I’ve been thinking a lot about the war this month. I’ll be teaching it in the next few weeks at school because of the decade anniversary (March 20). My quick sense is that any defensible theory behind the war was simply buried by an execution so awful, disorganized, mismanaged, and incompetent that it invalidated the whole premise.
The whole episode became just shameful, and regularly teaching and conferencing with non-Americans these last few years has made this so painfully clear. My students particularly are just bewildered to the point of incredulity. Again and again, the basic thought behind the questions is, ‘what the hell happened to you people? 9/11 made you lose your minds there?’ *sigh* (NB: when Asians ask me about guns in the US, the ‘what the hell is wrong with you people?’ bafflement is the same.)
Hence, the post title purposefully implies that the invasion was a bad idea. But to be fair, that should be the first question: what, if any, arguments at this point can be mustered to defend the war? IR should try to answer this seriously, because I’m all but positive that the journalistic debate will be not be driven by the state of Iraq or US foreign policy today, but by the high personal reputational costs faced by so many pundits supportive of the war. It would not surprise me at all if folks like the Kagans, Krauthammer, or Thomas Friedman miraculously found that the war was worth it after all. McNamara-style mea culpas only happen at the end of a career (so I give Sullivan and Fukuyama credit for theirs on Iraq). But IR should be more honest than that.
So, if you knew, 10 years ago, what Iraq looked today, and what it took to get here, would you support the war? I mean this seriously, even if the answers is almost certainly no, because Iraq is a better place today than it was then. The shaky Maliki government is definitely an improvement on Saddam; I don’t think that is up for much debate and should be admitted. The question is whether it was worth the cost. And the cost should include the roughly 125,000 Iraqi civilians killed. I find American pundits tend to focus solely on the much smaller number of US casualties, which is deeply inappropriate.
For myself, the answer is no. And I bet that is the opinion of over 90% of IR. I have no data for that intuition, but, as Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth just noted, IR as a discipline seems to strongly support US retrenchment today, and much of that is because of the Iraq War.
The second question then, assuming you think the war was a an error – and I bet many of us think it was a downright catastrophe – is how culpable IR is. Last year, I argued: “To our credit, just about everyone in IR was uncomfortable with the Iraq War before it started. (Remember that ad in the NYT against the war?) It’s true we didn’t oppose it that much, but at least we didn’t become the cheerleaders for it as happened at the big op-ed pages and DC think-tanks. The national security state clampdown at home makes us fairly uncomfortable (especially as academics strongly committed to free speech), as does the inevitable nativism and militarism stirred up by a decade-plus of war. The US public’s indifference to the huge numbers of brown Muslims we have killed in the last decade is horrifying (‘we don’t do body-counts’), a point Vikash has made again and again. US basing is way beyond any reasonable threat assessment to the US homeland. My guess is that most of us not only empirically think retrenchment is coming, but also desperately want it too. We may have shared the neocon intoxication with US power for a few years after 9/11, but my sense is that IR now is really, really nervous about what the GWoT is doing to America. Again, we study war, but we’re not the Kagans.”
I think this is still accurate. We didn’t oppose the war as well as we probably should have, but we did turn against it pretty quickly – certainly sooner than the pundit class. Does that mean we ‘saw the light,’ or just that we are fair weather hawks? Neocons will surely accuse us of the latter – academic wimps unwilling to see through our convictions.
I think IR bears a special burden for the US use of force overseas, because, more than any other identifiable section of academia, we study that. Yes, the DC think-tanks also work in this area, as do diplomatic historians. But at the risk of cheerleading for our discipline, I believe IR conducts more basic research than these other two, and we’re far less co-opted than the think-tank set. We generate a lot of deep theory about how world politics works, particularly on the causes and consequences of war. Furthermore, a lot of us study US foreign policy specifically – just go open an random copy of International Security to see how much ‘America’ actually dominates our supposedly ‘international’ discipline.
So if there is anyone who should know what they are talking about, it should be us, right? If we can’t pronounce meaningfully on our country’s choices regarding force after 60 year of studying this stuff, then wth are we being paid for? And in fact, I am willing to bet that most of us were asked 10 years ago what we thought about the coming invasion by people who respected our opinion because of our supposed expertise. You probably talked at least to your family and friends, and they listened attentively. You probably changed a few minds. Again, this is what we do, right?
It is of course true that the policy world doesn’t really consult us in-depth on lots of foreign policy decisions, and certainly the GOP, which genuinely relishes blowing off academics as lefty egg-heads, doesn’t give a damn what we think. But as teachers, we do obviously impact the debate at the grassroots level. At the very least, we probably helped convince our family, friends, students, etc. Every class we taught all across the country where this inevitably came up, every panel we sat on, every local media appearance we made, etc. – all that helped shape the public discourse from below. As Fallows notes, there was a lot of silence and ‘soft complicity’ (my term) in 2002 from journalism and academia, because we didn’t speak up louder even though the data that Saddam was a threat to the US homeland were weak, and even though we had lots of good theories that predict social chaos in decapitated, deeply divided societies. It’s true there was little enthusiasm and a lot of hemming-and-hawing from us, but there was little clear opposition.
All of this is to suggest that we probably did a poor job at providing the needed pushback to the 2002 Bush-Cheney campaign for the war. As Drezner notes, the exculpatory out we’ve always used – that 80% of us opposed the war – is based on a survey take in 2005. Consonant with Drezner’s recollections, my own memory too is that colleagues in IR were hesitantly supportive at the time. But then I was still in grad school, so I don’t have the sense of what was going on at APSA and ISA as much as others will. (Please speak to this point in the comments if you are able.) But at least at Ohio State, where I was at the time, I don’t remember a meaningful PS/IR effort to oppose the war. For myself, I must admit that I supported the war at the time – arguably the greatest professional error in my career (not that my opinion means much, but still, in the interest of full disclosure).
On the other hand, there was (thankfully!) that New York Times ad in which 33 big names in security studies argued against the war in September 2002. Also, Walt and Mearsheimer also put out a Foreign Policy piece against the war in January 2003. Indeed, reading these two pieces today, I am impressed how prescient they were. Here’s Walt’s own 10-year retrospective now. He’s admirably restrained; imagine the neocon gloating and chest-thumping about wimpy academic liberals who don’t know the real world of blood and iron had they been right. Ech – where’s Donald Rumsfeld to yell at the media when you need him? (Indeed, it’s amazing how Krauthammer and all the rest still command a huge audience despite their continued unrepentance; is America that hawkish?) Finally this much wider group of ‘Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy’ argued for more restraint as early as 2004, presumably also motivated heavily by Iraq. DoM was very heavily involved in that. There was a formal academic write-up as well. But of course, that was after the war began to go off course. On that score, Walt and Mearsheimer’s gutsy pre-war stand is particularly noteworthy.
Finally, all this then raises the question of how we should respond to efforts to confront Iran. My own sense is that IR almost monolithically opposed to that too, but we aren’t really saying much about that either. Is that a mistake? Are supposed to be more engaged in policy? Should we circulate an open letter? I don’t know of any effort to do so.
Cross-posted at Asian Security Blog.
Several problems here:
1. The statement that Iraq is a better place today is not grounded in any voices from Iraq. As someone who studies Iraq on the ground I can tell you that opinions on this are very divided, but most still feel Iraq is worse today. This knee-jerk statement is generally grounded on a belief that Saddam was evil incarnate rather than any sensible assessment of life in Iraq.
2. If you are concerned about how much ‘America’ (the United States…) is dominating the discipline then pieces like this do little to help.
3. The principal problem vis-a-vis Iran is Israel. If you want tips on what to do then Walt and Mearsheimer are a good place to start. The difficulty with this, however, is that the lack of critical thinking in U.S.-IR prevents most from even contemplating advocating action against Israel.
Mearsheimer, Walt, and other Realists opposed Iraq war too.
https://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/04/30/what_if_realists_ran_us_foreign_policy_a_top_ten_list
Is the ‘principal problem vis a vis Iran’ really Israel (in general – rather than specifical on the possibility of an attack on Irans nuclear facilities) I’m personally no ‘fan of Israel’ but US policy makers/academics and politicians are very quick to pass the buck on failed policies when the source of that failure might be closer to home
I would say it is. While deep (and largely Orientalist) animosities emanate from the U.S. towards Iran, the recent ‘war scares’ are largely driven by Israeli lobbying… Nobody else wants another war in the Middle East. The problem, too, is of Israel’s making given its own undeclared nuclear program.
But is the Israel alliance and by extentsion power of the lobby not a symptom of US policy in the Mid East rather than the cause..I mean current US policy towards Iran can just as likely be traced back to the fall of the Shah/hostage crisis and the manner in which the relationship has evolved since then (also constrained by the Saudis)..leaving aside the potential attack on Iranian Nuke facilities, how different would US policy towards Iran be without Israel and the lobby do you think?
The point vis-a-vis Israel is that Israel is the motivating factor behind most Iranian acts perceived as ‘aggressive.’ Although there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has a nuclear program, we believe it does largely because Israel does not want another state to have even a latent capacity to develop weapons and threaten its regional hegemony. Israeli forces have assassinated many civilians inside Iran, and elsewhere; they are escalating events vastly. (Note that any potential Iranian/Hizbullah counterstrikes (Burgas) came after Israeli actions). The U.S. would no doubt still be very antagonistic towards Iran- because generally the U.S. is irrational when it comes to people with beards- but we would be unlikely to be at this same stage of escalation without Israel.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21703819
interesting piece, much thanks!
I was in Chile during the initial campaign to gin up support for the invasion. I recall being asked by Chilean academics if the US really intended to invade Iraq. This was when Hans Blix was still trying to head off the invasion and the farcical attempt at securing UN legitimation was going on. I thought that the Bush regime definitely would invade Iraq, mostly because the humiliation of 9/11 was still too strong. It was apparent to everyone I spoke with that the planned invasion was not only immoral but stupid. Of course more people mobilized around the world to protest the pending war than ever before or since. I came back to the US in February 2003, after living abroad 4 years. It was surreal; the run up to the war was like Germany on the eve of war in “All Quiet on the Western Front.” It is still hard for me to believe that there were thoughtful people who felt ambivalent about or supported the invasion.
I actually think the best case for supporting the war retrospectively is to *not* start with this: “So, if you knew, 10 years ago, what Iraq looked today, and what it took to get here, would you support the war? ”
I think a better place to start is to say: suppose the US never invaded and then the Arab Spring touched off a civil war similar to that which occurred from 2004-2006, but without the US military (or anyone else) there to mitigate any of the violence at all, or to support any sort of representative government (however imperfect it may be), or to buy off local leaders and bring an end to the violence more quickly than otherwise would have occurred. You’re looking at a Syria-type situation, which is (arguably, but probably) no better than what actually happened, could have been a great deal worse, and would have been less likely to conclude in a way from which any positives may be taken at all. *Then* would you still have supported the invasion, even given the actual outcome?
I recognize that that’s a helluva alternative scenario. But the probability of it is nonzero just as well. Even with all that, it still may have not made sense to go in. But it seems probably correct to say that Iraq was not on an upward trajectory in 2002. Even if life under Hussein was somewhat better than it is now (and opinions differ! certainly Baathists don’t think so), Hussein wasn’t going to live forever; anyway, at some point a civil war was a fairly high likelihood. Add in the fact that a semi-regular autonomous anti-regime militia with few scruples (Peshmerga) was already formed by the time of the invasion (unlike Syria) and it could’ve gotten ugly. Fast. Even uglier and faster than it *did* get.
I.e., I think the best contemporary argument for the invasion is that a key state in a key region was eroding, and having the US military there to manage a transition to a new (and hopefully more stable and equitable) state was better than not having it, on balance and all things considered and taking a medium-to-long-run view. Again, there are certainly arguments against that argument and I don’t know that I believe it myself. But it is worth considering. If the US hadn’t invaded it’s wrong to think that nothing else would have happened.
I guess it comes down to whether you think the US invasion caused the Iraqi civil war, or whether the contradictions and fractions within Iraqi society caused it and the US invasion just put a match to the kindling. If the former, okay; but I’ve yet to see that case made explicitly in persuasive form. If the latter, you have to think that some other match would have started the blaze eventually.
As for Mearsheimer/Walt… their critique was from the perspective of American security, and deterring threats to it. If your starting assumption is anything other than that then their argument is irrelevant.
It is quite easy to make the case for the U.S. being the direct immediate cause of the ‘Iraqi civil war’; they invaded, put thousands of men with guns out of jobs, funded the Peshmerga, and trained/supported/assisted Shia’ death squads (see recent Guardian/BBC report). And that is all without their own troops various massacres (see Iraq War Logs). A more interesting question is whether a civil war in the proper sense occurred in Iraq when so much of the supposed ‘sectarianism’ was generated by U.S. policy.
“Direct immediate cause” I’ll interpret as “proximate cause”, in which case I agree completely. But that’s very different from being the “fundamental” or “foundational” cause, which is what I’m saying (or, really, asking; I don’t know enough about the internal politics of Iraq to advance a strong argument).
Perhaps some sectarianism was generated by US policy. Perhaps that sectarianism would have been generated by almost any significant shift from the status quo, as it has in other countries both in and around MENA (some of which, compared to Iraq, had more well-developed civil societies and nothing which is comparable to the Peshmerga). That tends to happen in ethnic conflicts which begin under conditions of economic scarcity: everything is sorta-kinda fine right up until the moment that it isn’t.
The last time a group challenged the Iraqi regime Saddam gassed them. How do you think he, or his execrable sons, would have responded to the Arab Spring? Do you think Iraq’s internal frictions would have gotten better or worse with another decade of sanctions plus predation by the Hussein family?
It isn’t obvious that things would be better than they are now, is all I’m saying.
I don’t mean “ethnic” to be strict, here. I should have written “identity conflict” but that seems horribly general. “Ethnic conflict”, rightly or wrongly, is a term used in a lot of the literature.
The difficulty with this counterfactual is simple; how many more people would Saddam have killed than the U.S.-managed? I doubt he would have managed more. Saddam, for example, would not have fired depleted uranium shells in Fallujah leading to the vast number of birth defects ongoing today… to simply try to quantify this counterfactual difference is perverse. The only moral distinction I can find is that an internal uprising against Saddam is always going to have more legitimacy than a U.S.-led occupation and installation of quasi-democratic/really just as bad as Saddam government. Syria may be terrifying but alhamdulillah the U.S. are not on the ground for the future of Syria.
No, he would’ve just gassed Fallujah. Or steamrolled it. Or (like Assad) sent in the MIGs.
Trying to quantify this may be perverse, but you started the body-counting. Anyway, when weighing counterfactuals it’s probably unavoidable. The sanctions regime (i.e. status quo c. 2002) was killing perhaps a hundred thousand people a year (according to one UN estimate that I recall); almost certainly tens of thousands. Post-invasion, the US was trying to keep civilians alive at least at the level of policy; the “internal uprising” they were combatting was targeting civilians deliberately (often on sectarian grounds); Saddam had (and would have) targeted civilians deliberately. Who knows what the body count would’ve looked like under other scenarios. My point is that the answer is not obvious on its face. You can’t just pretend that the years 2003-2012 would not have happened absent an intl intervention. Something else would have happened, and most of those possibilities are really awful; even a continuation of the sanctions status quo was horrible and getting worse.
I have no idea why “internal uprisings” are ipso facto morally preferable to international interventions (see prev paragraph). Or, even if they are, why they should be preferred when they are likely to fail while an international intervention is more likely to succeed. I’d rather start from goals and principles and then see which side is more likely to fulfill those goals and uphold those principles.
Again, the U.S. destroyed Fallujah; I dont see what your point is that Saddam might have done the same.
The sanctions regime was only kept in place because of U.S./U.K. demands; otherwise it would have collapsed, those deaths are also the direct responsibility of the U.S./U.K. (See Joy Gordon ‘Invisible War.’) The U.S. supported the militias targeting civilians, trained them, and armed them. (See recent Guardian/BBC report).
I fail to see what the goals and principles of the U.S. were; illegal invasion on false pretences, torture, supporting death squads, pillaging Iraqi wealth… The only ‘principles’ were rhetorical.
Internal uprisings are preferable simply vis-a-vis issues of legitimacy. Tunisia and Egypt show that Syria is not a necessary end result of sudden internal change.
Again all your arguments rest on the simple notion that Saddam was an evil man, which itself is based only on the morally dubious argument that Bush/Blair/Obama/Etal get some moral ‘free pass’ for the consequences of their actions merely because they rhetorically claim some transcendent principal. Nonsense, in short.
We disagree about a lot and that’s fine, but I must object to your last paragraph. It’s not only wrong — I think the problem in Iraq was much bigger than just one bad guy — it’s a complete misrepresentation of what I’ve written. None of my arguments reduce to “Saddam was bad therefore any action taken against him is justifiable”. In fact, as I’ve noted, I opposed the invasion.
Your argument (really more of an assertion) does come dangerously close to “the US is bad therefore any action take by it is damnable”: there were no problems in Iraqi society until the US got there, there was no risk of a civil war happening absent a US invasion, there is no possibility of more people dying if the US didn’t get involved, Saddam was bad but no worse than Bush/Blair, etc. You can believe that if you wish, but you can’t just ascribe to me the opposite view to yours just because I disagree.
I’m not giving, and have not given, any American or British policymaker a “moral free pass”. But at the same time I’m not so willing to engage in casual moral equivalence either. Once again: between Wolfowitz and al-Zarqawi I know which side I’m on. I can’t actually tell which you’d prefer, and that’s all kinds of problematic. (al-Zarqawi was an Arab but not an Iraqi; however many of his supporters were, which I guess would make his campaign more “legitimate” than Wolfowitz’s in your eyes. Not mine. If you’d rather substitute in al-Sadr then be my guest.) And I *am* arguing that the question of whether the Iraq war was “worth it” must take into account some feasible counterfactual which you have thus far not presented. (Iraq in 2002 looked absolutely nothing like Tunisia, or even Egypt, c. 2011. It’s irresponsible to claim that it did.)
You have so far spent this whole thread blaming the US/UK for literally every single thing that went wrong in Iraq, while minimizing the culpability of Hussein (who was something more than just a “bad guy”), AQI, or anyone not American. And so UN sanctions become US/UK sanctions. And so the corruption of those sanctions via oil-for-food, which enriched Saddam while it starved the citizenry, become deaths on the US/UK’s hands. That, I think, is not a reasonable position.
I had a longer reply here but it got lost as my internet dropped. First apologies if my tone/coherency was off (I am writing these rather quickly I have to admit!).
Then, on sanctions please do read Joy Gordon, Invisible war (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674035713), especially chapter 7 on the fiction of Saddam starving his people. I can scan a copy if you like. It is notable that malnutrition levels in Iraq are worse now than under Saddam under sanctions. This does not mean Saddam was not a despot but simply that a despotic leader like Saddam under crippling sanctions was able to feed (clothe and give electricity) to his people better than a supposedly democratic state today. This indicates a real problem.
My counterfactual:
No invasion. No-fly zone still in force in the North (Kurdistan). WMD now removed under sanctions/continued inspections (as we know was the case). 2011 emerges [note that Egypt/Tunisia in 2001 also looked very different to Egypt/Tunisia in 2001], and Baghdad protests. Closest analogy; Libya, but with a no-fly zone already in force in the North, thus easier to extend and assist; no occupation, however, and Iraqi infrastructure/army remains in place. Many tensions still remain; ethnic, religious, political- instability and violence is thus possible, but with the state not literally gutted by the U.S.-occupation then likely to be less so than what occured.
Thoughts?
I don’t think that counterfactual is unreasonable at all. I think the odds of Iraq being more like Libya than Syria are lower than you, if only because I think Iran and Saudi Arabia would have taken a strong interest, and probably armed/funded opposed groups in competition for the state. Then there’s the Peshmerga. So the probability of a prolonged civil conflict was pretty high, in my view. I could certainly be wrong about that.
There are so many other alternative scenarios here though (1) perhaps not realistic in the wake of 9/11 but a reevaluation of policy towards Iraq and general priorities in the region (2) perhaps not realistic but at least putting the effort into developing a coherent post invasion plan/international coalition (3) the fact that the US would (surely?) have completly different options vis a vis the Arab Spring if not for the Iraq war…..etc
On the topic of contradictions and fractions within Iraq, an expert on Iraqi politics/history is going to be able to answer this better than me..but for a starter we shouldn’t take these fractions for granted (or that they would have decended into sectarian violence)..a lot of new research has shown that Saddam’s regime was not explicitly sectarian (it was concerned with enemies of the regime, not sectarian identies .. although these did tend to fall along those lines) ..in reality it was specific US policies that instigated the sectarian divide (as much as one exists)..Im open to correction on that, but it appears to be the reality
And I don’t know what the IR/Pol sci says on these topics in general..my laymans reading is it generally takes the ‘inevitablility’ angle..woe is us/there’s no room for alternative policies/the dynamics that drove Iraq’s civil war would have existed anyway/the constraints policy makers exist under means there would have been no alternative..which is fine, I guess
Right. There’s the “possible” and then there’s the “feasible” (and then the “likely”). I guess my point is that the most likely counterfactuals are not esp optimistic either. None of them are. Often the best case for anti-intervention (other than taking a “US national interest” perspective, which isn’t my style) is “life is no better now for Iraqis than it was under Saddam, according to about half of them”. Well, that indictment isn’t as damning as it appears, considering the horrors that Iraq was going through just 5 or 6 years ago (and still faces to a somewhat lesser extent); even less damning when considering that Arabs are not generally predisposed towards positivity regarding US foreign policy, and that many trends are upwards.
The consensus in the US now seems to be that it was a blunder if not a calamity. Maybe it was, but the justification is usually nationalist: we spent a trillion or so dollars and what did we get for it? That type of argument isn’t very attractive to me on normative grounds tho obv YMMV.
Not that it necessarily matters, but i opposed the war at the time. Once it began to devolve, however, I became pretty dedicated to it. Partially on a “you break it you fix it” basis — it would’ve been disastrous if we’d pulled out in 2006 as Dean & maybe Kerry wanted — but also on radical grounds: this became something of an internationalist “revolution” (if only from above) being fought against vicious reactionary forces. I never was a neocon and I never supported the Bush administration, but if the choice is between Wolfowitz and al-Zarqawi (or Talabani and Khamenei, as the case may be) I know which side I’m on. And in 2006 it pretty much was.
Well said. I think this is spot on, and why I too ended up supporting the US effort long after it was clear that invasion was a mismanaged disaster. Once we were in there, it would have been immoral not to make our best effort. As you say, if the choice was Wolfowitz or Muktada al Sadr, there was no real choice. Hence I supported the surge too, as one last hail-mary pass to try to fix things somewhat.
The larger lesson then is that the US should probably not do these sorts of things in the future. Hence Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth’s worry about the rise of retrenchment in IR.
Also, I should quickly mention that IR scholars didn’t have a ton to say on this issue because the discipline is not well oriented towards answering questions like “Is this war a good one or not?” The rationalists in the discipline are focused, primarily, on finding ways to prevent war (i.e. “peace science”), not speaking to when war might be preferable to living with info asymmetries and dynamic consistency problems. Various strands of non-rationalist IR either oppose (support) US hegemonic action as a principle, or oppose to all non-defensive war as a principle; they would therefore not have all that much to say about the particular issues being debated in 2002.
So the argument was mostly conducted among the various strands of liberals, internationalists, and interventionists.
In any case, from several perspectives (certain views of US’s national interest, certain internationalist traditions) the developments over the past decade or so in the MENA have not been so bad or at least could have been much worse.
Most of our theories pointed against the war. Realism does not have a monopoly on rationalist thinking nor on thinking about consequences. I remember most of the IR folks I talked to pre-March 2003 were not big fans of the war. But this was an empowered govt that was not really engaged in reality-based thinking. They thought they could make reality, impose their views on the world, and so on. Here I try to remember what I was thinking at the time when it was not clear how badly the Bush folks would mess up the execution: https://saideman.blogspot.ca/2013/03/iraq-in-retrospect-what-was-i-thinking.html
I think it is worth also thinking about the role ideas and theories from IR played in helping to justify (and perhaps motivate) the war. For instance, Tony Smith strongly argued in “A Pact with the Devil” that liberal scholars provided much of the intellectual underpinning for the arguments the neo-cons used for going to war with Iraq.
https://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415952453/
I love arguments like this — as though the people who planned and executed the war really read the kind of stuff that academics write. The gulf between academia and policy is so wide that it really is narcissistic for academics to think that their ideas are penetrating the policy sphere to that degree. I worked in DC during the first Gulf War while on leave as a young academic, and other than the study on sanctions done at Brookings, no one in my experience gave a hoot what professors thought about anything. I don’t see how that’s changed in 20 years; if anything, it’s gotten worse, mostly because academic work has become so impenetrably esoteric.
I was studying IR at the time, too, and I distinctly remember that a dominant perspective here in Canada was “the intelligence is dubious, but we may need to go along with it just to mollify the Americans.” That we didn’t end up doing so ended up being a bragging point, but I still vividly remember that discussion.
The better take-away, though, might be that academic IR just wasn’t really equipped to handle the Neo-Conservative critique. The whole IR theory framework was still trapped in the increasingly-stagnant battle between the old-line Realists and the Neo-Liberals, each smarting from the damage done by the end of the Cold War and the end of the Washington Consensus respectively. You also had Wendt and the relatively-progressive Constructivists, but they seemed to be mostly just trying to get heard.
A viewpoint as wildly alien from this framework as Neo-Conservative nation-changing adventurism just wasn’t one that the academics had any tools to deal with. It obviously wasn’t Realist in any fashion, and spurned Neo-Liberalism for the most part. If anything, it still strikes me as almost constructivist in a way, with its focus on values and mores and indifference towards the foreign policy priorities of Homo Economicus.
I don’t think IR has really recovered from that. I don’t think it’s going to, either, until it finally accepts that Economics isn’t the Sole Source Of Social Science Methodology, that states probably shouldn’t be treated as Homo Economicus writ large–as both Strategic Realism and Neo-Liberalism tends to do–and that ideas that are expressed using algebra aren’t a priori superior to those that aren’t.
Iraq put paid to any claims of explanatory power there. Once the lesson’s learned, maybe then we can move on.
Oh, and as for reputation…let’s not dance around the issue. If you weren’t a supporter of the Iraq conflict during much of the 2000s, you couldn’t even hope for a reputation as a “serious thinker” on security studies.
Paul Krugman’s constant refrain about Very Serious People has far, far more salience when it comes to security studies than it ever did for economics.
That was my sense too, especially in the classroom. The atmosphere was very ‘patriotic’ I recall. I remember reading papers from students defending torture, saying we should use nuclear weapons in the GWoT if necessary, stuff like that. It didn’t really become ok to criticize the war until around 2005 or so, at least in my experience.
My experience, re when it became ‘ok’ to criticize the war, is completely different from yours. In the spring of ’03 I was a grad student and it so happens that was the one semester I taught the intro course (had about 35 students — and I was not a t.a., I was the instructor — the institution I attended gave me two weeks’ notice [sic] that I would be doing it. Considering that, I think I did an ok job.) Anyway, the point is that the students in that class were very divided on the (prospective but increasingly likely) war w Iraq, with many taking the “we have to disarm Saddam” line, but w several very opposed to invasion. One of the best students was out in the streets protesting against the (coming) war. He asked me to wear a black armband in class one day and I declined, saying (prob in a slightly less articulate way) that it would violate my notion of the teacher’s role, which is not to impose, even subtly (or not-so-subtly), his/her political opinions on students. So I let them argue about it for a couple of classes among themselves, trying occasionally to inject facts (and/or ‘theory’ though not much of that) where appropriate, but not tell them what I thought. (those were good sessions,or at least lively)
I wd also note, as I think has been mentioned already in this thread, that the majority of IR scholars in the U.S. opposed the invasion, I think that’s pretty well established (at least from what I gather). So I don’t agree w Craig Bamford’s comment that opposing the war put someone’s reputation at risk.
clarification: the invasion of course occurred in March, in the middle of the academic semester, but the debates i mention happened before, prob February.
The idea that opposing the Iraq war disqualified you as a “serious thinker” is pure bunk. As someone at the time who did support the war, it seemed to me that nearly the entire academic community (with notable exceptions, like Bob Lieber) judged any willingness to take the Bush administration seriously as a character defect. Those guys who signed the NYT ad were not exactly outcasts in the IR field, so I’m not sure what on earth you’re talking about.
I think there would a stronger case for the prescience of IR theory if
the record of the academic theorists in the past 40 years was not one of
almost unbroken opposition to *any* exercise of U.S. military power. (And let’s not gloat over the predictive power of IR after the complete failure to foresee anything like the end of the Cold War.) And 10 years is a pretty arbitrary line: imagine asking if Vietnam was “worth it” — a ghastly phrase, imo — in 1985, with the U.S. locked in
struggle with the USSR, and then asking again in 1995, with the Soviet
Union just a memory, archival findings at least partly vindicating the
domino theory, and Vietnam essentially a state capitalist country
serving as a partial counterweight to China. The war in Iraq was
stupidly executed, for which Bush and Rumsfeld bear direct blame.
Whether the war was a bad idea, or produced an outcome not “worth” it, is a different matter entirely.
This is a good critique: ‘even a broken clock is right twice a day.’ If Iraq war opponents reflexively opposed US military action, then they had no good insight into the particulars of Iraq invasion. Opposition flowed from general paradigmatic/ideological concerns, not the speficifics of Iraq, the Middle East, the GWoT, etc. That should be addressed.
I also agree that there was a theory behind the war that has not really been engaged by many of its opponents, who prefer to adhere to the bungled execution. My write-up of that neocon argumenent for the war is here: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/iraq-10-years-later-2-what-was-the-neocon-theory-behind-the-war/.
My sense is that the arguments you discuss were hotly debated in the policy community before the war, e.g., Mearsheimer’s “stump speech” attacked the bandwagoning claims and argued balancing was a more likely response. However, he may have been right because of bungled execution (see, the Iranian 2003 offer).
Academics’ “almost unbroken opposition to any exercise of US military power in the past 40 years” is an overstatement, I think. (Eg Gulf War I, Afghanistan invasion Oct. ’01 both had wide academic support, I would bet.) In any case, that opposition has not extended to a broader critique of the reach of U.S. mil. presence abroad, except in the case of a minority (e.g. C.Johnson, Bacevich, and a few others, including Walt in some respects, I suppose — but still a minority).
But Tom’s point is still good I think, because it does suggest that those who oppose US intervention somewhere should also have to explain themselves if that internvention is successful. For example, US restraint was probably the right choice on Iraq, but probably the wrong one on Libya. I bet most people would say that Libya worked out reasonably well. Concerns about a quagmire and spiralling US costs didn’t materialize. The looming Benghazi slaughter was averted. Qaddafi is out. Libya is much better governed now. (If that had been the outcome of Iraq too, we wouldn’t be debating the war in this post.) So ‘leading from behind’ turned out to be a pretty good choice, and those who opposed the Libyan intervention should also feel obliged to explain themselves.
The point is that if you always say the US should (or should not) intervene, sure you are bound to be right sometimes, but that’s analytically slippery. It doesn’t actually repsond to the details of the case, but from a deductive posture that isn’t necessarily right all time. So if the neocons were arrogant and incompetent on Iraq, one might just as well say ‘retrenchers’ would have foregone an low-cost opportunity to improve the lives of Libyans, and western security, in 2011.
I tried to capture these competing impulses here: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/retrenchment-liberal-internationalism-dont-really-fit-together-2-r2p/
Well, I agree that these judgments are probably best made on a case-by-case basis rather than from a blanket always-intervene or never-intervene position.
I’m not sure however that Libya — and fwiw I pretty much supported the NATO intervention vs. Gaddafi — has turned out quite as rosily as you depict. I don’t follow the situation there at all closely but it’s hardly, from what I gather, a settled polity — militias are running around in various places, the security situation still uncertain in some areas — or at least that’s what D. Trombly has suggested at his blog recently (of course he opposed the intervention so that may color his presentation).
I also don’t entirely like the framing of “X is obliged to explain himself or herself.” Libya is not such a clear success (yet) that one shd be saying “explain yourself if you opposed intervention,” ISTM (and there is the counterfactual problem that no one can know for certain exactly what would have happened absent the intervention). In any event, w/r/t Iraq, I think the obligation to explain falls mainly on those who made the policy: the people who really need to explain themselves are the policymakers and their key advisors. And Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Rice have by now all published memoirs in which, I presume, they defend themselves rather than apologizing, as they should, for their incredibly stupid and in some cases transparently dishonest actions.
Well, I didn’t mean it like some kind of inquisition. I just meant that, in the name of intellectual integrity, the never-intervene position can’t claim strategic wisdom due to a good call on Iraq, if it doesn’t also intellectually respond to interventions that went better. Arguably the Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya interventions were better than the counterfactuals of not intervening. This why R2P has emerged, because there is a growing consensus for some kind of intervention when things get really bad. If there was wide agreement that one intervention after another was a catastrophe, we wouldn’t have R2P, or be debating western intervention in Syria. So we can argue over the details of this or that intervention, but my sense is that very few people believe all post-CW interventions turned out badly.
Hence, it strikes me as intellectual necessary for restrainers to say why the counterfactual is better than the post-intervention situation. In Iraq, that was easy because we mucked it up so bad. But in B/K/L, I think it’s disputable at best. Saying Libya today has problems is not a good answer, because that’s not the benchmark for comparison.
Bob – “the never-intervene position can’t claim strategic wisdom due to a good call on Iraq” really nails it. Even worse, because wars are messy, they claim anything short of flowers-in-the-street liberation anywhere as, basically, a loss that vindicates them. This is more about the politics of the field than any kind of real analysis.
See my reply to Tom Nichols above.
While I’m not comfortable with Bob Kelly’s hypothetical about trying to decide, at the 10 year mark, whether you would or wouldn’t do it all again — clearly, Dick Cheney would — I do think it’s something of a violation of intellectual integrity for academics (or anyone else) to cherry-pick the outcomes in order to defend their position. The Iraq supporters say that Iraq’s not as bad off as we think; the opponents of the Libya operation say that Libya’s not doing as well as it should. That, to me, is Monday-morning quarterbacking. To this day, I have people telling me that Kosovo was really a secret disaster that’s destabilized Europe, and we’ll only know that in 50 more years, and….well, you get the picture.
This snap-judging of history after the fact is less interesting to me than evaluating the performance of the field *before* one of these events. Sure, the Iraq opponents said it would be a disaster, and Don Rumsfeld did his best to make sure it nearly was. But I seem to recall dire predictions of partition, endless civil war, intervention from neighboring states, regional war spreading like wildfire, dogs and cats living together… At some point, yeah, we have to have an accounting of what we’ve gotten right and wrong so far. (My worst single prediction? That the insurgency had burned itself out in the first year. One of the stupidest things I ever said in public, and that’s saying something.)
But I really feel like we’re giving too much credit to the doom-sayers, because they predicted disaster and have since carefully picked out the data that’s supported some of their predictions, while ignoring the twin elephants in the room — an existing Iraqi state and a wave of Arab democratization — that they *didn’t* see coming. They’d say that Bush didn’t see it either, but that’s not answer. (Steve Cambone implies they did, but…well..)
Like I said, I’m a former Sovietologist who watched 1991 happen while IR specialists and even some of my own tribe of Soviet studies guys were plugging their ears and saying it couldn’t be happening. Iraq, Kosovo, Libya and the Cold War are four good cases where IR has a lot to answer for, and quite frankly, I doubt that a serious study of where the IR field was on any of them would really give policymakers any reason to listen to us. (IR scholars about 60/40 supported Libya, but I’m going to be churlish here and say, anecdotally, that I think it had more to do with a reluctance to criticize a president they admire than it did with the case involved.)
I agree on the point about ‘cherry-picking’ outcomes.
I would like to make one point however — and this also applies to R. Kelly’s comment below — about Iraq and the cases of Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya. Though there are certain similarities and Iraq, one could argue, had some R2P-ish elements, there are differences. The B/K/L cases were interventions (exclusively w airpower in the latter 2 cases) in ongoing intrastate wars — in the case of Libya, an ongoing insurrection/civil war. Iraq, by contrast, was a full-scale military invasion of a sovereign state which, despite being ruled by a dictatorial, repressive minority-ethnic regime which had engaged in large-scale killing of sectors of the population in the past, was not in the midst of civil war (or ongoing mass killing). Thus the Iraq invasion, sold to the public not mainly as a humanitarian intervention but as a natl-security imperative, arguably carried a heavier burden of justification than the B/K/L interventions b.c it was a direct invasion of a sovereign country. Indeed, the international lawyers seemed to realize this, hence their endless pre-invasion (and post-invasion) wrangling over whether the invasion had a substantial legal justification, whether the UN resolutions that Saddam was in violation of back in ’90’-91 had a continuing legal effect, etc. Now the Bush admin, admittedly, didn’t really give a **** about this lawyers’ debate but they nonetheless felt required to participate in it, at least to the extent of having the State Dept Office of Legal Counsel churn out justifications and sending supportive intl lawyers (what few there were) onto the talk shows. Even the Bush admin realized, IOW, that invading a sovereign state required a legal figleaf, however flimsy many judged it to be.
This doesn’t really counter what you’ve said about hindsight and cherry-picking, w which I agree, but I do think it’s worth recalling.
Actually the correct name I think is the State Dept Office of Legal Adviser (not that it matters much).
also “minority-ethnic” is the wrong phrase, but I assume you know what I meant.
Ok. This is good. It might not be fair to restrainers to compare decisions on Iraq to those on B/K/L. We could quickly get into relitigating Libya all over again, which occupied DoM for months and months in 2011, so I will leave it there.
But methodologically, it’s obviously contestable to tag Iraq as R2P, and I agree 100% with you that the Bush people saw all this as just lawyers’ prattle. They didn’t give a d— about that sorta thing. As I tried to argue here (https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/iraq-10-years-later-2-what-was-the-neocon-theory-behind-the-war/), the war was a about neocon beliefs about the Arab world. The rest was placating ‘French cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’ Ah, Bush-era arrogance… How we all miss it…
“But I seem to recall dire predictions of partition, endless civil war, intervention from neighboring states, regional war spreading like wildfire, dogs and cats living together”
My sense is that most of these were presented as downside risks rather than inevitable outcomes. I agree that cherry-picking predictions is bad. I also think turning probabilistic statements into categorical ones is misleading.
Part of the larger issue here — which is something PTJ has written about — concerns what happens when scholars transition from “doing scholarship” to public advocacy. Part of the role of a public advocate is to *win* the policy debate — to get their preferred policies enacted — which involves emphasizing risks to the other side’s preferred course of action and benefits to your own. IR scholars are no better or worse than, say, economists in this regard. Yet, despite all kinds of outlandish claims emanating from partisan economists, they still get taken seriously in policy circles. So I’m not sure your characterization of the sociology of knowledge at work here is accurate.
And yes, I don’t think it is shocking that many academics are partisans and behave accordingly.
PS: But of course, I was one of those liberal hawks who saw merit to removing Saddam Hussein but didn’t trust the Bush administration to get the implementation right. That assessment turned out to be correct, but I’m not sure it stemmed from careful analysis rather than partisan bias.
“archival findings at least partly vindicating the domino theory”
Just on this, is there any chance you could point me towards something to read (or give a brief rundown) as I wasnt aware of this? Thanks
I regret missing this original post.
It might be helpful to split your post into two question: 1) how culpable is IR theory? and 2) how culpable are IR theorists?
One thing that we learned from 2003 was that even though some theories got it nominally ‘right’, academics were extremely poor antiwar advocates. Why didn’t epistemic authority transmit into to political authority? Why didn’t realism, the supposed hegemon of security studies, have a more appreciable impact?
For discussion of the political advocacy of American realism come to the Perspectives of Security Theory panel at ISA, Saturday April 5 at 4pm in Union Square 8. Yes I just did an ISA panel plug…
That is a useful division, because the IR community is so big – so many programs and journals now – that I might have reached too far in the OP to speak of the ‘community’ as whole. I don’t know…
Also, the end of the Cold War in ways no one predicted, opened a ‘let 1000 flowers bloom’ period in security studies in the 90s. So IR probably was not monolithic enough on Iraq 2 to be singular actor in the 2002 debate. By contrast, the community seems much more consolidated today – around restraint/retrenchment, or so Brook, Ikenberry and Wohlforth just argued in IS.
That raises the interesting question, would have IR have more policy relevance if we agreed with each other more, if we spoke with a more united voice on things like Libya, Syria, or Iran today? That’s hardly a methodologically defensible reason to agree of course, but it might be true…
Perhaps you can write a post here or elsewhere about that panel for those of us not going to ISA.
On the specific question you raise: well, realists did not have the ears of the key policymakers, at least not in the U.S. Some of the most prominent names in security studies in the U.S. signed the Sept 02 NYT ad “War in Iraq is not in America’s Interest’ — I was just looking at the list of signatories the other day — Jervis, J. Snyder, G. Snyder, Posen, Van Evera, D. Larson, Waltz, Mearsheimer, Walt, R. Art, the list goes on. I assume they could have gotten more than 33 names but cut it off there for whatever reason — time pressures, perhaps. (Anyway, it ended up just underlining how little impact on policy their views had, unfortunately.)