My first post on the Iraq War asked if academic IR had any responsibility to slow the march to war.
The second tried to formulate what the neoconservative theory of the war was, because many of us, in retrospect of a conflict gone so badly, desperately want to un-remember that there really was a logic to the war, that it was at least somewhat intellectually defensible, and that a lot of us believed it. We may want to retroactively exculpate ourselves by suggesting it was just W the cowboy acting ridiculous, or a neocon hijacking of the policy process, or Halliburton oil imperialism, and all the other reasons so popular on the left. And some of that is true of course.
But it ducks the crucial point that the war was popular until it flew wildly off-the-rails, which in turn revealed the staggering incompetence of the Bush administration to act on the neocon logic the country had embraced by March 2003. In short, I argued that the Iraq invasion was not about WMD, preemption, or democracy, although that rationale was played up in the wake of the failure to find WMD. The real neocon goal was to scare the daylights out of the Arabs and their elites by punching one of their worst regimes in the face, thereby showing what was coming to rest of the region unless it cleaned up its act, i.e., crack down on salafism and liberalize so as to defuse the cultural extremism that lead to 9/11. (Read Ajami saying in January 2003 that the war is ‘to modernize the Arabs;’ that’s about as a good a pre-war summary of this logic as you’ll get.)
So what went wrong?
To me, the irony is that this line of argument is at least somewhat defensible. In fact, I think this is why so many people supported the war, even if they couldn’t articulate it well. It was the execution on this premise, the conduct of the war itself, not the arguments for it, that ruined it in US public opinion. The Army particularly was simply not trained and designed to wage a counter-insurgency and nation-build. Rumsfeld repeated the old saw that soldiers are trained to ‘kill people and break things,’ a fairly crude way of saying they are trained to win conventional inter-state wars (which is why the US military is thrilled with the Asian pivot – China is an opponent we understand), but not long-term stability operations.
But post-‘Mission Accomplished’ Iraq didn’t really need those skills. It needed counter-insurgents – a skill-set the Army deliberately un-remembered after the Vietnam War in order to forestall policy-makers ever using the Army that way again. The Army also needed social scientists, administrators, engineers, aid workers, and all the other NGO/UN-style nation-building expertise it did not have. This is not to blame the Army; it was not reconfigured before the war to include these capabilities. As Rumsfeld notoriously said, ‘you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want’ – which is another way of saying that he and the Bush administration did not properly prepare the tools for the ambitious strategy the neocon analysis of the Middle East suggested.
As a result, the army stumbled through the occupation, including the use of torture and extensive detention, until Petraeus began applying counterinsurgency meaningfully in 2008. But by then, just about everyone had had enough of the war – Congress, the military, and the public all wanted out. And today, we’ve all but forgotten about Iraq, as we did Vietnam by the Carter years. Obama’s speeches this year haven’t mentioned it; it’s not in American news anymore; even the the 10-year retrospectives are focused more on the American debate and fallout, than what is actually happening in Iraq.
All this suggests to me a far more mixed picture of the war than we will get at the current anniversary. Critics will, rightfully, take credit. Steve Walt particularly, whose resistance was constant and forthright, deserves kudos for his prescience. Too many war supporters will admit nothing. No one in the pundit class seems capable of apologizing, nor can former Bush officials it seems. So they’ll come out to say that they would do it all the same way again if they had too. Bush himself has all but said that in his memoirs. But no one believes such vindication-seeking hackery; a fairer judgment on the neocon case for war would be:
– in the wake of 9/11, binladenist pathologies looked dangerously widespread in the Arab world (we learned later just how wrong this really was, but go re-watch Fahrenheit 911 again to see just how paranoid we were at the time, with companies selling parachutes for executives to use in the next 9/11, and Fox News anchors talking about al Qaeda building pen bombs);
– Afghanistan was not a Arab state and too far from the Arab stage to make a effective demonstration against those 9/11 pathologies (defensible claim in itself, but a weak justification for attacking a state unrelated to 9/11);
– the Arab states would not change on their own, and their internal problems were now going transnational and damaging others (back in 2002 no one expected Arab Spring);
– Iraq was a target of opportunity given its history and other bad options (it’s a clear hole in the neocon analysis that we targeted a secular dictator rather than the center of Islamic fundamentalism – Saudi Arabia; it’s no wonder people thought the war was a oil/land grab);
– the US military had neither the force structure, aptitude, nor interest to perform COIN and long-term nation-building, while the US public did not have the decades-long endurance for it;
– while the initial, promised blitzkrieg was successful, the public had been led to believe we would then dump Iraq on Chalabi, or the UN, or the French, as in the Balkans. At this point, the astonishing lack of post-conflict planning started becoming apparent.
– it all went down hill from there. The moral case for the war fell apart under the weight of incompetence and the consequent suffering of the Iraqis. Abu Ghraib particularly was the last straw. After that, it was all but impossible to say the war was worth it.
In short, it was the ‘fiasco’ execution of the Iraq war that turned so many against it, not the original premise. That is why neocons still get air-time on the right and aren’t repentant; they don’t feel that they have been intellectually disproven. That is also why Drezner is correct to note how many people thought the war was at least not a bad idea before it actually occurred.
That said though, the primary geopolitical lesson is probably just the banal, Waltian observation that some ideas are simply too ambitious to see through even if they’re intellectually defensible. Iraq is a perfect example of why realism counsels prudence. Even if the neocon analysis was right – which is disputable, especially in the wake of Arab Spring – to follow through on it would have required, 1) a wholesale COIN/nation-building re-making of the military, especially the army, in the face of painful lessons to the contrary from the Vietnam War and disinterest in that re-making almost everywhere in DoD; and 2) enduring US public support for long-term nation-building, which the US electorate has never before supported like that. In fact, the US public is known for the opposite – casualty-shyness that regularly puts a political limit on the US use of force. Yet even were both of those in place, trying to remake a foreign society is still extraordinarily difficult. Nonetheless, with mixed tools and tepid public public support, we tried something super-difficult. It’s not surprising, then, that it ended so poorly. Hence, today’s ‘leading from behind’ is not a bad choice after all.
There’s a second, moral lesson too, which should matter to us, because we’re Americans, not realist robots worried only about high politics: Wars of choice have a different moral calculus. Because we preemptively attacked Iraq, the moral requirements of our post-war behavior in the country and reconstruction of it were much higher than in other conflicts. And we failed: in the last decade 125,000 Iraqis have died violently for reasons related to the war, and a fair share of that is on us. We should be ashamed of our culpability in that, but I have the feeling most Americans don’t really care, probably because most of those victims are brown Muslims. That’s appalling and the real reason to never try this sort of ‘experiment’ again: it made us cruel.
Cross-posted on Asian Security Blog.
I think it’s a *bit* more complicated than that. Many (not all) neocons had a theory of comparative politics which was absurd: remove the dictator and everyone will love their freedom so much that a transition to orderly democratic politics will be simple. Sometimes this was implicit, but other times it was stated more or less just like that. There wasn’t really a sense that there would be domestic groups with different interests who would compete for control of the state (except for Baathists, who would be shot), or that Malthusian pressures would lead to factionalization even if it didn’t exist in salient form before. The quasi-deification of the liberal values among the neocons led them to a conception of domestic politics which was essentially apolitical; it was a huge blind spot.
In other words, it’s maybe not IR theory that we should be examining to figure out why the invasion failed; it’s comparative political theory that we should look to to understand why the occupation failed.
So many of the neocons really did have a major intellectual failure which they’ve failed to live up to, which resulted from thinking on the wrong level. This is even more problematic if you are correct (as I think you are) about the real reason for invading not being WMD but to convince other states to enact domestic reforms.
To be fair, some neocons (or neocon-ish) folks were saying this fairly early on. Thomas Barnett wrote a lot about having a “Department of War” to break stuff and kill people and a “Department of Everything Else” to get the electricity on, help develop civil society, start economic development programs, etc. But this view was not taken seriously by almost anyone in policymaking circles. Instead, the whole war was run out of the Defense Dept and the State Dept had basically no role. (Additionally, the State Dept was being run by a former general, not a diplomat or career civil servant.) This, itself, tells us what theories were guiding policy.
Even now most folks talk as if the operation hinged on COIN: we should’ve been ready to employ counter-insurgency tactics sooner. And that’s probably true to some extent on a tactical level. But if the strategy had been right then the counter-insurgency might not have developed to the extent that it did in the first place.
This is a really good point – a terribly simplistic idea of comparative politics. Hadn’t really thought about it like that. Thanks. See also my comments above where I reference your response here.
I still find it absolutely astounding this idea being floated that so many people were in favor of invading Iraq. In the US, perhaps. But expand your reality a little more (hint: no, the US is not the world). The run-up to the war produced the largest protests around the world in history. Sorry, but your head had to be deeply up your ass in 2003 to not understand that first, and most importantly, invading another country just because you can is WRONG, and, second, that all the bullshit about WMD and democracy were just that…bullshit. Bacevich in his open letter to Wolfowitz states it more elegantly: https://harpers.org/archive/2013/03/a-letter-to-paul-wolfowitz/
The public opinion of other countries matters little in the US (political leaders tend not to care about the opinions of those that can’t legally vote for them), so the author is right to focus on US public opinion in the run up to the war. I don’t think he is saying that the US is the world, but that US policy-makers are influenced most (obviously) by US public opinion. Why include public opinion of other countries in a discussion of choices made by US policy-makers? Better to look at support for the war among people that US leaders actually pay some attention to.
This post doesn’t seem to be limited to the relationship between US public opinion and the decision to invade Iraq, but instead focuses on the set of ideas that provided the intellectual (or better ideological) justification for that decision. It’s in that context that the author talks about the ideas behind the invasion being “somewhat defensible” and “why so many people supported it.”
And my point is that no, it was absolutely not defensible–not at the time and not in retrospect. Invading Iraq was not justifiable “in theory” (i.e. if it had been better executed and everything had gone as according to plan) any more than how the actual invasion turned out (and the assumption that you can separate the two, is itself problematic). In fact, most thoughtful people at the time were against it, and if you don’t fall into that category, you should re-examine not only your intellectual assumptions but more basically your worldview.
Congrats, you look good for opposing the war from the start. I was in middle school when Iraq was invaded, so I’m afraid I would not have qualified as a thoughtful person at that time. But to many Americans, the war appeared defensible. Whether or not it actually was is not the question raised here. The goal of the article is to determine why so many who were initially convinced of the war’s propriety eventually came to oppose it. Given that question, I fail to see where your observation that “the US is not the world” is helpful.
I think we could agree on one thing–the (il)logic of the war and the execution thereof cannot be separated. The statement that, “It was the ‘fiasco’ execution of the Iraq war that turned so many against it, not the original premise,” fails to draw a connection between the flawed neoconservative logic and its inevitable failure when put into practice.
I think this – “fails to draw a connection between the flawed neoconservative logic and its inevitable failure when put into practice” – is a really good point. That’s probably right. Thanks.
One thing I should have emphasized more is that just because the neocons had a somewhat defensible logic for the war, doesn’t mean it was really strong either, as WK Winecoff notes below. The neocons got a lot wrong – so much in fact, that the war became a catastrophe. I try to point out, in the middle of the post above, where the neocon theory got it wrong. In general, I would say that the neocons vastly overestimated the appeal of salafist extremism in the region. Hence Iraq became an extraordinary and unnecessary over-reaction to 9/11.
But there does seem to be a resistance to imputing even the most basic logic to the conflict, reading it instead as a product of Bush arrogance, oil, a neocon hijacking, and so forth. I just don’t buy that. The neocons were badly wrong, but they weren’t dumb, and they were persuasive at the time.
You’re welcome! And thank you for a stimulating series of articles.
My argument that the war was popular in the US at the beginning, but then support faded as casualties rose and OIF flew off the rails is based on John Mueller’s work: https://people.uncw.edu/lowery/pls302/Erikson%20Chapter%20Outlines/the-iraq-syndrome.html. I think this point has been pretty well established now for a long time. And Foud Ajami just noted this point yet again a few days ago: https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578356850968106208.html
Americans supported the war, becaue the reasons sketched here were in fact persuasive to a lot of them, especially Republicans. Americans did believe Islamic fundamentalism was a big threat, and neocons are correct that the pathologies that led to 9/11 did not stem from Afghanistan, but from the Arab Middle East. Does the mean the invasion was the only possible to salafist terrorism? No, of course not. It was a terrible error, and sparked a deeply shocking American insousiance about Arab/Muslim fatalities. But it does not mean that the neocon rationale can simply be dismissed as a fig-leaf for Halliburton, Bush cockiness, the Israelis, a neocon cabal, etc., as I think the left has been too wont to do. That’s just not correct.
Didn’t the pro-war argument depend on the certainty that Iraqis would generally be pleased to have their country bombed and welcome the invasion, and this is why not much by way of counter-insurgency was expected? They seemed to disregard the possibility of people being motivated by any form of nationalism or resentment of invasion by a foreign power, especially given the history of western domination, regardless of how they felt about
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Thanks. I should have worked that into the section on why the neocon theory failed.
“Americans supported the war, becaue the reasons sketched here were in fact persuasive to a lot of them, especially Republicans.” This is a leap. That Americans supported the war at the outset and then did not as the conflict went on is a well-established fact, but the *reasons* for this varying support are still very much up in the air, I believe. And I would caution all of us against making the leap from public rationales to motives — it’s unclear to me whether anyone actually believed the neoconservative rhetoric, and I would go out on a limb (as I have done in lots of my published work) and suggest that from a social-scientific explanatory stance the subjective belief question is irrelevant. What matters is the configuration of rhetorical resources.
That said, I wonder whether you aren’t making a more general category mistake here in trying to treat neoconservatism as a “theory.” The question of whether neoconservatism has any explanatory utility is distinct from the question of whether it has or had any political efficacy. I would agree that it’s more than a fig-leaf for other interests — which is why I am generally not comfortable calling it an “ideology,” since that implies to most people that it’s false consciousness obscuring some deeper reality — but I don’t think it’s a candidate for true/false or valid/invalid.
I never finished my post on this, but I was trolling through the polling data and found something interesting: peak and-near peak support for using force to overthrow Hussein tended to be *immediately after 9/11*, i.e., before the legitimation blitz.
That is interesting. I don’t think it’s plausible to argue that the opinion polls drove the Bush Administration into Iraq (especially given the earlier PNAC memos and similar anti-Hussein campaigns…taking out Hussein was already a stated goal). Rather, I think the equation is: “something has to be done because of 9/11” + “Saddam Hussein is a Bad Guy” = “invade Iraq.” This doesn’t have anything to do with a neoconservative “theory” that anyone found plausible or compelling; at best it tells us that ‘Saddam Hussein’ had some powerful rhetorical resonance already, so that various neocons could use that to legitimate a policy of invasion.
Uh, yeah. Do you honestly think I was suggesting something different?
I think this is right on the rhetorical resonance on Saddam — see my earlier post on why the public bought the war. Dan is right on the timeframe for peak support for overthrowing Saddam. I looked at this question and the polling data pretty closely in my Security Studies piece in 2005 — The War over Iraq. I argued that the Bush administration’s blitz that began in Sept 2002 was largely an effort to slow the real (and anticipated further) decline in public support as we moved away (in time) from 9/11. It was not coincidence that the beginning of the Bush administration’s campaign came on the first anniversary of 9/11.
No, that’s exactly what I thought you were suggesting. I was just spelling it out for the rest of the class ;-)
Yeah, that’s a good point; one I’ve been think about myself. What exactly motivated support is not really clear. My own sense or memory of 2002 is that the neocon line was sorta persuasive. Iraq was not directly connected to 9/11, and WMD was something of a stretch (turned out to be a huge leap in fact). But my memory was that there was a broad sense in the media and such that somehow something needed to be done more directly in the Arab world because of 9/11. I may be mistaken, but that is certainly my own memory of that year. But I may have pushed that too far in the post.
I am indeed using ‘neoconservative’ in the laymen sense of ‘theory.’ My concern was primarily to argue that the neocons did at least have some kind of intellectual architecture behind the war. It was not just a ‘cabal’ or oil grab or whatever.
I think the most interesting problem is holes in the neocon logic, and I wish I had written that up more vigorously, because people seem to think I am defending the war, which was not really my intent.
I did say the neocon logic was at least ‘defensible,’ but that doesn’t mean that it was really strong either. There was no insider plot, but the neocons also didn’t really have a decent theory for how the transition after the ‘hammer strike’ would occur, as WK Winecoff points out in his useful comment on this post. That’s why I’ve been trying to argue that the neocons weren’t dumb/conspiratorial. Lots of the war-supporting writers I cited in the first post were good thinkers who put real time into this. But – they were still wrong.
Just because Afghanistan was not an Arab state, doesn’t mean the next step is invading Iraq. And just because the pathologies that generated 9/11 came from the Arab world doesn’t mean the next obvious step is to kick down the door of the Gulf. I should have said that more clearly.
If neoconservatism counts as an “intellectual architecture,” Britney Spears is a musical genius. Popular appeal ≠ quality. And I’d rather listen to Britney than Wolfowitz any day…
To “scare the daylights out of the Arabs and their elites by punching one of their worst regimes in the face, thereby showing what was coming to rest of the region unless it cleaned up its act, i.e., crack down on salafism and liberalize so as to defuse the cultural extremism that lead to 9/11. ”
What you seem to be ignoring here is that the very heart and centre of Salafism is Saudi Arabia. That is where most of the 9/11 terrorists came from. That is where Bin Laden came from.
By destroying Saddam Hussein the US and the West only served Sunni Saudi Arabia’s purposes, getting rid of their secular enemies for them. Same with Gadaffi. And letting the Jihadists get rid of secular governments in Tunisia and Egypt. And now it looks like the West is going to top it off by helping the Jihadists eliminate their last real obstacle; Syria’s Assad.
Well done!
Then all the West will have to do is bring down Shia Iran and the Sunni Islamists’ joy will be complete. Jihad will triumph, and all at the cost, in blood and treasure of the useful idiot Christians.
We have been manipulated and used by the Saudi’s all the way down the line, only we’re too ignorant of Middle Eastern cultures to realise it.
“That is where Bin Laden came from.” Yes, but worth recalling that he hardly had smooth relations w the Saudi govt.
From some notes I took on Wright’s The Looming Tower:
Aug ’95: Bin Laden manifesto calls for King Fahd’s resignation, further solidifying his break from the Saudi regime, which had already taken away his passport and cut off family stipend. (p.238)
More broadly, your post implies that all Sunnis are Jidahists, which is false. The Saudi Arabian monarchy is unsavory in quite a few respects, but I doubt they care much about restoring the caliphate.
I agree that not all Sunnis are militant Jihadists, of course not. However the Saudis have been massively funding militant mosques all over the world, from which severe Wahhabite militant doctrines are preached.
Whatever their day-to-day internal differences though, what most militant Sunnis can agree on his that they hate and wish to destroy a) secularists – or infidels as they are more popularly known in those circles – and b) Shirk (heresy) of any kind, especially Shiism, and especially Iran, because they pose the greatest existential and political threat to the Sunnah.
The foolish poodle West has already made huge strides towards the first of those objectives; eliminating secular leaders and regimes, as I mentioned above, and look ever menacing towards Iran.
These actions are clearly serving Sunni interests more than our own, but whereas this costs the Saudis and salafists very little, the West is bleeding ourselves dry over it, with fearsome consequences for our future.
There is one big honking thing wrong with this analysis, and that is the premise that the war in Iraq was a failure. It was not, at least not in the opinion of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malik, who writes in the Washington Post:
“Today, on the 10th anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein,
the debate about whether it was worth it to topple the regime and the
direction of the U.S.-Iraqi relationship is influenced by a pessimistic
view that the United States has lost Iraq. Not true. Despite all the
problems of the past decade, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis agree
that we’re better off today than under Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.
“Iraqis will remain grateful for the U.S. role and for the losses
sustained by military and civilian personnel that contributed in ending
Hussein’s rule. These losses pale by comparison, of course, to those
sustained by the Iraqi people. Our government emerges from this
experience determined to ensure that these sacrifices contribute to a
future of freedom and prosperity for our country…
“The United States has not “lost” Iraq. Instead, in Iraq, the United
States has found a partner for our shared strategic concerns and our
common efforts on energy, economics and the promotion of peace and
democracy.
Indeed, look at conditions in Iraq at present and it’s hard not to agree that things are better. The neocon aim of at least showing that more pluralism was possible there appears to have been achieved. Surely there is no dispute over the fact that Saddam Hussein and his regime, formerly bent on destabilizing the region and exporting terror, as been removed?
So why do our intellectual geniuses keep insisting that the war was a fiasco? It’s hard to say. What objective indices to they point to to prove the war was a failure? Abu Gharib? Public opinion? Their own embarrassment about being American? What? One can’t tell from this analysis, not in any credible fashion.