraq, the scandals and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the well-publicized opposition of transatlantic partners undermined the securitization of the threat in Iraq, and in turn, of the GWOT as a whole. Therefore, in examining the evidence demonstrating why the Iraq War is a source of great division between the allies, we can see how these divisions in turn affect their partnership within the GWOT. Now we turn to an examination of the evidence: how did the construction of the enemy create a divide, and how did the Iraq War defy the Just War theory?
What Evidence Points to Iraq as the Great Divide?
Discourse and Language in the GWOT
Discourse is used to enhance the construction of the identities of allies and enemies. The narrative of threat that is now so widely prevalent in the context of the GWOT was constructed with great haste in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, supported by the atmosphere of fear, grief and revenge that characterized the immediate aftermath of the incident. According to Croft, a security crisis like this can lead to different social phases, “in which ‘we’ are identified and solidified, [and] ‘they’ are identified and demonised” (Croft 2006: 5). Writing on the production of a discourse surrounding 9/11, Croft also asserts that the construction of a narrative of threat in the GWOT falls along the same lines as the Early Modern period of witch hunts in the United States from 1450 to 1750, “during both discursive shifts, legal and ethical boundaries of behaviour towards a newly constructed enemy were to be changed” (Croft 2006: 52). In this case, the ‘newly constructed enemy’ was not just the individuals that had planned and executed the attacks on 11 September 2001, but also the group they represented, any state that harboured or provided aid to them, and any allies that did not support the United States in their pursuit of justice (White House 2002: 5). This division further reinforces the aforementioned binary division between “us” and “them”. The GWOT was framed in a similar way to the Cold War: “a similar sort of zero-sum, global scale, generational struggle against anti-liberal ideological extremists who want to rule the world” (Buzan 2007: 1101). This binary was problematic, because it placed anyone who disagreed with the war (even with just the way it was being waged) on a similar discursive level as those who had perpetrated these heinous acts. This is evident in President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on the 20th of September, declaring, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (CNN, 2001). This discursive equivalent likely created tensions between the Allies, particularly as the GWOT progressed and their divergences became more apparent.
Most importantly, this category of the “other” was qualified as “evil”, as stated in President Bush’s address the night of the attacks: “Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror” (CNN, 2001). In contrast, he qualified the “us” as America and its allies, innocent of all blame and unjustly victimized, all while reinforcing its redeeming qualities, as seen in an address one month after the attacks: [T]his great nation, a freedom-loving nation, a compassionate nation, a nation that understand the values of life […]” (Jackson 2005:77). President Bush further asserted this division between “good” and “evil” at his State of the Union Address on January 29th, 2002, where he delivered his now famous “axis of evil” speech, naming the “evil” regimes that threatened the United States with weapons of mass destruction: North Korea, Iran, and, significantly, Iraq. In creating a discursive link between those who had perpetrated violence on the United States and the Iraqi regime, the Bush Administration sought to create a justification for their legally ambiguous attacks in Iraq. Additionally, the term “axis of evil” creates a discursive recall to the “axis” of Nazi Germany and its allies in World War Two, thereby evoking a memory and spirit of cooperation among transatlantic allies and fostering the sense of “us” in the face of adversity.
This discursive link between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime is an important source of division in the transatlantic relationship. By September 2003, almost 70 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 11 September 2001 attacks, even though there was no evidence to support that claim (Bergen 2011: 132). In contrast, Europeans saw the linking together of al Qaeda with the ‘rogue regime’ of Iraq as unreasonable and unfounded. Actually, the Europeans found the discursive link painting Iraq as the enemy “tenuous to say the least” (Cox 2005: 218). Some European states contested the securitization of this issue, as seen with the prevalence of public protests against the war in France and even in Britain, thereby indicating that Europeans have not accepted the language used to elevate this policy issue into emergency practices. Schroder, who had declared Germany’s “unlimited solidarity” after the 11 September attacks, was faced with over 95% of the German population expressing their opposition to the war in Iraq by early September 2002 and, in a re-election year, chose to distance himself and Germany from the increasingly unpopular conflict (Brunstetter 2005: 29). By simplifying the complex situation down into a binary of “good” versus “evil”, the United States categorically excluded any allies that were uncomfortable with the way the rhetoric of war was being used to justify extreme actions and disregard international law. This deepened the split between actors who were undecided about their position within the GWOT.
Furthermore, even within the “us” of this binary, there was division. The Iraq War is seen as the height of the special relationship, and yet the two states were on unequal footing: this is evident in the “oft-repeated insult that Blair was Bush’s poodle – dependent, subservient, obedient and uncritical”, thus representing an obvious imbalance in their relationship (Dunn 2008: 1132).
Simply through Britain’s involvement in this war, Kennedy-Pipe and Vickers argue there has been a “blow-back for Britain” in the questioning of the competence of intelligence services, in examining the processes of governments, and most importantly, in opening Britain to more vulnerability in the form of abuse and threat, for example, the 7 July 2005 bombings in London (Kennedy-Pipe and Vickers 2007: 220). This “blow-back” is evident: in 2006, only 14% of Britons wanted to maintain close ties with the United States, as compared to 45% who sought closer relations with the EU (Porter 2010: 374). Blair’s association with whom many Europeans perceive to be an “ill-informed cowboy” brought into question not only his personal judgement, but also Britain’s position as a bridge between Europe and America was compromised because the special relationship was believed to have failed in Iraq, thereby undermining the British authority as the state connecting the disparate American and European foreign policies (Gordon 2008: 70). Blair had intended to engage in the war so as to push the US to a more multilateral path, but in reality only yielded a very small influence, as seen with his failed private opposition to the siege of Fallujah in 2004, which was one of the bloodiest battles of the war and has now been identified as a turning point in public opinion on the Iraq War as it brought home the reality of the casualties sunk into the conflict (Porter 2010: 372). In this way, Blair yielded limited influence on the strategy of the war and therefore cannot be conceived as part of an equal partnership within the “us” of the Special Relationship. On the whole, the binary of “us” versus “them” was unhelpful in categorising allies versus enemies in the GWOT, and actually served to demonstrate the extremeness of the American rhetoric in the lead up to the second front in Iraq.
Having examined the dividing discourse of the GWOT and the Iraq War, we look now to how the process to war in Iraq fell outside of the legitimate path to war as outlined in the multilateral conceptions of Just War theory.
Just War in Iraq
The Europeans and the Americans clashed over the legal framing of the war in Iraq, with the Europeans viewing the arguments put forward by the Bush Administration as “legally unpersuasive” (Donnelly 2013: 4). This war brought to light competing conceptions and prioritisations of the rule of Just War, particularly the concepts of jus ad bellum, the right to wage war, and jus in bello, the right conduct in war. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration created a discourse of fear and othering that allowed them to put the security of their citizens above all other multilateral commitments. In their invasion of Iraq, they showed a blatant disregard for the processes of waging a legitimate war that have been meticulously crafted to maintain stability and peace in the post World War Two security environment. The Europeans asserted that the use of force should be a last resort, and used only when sanctioned by the UN Security Council. They reinforced their commitment to the international rule of law, “even, if not especially, in times of crisis” (Zucca 2009: 232). This division over the legality of the war is a key point of contention between the two allies.
It is important to note here that the Europeans are not opposed to war or military means as a whole. In fact, before the war in Iraq, Germany was the second-largest force provider in operations around the world (Riecke 2013: 13). Moreover, the war in Iraq is the first European opposition to US military action since Reagan’s unpopular involvement in Vietnam (Moravscik 2003: 78). The Europeans therefore are not inherently pacifist, but rather highly value the conditions of the Just War theory. Moreover, the framing of a “war” on terror is contradictory, because the United States crafted their language in the form of war but then refused to accept the constraints on their actions to pursue a legitimate war: as seen with their non-compliance with the Just War theory, which will be further unpacked by observing the violations of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.
Jus ad bellum
The concept of just cause and right intention means that war should not be pursued for national interests, but rather only to re-establish a just peace. The reasoning of self-defence was successfully applied for the war in Afghanistan (at the start of the GWOT), as demonstrated through the support of the Allies and the invocation of NATO’s Article 5. However, in the Iraq War, the application of a pre-emptive military attack did not hold strong. Pre-emptive war is only ever justified “if the threatened nation’s attack is absolutely necessary to repeal an imminent attack that would likely bring either large-scale loss of life or loss of territorial sovereignty in the absence of such a pre-emptive strike” (Schwartz 2004: 286). The war in Iraq is therefore better described as a preventive war, which is not justified by the just war theory. The US Army War College text defines a preventive war as “initiated in the belief that armed conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that delaying such action would involve unacceptable risk” (Evangelista 2008: 108). The Iraq War certainly fits this description: the suspicion that Iraq was holding weapons of mass destruction, and that this unstable regime was linked to the terrorists who had planned the 11 September attacks, meant that the Iraqi regime represented an unacceptable, yet eventual (and unconfirmed) threat.
The concept of a preventive war undermines the principle of sovereignty, a key doctrine underpinning the international system since the peace of Westphalia in 1648. The importance of sovereignty was another key dilemma between the allies over the jus ad bellum of the war in Iraq. In response to the 11 September attacks, Richard Haass, the then director of Policy Planning within the Bush Administration, put forward his “limits to sovereignty” thesis, whereby he asserted that one of the conditions of sovereignty was to not support terrorism in any way. He stated, “If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory” (Haass, cited in Acharya 2007: 278). For the Europeans, who have been at the forefront of the concept of a rule-bound international community, the American justification of war was worrisome. It seemed to mean there were two different sets of rules operating in the system: one for the global hegemon, and one for all others. Additionally, the Americans framed their rhetoric of war within similar language of the concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a governing norm that stipulates that sovereignty is not an absolute right, but is rather conditional if the state does not protect its population from human rights violations, including atrocities like genocide, war crimes and cases of ethnic cleansing. In referring to this rhetoric, the Americans attempted to justify their violation of Iraqi sovereignty by framing their invasion in terms of the abuses of the Iraqi democratic regime. However, it was clear to the Europeans that “violations undertaken in the name of a narrowly defined conception of national security (…) do not have the same moral weight or legitimacy as collective of violations of Westphalian sovereignty by the international community for the sake of preventing genocide or protecting lives” (Acharya 2007: 278). Attempting to create a moral equivalent to the R2P norm also undermined the American case and invited unwanted comparisons with other past (legitimate) breaches of sovereignty. Overall, this intrusion on the sovereignty of Iraq demonstrated to the Europeans that the framework of the GWOT brought on a new kind of American exceptionalism, whereby they were exempt from the international regimes and multilateral legal frameworks that they had been at the forefront of developing in the post World War Two context.
Jus in bello
Though the Europeans shared a common enemy, and agreed with the cause of the fight against terrorism, their support was limited because of the perceived disregard for international law and norms by the Americans, as seen with their jus in bello. This is evident in the controversies of Abu Ghraib, a prison complex near Baghdad that was the site of a prisoner torture and abuse scandal that undermined the role of the United States in the global war on terror. The inhumane treatment of suspects and prisoners of war was emblematic of the concerns about the way in which the war was justified: they flouted the rules of the UN Security Council in the lead up to war, just as they flouted the accepted conventions of war, such as the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, which, for example, forbids the use of torture. The tales of abuse by American soldiers reversed the established binary of “us” versus “them” as divided into “good” and “evil”, leading to a notable drop in esteem of the United States in the eyes of European people (Jackson 2005: 83).
The principle of last resort, stipulating that war should be the last resort after all other channels have been exhausted, would imply the use of proportional means in the war – meaning a use of force and intensity as equal to that of the provoking attack (Acharya 2007: 289). Many Europeans were shocked at the scale of the violence, with an estimate of over 211,000 Iraqi combatant and civilian fatalities as compared to the 3,000 lives lost on the attacks of 11 September 2001 and 6,840 lives lost in the subsequent conflict in Iraq (Iraq Body Count: 2015, Washington Post: 2015). These vastly different numbers do not seem to imply the use of proportional violence. All of these violations of the Just War theory meant that the Europeans sought to distance themselves further from the American narrative of the GWOT, believing that their securitisation of the issue was doing more harm than good to the civilized world’s fight against terrorism (Buzan 2007: 1112). The multiple violations within the Iraq War seemed to represent to the Europeans “Bush’s abandonment of core values closely associated in their minds with the idea, and indeed the ideal of the West” (Cox 2012: 74). This perceived abandonment of values, however, seems to have shifted under President Obama, who sought to distance himself from the language of the GWOT and sought to mend the transatlantic relationship and America’s reputation as a whole by promising, for example, to close the Guantanamo Bay facilities when he first came to office. Though this still hasn’t happened yet, it shows an effort on behalf of the Americans to mend the transatlantic relationship in the wake of the Iraq War.
If We Do Qualify Iraq as the Great Divide, Then Why Does Transatlantic Cooperation Within the GWOT Still Exist?
Though we have situated the divide over the Iraq War within a divisive discourse and the disparity between the Europeans’ commitment to international rules and norms and American exceptionalism, there may be another more strategic reason for their dissent. This has to do with their unhappiness over the Americans’ rejection of their strategic support. Despite offering troops through the Article 5 clause of collective self-defence, the United States decided to go into Afghanistan without the approval of many of their European partners. Similarly, in the lead up to the Iraq War, there was no main consultation with the allies. This shift marked a unilateral turn that represented a “significant departure from processes, which hitherto formed an important function in maintaining cohesion and trust” in the transatlantic community (Flockhart 2004: 411). After all, the Europeans did not have any qualms about the lack of a UN security Council mandate when they joined NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, not only because the cause was more evidently just because of the level of ethnic cleaning, but also because they were acting in conjunction with the Americans throughout the conflict (Pauly 2005: 14). In this way, the division over the Iraq War may be a symptom of under-appreciated allies who were excluded from the process of decision-making, a much more “fixable” concern than a division based on discourse or a European commitment to the rule of international law.
Cooperation in the GWOT
Though we have shown how divisive the Iraq War has been within the context of the GWOT, there are other facets of the fight against terrorism where the transatlantic partners have enjoyed successful cooperation. Firstly, it is important to note that the United States engaged in Iraq alongside a Coalition of the Willing, which included over 30 states, many from Eastern Europe. In this way, there was military cooperation from European countries, even though they may not be the countries at the forefront of the transatlantic relationship.
Secondly, the transatlantic partners have shown to be cooperative in the area of surveillance and intelligence gathering. Their intelligence cooperation has substantially increased since the 11 September attacks, building on the international institutions fostered in the Cold War, with the Europeans adopting distinctly American-oriented policies like the EU Data Retention Directive of 2006, outlining the rules on the retention of data processed from electronic or public communications networks (Aldrich 2004: 731). Though the legal bases for the regulation of intelligence and privacy are different on either side of the Atlantic, they have similar goals in the sharing of information. However, yet again, the Europeans disagree with how the rhetoric of the GWOT is used by the Americans to justify what they deem to be unacceptable conduct, as exemplified in the NSA scandal of 2013, where whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed the details of a large scale data-mining operation in the United States, demonstrating the American trade-off between personal privacy and protection of the state against the terrorist threat. Therefore, even in this realm of cooperation, the transatlantic partners seem to find divergences between their outlooks on the threat of terrorism and what actions are justified within the GWOT.
If Iraq was as divisive as academics like Cox believe, then why do they continue to collaborate within the GWOT? These powerful actors choose to hang together, because despite any divergences in the importance of norms, or differing discourses of threat, they have a multitude of other shared values: for example, democracy, human rights and open markets. It seems that the transatlantic partners have chosen to engage in what Moravscik calls “Decent Diplomacy”, that is, managing controversial issues while ensuring cooperation in other areas, primarily “consulting quietly and comprehensively before launching public attacks in the media” (Moravscik 2003: 82). This policy of “Decent Diplomacy” allows the transatlantic partners to co-exist within their hugely important partnership, while still allowing the space for their natural divergences. Overall, the transatlantic partners seem to have come to the conclusion that a split partnership is not possible or practical while they still face such an important common threat.
Concluding Thoughts
If we turn once again to the Michael Cox and Vincent Pouliot debate, we can see how they interpret the divergence in support of the GWOT in Iraq in different ways. The Iraq War can either represent a massive point of departure, or it can show how no alliance is without its disagreements, and the strength of the relationship lies in their ability to maintain peace despite such disagreements. Here, I choose to side with the scholarship of Vincent Pouliot. Though the Europeans publicly disagreed with the American approach to the conflict in Iraq, they never chose to wage war on them. Instead, their response was simply not to engage in the war and to publicly criticize the Bush Administration. In the aftermath of Iraq, the allies have continued to cooperate as the two main pillars of the Western world in managing terrorism, particularly through cooperation on surveillance and intelligence gathering. Though the Iraq War certainly is an important source of dispute, it may not be any more severe than any other publicly vicious disagreements, such as the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 or European opposition to Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975.
Overall, the allies seem to agree on the premise and the threat of terrorism, but disagree over the extent to which the targeting of the United States allows them to operate outside of widely accepted international rules and norms. The legitimacy of the United States and the securitization of the GWOT as a whole suffer because of these normative violations. However, in the end, their relationship is still incredibly valuable. As the core of the democratic world, they have a very close economic and cultural relationship that seems to take precedence over any issue-specific disagreements. The divisions over the Iraq War are just another in a long line of divergences in the history of their long alliance that do not seem to threaten the overall stability of this old alliance. In conclusion, though the Iraq War seems to be much more divisive than the global “war on terror”, as seen with the evidence presented above in the form of a diverging discourse and disagreements over the application of the Just War theory, we may understand that despite this division, the transatlantic relationship continues to exist and cooperate.
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Zucca, Lorenzo (2009) “A Transatlantic Divide on the Balance Between Fundamental Rights and Security” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review Vol. 32, No. 2, Article 6 pp.231-240
Endnotes
[1] It is important to note that there are multiple connotations associated with the shortening of this term to the acronym “GWOT”. However, for the purposes of this essay, we seek to remove those implications and look to it simply as a shorthand for the global “war on terror” referred to in the essay title.
Written by: Alexis McGivern
Written at: University of Saint Andrews
Written for: Dr. Faye Donnelly
Date written: April 2015
Further Reading on E-International Relations
- Securitising the War On Terror
- The Meaning of US Drone Warfare in the War on Terror
- The Importance of Language in Transatlantic Relations: The INF Treaty
- Analysing the ‘Special Relationship’ between the US and UK in a Transatlantic Context
- ISIS’ Use of Sexual Violence as a Strategy of Terrorism in Iraq
- International Political Economy and the 2003 Iraq War: A Keynesian Perspective
