Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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