Abstract

CHAOUCH, Mail Tahar. MILITARY INTERVENTION IN IRAQ: SECURITY, DEMOCRACY, AND WAR AGAINST TERRORISM. hist.crit. [online]. 2003, n.26, pp.49-63. ISSN 0121-1617.

The purpose of this article is to question the reality principies that made US and UK military intervention possible in Iraq. Three theses are set forth. First, the political realism that justified military intervention in Iraq is both paradoxical and false since, instead of propitiating sustainable conditions of international security, it is in fact generalizing the insecurity. Secondly, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is a creation of the western world's monologue of universalism with respect to the Islamic world which camouflages the far more serious threat which that very same universalism constitutes. Thirdly, the «war against terrorism» has generaüzed the creation of imaginary enemies which makes it possible to conceal and manage the real contradictions endemic to the competitive world in which it was defined. In this sense, the «war against terrorism» becomes a war against everyone, aimed to administer and reproduce the conditions of generalized insecurity which it supposedly seeks to combat.

Keywords : Iraq; post-cold war; international insecurity; democracy; islam; fundamentalism; war against terrorism.

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