Great summary and review, but I was a bit surprised that while you mention America's missionary impulse and even Star Wars fandom driving this mistake, you didn't give mention to the specific memory of World War 2. A big reason America was so overconfident about its ability to build a liberal democracy from scratch in a short time was that it allegedy did so in both West Germany and Japan very quickly after WW2. WW2 was still "only" as distant then as the 60s are to us today, so its cultural presence was greater -- there were still WW2 veterans in Congress, even. I think the WW2 analogy shows most strongly with "de-Baathification" as a concept -- it's so clearly a rehash of the perceived de-Nazification after WW2, complete with a Nuremberg knock-off for Saddam and other high-level members of his regime.
I'd also point to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (only as distant from 2003 as Obama's Libya intervention is from today), which had mostly successfully turned authoritarian Communist states into functional democracies from Bulgaria to Estonia.
Basically, several standout events in living memory made us inclined toward optimism -- especially since this was also a peak for "blank slate" thinking that didn't consider whether highly developed European societies might fare differently from basically tribal Middle Eastern lands.
I guess they did not notice how the vibe shifted. Consider Fukuyama, he wrote a few years ago that his end-of-history model was based on false premises. He based it on Economic Man, which basically means people just want comfort and consumption. Post-WW2 Germany and Japan, bombed out, starving, took one good look at the food rations of American soldiers and immediately decided they want that kind of living. The same thing happened in Eastern Europe - we were watching Married With Children, and wondering, this is what being poor in the US looks like?
Fukuyama said a few years ago that this is not the "vibe" he is getting anymore. It is basically everybody demanding respect. Sometimes it is right-wing, like nationalists demanding respect for their countries, sometimes it is left-wing like gays demanding respect, but ultimately it is all the same thing. This is a very new thing that is hard to understand by 1990's logic.
Look at far-right Romanian presidential candidates, Georgescu and Simior. In the 1990's such candidates did not really go anywhere, largely because they were understood as losers, exactly how a KKK member in the US would be considered a loser, I think this requires no elaboration. They just do not have the rich, intelligent etc. people on their sides. Looks like a bunch of frustrated rural alcoholics. But... something has changed. I don't know what. Perhaps by that time a lot of people felt like they are losers, and wanted respect for losers.
The de-nazification of post-war Germany is also a bit exaggerated, given the US certainly didn't fire or prosecute the entire German police force and judiciary (many of which were members of the NSDAP.)
I realize the author is a conservative, but I think pointing to Trump as the person who broke the taboo on calling the Iraq War a disaster in mainstream political discourse is incorrect. Obama beat Hillary Clinton in no small part due to his ability to attack her on her vote for the Iraq War. If the Iraq War doesn't happen but the Financial Crisis still occurs, I think Clinton is highly likely to be the president in 2009. There was a somewhat consistent party id polling gap on support for the Iraq War throughout basically the entire time polling exists on the topic (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/).
I do think that Trump broke the taboo within the mainstream conservative ecosystem, which is still notable, and if you want to be generous, more politically 'brave', given the continuing relative popularity of the war amongst the GOP primary base in 2016.
As a Brit it's delightful to read an American who thinks that the rebels are always the bad guys. Come back into the fold cousins, our King will be merciful to you.
I do love the reviews on this substack, and this review is helpful in pointing at the myriad failures leading up to the Iraq war. But I don't think all of the conclusions you draw follow from this. It reads like you're saying that the foreign policy dichotomy is between self interested realpolitik and naive idealism. But really, the better line to draw is between focused competence, and fuzzy incompetence. Some of the blame for the mess in Ukraine might sit with NATO expansion, but much more sits with Russia's lack of awareness of what would follow their initial invasion, and lack of planning for it. Russia's foreign policy can't be held up as a success.
Of course US idealism has failed (and failed often), and I wish Western countries were a little more clearminded about their own self interested goals. But being the world's policeman has...sometimes been fine.
The Western intervention in the Balkans in the 90s was good, and a Western* intervention in Rwanda might have saved millions of lives and stopped the bloodiest conflict since WW2.
In Syria the counter factual is what if the west had acted decisively in support of the moderates who first rebelled against Assad, rather than leaving them to be crushed between two extremes.
I'm for clear goals, and a moral foreign policy please.
I think this is implicit in your joke, but it's really striking how little the American Revolution and a few others (the Color Revolutions most saliently) have in common with your stereotypical populist revolution. Maybe the thesis should be "rebels can only be the good guys when they have both broad popular support and a legitimate elite ready to step into power".
A wonderful review--but isn't there an elephant in the room which has gone unmentioned, apparently in the original book, and certainly also in the review? Is it truly plausible that a pseudo-moralistic and intellectually lazy missionary impulse, and an amorphous, over-determined de-centralized (non) decision making process are the sole reasons for a long, trillion dollar and bloody war? Cui bono? Isn't it at least possible, if not extremely likely, that the parties who ended up being the recipients of the trillions of dollars spent by the US on the Iraq War could foresee what a financial and career bonanza this scale of blood-letting would be, and actively steered the Bush Administration towards the fateful decision to start the war? After all, Iraq and much of the Middle East may have been wrecked, but those trillions of Dollars ended up in lots of people's bank accounts and funded some very nice lifestyles in many of the most affluent zip codes in America.
The idea that, say, defense contractors pushed for war is not inconsistent that the decision making was very diffuse. Are you saying you think it was a tightly controlled process? If so, this directly contradicts the premise of the book.
1) It seems that Saddam's attempted assassination of Bush 1 is worth a mention, no? That seems to have been a decisive turning point in making the deposition of Hussein official US policy
2) I don't think the pro-war consensus was as strong among elites as you suggest. A majority of Congressional Democrats voted against the war, but you claim that virtually the entire party was in favor of it.
3) It's odd to characterize Obama's foreign policy as being identical to Bush's. Obama's whole thing was the pivot to Asia... He very famously did not follow up on a threat to overthrow Assad, for instance.
3.1) The idea that Trump was elected as a repudiation of neoconservativism is odd. Obama was elected in large part as a repudiation of Bush - not only was the economy crashing, but the war in Iraq had become quite unpopular by then.
3.1) Trump was elected because Hillary Clinton was not, and her hawkishness played a major role in that result. People voted against potential return of invasive foreign policy.
How credible is it that Saddam could have gotten to Bush if he wasn't visiting Kuwait, though? I mean... sure, it's an issue, but probably not sufficient grounds for a large-scale invasion of another country.
This reminds me of General Wesley Clark’s comments after 9/11, where he stated that Bush’s neocon team wanted to invade and destroy seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, none of which had anything to do with the supposed 9/11 attackers. You can see him discuss this in the below clip:
This strategy was itself based on Israel’s 1996 policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. In this document Israel's strategy for regional security included destabilizing and weakening key nations seen as threats. The document explicitly called for efforts to undermine and topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It proposed supporting internal opposition within Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein’s regime, particularly due to concerns over Iraq's military capabilities and potential weapons of mass destruction, while Syria was viewed as a major regional threat because of its alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah. Although not directly calling for military action, the strategy also outlined efforts to counter Iran's growing regional influence, especially its nuclear ambitions. The overarching aim was to reshape the Middle East by destabilizing these nations to reduce the perceived threats to Israel's security.
First of all great article, thankyou for summarizing so much of a 'definitive' book I'll never have time to read. A few comments:
1) Your description of how modern states constitute a dysfunctional mass mind fits in well with recent writing by Eugyppius and Jack Laurel on Substack. If you are not already familiar, I think you will get a lot out of them.
2) I think the epochal nature of the Iraq war for people of your age means that your view of it is stuck in 2016. It is received wisdom by now that the war was a failure in every respect, but the reality is that Iraq today is (a) a parliamentary democracy (b) a US ally (c) has a relatively stable and growing economy and (d) sells oil to America under favourable circumstances. That is to say that the aims of the Iraq war - even the incompatible ones! - have all been achieved. That doesn't mean that it was a good decision, because the intervening period was so awful, and the damage America sustained wasn't worth it. However, it does rather change the nature of the bad decision. It turns out it was possible to invade Iraq and turn it into a democratic ally, and it was possible even with incredibly bad planning and strategy, a fortiori if there had been an actual plan.
3) Some other commentators have pointed this out, but your account of establishment US opinion maintaining a protective wall of support for the Iraq War until Trump is just wrong. Obama opposed the war from he beginning, but, more to the point, his opposition to the war was the reason he won the nomination in 2007. The exact timeline of how liberal opinion changed is a book in itself, and memory deceives us all, but a few datapoints are that the New York Times formally apologized in 2004*, Matt Yglesias (the platonic ideal of a thoughtful establishment Democrat) also changed his mind in 2004, Ezra Klein apologized in 2013.
4) It really just isn't true that America plunged Syria into Civil War. Turkey, all the Gulf States, and Israel were all backing various types of rebels a lot more than America (and, indeed, the current question, now the rebels have won, is to what extent it will be a Turkish or Gulf vassal state and to what extent it will normalise relations with Israel). Attributing the Syrian Civil War principally to American intervention is the same basic fallacy of neoconservativism in seeing the US as omnipotent, except that it is seen as the font of all evil, rather than good.
You make a good point about the current state of Iraq not actually being that terrible an endpoint (although getting from A to B could have been a hell of a lot less painful with better planning and more reasonable end-goals.) It's certainly not a *liberal* democracy, though, hence the contradiction.
"but a few datapoints are that the New York Times formally apologized in 2004*, Matt Yglesias (the platonic ideal of a thoughtful establishment Democrat) also changed his mind in 2004, Ezra Klein apologized in 2013."
Lol this is like a timeline of "when cowardly centrist liberals admit they are wrong." They decided that BLM was wrong or trans was wrong or Biden was wrong or etc etc etc on about the same timeline...after it was too late to make a difference and after they would have had to suffer consequences for sticking their necks out.
Sure, I'm not citing these data points as evidence of their great integrity or foresight, but rather simply as a simple demonstration that the claim of the OP is wrong. I think it's fair enough to say that liberals as a group supported the Iraq War and then successively pivoted and exploited its failures shortly after to overturn the Republican control of the Presidency and Congress and implement quite a sweeping liberal agenda.
However, if you want someone who did oppose the Iraq War from the beginning, apart from Obama, there's always George Soros.
I remember Iraq being supported by all conservatives until Trump in 2015. If you’re a conservative then certainly the war was the biggest political item of a decade. One of my best friends has to walk with a cane and has seizures because of wounds from Iraq. It cost trillions.
I’d say to that the Iraq war was part and parcel with “blank slate” conservatism that saw America as a proposition nation rather than a people. Iraq and the entire war on terror was an attempt to export that idea.
Democrats turned against Iraq after it was unpopular, but not against the ideas behind it. When in power they supported the same foreign policy base on similar principals. If you asked someone today who the “pro war” party is the answer everyone would give you is the democrats.
There is a uniparty in DC that loves war and aggressive foriegn policy idealism. Occasionally the results of that policy will be so disastrous that one party will exploit that disaster for short term political gain, but we always forget and move on and go right back to the uniparty consensus which always seems to result in more government spending for the people running the uniparty.
You're just saying a bunch of stuff that doesn't contradict what I said.
Overall, the United States has clearly become less warlike over the past seventy years, and far less tolerant of U.S. casualties. It lost >36,000 men in Korea, and 58,200 in Vietnam. The US used to intervene militarily around the globe at the slightest opportunity, often for really mundane stuff like helping out fruit canning companies. Now, even simple risk-free bombing raids against Iran are considered incredibly controversial. The Iraq war a was a major exception to this trend, that wouldn't have happened were it not for 9/11, and is universally considered a total failure (in excess of how much of failure it actually was) and discrediting any similar episodes. If you are anti-war, you are getting what you want and should probably stop bitching about muh uniparty. Take the W.
> 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.)
I'm more sympathetic to the proposition than you are. Germany and Japan didn't have much in the way of durable democratic institutions prior to World War II, we traumatized and occupied them, and now they're among the best examples of stable US-aligned democracies. You could include South Korea in that pattern as well, though the story there is less cut-and-dried.
Granting that there are many differences between those situations and Iraq (or Afghanistan or Vietnam), you still need some kind of theory of how those differences matter more nuanced than "overthrowing a dictator, invading and occupying a foreign country, and strong-arming them into setting up a parliamentary democracy never works"... because it sometimes does.
Germany and Japan did not have much experience with democratic practice prior to US occupation, but they had a little experience, and that experience was fairly recent as of the beginning of the occupation-you cannot say either of those things about Iraq in 2003. The bigger issue is the ‘spontaneously’ part-we went into Germany and Japan expecting to re-engineer political life in those countries. We believed that we had the right to do so and we were prepared to use a fairly heavy hand if necessary. By contrast we went into Iraq without a consensus within the government as to whether we would, could, or should take much of an active role in steering Iraq’s political development. I will also say that it was easier to restructure Germany and Japan according to our preferences because those countries had just suffered catastrophic defeat in a total war. In Iraq we just took out an unpopular and debilitated government. Most of the Iraqi people felt, correctly, that they had not been defeated or conquered by us, which I suspect made it easier for them to ignore us when we told them to do things that they didn’t want to do.
Germany as a whole had had continuous parliamentary elections, relatively independent judges and considerable freedom of speech from 1871 (at the latest) to 1933. Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden had had constitutions since the 1820s. Many towns in Germany had had republican constitutions for more than 500 years. It is maybe not utterly surprising that the mechanisms of democracy took better after 1945 in Western Germany than after 2003 in Iraq, though I think the most important factor was the overwhelming number of Allied soldiers stationed without an expiry date all over Germany.
Maybe it is the Finn in me speaking, but to me the main comparison of Iraq and Ukraine wouldn't seem to be anything about American moralism and overreach - after all, from a realpolitik point of view things seem to have gone quite well for the US, which has managed to bleed a geopolitical rival at some monetary cost and no cost in blood - but rather that the supposedly cynical, amoral and realistic Russia ended up getting itself into a worse quagmire than Iraq through a remarkably similar process, including the same tendentious rhetoric about nuclear weapons and human rights violations that US used in Iraq.
I, of course, am also aghast at the heartless monsters who would refuse to let the noble Estonian people have a choice, but perhaps more in the sense that it is very curious that many American conservatives seem to have subtly imbibed the same disdain-ranging-to-hatred towards the Baltic states for the simple desire to continue their national existence.
I have long maintained that if Gore had won in 2000 rather than Bush (and he almost did) that he would have also ended up invading Iran. When I present this idea most people scoff at it. But after reading your review, which mentions how strongly Gore supported it and the antipathy already present in the Clinton administration. Add to that the bureaucratic inertia, which would have mostly still been there (though the Dramatis Personae would have been different) and I feel that the situation you describe supports my assertion.
So what does everyone else think? Would the Iraq Invasion still have taken place if Gore was president? I say it would have.
Gore supported the first Iraq war, not the second. He argued against pre-emptive war. Al Gore's speech on Iraqhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/23/usa.iraq?CMP=share_btn_url
Vindicated in my lifelong hatred of Star Wars. Always thought it was suspicious how all the Empire's technology is designed from the ground up to be easily defeated by a small but determined band of plucky rebels. Also very on the nose how the sequels can't handle peace - afraid to tell a story in which the Republic has to handle the responsibility of peaceful democratic governance - and so just awkwardly resurrect a defeated enemy.
Why are Americans like this though? The Chinese don't, as far as I can tell, want every country in the world to be governed according to Xi Jinping Thought.
I guess the Soviets were evangelical - they encouraged communist movements across the Third World - and people say the neoconservatives were originally Trotskyists. The British introduced parliamentary democracy to a lot of their former colonies. Christians have long been very determined to make other people into Christians. Muslims seem pretty evangelical, they just don't have the political power to throw their weight around on the world stage.
The evangelical mindset is mostly alien to me, but it makes sense that ideologies which make a virtue of actively recruiting new followers would be more successful than ones that didn't.
I think as a non-American it's difficult to keep in mind the degree to which they actually take seriously all that stuff about the Revolution and the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and so on. Christians and Muslims and Communists I get, but I always struggle to remind myself that the Yanks, as the first modern democracy, can be just as persistent and dogmatic about their liberal ideas as any Wahhabist or Trotskyist.
Partly of course this is because I grew up in the shadow of the Iraq War, which massively discredited liberal evangelism by using it as the basis for an obviously insane military project. Easy to forget now how completely it changed the intellectual landscape.
Much accurate but much inaccurate or rather the company line, what people pretend is true rather than was really true. First, everyone new it would be a disaster to topple the government. We were discussing this in our think tank faculty rooms, that iraq would break into pieces. They had plans to invade iraq even before the idea of “lets say they had wmd’s” entered their heads.
The US went into a negative cycle during the genocide in Vietnam. You need to revisit the history of the 60s and 70s, if you didnt live through it. Though i appreciate that you just dont want to accept the Dick Cheney is evil line, you should. What is evil if not violent sociopathy for the pursuit of power and wealth? I think your greatest omission in this is to ignore the economics, they made a huge amount of money in these wars, personal as well as corporate transfers of wealth. The US exports instability as it drives weapon sales and increases the price of oil in which many of these individuals are heavily invested. To view foreign policy in terms of political ends is to create a very incomplete picture. They are just good at selling alternative narratives. Lets face it, the US loves dictators, just not dictators that don’t tow the company line.
What i want to end this with is that the invasion of Iraq was no mistake nor a failure for those that orchestrated it. It was incredibly successful in making many people a whole lot of money.
To be fair to the people at the time -- we know now that 9/11 was a "one of".; they did not know that. (In fact, I have heard an Arab scholar argue that 9/11 was too successful; it stopped any further Islamist attacks -- because in the Islamist world, the next attack would have had to have been bigger, and that was impracticable).
Underlying this is the situation that US/Western "intelligence" was not up to the job. They did not know the true status of nuclear weapons in Iraq -- just like those intelligence agencies were surprised by the collapse of the USSR or by Russia's reaction to NATO expansion. If there is an action item from this story, it is that the existing "intelligence" agencies need to be levelled and then replaced with something that works better.
As to the Iraqi nuclear weapons story, we forget that the assertion about those weapons was only one of about 16 different justifications given for the attack. The bureaucracy treated the criticisms of Iraq as if they were arraigning Al Capone -- if we can't get him on murder charges, at least we can get him on tax evasion. That kind of shotgun approach may work in the vile US "legal" system, but it is no way to run foreign policy.
And let's remember that Saddam had already invaded three countries -- Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Arguably, Saddam himself was the weapon of mass destruction. If he had been left alone, no-one knows where it would have ended up. Just like no-one can say what would have happened if the Allies in the 1930s had reacted forcefully after Hitler went into the Sudetenland. Removing Saddam was justifiable -- doing it without a plan for what to do next was not.
Does Mazarr even mention Israel? Because they had an axe to grind with Saddam since he bombed them during the Kuwait War and the neocons are big supporters of Israel.
As mentioned by another commenter, the white paper, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, suggests otherwise. Removing Saddam from power was an Israeli objective in its own right, as his Ba'athist ideology was shared with al-Assad's and largely supported the regime in Syria, and a blow to Assad's regional ally would reduce their footprint in Lebanon and help secure their northern border.
This is coupled with the fact that this white paper was not some random document with rather shocking predictive power, but was crafted by major figures in the Bush administration.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmzer (among others) were all attributed in the report's final form and held various positions within the administration (see Office of Special Plans).
Great summary and review, but I was a bit surprised that while you mention America's missionary impulse and even Star Wars fandom driving this mistake, you didn't give mention to the specific memory of World War 2. A big reason America was so overconfident about its ability to build a liberal democracy from scratch in a short time was that it allegedy did so in both West Germany and Japan very quickly after WW2. WW2 was still "only" as distant then as the 60s are to us today, so its cultural presence was greater -- there were still WW2 veterans in Congress, even. I think the WW2 analogy shows most strongly with "de-Baathification" as a concept -- it's so clearly a rehash of the perceived de-Nazification after WW2, complete with a Nuremberg knock-off for Saddam and other high-level members of his regime.
I'd also point to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (only as distant from 2003 as Obama's Libya intervention is from today), which had mostly successfully turned authoritarian Communist states into functional democracies from Bulgaria to Estonia.
Basically, several standout events in living memory made us inclined toward optimism -- especially since this was also a peak for "blank slate" thinking that didn't consider whether highly developed European societies might fare differently from basically tribal Middle Eastern lands.
I guess they did not notice how the vibe shifted. Consider Fukuyama, he wrote a few years ago that his end-of-history model was based on false premises. He based it on Economic Man, which basically means people just want comfort and consumption. Post-WW2 Germany and Japan, bombed out, starving, took one good look at the food rations of American soldiers and immediately decided they want that kind of living. The same thing happened in Eastern Europe - we were watching Married With Children, and wondering, this is what being poor in the US looks like?
Fukuyama said a few years ago that this is not the "vibe" he is getting anymore. It is basically everybody demanding respect. Sometimes it is right-wing, like nationalists demanding respect for their countries, sometimes it is left-wing like gays demanding respect, but ultimately it is all the same thing. This is a very new thing that is hard to understand by 1990's logic.
Look at far-right Romanian presidential candidates, Georgescu and Simior. In the 1990's such candidates did not really go anywhere, largely because they were understood as losers, exactly how a KKK member in the US would be considered a loser, I think this requires no elaboration. They just do not have the rich, intelligent etc. people on their sides. Looks like a bunch of frustrated rural alcoholics. But... something has changed. I don't know what. Perhaps by that time a lot of people felt like they are losers, and wanted respect for losers.
The de-nazification of post-war Germany is also a bit exaggerated, given the US certainly didn't fire or prosecute the entire German police force and judiciary (many of which were members of the NSDAP.)
Very true. But the popular memory at the time, which informed our approach to Iraq, is that de-Nazification was more sweeping than it really was.
Mistaken, abbreviated summaries have consequences, I guess the saying goes.
I realize the author is a conservative, but I think pointing to Trump as the person who broke the taboo on calling the Iraq War a disaster in mainstream political discourse is incorrect. Obama beat Hillary Clinton in no small part due to his ability to attack her on her vote for the Iraq War. If the Iraq War doesn't happen but the Financial Crisis still occurs, I think Clinton is highly likely to be the president in 2009. There was a somewhat consistent party id polling gap on support for the Iraq War throughout basically the entire time polling exists on the topic (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/).
I do think that Trump broke the taboo within the mainstream conservative ecosystem, which is still notable, and if you want to be generous, more politically 'brave', given the continuing relative popularity of the war amongst the GOP primary base in 2016.
As a Brit it's delightful to read an American who thinks that the rebels are always the bad guys. Come back into the fold cousins, our King will be merciful to you.
I do love the reviews on this substack, and this review is helpful in pointing at the myriad failures leading up to the Iraq war. But I don't think all of the conclusions you draw follow from this. It reads like you're saying that the foreign policy dichotomy is between self interested realpolitik and naive idealism. But really, the better line to draw is between focused competence, and fuzzy incompetence. Some of the blame for the mess in Ukraine might sit with NATO expansion, but much more sits with Russia's lack of awareness of what would follow their initial invasion, and lack of planning for it. Russia's foreign policy can't be held up as a success.
Of course US idealism has failed (and failed often), and I wish Western countries were a little more clearminded about their own self interested goals. But being the world's policeman has...sometimes been fine.
The Western intervention in the Balkans in the 90s was good, and a Western* intervention in Rwanda might have saved millions of lives and stopped the bloodiest conflict since WW2.
In Syria the counter factual is what if the west had acted decisively in support of the moderates who first rebelled against Assad, rather than leaving them to be crushed between two extremes.
I'm for clear goals, and a moral foreign policy please.
*Non French, obviously.
I think this is implicit in your joke, but it's really striking how little the American Revolution and a few others (the Color Revolutions most saliently) have in common with your stereotypical populist revolution. Maybe the thesis should be "rebels can only be the good guys when they have both broad popular support and a legitimate elite ready to step into power".
A wonderful review--but isn't there an elephant in the room which has gone unmentioned, apparently in the original book, and certainly also in the review? Is it truly plausible that a pseudo-moralistic and intellectually lazy missionary impulse, and an amorphous, over-determined de-centralized (non) decision making process are the sole reasons for a long, trillion dollar and bloody war? Cui bono? Isn't it at least possible, if not extremely likely, that the parties who ended up being the recipients of the trillions of dollars spent by the US on the Iraq War could foresee what a financial and career bonanza this scale of blood-letting would be, and actively steered the Bush Administration towards the fateful decision to start the war? After all, Iraq and much of the Middle East may have been wrecked, but those trillions of Dollars ended up in lots of people's bank accounts and funded some very nice lifestyles in many of the most affluent zip codes in America.
The idea that, say, defense contractors pushed for war is not inconsistent that the decision making was very diffuse. Are you saying you think it was a tightly controlled process? If so, this directly contradicts the premise of the book.
A few quibbles:
1) It seems that Saddam's attempted assassination of Bush 1 is worth a mention, no? That seems to have been a decisive turning point in making the deposition of Hussein official US policy
2) I don't think the pro-war consensus was as strong among elites as you suggest. A majority of Congressional Democrats voted against the war, but you claim that virtually the entire party was in favor of it.
3) It's odd to characterize Obama's foreign policy as being identical to Bush's. Obama's whole thing was the pivot to Asia... He very famously did not follow up on a threat to overthrow Assad, for instance.
3.1) The idea that Trump was elected as a repudiation of neoconservativism is odd. Obama was elected in large part as a repudiation of Bush - not only was the economy crashing, but the war in Iraq had become quite unpopular by then.
3.1) Trump was elected because Hillary Clinton was not, and her hawkishness played a major role in that result. People voted against potential return of invasive foreign policy.
How credible is it that Saddam could have gotten to Bush if he wasn't visiting Kuwait, though? I mean... sure, it's an issue, but probably not sufficient grounds for a large-scale invasion of another country.
This reminds me of General Wesley Clark’s comments after 9/11, where he stated that Bush’s neocon team wanted to invade and destroy seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, none of which had anything to do with the supposed 9/11 attackers. You can see him discuss this in the below clip:
https://youtu.be/FNt7s_Wed_4
This strategy was itself based on Israel’s 1996 policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. In this document Israel's strategy for regional security included destabilizing and weakening key nations seen as threats. The document explicitly called for efforts to undermine and topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It proposed supporting internal opposition within Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein’s regime, particularly due to concerns over Iraq's military capabilities and potential weapons of mass destruction, while Syria was viewed as a major regional threat because of its alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah. Although not directly calling for military action, the strategy also outlined efforts to counter Iran's growing regional influence, especially its nuclear ambitions. The overarching aim was to reshape the Middle East by destabilizing these nations to reduce the perceived threats to Israel's security.
Do you know the story of Saddam Hussein's novels? He spent the last years of his life writing fiction. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/saddams-secret-weapon/
First of all great article, thankyou for summarizing so much of a 'definitive' book I'll never have time to read. A few comments:
1) Your description of how modern states constitute a dysfunctional mass mind fits in well with recent writing by Eugyppius and Jack Laurel on Substack. If you are not already familiar, I think you will get a lot out of them.
2) I think the epochal nature of the Iraq war for people of your age means that your view of it is stuck in 2016. It is received wisdom by now that the war was a failure in every respect, but the reality is that Iraq today is (a) a parliamentary democracy (b) a US ally (c) has a relatively stable and growing economy and (d) sells oil to America under favourable circumstances. That is to say that the aims of the Iraq war - even the incompatible ones! - have all been achieved. That doesn't mean that it was a good decision, because the intervening period was so awful, and the damage America sustained wasn't worth it. However, it does rather change the nature of the bad decision. It turns out it was possible to invade Iraq and turn it into a democratic ally, and it was possible even with incredibly bad planning and strategy, a fortiori if there had been an actual plan.
3) Some other commentators have pointed this out, but your account of establishment US opinion maintaining a protective wall of support for the Iraq War until Trump is just wrong. Obama opposed the war from he beginning, but, more to the point, his opposition to the war was the reason he won the nomination in 2007. The exact timeline of how liberal opinion changed is a book in itself, and memory deceives us all, but a few datapoints are that the New York Times formally apologized in 2004*, Matt Yglesias (the platonic ideal of a thoughtful establishment Democrat) also changed his mind in 2004, Ezra Klein apologized in 2013.
4) It really just isn't true that America plunged Syria into Civil War. Turkey, all the Gulf States, and Israel were all backing various types of rebels a lot more than America (and, indeed, the current question, now the rebels have won, is to what extent it will be a Turkish or Gulf vassal state and to what extent it will normalise relations with Israel). Attributing the Syrian Civil War principally to American intervention is the same basic fallacy of neoconservativism in seeing the US as omnipotent, except that it is seen as the font of all evil, rather than good.
*https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublishing.usnews
You make a good point about the current state of Iraq not actually being that terrible an endpoint (although getting from A to B could have been a hell of a lot less painful with better planning and more reasonable end-goals.) It's certainly not a *liberal* democracy, though, hence the contradiction.
"but a few datapoints are that the New York Times formally apologized in 2004*, Matt Yglesias (the platonic ideal of a thoughtful establishment Democrat) also changed his mind in 2004, Ezra Klein apologized in 2013."
Lol this is like a timeline of "when cowardly centrist liberals admit they are wrong." They decided that BLM was wrong or trans was wrong or Biden was wrong or etc etc etc on about the same timeline...after it was too late to make a difference and after they would have had to suffer consequences for sticking their necks out.
Sure, I'm not citing these data points as evidence of their great integrity or foresight, but rather simply as a simple demonstration that the claim of the OP is wrong. I think it's fair enough to say that liberals as a group supported the Iraq War and then successively pivoted and exploited its failures shortly after to overturn the Republican control of the Presidency and Congress and implement quite a sweeping liberal agenda.
However, if you want someone who did oppose the Iraq War from the beginning, apart from Obama, there's always George Soros.
I remember Iraq being supported by all conservatives until Trump in 2015. If you’re a conservative then certainly the war was the biggest political item of a decade. One of my best friends has to walk with a cane and has seizures because of wounds from Iraq. It cost trillions.
I’d say to that the Iraq war was part and parcel with “blank slate” conservatism that saw America as a proposition nation rather than a people. Iraq and the entire war on terror was an attempt to export that idea.
Democrats turned against Iraq after it was unpopular, but not against the ideas behind it. When in power they supported the same foreign policy base on similar principals. If you asked someone today who the “pro war” party is the answer everyone would give you is the democrats.
There is a uniparty in DC that loves war and aggressive foriegn policy idealism. Occasionally the results of that policy will be so disastrous that one party will exploit that disaster for short term political gain, but we always forget and move on and go right back to the uniparty consensus which always seems to result in more government spending for the people running the uniparty.
You're just saying a bunch of stuff that doesn't contradict what I said.
Overall, the United States has clearly become less warlike over the past seventy years, and far less tolerant of U.S. casualties. It lost >36,000 men in Korea, and 58,200 in Vietnam. The US used to intervene militarily around the globe at the slightest opportunity, often for really mundane stuff like helping out fruit canning companies. Now, even simple risk-free bombing raids against Iran are considered incredibly controversial. The Iraq war a was a major exception to this trend, that wouldn't have happened were it not for 9/11, and is universally considered a total failure (in excess of how much of failure it actually was) and discrediting any similar episodes. If you are anti-war, you are getting what you want and should probably stop bitching about muh uniparty. Take the W.
> 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.)
I'm more sympathetic to the proposition than you are. Germany and Japan didn't have much in the way of durable democratic institutions prior to World War II, we traumatized and occupied them, and now they're among the best examples of stable US-aligned democracies. You could include South Korea in that pattern as well, though the story there is less cut-and-dried.
Granting that there are many differences between those situations and Iraq (or Afghanistan or Vietnam), you still need some kind of theory of how those differences matter more nuanced than "overthrowing a dictator, invading and occupying a foreign country, and strong-arming them into setting up a parliamentary democracy never works"... because it sometimes does.
Germany and Japan did not have much experience with democratic practice prior to US occupation, but they had a little experience, and that experience was fairly recent as of the beginning of the occupation-you cannot say either of those things about Iraq in 2003. The bigger issue is the ‘spontaneously’ part-we went into Germany and Japan expecting to re-engineer political life in those countries. We believed that we had the right to do so and we were prepared to use a fairly heavy hand if necessary. By contrast we went into Iraq without a consensus within the government as to whether we would, could, or should take much of an active role in steering Iraq’s political development. I will also say that it was easier to restructure Germany and Japan according to our preferences because those countries had just suffered catastrophic defeat in a total war. In Iraq we just took out an unpopular and debilitated government. Most of the Iraqi people felt, correctly, that they had not been defeated or conquered by us, which I suspect made it easier for them to ignore us when we told them to do things that they didn’t want to do.
Germany as a whole had had continuous parliamentary elections, relatively independent judges and considerable freedom of speech from 1871 (at the latest) to 1933. Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden had had constitutions since the 1820s. Many towns in Germany had had republican constitutions for more than 500 years. It is maybe not utterly surprising that the mechanisms of democracy took better after 1945 in Western Germany than after 2003 in Iraq, though I think the most important factor was the overwhelming number of Allied soldiers stationed without an expiry date all over Germany.
This is the kind of nuance I was looking for. Thanks!
HBD + commitment to long-term occupation (there are still major US military bases in Germany and Japan) are probably the key ingredients here.
Maybe it is the Finn in me speaking, but to me the main comparison of Iraq and Ukraine wouldn't seem to be anything about American moralism and overreach - after all, from a realpolitik point of view things seem to have gone quite well for the US, which has managed to bleed a geopolitical rival at some monetary cost and no cost in blood - but rather that the supposedly cynical, amoral and realistic Russia ended up getting itself into a worse quagmire than Iraq through a remarkably similar process, including the same tendentious rhetoric about nuclear weapons and human rights violations that US used in Iraq.
I, of course, am also aghast at the heartless monsters who would refuse to let the noble Estonian people have a choice, but perhaps more in the sense that it is very curious that many American conservatives seem to have subtly imbibed the same disdain-ranging-to-hatred towards the Baltic states for the simple desire to continue their national existence.
I have long maintained that if Gore had won in 2000 rather than Bush (and he almost did) that he would have also ended up invading Iran. When I present this idea most people scoff at it. But after reading your review, which mentions how strongly Gore supported it and the antipathy already present in the Clinton administration. Add to that the bureaucratic inertia, which would have mostly still been there (though the Dramatis Personae would have been different) and I feel that the situation you describe supports my assertion.
So what does everyone else think? Would the Iraq Invasion still have taken place if Gore was president? I say it would have.
Gore supported the first Iraq war, not the second. He argued against pre-emptive war. Al Gore's speech on Iraqhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/23/usa.iraq?CMP=share_btn_url
Vindicated in my lifelong hatred of Star Wars. Always thought it was suspicious how all the Empire's technology is designed from the ground up to be easily defeated by a small but determined band of plucky rebels. Also very on the nose how the sequels can't handle peace - afraid to tell a story in which the Republic has to handle the responsibility of peaceful democratic governance - and so just awkwardly resurrect a defeated enemy.
Why are Americans like this though? The Chinese don't, as far as I can tell, want every country in the world to be governed according to Xi Jinping Thought.
I guess the Soviets were evangelical - they encouraged communist movements across the Third World - and people say the neoconservatives were originally Trotskyists. The British introduced parliamentary democracy to a lot of their former colonies. Christians have long been very determined to make other people into Christians. Muslims seem pretty evangelical, they just don't have the political power to throw their weight around on the world stage.
The evangelical mindset is mostly alien to me, but it makes sense that ideologies which make a virtue of actively recruiting new followers would be more successful than ones that didn't.
I think as a non-American it's difficult to keep in mind the degree to which they actually take seriously all that stuff about the Revolution and the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and so on. Christians and Muslims and Communists I get, but I always struggle to remind myself that the Yanks, as the first modern democracy, can be just as persistent and dogmatic about their liberal ideas as any Wahhabist or Trotskyist.
Partly of course this is because I grew up in the shadow of the Iraq War, which massively discredited liberal evangelism by using it as the basis for an obviously insane military project. Easy to forget now how completely it changed the intellectual landscape.
Much accurate but much inaccurate or rather the company line, what people pretend is true rather than was really true. First, everyone new it would be a disaster to topple the government. We were discussing this in our think tank faculty rooms, that iraq would break into pieces. They had plans to invade iraq even before the idea of “lets say they had wmd’s” entered their heads.
The US went into a negative cycle during the genocide in Vietnam. You need to revisit the history of the 60s and 70s, if you didnt live through it. Though i appreciate that you just dont want to accept the Dick Cheney is evil line, you should. What is evil if not violent sociopathy for the pursuit of power and wealth? I think your greatest omission in this is to ignore the economics, they made a huge amount of money in these wars, personal as well as corporate transfers of wealth. The US exports instability as it drives weapon sales and increases the price of oil in which many of these individuals are heavily invested. To view foreign policy in terms of political ends is to create a very incomplete picture. They are just good at selling alternative narratives. Lets face it, the US loves dictators, just not dictators that don’t tow the company line.
What i want to end this with is that the invasion of Iraq was no mistake nor a failure for those that orchestrated it. It was incredibly successful in making many people a whole lot of money.
If Vietnam was a "genocide", then all wars are genocides.
To be fair to the people at the time -- we know now that 9/11 was a "one of".; they did not know that. (In fact, I have heard an Arab scholar argue that 9/11 was too successful; it stopped any further Islamist attacks -- because in the Islamist world, the next attack would have had to have been bigger, and that was impracticable).
Underlying this is the situation that US/Western "intelligence" was not up to the job. They did not know the true status of nuclear weapons in Iraq -- just like those intelligence agencies were surprised by the collapse of the USSR or by Russia's reaction to NATO expansion. If there is an action item from this story, it is that the existing "intelligence" agencies need to be levelled and then replaced with something that works better.
As to the Iraqi nuclear weapons story, we forget that the assertion about those weapons was only one of about 16 different justifications given for the attack. The bureaucracy treated the criticisms of Iraq as if they were arraigning Al Capone -- if we can't get him on murder charges, at least we can get him on tax evasion. That kind of shotgun approach may work in the vile US "legal" system, but it is no way to run foreign policy.
And let's remember that Saddam had already invaded three countries -- Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Arguably, Saddam himself was the weapon of mass destruction. If he had been left alone, no-one knows where it would have ended up. Just like no-one can say what would have happened if the Allies in the 1930s had reacted forcefully after Hitler went into the Sudetenland. Removing Saddam was justifiable -- doing it without a plan for what to do next was not.
Does Mazarr even mention Israel? Because they had an axe to grind with Saddam since he bombed them during the Kuwait War and the neocons are big supporters of Israel.
The decision had little to do with Israel.
As mentioned by another commenter, the white paper, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, suggests otherwise. Removing Saddam from power was an Israeli objective in its own right, as his Ba'athist ideology was shared with al-Assad's and largely supported the regime in Syria, and a blow to Assad's regional ally would reduce their footprint in Lebanon and help secure their northern border.
This is coupled with the fact that this white paper was not some random document with rather shocking predictive power, but was crafted by major figures in the Bush administration.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmzer (among others) were all attributed in the report's final form and held various positions within the administration (see Office of Special Plans).
I don't think it was the dominant factor, sure, but it would be weird if the neocons had exactly zero influence on the decision either.
Brilliant review. I remember all of that far too well.