REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr

Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy, Michael J. Mazarr (PublicAffairs, 2019).¹

Introduction

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans² for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So…they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy.” What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.³ But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation,” and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.

As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,⁴ but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity.” I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.

Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.

Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.

The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil.” I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails

Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive⁵ book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?” Let’s get started.

Backstory

There’s a story that the Bush administration came into office in 2001 itching to get rid of Saddam Hussein and looking around for a pretext. Near as I can tell, this is totally false — actually, the entire US government had been looking for a pretext since at least a decade earlier than that. It all goes back to 1990 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Prior to that, Iraq was an American ally and proxy that helped contain the revolutionary regime in Iran. That relationship gave Saddam a long leash and meant he could get away with a tremendous amount. But the leash was not as long as Saddam thought, and he badly overstepped his limits when a diplomatic fight with Kuwait over the terms of some war loans escalated into a military confrontation. Improvisational decision-making was not out of character for Saddam, who had a tendency to do things like go alone into one of his many palaces and emerge wild-eyed the next day declaring that he had a prophetic dream which would henceforth guide state policy. But this time he got into some real trouble.

The Americans kicked Iraq out of Kuwait quickly and easily, and then…hesitated about what to do next. Nobody wanted to keep Saddam around (remarkably, when you have outlived your usefulness, people suddenly start to notice all of your human rights abuses), but nobody wanted to march into Baghdad and topple him either. There was some wishful thinking that the Kuwait defeat would cause Saddam’s regime to collapse, but most US foreign policy thinkers just shrugged their shoulders and figured better Saddam than chaos and a Vietnam-style quagmire. One especially perceptive official put it this way to a PBS journalist:

I felt there was a real danger here that you could get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict…and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And then you have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all-US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go much around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it.

That official’s name was Dick Cheney.

So Saddam was left in place, and throughout the ‘90s American policymakers seethed about it. There was no official policy that said we were going to overthrow him, but prominent politicians like Al Gore were out there writing op-eds saying that Saddam must be toppled and his government dismantled. This produced what Mazarr calls “destructive ambiguity” — everybody knew that everybody else knew that the real policy was to get rid of the guy, but since this was an unofficial position it went through none of the usual policymaking channels and was never formally debated. It also left a lot of room for freelancing.

For example, CIA clandestine operative Bob Baer (whose memoir is a terrifically fun read, by the way) began organizing a coup in 1995, not because he was directly ordered to do so but because he thought it was what his supervisors wanted. Even the strategy of the coup points towards this ambiguity — rather than straightforwardly overthrowing the government, it aimed to spark a rebellion that would gain some momentum but not enough to win, so that when Saddam moved to crush it the US would be pulled in and forced to act.⁶ Think for a moment about what an odd plan this is, and how it only makes sense if you believe the US secretly wants to invade while officially pretending not to.

The leader of this rebellion was supposed to be Ahmed Chalabi, one of the more fascinating characters in this story. Chalabi was a dapper, cosmopolitan, and erudite bank manager who got exiled from Iraq for gross financial corruption. He promptly reinvented himself as a freedom fighter, rented beautiful houses stocked with fine art in several major cities, and set about ingratiating himself with Western elites. He also began organizing his fellow emigrés and exiles into an effective political lobbying force. Unsurprisingly given his educated and aristocratic manner, he was extremely good at the lobbying part, and soon placed a special focus on the United States, wining and dining congressmen and writing op-eds for major newspapers. Soon he managed to convince the CIA that there were thousands of resistance fighters back in Iraq ready to follow him into battle.

He was good at convincing, but they also wanted to be convinced. Chalabi and his fellow emigrés were charming, cultured, westernized intellectuals who at least pretended to be pro-democracy. It was oh-so-tempting to believe that everybody in Iraq was like that, when in fact they were completely unrepresentative. As a rule of thumb, when a country has a revolution or a civil war or other social breakdown, the ones who make it out are the ones bright enough to see it coming and rich or well-connected enough to escape. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, the Lebanese Civil War, or whatever you call what’s happening in South Africa, the people who leave are not a random subset — they’re the creme-de-la-creme. Unfortunately the US government somehow couldn’t figure this out in the case of Iraq. They met the emigrés, and were impressed by them, and decided that Iraq really was a civilized and cosmopolitan place under the surface, when in fact the society that created the emigrés had been destroyed decades earlier.

The emigrés represent one pole of the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition that emerged in the ‘90s to advocate for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. The other is exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz, a soft-spoken academic who bounced between senior government positions and jobs at think tanks. Wolfowitz was a humanitarian in the most sincere sense. Much of his extended family had been killed in the Holocaust. The plight of oppressed peoples was not an abstraction for him, and he dedicated his life and career to the proposition that the United States should use all available means to end tyranny and oppression wherever they existed.

Wolfowitz is commonly described as a fanatical neoconservative, and he is, but I think it’s important to demystify that term. Too often it gets used as a catchall for “people we don’t like,” but at least when it comes to foreign policy the neoconservatives fit squarely within the American mainstream. With the notable exception of Donald Trump, every American president of the past few decades has had essentially the same foreign policy, driven by essentially the same core ideas: (1) Americans are the good guys, (2) it’s the job of the good guys to right wrongs wherever they are happening, (3) freedom and democracy are the non-negotiable inheritance of everybody on planet earth. These ideas drive the neoconservatives, yes, but they also drive Samantha Power and Susan Rice, not to mention Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

If you are an American, it may not be apparent to you how weird these ideas seem to the rest of the world. If I were to characterize how previous empires — and America’s current rivals — think about the world, it would be more like: (1) every country has core interests and peripheral interests, (2) you should not interfere in another country’s core interests if you can help it, (3) different peoples and cultures are adapted to different forms of government, and this diversity makes life spicy and interesting. Perhaps most shocking to Americans: most countries do not self-identify as “the good guys,” instead they think of themselves as a people with a history and a set of territorial claims.⁷

Mazarr describes this peculiar American quality as “the missionary impulse,” and notes that while it comes from a well-intentioned place, it “can produce a theological and absolutist conception of America’s responsibility as well as a romantic conviction that America can renovate other societies at will.” Or, to put it in blunter words, it makes us do insane things like invade and occupy a culturally alien country on the other side of the world, and stand there in blinkered incomprehension when people don’t like it. Perhaps the most damning thing about this missionary impulse is the way it provides a self-excusing justification for recklessness: since America is definitionally the good guys, all the horrible consequences of America’s dumb decisions must be somebody else’s fault, and anyway we meant well so you can’t really blame us.⁸ It’s like a speeding driver who hits and kills pedestrians over and over again, and when confronted gets huffy and points out he’s on his way to feed people at a soup kitchen.

Why is our national character like this? It’s one of those eternal questions. Maybe it’s because we were settled by various strains of fanatical Protestants, or because our ethnos was born during the Enlightenment, or some other “genetic” factor. Alternatively, it could be something about our historical development, or perhaps the large oceans that have always insulated us from most of the negative consequences of our decisions. Or maybe it’s just inevitable that whoever the current world empire is will feel this way, a consequence of our “unipolar moment.”⁹ Whatever the cause, it’s been a frequent source of misunderstanding between American and foreign diplomats, and few more so than Iraq’s.

The inability of the Iraqi regime, and of Saddam Hussein in particular, to “get” America or its motivations is a recurring bit of comic relief in Mazarr’s book, and one of the first big episodes of it occurs here in the mid ‘90s. This was the time when the Iraqis completely shut down their WMD programs and destroyed every trace of them. But even while halting their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons projects, they continued to loudly insist that they were operational. This appears to have been done out of fear that they would lose prestige if they admitted to backing down. Saddam also really wanted the Iranians to think that he still had chemical weapons out of fear that they’d invade if he didn’t, and he figured that US intelligence would obviously figure out that the programs had been stopped, so they didn’t have to come out and say it themselves.

I remember when I was a kid watching Dr. Strangelove, and laughing at the part where the Soviets built a doomsday device without telling anybody, completely defeating the purpose of having a doomsday device. Then I got older, and learned that no actually, in real life the Soviets built a doomsday device, and then didn’t tell anybody, because they apparently assumed that its psychological effect would be more powerful if America found out about it from its spies (naturally, we didn’t find out until after the Cold War was over). Saddam’s mistake was a weird inverse of this, destroying all his doomsday weapons and then just assuming we’d figure it out. I guess the moral of the story is that in real life, these too-clever-by-half schemes where you double-bluff your opponent are rarely worth it.¹⁰

Anyway, Saddam destroyed all of his WMD, and then kicked out the UN inspectors so as to maintain the charade that he still had them. At the same time that all of this was happening, the sanctions regime that the US had imposed was clearly falling apart. European and Asian businessmen were swarming all over Baghdad, trying to get things in place for when foreign investment inevitably flooded back into the country. All of this contributed to an ambient sense that something had to be done; the attempt to kick the can down the road was failing. By the late ‘90s, the Clintons had already convinced themselves that a rematch with Saddam was inevitable, but they didn’t have time to act on it before their term was up and a new sheriff rolled into town.

Dramatis Personae

Of all the personalities in the Bush White House, the one that towers above the scene is the Vice President, Dick Cheney. Both at the time and in the years since, Cheney has had a reputation as a Svengali or an evil sorcerer who manipulated a weak-willed and weaker-minded President. This is a gross exaggeration, unfair to both individuals, but it’s easy to see where it came from. Cheney came into office as one of the most experienced and accomplished vice presidents ever — he had worked in the Nixon White House at the age of 28, was elected to Congress, held countless senior government positions, and served as CEO of a major corporation. When somebody who’s used to being in charge comes into an organization in a subordinate role, it can be hard even when everyone is well-intentioned.

But what really sets Cheney apart is what he did after he got there. Mazarr very huffily accuses Cheney of having “contempt for democracy,” but apparently what this refers to is Cheney’s habit of reaching down through many layers of the bureaucracy to get the information or answers he wanted directly, or to make something happen. This, apparently, violated “the norms,” and Mazarr is very upset about it, because he thinks Cheney should have, I dunno, stayed in his lane and allowed himself to be manipulated by the Deep State like every other politician, I guess. One national security official sadly remarked that the system is just not set up to handle a vice president who’s an active player.

Of course this reminded me of nothing so much as Paul Graham’s writings on “Founder Mode.” Everybody who’s run an institution, large or small, knows that as the institution grows, the quality of the information the leader gets is worse and worse. Every bit of data gets padded and massaged and reformulated as it makes its way up through layers of yes-men and of honest men with agendas. The only solution, as countless CEOs and presidents and generals and monarchs have discovered, is to “go deep,” reaching down through all the protesting layers of middle managers to find out the ground truth for yourself. The middle layers hate it when you do this, and they hated Cheney for it, but this is a good way to get results — and alas (since he would become the biggest booster of the war), it worked for Cheney.

The upper reaches of the administration also contained another, very different sort of bureaucratic knife-fighter. Henry Kissinger once described Donald Rumsfeld as “a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly.” Richard Nixon described him as “a ruthless little bastard.” Coming into office, Rumsfeld had not been planning to aim that ruthlessness at the Iraqis, but at the Pentagon bureaucracy. His goal was the transformation and reform of America’s bloated and inefficient military machine. When he suddenly found himself needing to wield that machine at a moment’s notice, it’s no surprise that things went badly.

Rumsfeld was a smart guy, but in a very particular sort of way that you often see in competitive debaters. He excelled at picking apart the reasoning of others and wearing them down with a barrage of needling questions, but he struggled to synthesize and integrate information into his own theories. He had the verbal and intellectual dexterity to argue any side of any topic, but which side he picked was often arbitrary or down to convenience, rather than rooted in deep beliefs about the world. His mind charged fast down well-worn grooves, performing logically valid moves at every step, but rarely making intuitive or creative leaps. He was the kind of person, in short, who is very good at justifying a course of action, but very bad at deciding what needs to be done.

The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is and was considered by many to be an enigma. He had been a political rival of Bush’s and considered running for office against him in 2000. He had a reputation as a good, honorable, moderate Republican. And yet he was the one who delivered a passionate speech to the UN Security Council, full of statements he knew to be shaky at best, and melodramatically waving around a prop purporting to be a vial of anthrax. “How could an honorable man have done such things?” the court historians and biographers have bleated ever since. What an ineluctable mystery!

To clear up the mystery, I think it’s useful to consider a very different episode from decades earlier. In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, at a farming village wrongly labeled “My Lai” on US Army maps, a unit of American soldiers committed various atrocities. As is usually the case with these things somebody breaks the taboo (in this case a soldier clubbed a Vietnamese villager with a rifle butt), and then the violence escalates in a jokey way (another villager was shoved into a well, and a grenade thrown in after him), and then pretty soon you have mass executions, gang rapes, the usual stuff. Finally, you get the sadistic flourishes: forcing Vietnamese parents to watch their children be murdered one by one, torturing helpless people for fun, etc.¹¹ When word eventually got out, people were outraged, and the Army dispatched a young officer to investigate what happened. He wrote a report that to call a coverup would be an insult to coverups, including the declaration that “relations between…soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” The name of that young officer was Colin Powell.

There are good men, and there are evil men, and then there are company men. Colin Powell was a man defined by his willingness to do what his superiors wanted. He did it in 1968, and he did the same thing (in vastly different circumstances) thirty-five years later. I have never felt like any part of this was very mysterious.

Rounding out the Bush war cabinet we have the National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice. If Rumsfeld and Powell were each a distinct archetype of “competent but directionless” (Rumsfeld: the debate kid, Powell: the loyal soldier), then Rice was a third type, and the most dangerous of all. The key to understanding Rice is that she was a child prodigy: violin, French, and ballet by the age of three. Shortly after that, her teachers decided she had the makings of a world-class concert pianist. By the age of ten we are told she was more or less running her parents’ household, and by the age of fifteen she was off to college. While still a teenager she began pursuing a master’s degree in Soviet studies, and headed to Moscow State University for Russian immersion, then back to do a quick PhD. and begin a meteoric ascent through the professoriate at Stanford.

This is all very impressive, you may say, so what’s the problem? The problem is that as with many child prodigies, Rice got addicted to approval. I suspect this dynamic plays as large a role as regression to the mean in explaining why so many child prodigies never amount to anything. When you are a gifted child you spend your whole life listening to adults praise you, and unless you are an outlier in another way completely orthogonal to giftedness (for example, by being highly disagreeable), then this inevitably warps your entire personality.¹² The trouble is you never learn to set your own terminal objectives, never learn to ask whether the next ladder is worth climbing, certainly never get used to the fact that sometimes you need to disappoint your superiors and that they need to deal. Rice had this problem to a terrible extent: decades of praise from the entire American power structure had moulded her into a terrifyingly effective tool. but a tool without agency or purpose. She finally found that purpose in the approval of the handsome, smiling, Chad President she worked for, but that meant she would never put up any resistance to him.

And so we come at last to the man who was notionally running things. We amateur historians have been done a great disservice by the popular attitude towards Bush, which pretty much amounted to “he’s dumb.” Seriously, if you weren’t alive or weren’t politically aware in the early 2000s, you have no idea the extent to which this single slur dominated all public discussion of the President. The memes were all of Bush looking like a monkey,¹³ or holding a banana, the SNL skits were all of Bush acting stupid, and so on. This was all very unfair: Bush was not an idiot. But the greater crime is that this meant we never got to see people grapple with the paradoxical, almost novelistic aspects of his character. As Mazarr puts it:

This is a man brimming with the most interesting contradictions: at once shrewd and intellectually lazy; aloof from the details of policy, and a recurrent micromanager of speeches and statements; humane and compassionate at some moments, and frat-boy cutting and dismissive at others; a faith-driven altruist capable of titanic outbursts of fury and profanity…essentially genuine and deeply committed to the well-being of the American people and to the promotion of freedom abroad…so heedless of detail as to be repeatedly shocked by the implications of his own choices.

Much has been made of Bush’s valorization of decisiveness, his self-conception as “decider” or “doer,” and his understanding of international relations as a series of contests of “will.” But I think even more important, and even more quintessentially American, was his belief in the importance of belief. People tend to associate this strain of thought with Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, but actually it long predates that (for instance, The Little Engine That Could likely dates back to the 19th century). Again, these are deep cultural waters so all-pervasive, it is hard for us fish to even tell that we’re swimming in them. But once you learn to look, you start to see it everywhere. Isn’t the moral of the ultimate American folk tale, Star Wars, basically just that if you believe in something strongly enough, reality itself will warp to accommodate your belief?

None of these qualities — love of decisiveness, disdain for details and deliberation, believing in belief — necessarily had to be a fatal flaw, but when combined within a single person they congealed into a practice that I will hereby term “VIBE-GOVERNING.”

Vibe-governing is sort of the opposite of “founder mode” — it’s where you find good people, put them in charge of stuff, and otherwise just go with your vibes. If there’s a problem in some part of your organization, you don’t read the error messages memos too carefully — you just make some big decisions, shake things up a bit, give a pep talk or two, and then it’s back to vibes. The concrete details of what’s happening are, let’s face it, kinda boring. Or as Condoleezza Rice once said about the president she adored: “Very intuitive and insightful… He is somebody who very efficiently gets to the essence of a question… He least likes me to say, ‘This is complex.’”

So there you have the stage, and there you have the actors. But history requires one more thing: a spark. I believe there are many worlds out there in the multiverse where that spark never came, and where the US security state ground on peacefully and unobtrusively, and that in those worlds the Iraq War likely never happened. But here in this world, the spark came on September 11th, 2001, and the responses of these men and women to the events of that day set us down a path that was as inevitable and overdetermined as any Greek tragedy.

The Catalyst

The immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was total mayhem. Then-CIA Director George Tenet describes the atmosphere in the White House as “more raw emotion in one place than I think I’ve ever experienced in my life.” Events were moving quickly, everybody was operating in the fog of war, nobody knew what further attacks might happen next, but everybody knew that they might be in personal, physical danger. The President was out of town and only intermittently accessible. Cheney was grabbed by Secret Service agents and hustled into a bunker beneath the White House. Rumsfeld rushed to the spot where the 757 had hit the Pentagon and called the President from the scene of the destruction. Rice also called to tell him, “Mr. President, you can’t come back here. Washington is under attack.”

Extreme events can have a profound effect on your personality. Rice later told a biographer that 9/11 had “changed her psychology.” The changes in Cheney were even more profound: he developed an “obsession” with followup attacks using WMD and articulated a new “one percent”¹⁴ doctrine that any terrorist plot that had a greater than one percent probability of being real required immediate action.¹⁵ These changes weren’t just the result of being in physical danger and an emotional pressure-cooker — the new administration had just settled into office, and had then presided over one of the greatest catastrophes on US soil in the modern era. They felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility for making sure it never happened again, and perhaps some need to atone as well.

Their mental state was not helped by the next few months. In accordance with Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine, every morning the entire senior staff was briefed with the “threat matrix” — a terrifying list of all the possible terrorist threats that US spy agencies were investigating. The Threat Matrix was several pages long, and CIA Director Tenet later admitted that you would “drive yourself crazy” if you actually read it. Around the same time, results from a wargame called Dark Winter were released. This had simulated a bio-terrorist attack using weaponized smallpox. And then shortly after that, somebody started mailing anthrax to random government officials including Dick Cheney and his daughter.

This was an environment conducive to some truly silly ideas — after all, if the goal was a Global War on Terror, did that mean sending stealth bombers after IRA cells in Belfast, or invading Japan to take out Aum Shinriko,¹⁶ or American boots on the ground fighting Hamas? Actually, some people very seriously argued that the answers to questions like these was “yes.” Rumsfeld sent a message to his top generals saying: “Targets worldwide… regions outside Afghanistan and even outside the Middle East… It will be important to indicate that our field of action is much wider than Afghanistan.” His deputy Doug Feith would later confirm that this meant targeting groups not even connected to al-Qaeda. At one meeting at which he pushed for attacks on supposed terror cells in Latin America, he elaborated, “Well, they all read the newspapers… If we knock one back, the others will take notice.”

Feith was an extreme case, but there was a universal sense that this was the time to, as one military planner put it, “get a lot of stuff done off of our to-do list.” Unfortunately for Saddam, he had been on the to-do list for a very long time. And he was not aware of the danger. He knew perfectly well that Iraq had destroyed all of its WMD, and that Ba’athism was the ideological opponent of radical Sunni Islam of the sort that al-Qaeda espoused. Surely, he reasoned, the United States would be calling him any day now to ask for his help against their common enemy.

But he was in terrible danger, because American officials had a completely nonsensical theory of where terrorism comes from (a view that they largely still hold, by the way). Their view was that dictatorships (which are bad) sponsor terrorist groups to do their evil bidding, so we need to knock over the dictatorships (which are bad) and there will be no more terrorism. At first glance this view might not seem crazy: after all, look at Iran! They arm and bankroll Hamas and Hezbollah. And before them, the Soviet Union sponsored all kinds of groups to do their dirty work. And well, err…let’s not look too closely at who else might have occasionally done a bit of that during the Cold War and in the present-day Middle East. Maybe these government really are the source of the problem?

But look a little bit more closely. Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and all the other many groups have something in common: they all operate out of places with exceptionally weak and fragile states (and, if you want to get all lib about it, fractured and hopeless societies). How could it be otherwise? Governments don’t like a bunch of other wannabe governments freelancing on their territory. The natural predator of terrorists is the secret policeman. It might be that these groups receive funding and support from states, but they can only grow in the fertile soil of power vacuums. Anarchy, not dictatorship, is the fundamental enabler of terrorism.

How could the professionals in the White House not have understood this? Once again I will go back to the ultimate American folk tale: Star Wars. Every American knows from childhood that “the rebels” are the good guys. It’s the one constant in all of our stories. But in real life, “the rebels” are never the good guys. The regime, whoever it is, may be bastards, but the rebels are almost always worse. “Rebels took over” is a link in the causal chain of almost every genocide, famine, and civil war in the books.

There was one more reason Saddam was in danger: the war in Afghanistan was going too well.¹⁷ The supposed “graveyard of empires” was seeming like a walk in the park, and the US had gone with a light footprint and no real plan about who would rule the place afterwards. Of course, this would eventually all turn into a debacle that returned to Taliban to power, but at the time, in 2001 and 2002, things appeared to be going very smoothly. This had two dangerous effects: it reinforced the notion that you could get sloppy with regime change, and it meant there was still a bunch of excess psychic energy left over from 9/11. As one official put it, “the only reason we went into Iraq… is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick, Afghanistan was too easy.”

The Non-Decision

By far the longest section of this book is a detailed blow-by-blow of the actual decision to invade Iraq. I will summarize over 300 pages of densely-spaced text for you: nobody ever actually made a decision to invade Iraq. The system as a whole “decided” in the sense that that was the outcome, but this was emergent behavior, like an ant colony discovering a source of food. At no point did any human being sit down and say, “okay, now we’re going to debate the pros and cons of invading Iraq,” and then make a decision that the benefits outweighed the costs. Instead a vast multitude of people — with different goals, presuppositions, and beliefs about the world — interacted over a period of years, and at the end of it an invasion occurred. At some point there was a phase change. At some point everybody started assuming that somebody must have made a decision that we were really doing this, but in fact nobody had. Does a molecule of water decide to join a flood?

This is not to say that nobody was pushing for an invasion. The system included plenty of people who wanted it, like Chalabi, Wolfowitz, and eventually Cheney. But none of those men, not even Cheney, could make the decision. They acted as “policy entrepreneurs.” They spotted the vast impersonal forces that were grinding along inexorably, inevitably, creating an opening, storing up vast amounts of potential energy, and they gave them a nudge in their preferred direction. Can an ant start an avalanche? Probably not. Can a team of ants? Maybe if they find the right boulder and really throw their thoraxes into it. But did the ants cause the avalanche, or did whatever process of continental drift deposited a boulder right there, and whatever freak weather arranged the snow just so?

We find it uncanny when organizations make collective decisions with no actual person involved. Bad news: that’s because governments and corporations are your first exposure to artificial intelligences making decisions, and you’re about to get a whole lot more. A contrarian might argue that this is no different from people — there’s a whole discipline of cognitive science which says that if you peer into our subconscious, we too make decisions in random or inexplicable ways. It further claims that what feel like “reasons” are the output of a whole set of mental machinery devoted to retroactively justifying and explaining our choices. Maybe so. But we also have a whole set of mental machinery, honed by aeons of evolution, for modeling and predicting the decisions of other human beings.

The trouble with a corporation or a government is that, considered as a mind, it is a very strangely-shaped mind. Is it hyperintelligent, or is it retarded? Clearly in some ways the former and in others the latter. And the process by which it comes to decisions may be no more random or irrational than the process you and I use, but it’s less familiar to us, and that matters a lot. But everything I’ve just said about collections of people is even more true of the artificial intelligences we’re beginning to create. We are not prepared for the sheer diversity of cognitive architectures that is about to flood the world. And so much of the endless arguing over whether AIs are dumb or smart comes down to the fact that their capabilities are just differently shaped from ours. I roll my eyes when AI CEOs describe their language models as “PhD level,” because there are huge numbers of things that children can do¹⁸ and these models cannot. But there are other things they can do that no human can. And while I think mechanistic interpretability is as cool as the next guy, most of their decisions will be very difficult for us to understand.

Anyway, one big downside of the US government as a whole making the decision to invade Iraq “unconsciously” is that it was never actually debated or discussed in blunt term. This meant no hashing it out in a big room, no arguments sharpening each other, no big list of pros and cons, and, crucially, no big list of risks and how to mitigate them. Nobody even knew what the invasion would look like. Were we going in with a light footprint and knocking out Saddam, then leaving again? Were we engaging in a long-term occupation? Were we just bombing? Was the goal to free the Iraqi people? To fight al-Qaeda? To get rid of the WMD? Nobody knew the answers to these questions. Or perhaps everybody knew the answers, but they all had different ones in mind.

In 2002, as the storm clouds were gathering, Bush gave a speech in which he said:

Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies… [If we] wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.

Saddam Hussein watched the speech, and decided that Bush was probably talking about North Korea.

Of the many fundamental disagreements and inconsistencies within the US invasion planning, one of the biggest was contained in the name, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Was the goal to free the Iraqis? Or to install a democracy? Or to install a regime that would be friendly to the United States? The neoconservatives (idiots) and the liberal humanitarians (idiots) believed that these three were all the same thing. Naturally, they thought, if you remove all restraints of force and power from a populace, they will spontaneously generate a parliamentary democracy and immediately ally themselves with the foreign power that just invaded them, right? (The only evidence we have against that proposition is…all of human history.) On the other side, Rumsfeld and by extension the Department of Defense were a bit more pragmatic, and proposed essentially installing Chalabi as a king backed by the force of American arms. (Never mind that Saddam Hussein had until recently been…a king…backed by force of American arms.)

Colin Powell hated the idea of forcing a monarch on the Iraqi people, and did what Colin Powell does: stewed and seethed and wrote passive-aggressive memos before falling in line with his superiors. But President Bush also hated the idea (it seems that he saw right through Chalabi and regarded him as a con-man from the moment he met him) and decisively killed it. But that didn’t actually determine anything about what would happen, and Bush didn’t want to make that decision. So no decision was ever made, and right up until the invasion and after, the United States “wanted both to set Iraq free and to determine its future. It wanted to be liberator and hegemon at the same time.”

Another fundamental contradiction, bound up with the previous one, was about how expensive and involved this was going to be. Rumsfeld, who had come into office preparing to declare war on the Pentagon bureaucracy, was fanatically committed to the smallest possible footprint. As the army planners began drawing up designs (for an unclear mission with unclear goals), he continually pushed back on every proposal, asking why it couldn’t be smaller, demanding justifications for every unit allocated to the effort. Sometimes Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, would demand to know why particular “fire teams” (a four- or five-person unit), or even a particular individual was assigned. He also automatically rejected any plan or proposal involving a round number of troops (on the basis that a request for a thousand people could not be the result of considered analysis). The result was that the United States went into the country with a vastly smaller number of troops than it might have.¹⁹

Rumsfeld had an odd ally in his efficiency monomania: the neoconservatives. They saw an invasion and occupation of Iraq as just the first step in a broader US-led restructuring of the entire world order. As one of them put it, “This isn’t the battle for Baghdad. This is the first battle for Tehran.” In their view, the US had to use a light footprint in order to keep spare capacity for the next 3-4 wars that they expected to launch into immediately afterwards. Their phrase for this was “recocking the pistol.” One military planner Mazarr interviewed said, “No wonder Rumsfeld was only giving [US CENTCOM commander] Franks 100,000… because six weeks into this we were going to Syria.” Or as another put it, “We have a unique space in time to shake the Etch-a-Sketch clean.”

On the other hand, there were plenty of other people aware that this mission was not going to get done on the cheap. One USAID representative was informed that Iraqi schools needed to reopen within a few weeks of Saddam’s toppling, and that obviously they would need new textbooks that weren’t full of Ba’athist propaganda, so could they please develop, write, edit, and print millions of new textbooks for every grade level…in Arabic. Needless to say, this didn’t happen, but kudos to whoever made the insane request. Obviously if America was going to leave Iraq as a thriving democracy, it couldn’t have all the schoolchildren still using regime textbooks. But if the plan was for America to change Iraq down to the textbooks, what else did they then need to plan for, and how much would that cost?

These questions were not answered. By and large, they were never even asked. And when they were asked, the answers were not forthcoming. For example, in this September 2002 opinion piece, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry asked, “How will you govern a defeated Iraq?” The huffy reply from the administration was, “Why do we assume that the Iraqi people are unable to provide themselves with a decent government?” Oh, I dunno, maybe the entire history of the region, and everything the US government already knew about the state of Iraqi society? Later, when an aid agency asked who would be providing security for post-conflict reconstruction, a senior American military officer helpfully suggested that they “hire warlords.” (Apparently he did not realize that in Iraq, unlike in Afghanistan, there were no warlords available for hire.)

Perhaps the greatest indictment of Bush is that he didn’t recognize the level of confusion amongst his own subordinates, and didn’t move decisively to clear it up. No doubt he would protest that he was not “a details guy,” but one of the most basic tasks of any leader is to ensure that everybody under him knows what the goals are, knows what the strategy is, and knows what the plan is. And yet Bush failed at an even more profound level, because he didn’t actually know these things himself, let alone explain it clearly to his underlings. The result was that “agencies and departments were constantly backstabbing each other,” driven by the divisions and mistrust amongst their principals. Again, the most basic job of a boss is to resolve these conflicts and ensure that his team is indeed acting as a team, and Bush totally abdicated this responsibility. At one meeting when Rumsfeld was presenting some military plans, Rice asked to keep her copy of the slides, and Rumsfeld physically grabbed them across the table. The two of them were literally pulling the sheaf of papers back and forth across the table, until Rice asked Bush to adjudicate: “Mr. President, I need to keep these.” Bush shrugged and walked out of the room.

Bush wasn’t the only one who vacillated uselessly. Another bit of dark comedy in this book is the pathetic head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix. It was Blix’s job to say whether Iraq had actually violated the UN resolution requiring him to admit inspectors (which would provide the casus belli if he had). Instead, he produced maddening circumlocutions like, “The answers can be seen from the factor descriptions that I have provided. However, if more direct answers are desired, I would say the following: The Iraqi side has tried on occasion to attach conditions… It has not, however, so far persisted in this or other conditions for the exercise of any of our inspection rights.” This is just a small sample of his output. When one of Blix’s colleagues declared that Iraq did not appear to have a functioning WMD program, Blix quickly sprang into action, and asked for several more months to write additional reports.

Surprisingly, given the chaos and indecisiveness within the White House, once a decision was made to start selling war to the American people, all of the supposedly independent institutions of American life quickly fell into line. Part of America's marketing is a supposedly raucous culture of internal dissent, but that’s mostly for show and to keep would-be troublemakers distracted or entertained. One of America’s true strengths has always been a shockingly cohesive and disciplined ruling class, and when word went out that class obediently lined up like iron filings under the influence of a magnet. Every major newspaper and news program, including ones supposedly opposed to the Bush administration like the New York Times, instantly began parroting the party line that Iraq had WMD and Saddam must be toppled and it would all be easy and fast. Nearly every major politician also endorsed the war, including Bush's previous election opponent Al Gore, his future election opponent John Kerry, and the entire Clinton dynasty.

In fact, the American aristocracy had such internal solidarity, and such a stranglehold on political discourse, that even a decade later — when the true scope of the disaster was widely apparent — it was still verboten in Washington high society to admit just what a catastrophe it all was. Serious, fundamental criticism of the Iraq War was restricted to far-left radicals at outlets like Counterpunch and far-right paleoconservatives at places like The American Conservative. Both were firmly outside the window of acceptable opinion. This phenomenon, where an informational “firewall” is maintained against an obvious and important truth that could undermine the legitimacy of the entire system, is supposed to be something that only happens under oppressive or authoritarian governments. But in fact, even in countries like China or Iran, most of the work to maintain such a firewall involves “soft” methods: scoffing, and shunning, and imposing a social cost for having the wrong views.

These mechanisms are deployed with great effectiveness in the United States, and even more so in Western Europe, where supposedly democratic regimes routinely declare major issues of popular interest to be unacceptable topics for political contest. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! True democracy sounds dreadfully unstable, so it’s good we don't have it. And a complex society probably can’t survive having all of its basic presuppositions up for debate all the time. But sometimes these mechanisms prevent a vital practice of reflection and accountability and self-correction from playing out, and as far as anybody could tell in 2013, American elites were going to get away scot-free and would be able to pretend that Iraq had never happened.

And then this guy showed up.

A few years ago there was a fun meme where people collected reasons why other people said we got Trump. But no, seriously, that video is why you got Trump. Every respectable institution in American society compromised itself over Iraq, and every candidate in the 2016 election pretended it wasn’t a big deal, and then one man stood up on stage and told them all that they were full of shit. No, Iraq wasn’t the only issue where the views of the majority of Americans had literally no representation in either party (immigration and the degradation of the native lower class were also significant), but it was a big one. Economic theory tells us what happens next: when a monopoly gets lazy, it creates an opening for entrepreneurs. Trump spotted a big, wide open opportunity, and he seized it. That’s why you got Trump.

Aftermath

On March 20th, 2003, thousands of US soldiers swarmed across the border into Iraq. Organized resistance from the Iraqi armed forces collapsed quickly, and then almost immediately things went off the rails. In decades since, a lot of blame has been placed on the decision to demobilize the Iraqi army and security services. This was, indeed, very dumb, insofar as it involved taking hundreds of thousands of resentful, highly-trained soldiers and throwing them onto the streets with no salary. Many of these men became the nexus of the various uprisings and guerilla wars against American occupation which slowly escalated into almost a full-blown civil war. But dismantling the army was actually just a special case of the more general “de-Ba’athification” wherein everybody who’d held an important position in Saddam’s government was purged from public life.

What did we think would happen to a society when its entire upper stratum — everybody educated, or influential, or connected, or used to running things — was sliced away? Apparently, according to one senior US official, “Most people thought an Iraqi leadership would arise.” Pause for a moment to admire the absolute insanity of that sentence. I especially like the use of the impersonal construction: “would arise.” It’s such a perfect distillation of the Rousseauian notion that the people, liberated from their oppressors, would spontaneously generate a harmonious and functional society. (This is, no doubt, why you see so many hunter-gatherers practicing parliamentary democracy.) Notice also how vague the statement is: “an” Iraqi leadership. But who, specifically? There is a weird echo here of what Peter Thiel calls “indefinite optimism” — a gauzy assurance that someone, somewhere will figure it out. Don’t worry, “the market” will deliver “innovations”. But markets don’t deliver innovations, particular individuals with particular theories do, because they believe that they can beat the market. Something akin to that process can happen in politics too, but you may not like the result.

It was about one week into the invasion when the US realized that “liberating” the Iraqis and giving them “democracy” might not be a very good idea. Around this time we see a memo gingerly suggesting giving “those who share the President’s ideas a head start in the post-Saddam political process.” The language is very careful; after all, as it notes, “There is tension between our interests in steering the process toward a moderate and free Iraq, and our interest in winning immediate broad support in and out of Iraq for our policy.” Finally it declares that “hasty” elections and an “excessively ‘hands off’ approach” may produce “an anti-democratic result.” This is a remarkable statement: people voting might produce a result contrary to democracy! But of course it makes total sense when you realize that democracy actually means “people we like.” This is the logic behind the “democracy fortification” attempts we now see in Europe and the United States — for example calls to ban the most popular political party in Germany, or actually banning the most popular presidential candidate in Romania. They tried to do it to Trump too! But first, they tried it in Iraq.

In any case, it didn’t matter. US forces rapidly lost control of the situation in Iraq. The first sign was a mass outbreak of looting, which both destroyed much of the remaining infrastructure in the country (and countless irreplaceable historical artifacts) and fatally damaged the credibility of the occupying forces. If they couldn’t even keep thugs from ripping air conditioners out of hospitals, how could they possibly govern the country? As months went by, the violence and chaos got worse and worse. One US interrogator recalls a visit to a VIP prisoner: Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s deputy prime minister. Aziz spoke fluent English and retained his swagger even in a military interrogation center. One day, he noticed that his captors had a different look in their eyes when they came into his cell. He smirked. “The first few days were quiet, weren’t they? People were waiting for you to tell them what to do. They wanted to be told what to do.”

Mazarr lays blame for the disaster squarely at the feet of what he calls “moralism” in American foreign policy. By this he means emotional appeals for particular courses of action on the basis of a moral imperative, rather than a dispassionate weighing of benefits and costs, risks and opportunities. It’s the driver killing pedestrians on his way to the soup kitchen again. Mazarr ends his book (published in 2019) with a bracing warning that US relations with Russia are about to fall apart for the exact same reason. Relentless NATO expansion right up to the Russian border is viewed as an existential concern in Moscow, and it’s not at all clear how it benefits the US either. But rather than making an argument for why it actually wasn’t risky, or would bring some huge strategic advantage to the United States, its proponents couched the decision in moral terms. Countries “deserve” to have a choice to join NATO. What kind of heartless monster would refuse to let the noble Estonian people have a choice?

In light of the Ukraine war, this warning seems eerily prophetic. But it isn’t just Ukraine: since Iraq the US has plunged both Libya and Syria into immensely destructive civil wars, again for no clear strategic reason and triggering a wave of refugees that have destabilized friendly regimes in Europe. At least we didn’t get drawn into an occupation ourselves in those cases, but that’s small comfort to the millions who are dead or displaced. Mazarr closes his book with a story about interviewing a senior official in the Bush administration. As he finishes the interview, packs up, and is about to leave the office; his source stops him and says:

You know, it will happen again. We’ll do it again.

How many more times?

1. Many thanks to reader Tanner Greer at The Scholars Stage for recommending this book to me.

2. Those plans were provided by the Russians, who prior to multiple rounds of NATO expansion were our allies.

3. Given that almost everybody in the US mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans, were for it, this probably explains a lot about how I turned out.

4. Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a fiscal crisis, but the incredible thing about America is that all the money wasted in Iraq still won’t be in the top 5 reasons for it.

5. “Definitive” is publisher-speak for “very, very long.”

6. Yes, this was exactly Strelkov’s strategy in the Ukrainian civil war. And for similar reasons — the Russian government as an official body was dithering and indecisive, but a large faction within it wanted to act.

7. My north star here is, as always, my former coworker from Bulgaria.

8. Graham Greene did an exquisite job skewering this attitude in his novel The Quiet American. One character says of the titular American: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

9. Did the Romans feel this way? Did the Chinese? I don’t actually know, but I think there’s something distinctive about the American imperial attitude. It really does come down to our belief that we’re bombing you for your own good (or overthrowing your government for your own good, or whatever). My sense is that past hegemons have been a bit more honest.

10. Then again, Gaddafi did what Saddam arguably should have done, and look what that got him. I guess the real lesson is just not to make too much trouble until your nukes really work.

11. Human psychology is such a funny thing. The most chilling part of the whole episode to me is not the babies hiding behind their mother’s corpses, etc., but the fact that after a long morning of rape and murder the American soldiers called a one hour break to eat lunch. Then when lunch was finished, they got right back at it.

12. A related but distinct pathology is the “impressive for your age” syndrome.

13. Unfortunately for the President, he had a rather distinctively Simian physiognomy.

14. In expected value terms this is…not a completely crazy threshold? I certainly wouldn’t have minded if more people had thought this way about pandemic preparedness.

15. It’s odd to consider that the two groups in American life most fond of multiplying giant utility functions by tiny probabilities are rationalists and Dick Cheney.

16. You probably know them from the nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, but did you know that Aum Shinriko may have had nukes?

17. Of course, not everything went well. Mazarr devotes some significant time to the still-perplexing question of why the US didn’t try harder to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. After listing a bunch of possibilities and recounting interviews with multiple senior officials, he concludes that he still has no idea.

18. By the way, children are also best thought of as differently-shaped intelligences.

19. This section of the book bears a bizarre resemblance to the Ukraine War, where the Russians very similarly talked themselves into cheaping out with a light initial footprint, also resulting in a disastrous outcome.