Fred Kaplan
Nearly two decades have passed since President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, arguably the greatest strategic blunder in American history. It led to the deaths of more than 4,400 US military personnel and (according to the research group Iraq Body Count) up to 208,000 Iraqi civilians, to say nothing of the destabilization of the Middle East and the deadly convulsions that followed—sectarian violence, the emergence of ISIS, and a refugee crisis larger than any since World War II, among other calamities. And yet we still don’t understand just why the US went to war.
Conventional wisdom lays the blame on neoconservatives, mainly midlevel officials of the Reagan administration who, in their exile during Bill Clinton’s presidency, founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think tank that advocated a foreign policy stressing “US preeminence” to “secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace’” through, if necessary, the forcible removal of hostile dictators, not least Saddam Hussein.
“Regime change” in Iraq had been a neocon cause ever since Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, stopped short of sending US troops northward to Baghdad after ousting Saddam’s invading army from Kuwait in 1991. Two high-ranking officials in the administration of the younger Bush—Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney—had been prominent figures in the PNAC and, once back in power, pushed its agenda with new fervor.
Bush, who was the governor of Texas before he entered the White House, had no roots in that faction of the Republican Party and no background—or interest—in foreign policy. His national security adviser during his campaign and his first term as president, Condoleezza Rice, was a firm adherent of realpolitik, and she frowned on humanitarian intervention, touted the balance of power among nations as essential to maintaining peace, and had written, in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, that the best way to confront rogue regimes harboring nuclear ambitions—such as Saddam’s—was through “a clear and classical statement of deterrence”: If you nuke us or our allies, we’ll nuke you in response. During one of that year’s election debates, it was the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, who broadly advocated military intervention to promote freedom and democracy around the world. In pointed contrast, Bush called for a strong but “humble” foreign policy.
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were more interested in maintaining American power than in flighty goals of spreading democracy. The two came into office with no special animus toward the Iraqi government. Rumsfeld, as a special envoy for President Reagan, had met Saddam in the early 1980s to discuss their common interests in Iraq’s war against Iran. Cheney, as Bush Sr.’s defense secretary, had defended, perhaps sincerely, the decision not to oust Saddam in 1991. In the first several months of the younger Bush’s presidency, neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld expressed much support for Iraqi regime change—despite memos from Libby and Wolfowitz attempting to rally them to the cause.
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