Iraq After Twenty Years
At this time two decades ago, President George W. Bush resolved to invade Iraq and topple its brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. His decision was the most consequential American foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War, and arguably the most significant foreign policy action of the United States in the twenty-first century. As the invasion turned into a bloody occupation and triggered civil strife and insurrection, more than two hundred thousand Iraqis perished and almost nine million were displaced or fled abroad — about one-third of Iraq’s prewar population. Two decades later, a small contingent of American troops remain in the country helping to provide security for a struggling young democracy, whose constitution, elections, parties, and political institutions, at least in part, still bear the imprint of the American occupation policies.
For the United States, the invasion was a turning point. When it invaded Iraq, it was at the height of its hegemonic post-World War II power. But the war and insurrection exacted a human, financial, economic, and psychological toll on the United States that few had foreseen. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, almost nine thousand American soldiers and contractors died in Iraq and over thirty thousand Americans were wounded in action. Several hundred thousand veterans suffered brain injuries or experienced post-traumatic stress. The invasion, the war, and the occupation will have cost American taxpayers more than two trillion dollars. The conflict distracted policymakers’ attention from the mounting chicanery on Wall Street that precipitated the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. The war accentuated partisan rifts and sundered trust in government. Believing that President Bush and his advisers had lied about their motives and then acted incompetently, Americans grew more disillusioned with their leaders and institutions. Its consequences have ramified throughout American politics to this day. Faith in the American way of life slipped.
Geopolitically, the war enhanced Iranian power in the Persian Gulf, diverted resources and attention from the ongoing struggle inside Afghanistan, divided our European allies, and provided additional opportunity for China’s rise and Russia’s revanchism. Globally, it fueled the sense of grievance among Muslims, accentuated perceptions of American arrogance, complicated the struggle against terrorism, and dampened hopes for democracy and peace among Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. Rather than enhancing the spread of liberty, as the president hoped it would, the invasion and occupation of Iraq contributed to the worldwide recession of freedom, a development chronicled in 2007 and 2008 annual Freedom House studies of the state of democracy around the globe.
Why did this happen? Why did the United States invade Iraq and why did the decisions turn out so badly? As an historian of American foreign relations, I have been intrigued with these questions ever since I witnessed these developments as a visiting professor at Oxford University in 2002-2003. I was there to lecture about a book I was then writing about the origins and evolution of the Cold War. But Oxford students and professors pummeled me with questions about why my country was acting as it was. Why was it hyping the perception of threat and exaggerating the dangers of terrorism? Why was it so blind to the complicated socio-economic conditions inside Iraq and the religious rifts that an invasion was likely to accentuate? Why was it oblivious to the hatred that its own policies had spawned? So intense were the queries, so passionate the opposition to the trajectory of America’s policies, that I found myself almost daily trying to explain, if not to justify, the Bush administration’s behavior — my country’s behavior. Eventually, I decided to push aside the idea of speaking about the peaceful end to the Cold War and to focus on the frenzied aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. I called my Harmsworth lecture, “9/11 and American Foreign Policy.”
After I returned to the University of Virginia I finished my book on the Cold War, but I could not put out of my mind the ongoing traumatic developments in Iraq. Journalists began turning out impressive accounts of the Bush administration’s policies. Most were critical, stressing the malevolent influence of conservative nationalists such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; others focused on the naiveté and ideological zealotry of neo-conservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, respectively the Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary of Defense. The president himself often seemed like a minor actor easily manipulated by experienced, sophisticated, and devious advisers who distorted intelligence information and exaggerated threats in pursuit of American hegemony, or the region’s oil, or the interests of its ally Israel. The dysfunction portrayed inside the administration was not simply disturbing; it was ominous. Bush himself often was portrayed as a dumb zealot on a crusade to spread American ideals and God-given freedoms around the globe.
I found many of the accounts by journalists such as Bob Woodward, George Packer, Ron Suskind, and James Fallows to be informative, but not altogether convincing or explanatory. As a student of American foreign relations, I could not imagine the American president to be a minor actor. Nor had my previous assessments of U.S. foreign policy after World War I and World War II led me to believe that American policymakers were naïve idealists seeking mainly to spread American values or capitalist predators yearning to control the resources of the Global South, as many left-wing commentators claimed. Values and interests, I believed, sometimes clashed, but often intersected and reinforced one another. American foreign policy always was the result of a complicated mix of factors, heightened at times by perceptions of threat, and shaped by the contestation of many well-organized interest groups in a pluralist society. I did not think that the accounts I was reading captured the complex realities of decision-making in a presidential administration; I believed they were inspired by an understandable revulsion to the consequences of the Bush administration’s actions rather than a careful analysis of its motivations. Anyone observing developments in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 could not help but be distressed by the strife and destruction the American invasion had catalyzed.
I decided to explore the possibility of writing an analysis of the administration’s decision-making. I knew it would be difficult and would take time. In contrast to my studies of previous administrations’ policies, I realized there would be a dearth of archival materials. Most U.S. national security records remain classified for twenty-five or more years. Some researchers, journalists, and organizations, such as the National Security Archive, struggle to get specific documents declassified through Freedom of Information or Mandatory Declassification requests, and these appear on their own websites or those of agencies such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. But the processes are laborious and time-consuming. As of today, the vast trove of documents related to Bush administration foreign policies remain classified, despite occasional efforts by retired officials to get some documents released in conjunction with the publication of their memoirs, as did Rumsfeld, Feith, and William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs during the first administration of George W. Bush. Most of my own requests for documents have not been acted upon or have come back with huge redactions or outright rejections.
Fortunately, revealing documents can and did come from sources other than U.S. archival records. The British parliament conducted a comprehensive review — the Chilcot Inquiry — of the decision of the government of Tony Blair to go to alongside with the United States. Aside from interviewing extensively every leading member of Blair’s government, including more than a thousand pages with the prime minister himself and with Jack Straw, his foreign minister, the investigative committee, including renowned historians such as Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman, subpoenaed documents, memoranda, and intelligence estimates and put them on a website open to all researchers. Meanwhile, the U.S. government, albeit reluctant to declassify its own records, did open up captured Iraqi records and had some of them translated. The Iraqi documents that outline Hussein’s dealings with terrorist organizations and suicide bombings are especially illuminating. A volume of Saddam Hussein’s own tape recordings of key meetings also has been published by Cambridge University Press.
But what makes an assessment of Bush’s decisions to invade, liberate, and occupy Iraq so much more feasible today than a decade ago are the interviews with leading members of his administration. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia conducted an oral history of the Bush administration, and about two years ago released many (not all) of the interviews. One can now garner the impressions of top decision-makers such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, military leaders such as Generals Tommy Franks, George Casey, and Peter Pace, key diplomats such as Ryan Crocker, political advisers such as Karl Rove, and occupation officials such as Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in postwar Iraq. In addition, I conducted my own set of interviews with top policymakers across the government, including Vice President Cheney and key assistants on his staff, such as I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, as well as with the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. Unfortunately, President Bush himself refused requests for interviews. Yet his own attitudes and thinking can be gleaned from his speeches, press briefings, and conversations with his advisers and foreign leaders.
After years of interviews and research, I have concluded that much of what we think we know about the invasion of Iraq is misleading or exaggerated. Most emphatically, the United States did not go to war because an inattentive president was bent on war or was easily manipulated by his vice president or secretary of defense or by a conspiratorial group of neocon advisers. His decision was highly contingent; it was not preconceived or predetermined by the so-called Vulcans, the group of advisers who joined Rice to tutor the president about foreign policy before he was elected. Many of these advisers, such as Dov Zakheim, have written that Iraq was not even a key topic of their deliberations. When British officials such as Tony Blair or Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador, met with Bush prior to or after his election, they noted that Iraq seemed like a “grumbling appendix.” Moreover, I have concluded that Bush’s motivation was not an attempt to redress the failure of his father to overthrow Hussein after the first Persian Gulf War in 1991; nor was he preoccupied with retaliating over the Iraqi dictator’s attempt to kill his father during a trip to Kuwait in 1993 after he left office. Aides such as Michael Morell, who was the president’s daily CIA briefer during his first year in office, and the late Michael Gerson, his most important speechwriter, explicitly and persuasively rejected such allegations.
What emerges clearly from interviews with the president’s top advisers and from the memoirs of the most important officials in his administration is a portrait of a president vastly different than the one that has lodged itself in our collective memory. Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, wrote in his memoir that when he joined Rice’s NSC staff in the summer of 2001, “It took me just a few minutes . . . to see who was in charge. . . The caricature of [Bush] as lacking in intelligence was itself a joke.” Like so many of the advisers who came to work for the president and who had not really known him previously, Abrams was impressed with Bush’s energy, discipline, intelligence, self-confidence, and good humor. The president was straightforward, unpretentious, level-headed, honest, and easy to work with. He was a good listener, interactive in small groups, and incisive — if not always curious about the complex background of developments. His spiritual sensibilities and locker-room banter, however incongruous, garnered praise. Most of the people who came to work for Bush liked their president — and, more importantly, they deferred to him. Scooter Libby, for example, stressed to me that one of the biggest myths about the administration was that Vice President Cheney ran things. Richard Clarke, the president’s first counter-terrorist expert who became a fierce critic, agreed. It is just an “urban legend,” he wrote in his memoir, that Bush was the pawn of the vice president.
Bush was the key decision-maker inside the administration — not Cheney, not Rumsfeld, and not the neocons. He decided in early 2003 to invade Iraq. But he was not motivated by the fantasy of a democratic Iraq, or by hopes of nurturing a democratic peace. Nor were his advisers. Bush wanted a freer, more democratic Iraq to emerge if he deployed force and toppled Saddam, but that is not what motivated his decision to invade Iraq. In fact, when Rice circulated a memorandum in August 2002 saying that the aim of the administration was to create a democratic and unified Iraq, Rumsfeld bristled. And so did his neo-conservative advisers. “We should be clear,” Feith argued, “we are not starting a war to spread democracy. . . Would anybody be thinking about using military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover effects throughout the region? The answer is no.”
Bush and his advisers went to war to overcome their fear of another attack on Americans and to preserve American primacy. The attack on 9/11 killed more than three thousand Americans and ravaged the symbols of American power and capitalism — the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Policymakers were shocked, embarrassed, and infuriated. Accompanying the president on Air Force One as he flew back to Washington later that day, Morell, his CIA briefer, recounted his impressions: “I saw him transform from a president who really didn’t have a strong agenda, didn’t really have a clear path that he was on, that quite frankly was struggling. . . . I saw him transform from that to commander-in-chief and to somebody who almost instantaneously [knew he had a mission] to protect the country from this happening again; I saw that right in front of me.” Another attack was expected imminently. Bush told his advisers that they must not allow it to happen.
And then, just weeks after the attack on 9/11, anthrax spores began circulating in American mail. A reporter in Florida died after inhaling anthrax. More letters, laced with anthrax, were found. One of the letters read, “You cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” The anthrax scare raised the specter of catastrophic terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence analysts and policymakers riveted their attention on the prospect of an attack with biological and chemical weapons. “The threat reporting about additional attacks on the homeland was off the charts,” Morell emphasized in his interview with me. “Al Qaeda’s interest in anthrax was real.” Seth Carus, one of three bioterrorist experts on Cheney’s staff, labored with colleagues to determine whether the spores were of domestic or of foreign origin. The uncertainty compounded the anxiety. “It confirmed everybody’s view that there were going to be these follow-on attacks,” said Carus. “We were concerned,” recalled General George Casey, the director of Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, “about some type of chemical weapon deployed, either in a US city, or brought in, in a container, on a boat. I just remember we were wargaming and scaring ourselves to death about how ill-prepared we were to do it.”
In this atmosphere Bush’s attention gravitated to Iraq. The president wanted to thwart an opportunistic, ruthless dictator who previously had developed, possessed, and employed chemical and biological weapons, who repeatedly threatened their further use, who glorified suicide bombers, and who had extensive ties with terrorist groups, if not al Qaeda or its leader Osama bin Laden. But assessing what was happening in Iraq was tough and confusing. If you “put all the stuff on the table,” even now, said Morell, “you would come to the conclusion that he had a chemical weapons capability, that he had chemical weapons stockpiled, and that he had a biological weapons capability and he was restarting a nuclear program. Today you would come to that judgment based on what was on the table.” But what was on the table was circumstantial and flimsy, much of it coming from Iraqi Kurdish foes of the regime. We should have said, acknowledged Morell “that we had low confidence in that judgment and here is why.” But instead Morell told the president, “Hussein had a chemical weapons program. He’s got a biological weapons production capability.”
The evidence now suggests that Bush operated out of a real sense of fear, out of a sense of responsibility that his overriding task as president was to prevent another attack. He had a duty to protect the American people. He recognized that should he fail to do so, he would be held responsible. Bush and Cheney knew that they had minimized or shirked warnings of an attack the previous summer; they knew that there was embarrassing evidence that they had not done everything that might have been done to prevent 9/11. They “missed it,” Cheney crisply told me. They might be forgiven once, but not again. People would want to know, Rice acknowledged in her memoir, “why did you not do everything in your power to keep it from happening again.”
The record shows that policymakers were more concerned about preserving freedom at home than spreading it abroad. Bush framed the struggle as a civilizational battle over a way of life. Like many of his advisers, he felt keenly that “our way of life” really was at stake. “We must rid our world of terrorists so our children and grandchildren can grow up in freedom,” Bush declared. “By sowing fear,” Rumsfeld wrote, “terrorists seek to change our behavior and alter our values. Through their attacks they trigger defensive reactions that could cause us to make our society less open, our civil liberties less expansive, and our official practices less democratic — effectively to nudge us closer to the totalitarianism they favor.” This was an updated iteration of the fear of the garrison state, a concern that had inspired the struggles against Nazism and Communism. The proponents of the global war on terror felt this keenly; instinctively, they fell back on rhetorical tropes that resonated deeply in the American psyche. “If we don’t want our way of life to be fundamentally altered,” Wolfowitz explained in an interview on September 13, 2001, “we have got to go after the terrorists and get rid of them. That is why the stakes are so high.”
The evidence that we now have demonstrates that Bush and his top advisers were well aware that the intelligence the United States possessed about Iraq was highly ambiguous. Rumsfeld, for example, asked his general in charge of intelligence in October 2002 to assess the credibility of the evidence that they possessed. General Glen Shafer told him, “Our assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence.” He added that “we are struggling to estimate the unknowns.” And in conclusion, he reported that “we don’t know with any precision how much we don’t know.”
But what Bush did know was that Saddam once had possessed weapons of mass destruction, that he had used them, and that he had lied about them. What he knew was that in 1991 Saddam was much closer to developing a nuclear capability than analysts had deemed likely. Iraq’s capabilities certainly had diminished since that time as a result of inspections and sanctions; but in 2001 the inspectors were gone and the sanctions were eroding. And nobody was telling Bush that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Interviews and documents demonstrate that all Bush’s advisers sincerely believed that Hussein had WMD. Not only Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, but also Powell, Armitage, Rice and Hadley.
Their respective analysts did argue about the purposes of aluminum tubes that Hussein possessed and about the uranium yellowcake that he allegedly imported, but they did not argue about the fundamental issue: they all agreed that Hussein had WMD. “Not once in all my years in government,” acknowledged Richard Haass, at the time the head of policy planning inside the State Department, “did an intelligence analyst or anyone else for that matter argue openly or take me aside and say privately that Iraq possessed nothing in the way of weapons of mass destruction. If the emperor had no clothes, no one thought so or was prepared to say so.” Discussing his own beliefs, General Franks reflected that when he deployed troops to Iraq in 2003 “there was not a doubt in my mind [that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction]. Because of my talking to Bush,” he continued, “I can guarantee you that there was not a doubt in his mind.”
Yet there were doubts, many doubts, about Iraq’s links to al Qaeda. That relationship, according to the intelligence community, was “murky” — but so the relationship between Hussein and terror. In daily briefings, Morell told the president that “there was no Iraq involvement in 9/11 . . . zero; zippo; nothing.” Still, he also told Bush that Iraq was a terrorist state. “They conduct their own terrorism. Their intelligence service conducts terrorism [in] places around the world and they . . . give money, training, to a bunch of Palestinian groups. So, they were to some extent in bed with terrorism, not al Qaeda, but with their own terrorism and support of terrorism.” In Morell’s view, the president turned his attention to Iraq because he was ruminating, “what if this guy [uses] this stuff . . . against us or what if he were to give this stuff to one of these groups that he supports and they were to use it against us? I would have failed in my final responsibility.”
Morell had no doubt “that those links to terrorism . . . shaped the president’s thinking.” And it shaped the thinking of some of his top military chiefs: “Any power that could provide al Qaeda with nerve agents or anthrax was a major strategic concern,” commented General Franks. Peter Pace, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mused:
What else don’t we know? We didn’t see 9/11 coming. . . What might hurt really, really badly? Then you start thinking about Saddam Hussein, and you say, Ok, he’s got chemical weapons. We know that because he has used them on his own people, he has used them on his neighbors, so he’s got that for sure. He has a nuclear program that the Israelis blew apart, but we know about the part that they blew apart above the ground; we don’t know if he’s got anything underground. If chemical weapons were to get in the hands of the terrorists, which is possible, what might that lead to? So, . . . I’m thinking to myself, Hmm, OK, this is certainly a place from which the next attack could emanate. This guy is obviously a bad guy.
Bush thought so. He detested Saddam Hussein. He knew about the Iraqi dictator’s brutality. He learned that Hussein’s newspapers and propaganda organs boasted about 9/11. Bush wanted to make sure that the Iraqi dictator would not hand off his chemical or biological weapons to terrorists, any terrorists, that might seek to inflict harm on Americans. His advisers, notably Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, also wanted to make sure that Hussein’s WMDs would not deter American officials from exercising American power in the region on behalf of its interests and its allies. Hussein must not be allowed to “blackmail” the United States in the future, must not have the means to force Washington to self-deter. To gain reassurance, Bush and his advisers wanted Hussein to readmit inspectors and relinquish or destroy the very lethal weapons that they felt certain he still possessed. The only way to deal with Hussein, they resolved, was to intimidate him, to threaten him with the use of force. He must realize that his regime would be imperiled if he did not comply with the UN resolutions to allow inspections and relinquish and destroy his weapons of mass destruction.
Condoleezza Rice explained to the president that this strategy was called “coercive diplomacy” in academic circles (from which she came). Bush loved the concept. He believed it would force Saddam Hussein to comply with his promises or face extinction. Even leaders who did not want the United States to use force, such as France’s Jacques Chirac and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, nonetheless agreed that only the threat of force would persuade Hussein to end his defiance of UN resolutions. Most importantly, Hans Blix, the head of the UN monitoring team, concurred.
British documents now make clear that Bush took the diplomatic part of coercive diplomacy seriously. Even as he authorized the deployment of forces to the Persian Gulf in August 2002, he resolved to go to the United Nations and secure a new resolution demanding that Hussein allow the international inspectors back into Iraq, reveal all past efforts to conceal his weapons of mass destruction, and relinquish and destroy what he still possessed. Failure to comply, in Bush’s view, would justify an invasion and the removal of the dictator. Bush assigned the diplomatic tasks to Secretary of State Powell and to John Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations. They operated under the careful eye of the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. The hawks in the administration opposed this effort: they worried that Hussein would prevaricate and procrastinate, sow divisions among members of the Security Council, and make it more difficult to employ force should the president decide to do so. Bush rejected their advice, compromising time and again to get a unanimous resolution out of the Security Council. “We were giving Saddam one final chance,” the British prime minister subsequently explained: if the Iraqi dictator had complied, the invasion “would have been avoided. I made this clear to President Bush and he agreed.” The Americans, declared David Manning, Blair’s national security adviser, knew perfectly well “that we had given Saddam a get out of jail card if he chose to use it.”
Bush, however, grasped that he was vesting his credibility — America’s credibility — in the policy of coercive diplomacy. “Either he [Hussein] will come clean about his weapons or there will be war,” Rice bluntly stated. But Bush genuinely did want the diplomacy to work. After meeting with the president in September, Blix thought the United States “was sincerely trying to advance in step with the UN. It was affirmation that, despite all the negative things that Mr. Cheney and others had said about the UN and about inspection, the US was with us for now.” Yet Bush’s patience was not unlimited. He felt that Hussein was toying with him. He would not allow it to go on indefinitely. ”If we were to tell Saddam he had another chance — after declaring this was his last chance — we would shatter our credibility and embolden him.”
The outcome of “coercive diplomacy” depended on what Saddam Hussein would do, and his actions in the fall and winter of 2002-2003 did not inspire confidence. Grudgingly, he allowed inspectors back into Iraq. But Blix did not think that the Iraqi ruler had made a “strategic” decision to cooperate with the UN inspectors. He wrote in his memoir that his “gut” told him that Hussein “still engaged in prohibited activities” and that more military pressure might induce him to be more forthcoming. Like the Americans and the British, Blix thought that the Iraqi “declaration” of past efforts to deal with its WMD was totally inadequate. And when he and Mohamed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Baghdad, Hussein would not meet with them. Although UN documents reveal that the inspectors did gain more and more latitude inside Iraq and found hardly any incriminating evidence during January, February, and early March 2003, Blix continued to think that Hussein was cheating and deceiving even as he also became increasingly embittered by American impatience.
The president felt that he had displayed inordinate patience, and that further delays would erode America’s credibility among its allies in the region and demonstrate weakness once again to its adversaries, be they terrorists like bin Laden or rogue regimes like Hussein’s. America would seem like the paper tiger that it was alleged to be. When Saddam Hussein’s defiance seemed to challenge his resolve, Bush came to believe that he had no choice but to go to war.
Bush did not doubt that American power would prevail. Even before 9/11 he had committed his administration to enhancing American military might and to exploiting new technologies, notwithstanding the reality that the country’s capabilities already far surpassed any potential rival and its defense expenditures exceeded almost all of them combined. Moreover, the president and his advisers were buoyed by the success that they thought they had achieved in Afghanistan when they toppled the Taliban government in November and December 2001 and then successfully helped to install a new government in Kabul under Hamid Karzai. General Richard Myers, chairman of the JCS, waxed euphoric: “We had developed a new way to fight wars . . . [and] we had dared to use it.” The Americans, recalled David Manning, Blair’s national security adviser, “were fueled by the belief they had done something very important in Afghanistan.” Bush thought so, too. “I was feeling more comfortable as commander-in-chief,” he wrote in his memoir.
He was also confident that the outcome of an invasion, should he authorize it, would be benign — that the Iraqi people would embrace Americans as liberators. He liked to say that “out of the evil done to America” good would emerge. Iraqi dissidents assured him that American forces would be met “with flowers and sweets.” He sincerely thought that this was true. He recalled the images of Berliners joyfully knocking down a wall and East Europeans overthrowing communist tyrants and celebrating America for championing the cause of freedom throughout the Cold War. If he went to war to protect Americans and enhance American security, Bush expected that a liberated Iraq “would show the power of freedom.” “We’re working to make sure America is more secure,” the president declared, “but we’re also making sure that the Iraqi people can be free.” Freedom was America’s founding principle, its fundamental canon. “We believe that freedom is a gift from the Almighty God for every person.” Bush was unable to grasp the misgivings of Iraqi Kurds who distrusted the Americans for having abandoned them time and again in order to make deals with the regimes in Tehran or Baghdad, and he could not understand the skepticism of the Iraqi Shi’a who felt that his father had encouraged them to rise up after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and then did little to stop Saddam Hussein from massacring them.
Motivated by fear for American security, buoyed by American military power, and confident that Iraqis would embrace the opportunity to be rid of a brutal tyrant, Bush ordered American troops to invade Iraq on March 20, 2003. But he failed to plan adequately for the postwar situation. He had thought rather little about what it would take to establish democratic institutions, build civil society, and nurture freedom — all of them Herculean objectives. In this respect, the early accounts by critical journalists were entirely on the mark. Bush spent many hours on many occasions discussing the war plans with Rumsfeld, General Franks, and other members of his national security team and the military establishment, but he gave scant attention to what would happen after Iraqi forces capitulated and the tyrant was toppled or killed.
Rice occasionally tried to get Bush to focus on the security dimension of the postwar situation, and considerable planning did go on inside the many different branches of the American government. Still, key decisions about the nature of postwar governance were deferred until the last moment, and insufficient troops were deployed and trained for preserving stability and undertaking reconstruction after the initial fighting ended. This was not accidental. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had little interest in postwar Iraq, and General Franks felt his mission was accomplished once Iraqi forces capitulated and the regime collapsed. Everyone knew, said General Casey, that “Secretary Rumsfeld did not want to be involved in the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. He wanted to be out of there as fast as he could.” Even the official history of the U.S. Army in Iraq concludes that Phase IV of the war, the postwar stabilization phase, “was insufficiently detailed and largely uncoordinated.”
President Bush must bear ultimate responsibility for the postwar fiasco. He knew that his top Cabinet officials were feuding over the mechanisms for the postwar liberation and occupation, but for the most part he did not interfere. He knew that the challenges in Iraq were arduous, and his answer was to devolve responsibility to the newly appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer. When weapons of mass destruction were not found, the president shifted his focus from security to democracy-promotion and nation-building. But he had not undertaken or demanded the requisite planning; nor had he allocated the appropriate resources. He never resolved the differences between Rumsfeld, who wanted to leave Iraq as quickly as possible, and Bremer, who wanted to take time to build the “shock absorbers” of a civil society and who yearned for more troops to deal with the horrendous chaos that he immediately encountered.
Despite Bush’s many leadership qualities and the respect he garnered from his subordinates, the interviews, memoirs, and documents highlight his flaws as well as his strengths. He disliked heated arguments, and therefore he did not invite systematic scrutiny of the policies that he was inclined to pursue. He never directly asked his top advisers to examine and to debate whether invading Iraq was a good idea. He delegated too much authority and did not monitor implementation of the policies that he authorized. He did not order people to do things or criticize them for their failures. He allowed issues to linger in bureaucratic wonderlands, where their real-life outcomes had huge ramifications.
Fear, power, and hubris inspired Bush’s invasion of Iraq and, along with administrative dysfunction, contributed to the failure of the American occupation. Like most Americans, Bush and his advisers allowed their fears of another attack to overcome their more prudent inclinations; and their awe of American power to trump their judgment about the risks of employing it; and their pride in American values to dwarf their understanding of the people they were allegedly seeking to help. Like many Americans, Bush and his advisers conflated the evil that Saddam Hussein personified with a magnitude of threat that he did not embody.
While these failures are easy to chronicle, the new evidence allows us to better understand the fear, indeed the terror, that experienced policymakers felt after 9/11. Their worries mounted in the midst of the anthrax scare in the United States and persisted as a result of the ongoing terrorism and suicide bombings around the globe. Critics often forget how ominous the al Qaeda threat seemed and how vicious and manipulative Saddam Hussein really was. They overlook how imprecise the intelligence was, and the difficulties of gathering it. They ignore Hussein’s links to terrorists and the ongoing havoc caused by acts of suicidal terror. They trivialize how difficult it was to measure the threat that the Iraqi strongman constituted, how easy it was to magnify the danger that he posed, how tempting it was to employ American power (after the seeming success in Afghanistan), and how consequential it would be if America were attacked again.
The tragedy in Iraq occurred not because leaders were ill-intentioned, stupid, naïve, and corrupt. The tragedy occurred because earnest officials sought to protect the American people and homeland without fully assessing the costs and the consequences of war. We delude ourselves to think that disastrous decisions can be avoided in the future if we simply have more honest officials or stronger leaders, or if we eschew the use of force altogether.
History suggests more complex and challenging lessons. On the one hand, we should not conclude that the projection of American power is always wrong or bound to fail. We must realize that the international arena remains populated by rivals and enemies, by malicious dictators and repressive regimes; we still live in a world where aggression occurs, as in Ukraine today, and where atrocious acts of ethnic, religious, and racial repression remain commonplace. In such a world, American power must play an important role. At the same time, however, on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, its tragic aftermath should force us to think more deliberately about when, where, and how American power may be used responsibly, effectively, and justly beyond U.S. borders.
Officials must learn to reassess entrenched beliefs and assumptions, like the ones that posited Saddam Hussein’s continued possession of weapons of mass destruction. Early on, officials must rigorously assess the prospective costs of threatening the use of or employing American military power, an exercise that top policymakers mostly avoided and that their subordinates did poorly, belatedly, tentatively. Officials must recognize that threats entangle their credibility in certain outcomes, and credibility often obligates action that otherwise might be reconsidered, as might have been the case when the UN inspectors could not find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction during the winter of 2003. Priorities must be defined, something Bush was slow to do as he grappled with the overlapping yet sometimes competing goals of toppling Saddam Hussein or wresting control of his alleged weapons of mass destruction. “Coercive diplomacy” can become a viable strategy if diplomatic incentives — such as promising the end of sanctions — are designed to complement the means of coercion, an omission that diminished the possibilities that Saddam Hussein would see any reason to engage in a process of confidence-building. And if a strategy of “coercive diplomacy” seems desirable, skeptics and critics must have the opportunity to present their doubts. Acrimonious debates before an attentive president might well have been less harmful than the dysfunction aroused, as it was, by bureaucratic rivals operating tenaciously, and sometimes furtively, to achieve clashing goals.
Good intentions, we can conclude, will not compensate for administrative dysfunction and insufficient prudence, for a dearth of thought and a failure of competence. Self-confidence must be chastened by self-doubt. Too much fear, too much arrogance, and too much faith in the use of military force produced tragedy. They will do so again, if we do not study the past honestly and apolitically, and wrestle with extrapolating difficult, tough-minded, and ideologically unsatisfying conclusions.