Justifying water inviolability: between norms and interest in the 2003 invasion of Iraq

The 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom took place in an era of heightened humanitarian focus. Water, traditionally a key concern under international humanitarian law, began to be framed as a human right, reflecting the growing societal emphasis on protecting and securing water resources, a concept we term ‘water inviolability’. Focusing on the United States as the most likely complier, we examine how US military elites engaged in discursive politics by either positively signalling or mimicking the societal norm of water inviolability. We draw on norm rhetoric while employing qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis to scrutinise the US 2003 public communication, sourced from the Factiva database. Expecting acknowledgement of water inviolability and an attempt to reconcile this norm with the realities of water infrastructure damage and water shortage, we instead predominantly found opportunistic rhetorical strategies, such as temporal displacement of responsibility through reconstruction as compensation and blame-shifting. Our findings fill the missing link in the US water norm development literature, while demonstrating a lack of strong water-protective norms in the Global North.