Instrumentalizing Diasporas? The Bush Administration, INC and the 2003 Iraq war

• In Event: Transnational Diaspora Mobilizations

Abstract

Keywords: Diaspora; INC; Iraq; Homeland; Host State;

This paper inquires into the circumstances under which host governments utilize diasporas towards mutually beneficial goals, linking domestic politics in the country of immigration to amplify the international role of diasporas. More importantly, it examines the implications of this utilization for state sovereignty and state legitimacy in the country of emigration. The paper discusses the case of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a textbook instance of host government instrumentalization of diasporas. Relying on monographs, newspaper articles and online sources, it employs within-case analysis and the process-tracing method to inquire into the factors that influence a host government to utilize diaspora members to promote its international policy. The exile INC was established in 1992, with US support, as an opposition group to topple Saddam Hussein. Supported by the George W. Bush administration and its neoconservative members, the INC promoted the 2003 invasion of Iraq before the US and international public. The INC supplied defectors, who subsequently delivered conjured intelligence to security agencies and the media. The organization was also an intermediary with other Iraqi diaspora members. The INC upheld the neo-conservative agenda, and helped maintain the impression, later discredited, that Iraq had WMDs, and that Saddam was connected to al-Qaeda. Both of those misconceptions supplied a rationale for the 2003 Iraq war.

The central theoretical underpinning of the paper is that host government utilize diasporas in mutually beneficial ways. In addition to proposing a theoretical framework for the circumstances under which this occurs, the paper highlights the effect of domestic politics, which selectively incorporate diasporas, on transnational linkages. The paper thus contributes to examining the increasingly important effects that diasporas exert on transnational politics, building upon earlier research by Brinkerhoff, Lyons and Mandaville, Koinova, Waterbury and others, and underlining the collaboration with the state of immigration in the process.

The research also has implications for state sovereignty. Diasporas collaborating with an outside powerful country to impact politics in the homeland (in this case, through regime change), represent a challenge to state sovereignty, by shifting decision-making away from the home state apparatus (be it democratic or not) and to a heightened role for transnational forces. These select transnational diasporas may not possess sufficient homeland linkages to qualify for inclusion and participation in established autocratic, competitive autocratic or democratic regime politics.

The phenomenon of host government utilization of diasporas, more broadly, has implications for issues of state legitimacy. The paper’s discussion of this process sheds light on the relationship between the citizens and the state, by emphasizing the role of a third, and partially overlapping with the polity entity, the diaspora. Further applicable to democratic contexts, the theoretical model enhances the understanding of the moral congruence between home state and society, which has been analyzed in the literature on legitimacy in comparative politics and sociology.

Author

• Nadejda K. Marinova, Wayne State University