Abstract
The US decision to invade Iraq was the result of the congruence in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks between the neoconservative movement that provided the second tier of decision-makers, the Bush administration, and the central hawkish conservative players in the cabinet, especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.1 The chief consideration was maintaining US prestige as a strong international leader.
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Notes
On neoconservatives in the administration, see Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 14. On the central role of Rumsfeld and Cheney, see
James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking Books, 2004);
Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and the Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
Harvey correctly denounces the error of “neoconism”—tracing the invasion of Iraq solely to the influence of neoconservatives. Harvey also makes the important counterfactual point that had Al Gore been elected president in 2000, his administration would have still invaded Iraq. However, this argument is dependent on the debatable assumptions that a Gore presidency would have faced the exact same sequence of events as the Bush administration, and, as a result, that its election would not have affected in any way events such as September 11, the intervention of Afghanistan, the siege of Tora Bora, relations with allies, and the decision to conduct a ground invasion of Iraq. Frank Harvey, Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic, and Evidence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
The neoconservatives were actually critical of Bush’s initial foreign policy of containment toward Iraq. Reuel Marc Gerecht, “Liberate Iraq,” Weekly Standard, May 14, 2001; Reuel Marc Gerecht, “A Cowering Superpower,” Weekly Standard, July 30, 2001. On the secondary importance of neoconservatives in the administration, see Max Boot, “Myths About Neoconservatism,” in The Neocon Reader, ed. Irwin Stelzer (New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. 45–52; on the enclave plan see Robert Kagan, “A Way to Oust Saddam,” Weekly Standard, September 28, 1998; on Chalabi, see Jane Mayer, “The Manipulator,” New Yorker, June 7, 2004.
Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: The Neocons and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 135–7; also see
Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs 79 (January/ February 2000): 45–62.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Introduction: National Interest and Global Responsibility,” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign Policy, ed. Kagan and Kristol (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), pp. 3, 4, 12.
Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 118.
Paul Wolfowitz, “Remembering the Future,” National Interest 59 (Spring 2000): 44.
Ibid. p. 26; Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century (Washington: Project for the New American Century, 2000), pp. iv–v, 22–49.
Trauma represents “exposure to an event so shocking that our everyday expectations of how the world works are severely disrupted.” Jenny Edkins, “Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11,” International Relations 16, no. 2 (2002): 245–6.
Bush, “Address to Joint Session of Congress.” Also see Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), p. 79.
Frank Bruni, “For President a Mission and a Role in History,” New York Times, September 22, 2001; Condoleeza Rice, “Speech at Johns Hopkins University,” April 29, 2002 , at merln.ndu.edu./archivepdf/iran/WH/20020429–9.pdf;
Dick Cheney, “Remarks to the Council of Foreign Relations,” February 16, 2002, at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/cheneyiraq.htm; Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 297–9, 315–7;
Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2003), pp. 78–80, 82–3.
For a discussion of Iraq in terms of concerns for prestige that stresses the significance of the individual psychology of Bush decision-makers, see Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 459–80.
David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 28–9.
Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), pp. 203, 210–2, 282, 312–4.
Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2008), pp. 231–2, 226–36. Also see Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 38–9.
Bob Woodward, State of Denial (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 84–5.
Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), pp. 119–20; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, p. 346.
Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (London: Verso, 2002).
Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 32; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 16–7; Rice, No Higher Honor, pp. 170–1.
The label WMD obscures the fact that these weapons vary considerably in their capacity for deployment, ease of acquisition, and destructiveness. Joseph Cirincione, Jessica Matthews, and George Perkovich, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004), pp. 52–4.
Paul Wolfowitz, “The United States and Iraq,” in Future of Iraq, ed. John Calabrese (Washington: The American Enterprise Institute, 1997), pp. 107–13, 110.
“Bush Links End of Trading Ban to Hussein Exit,” New York Times, May 21, 1991; Christian Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq (New York: Doubleday, 2006), pp. 235–6.
George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 46.
The most extensive overview is by Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), chaps. 5, 7, 11.
Maria Ryan, “Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Myth and Reality of US Intelligence and Policy-Making After 9/11,” Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 4 (December 2002): 55–76, 55. Lawrence Freedman writes that “the prominence of intelligence assessments in justifying a war against Iraq was really without precedence.”
Lawrence Freedman and Ephraim Karsh, “War in Iraq: Selling the Threat,” Survival 46 (Summer 2004): 8.
Jervis argues that the intelligence failure on Saddam’s weapons was general, not limited only to the US intelligence community. But as he admits, proving intelligence has failed owing to misperception does not mean that the decision to invade Iraq was caused by the intelligence failure. Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), chap. 5, esp. pp. 124–6, 134.
Jonathan Renshon, Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (Westport: Praeger, 2006), chap. 6;
Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 115–6, chaps. 3–4;
Jack Levy, “Preventive War and the Bush Doctrine: Theoretical Logic and Historical Roots,” in The Bush Doctrine: Psychology and Strategy in an Age of Terrorism, ed. Stanley Renshon and Peter Suedfeld (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 175–200.
Robert Jervis, “Reports, Politics, and Intelligence Failures: The Case of Iraq,” Journal of Strategic Studies 29 (February 2006): 20–1;
Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Political Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Jervis contests this was an instance of groupthink for the intelligence community, since groupthink only takes place in small groups, not in organizations, but groupthink is still possible among the principal decision-makers. Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, pp. 129–30.
Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 191–2. On denial, see Jervis, “Reports,” pp. 7–8;
John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (New York: New Press, 2004), pp. 308–15, 320–1, 344–6; Kenneth Pollack, “Saddam’s Bombs: We’ll Find Them,” New York Times, June 20, 2003.
For a similar point, see Paul Pillar, Intelligence and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 35–6.
Paul O’Neill, the former secretary of Treasury, as well as the antiterrorism czar Richard Clarke intimated that the decision was taken in January 2001, but, even though Iraq was discussed, prior to September 11, Bush continued the policy of keeping Saddam in the box. Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 70–6, 81–6; Clarke, Against All Enemies, pp. 264–6.
Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, pp. 425–7; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 3–4, 19; Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, “The Path to War,” Vanity Fair 516 (May 2004): 228–32.
David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 224–5, 231–9;
George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002, at http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/bush.speech.txt/.
Richard Betts, “Suicide from Fear of Death?” Foreign Affairs 82 (January/February 2003): 34–43.
Ole Holsti, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy,” in Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert Lieber (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002), pp. 22–4.
Mohammed ElBaradei, “The Status of Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: An Update,” March 7, 2003, http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2003/ebsp2003n006.shtml;
Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), pp. 208–11.
Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), pp. 82–3, 85–91,118–24, 127–31.
Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), pp. 423–4.
Noah Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations in the Post 9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005);
Stephen Pelletiere, America’s Oil Wars (Westport: Praeger, 2004);
Michael Klare, “Deciphering the Bush Administration’s Motives,” in The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions, ed. Michah Sifry and Christopher Cerf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), pp. 392–402.
Peter Grier, “Is It All About Oil?” Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 2002; Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties (New York: Scribner, 2004), pp. 222–6.
Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), pp. 53–65;
Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).
Michael Gordon, “U.S. Is Preparing Base in Gulf State to Run Iraq War,” New York Times, December 1, 2002; Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt, “US Will Move Air Operations to Qatar Base,” New York Times, April 28, 2003. Far from being coerced into accepting US bases, Qatar induced the United States to open a base on its territory in order to strengthen its own security vis-à-vis Tehran and Riyadh. Steven Wright, “Foreign Policies with an International Reach: The Case of Qatar,” in Transformation of the Gulf Politics, Economics, and the Global Order, ed. David Held and Kristian Ulriksen (London: Routledge, 2011).
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Onea, T.A. (2013). The United States Supreme: The Invasion of Iraq. In: US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_6
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