 The purpose behind America's invasion was to stop the rapid emergence of China as the new superpower which threatened to end U.S. hegemony as the sole superpower. The inquiry being held in the UK into the Iraq war has reignited the question about the real reason for it. Tony Blair's recent confession together with the revelations made by two former British Ambassadors to U.S.A. and the UN from 1997 to 2003 leaves no more doubt that Bush and Blair had decided to invade Iraqi in 2002, much before they raised the bogey of WMD even though they still maintain that they were reasonably sure that Saddam had WMDs. The fact is that they knew that there was no WMD in Iraq and the truth will be made known to the world if Hans Blix and El-Baradie, heads of the UN inspection team, were allowed to complete their investigation. Consequently, Bush and Blair rejected their request for a three months extension to complete the inspection and at the same time insisted that UNSC resolution 441 contained the necessary authorization for them to invade Iraq. Hence they rejected France and some other members' proposal that they needed a new and specific resolution authorizing them to invade Iraq.
So why did Bush and Blair go to such a length to invade Iraq when they could have easily waited for three more months to find the truth about the WMD? Their claim that they had relied on their intelligence or that they wanted to free the people of Iraq of a tyrant were nothing but "sexed up" justifications, as a British journalist reported a few weeks before the invasion.
The fact is that the sole purpose of their invasion was to stop the rapid emergence of China as the new superpower which threatened to end the U.S. hegemony as the sole superpower. Readers would recall that soon after Bush's inauguration on 20 January 2001 and several months before 9/11, the U.S. establishment and its think tanks had started to express apprehension that China would soon emerge as the next strategic rival of the U.S. and end the neo-cons dream of keeping the U.S. as the sole superpower of the world.
Consequently, the Bush administration adopted the policy of supporting Taiwan's pro-independence President, Chen Shui-bian, and supplying him with the most sophisticated weapons including F-16s, and short range ballistic and anti-ballistic missiles. It seemed as if the U.S. wanted to provoke a military confrontation between China and Taiwan to cause damage to the Chinese infrastructure and bring to an end the enormous flow of foreign investment into China which had helped it achieve its super fast growth rate.
The Chinese however apprehended long before Bush's inauguration that sooner or later the U.S. would embark on a policy of containing China. It was during an official visit of President Zia ul Haq to China in 1978, of which I was a member that the then Chinese leader Deng Hsiao-ping first hinted at such a possibility. He told President Zia that straits of Hormuz and Malacca were like a "dumb bell" for China and its foreign trade could be almost completely chocked off by blockading these two straits. It was that perception that had led China to adopt the policy of building sea ports like Gwadar in the littoral states of the Indian Ocean.
It was under this rapidly changing international situation that Bush was sworn in as the 43rd President of the U.S. on 20th Jan 2001 and soon thereafter, he and his new-con advisers commenced the policy of containing China to preserve the political, economic and military hegemony of the U.S. In pursuance of this goal they started building up Taiwan's military power and encouraging it's newly elected pro-independence President to go for UDI. They knew that the unilateral declaration independence by Taiwan would result in a clash with PRC, which had it quite clear that it would not tolerate declaration of independence by Taiwan.
It was in this back drop that in April 2001 an aerial collision took place between a U.S. spy plane and the Chinese fighter jet, which had caused the U.S. plane to force land on Hunan Island of China. The U.S. had claimed that the U.S. plane had accidentally strayed into the Chinese air space and blamed the Chinese of deliberately hitting it after the pilot of the U.S. plane had refused to land on the Chinese island.
In reality it was a deliberate violation of Chinese air space by the U.S. plane, resembling the deliberate violation of the Soviet air space by American U2 planes in the 50s. Hence in all probability the U.S. spy plane had deliberately intruded into the Chinese air space to create an incident which could be used by the U.S. as an excuse to create confrontation with Beijing.
However, the 9/11 terrorist attack totally diverted Bush and his neo-con advisers' attention away from emerging rival towards the threat posed by Al Qaeda. However, once the U.S. had defeated the Afghan Taliban, they once again turned their focus on the job of containing China. But by then China had gone beyond the reach of the U.S. military power. Hence Bush and his advisers were forced to choose a new strategy to achieve their strategic goal.
But as provoking an armed conflict between Taiwan and China could prove to be very costly to the U.S. and divided the West they thought of choking the supply of energy to China, which needed huge quantities of fossil fuel to maintain the pace of its growth rate. This was the real reason why Bush and his neo-con advisers took the decision to invade Iraq on the pretext of WMD. They seem to have calculated that a "regime change" in Iraq would also facilitate a regime change in Iran and give them total control over the flow of oil from the Gulf. As China was heavily dependent on the supply of oil from the Gulf States for its industries, a disruption of oil supplies to it would put a break on its rapid rise as a rival to the U.S.
This theory may look a bit far fetched to some but all explanations given by Bush and Blair to justify their decision to invade Iraq make even less sense. After all the Bush administration was launching an illegal, risky and costly military operation despite serious reservation from many of its NATO allies and non-NATO friends in the teeth of unprecedented public opposition and anger among the Europeans, including the British. Why would they do it rather than wait for a little while longer, a mere three more months that the UN inspectors wanted to complete their investigation and confirm beyond any doubt, not beyond any reasonable doubt but beyond all doubts whatsoever whether or not Saddam Hussein possessed the WMDs.
I hope that history will soon reveal the dark truth about the reason for the callous and brutal invasion of Iraq which led to the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and widespread destruction of its cities. But whatever the real reason for that illegal invasion, it must be counted as war crime and its perpetrators punished, the political punishment they have suffered is not enough. Their decision to invade Iraq is similar to Hitler's attack on Poland and other European countries for which he and his collaborators paid a price. At least the principles of Nuremberg Trials must apply to them and their neo-con advisers. But the unfortunate truth is that in international relations might is still right. Humanity has progressed from a village to a global village, but the law of the jungle still prevails. 
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