Is this really why we invaded Iraq?

What's missing from a new history of the Bush administration's catastrophic war decision

Melvyn Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2023)

The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has brought forward an outpouring of analysis and commemoration of one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history. A lot of the op-ed commentary (as opposed to the often profoundly sensitive and sharply observed reporting) has been repetitive, self-justifying and predictable (some of it virtually absurdist self-parody). It’s not an accident that the exceptions have mostly been written by Iraqis. I especially liked the contributions to this outstanding Century International roundtable and others by Raad Alkadiri, Sinan Antoon, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Dina Rizk Khoury, Feurat Alani, Balsam Mustafa, Renad Mansour, and more I’m sure I’m forgetting. Compare that impressive list to what I observed in 2013 in a column for Foreign Policy:

How American-centric has the outpouring of commentary been? Very. The New Republic got eight writers to comment on the anniversary, none Iraqi. Foreign Affairs put out a very good retrospective of its coverage of Iraq with 11 articles and 25 contributors, none Iraqi. The New York Times managed to find one, out of six roundtable contributors. And to show that there’s no house bias here, the otherwise fascinating roundtable overseen by my Foreign Policy boss invited 20 significant participants in the war to talk about its lessons — and didn’t include a single Iraqi. (We’ve got a few pieces by Iraqis in the works for the Middle East Channel, but we could do better, too.) The bestselling books about Iraq also tend to focus on American military strategy, Washington policy debates, or Gen. David Petraeus, with only token appearances by Iraqis. Exceptions, such as Mark Kukis’s Voices From Iraq, the late Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near, and Nir Rosen’s exceptional reporting from inside the insurgencies only prove the rule. 

It’s interesting that, while still underrepresented, Iraqi voices are far better included this time around than they were ten years ago, when the retrospectives on a decade of war were “overwhelmingly written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans”. Most major publications and organizations have done better at the two decade mark, with a significantly greater number of Iraqi perspectives featured across multiple platforms and formats telling their own stories, challenging American assumptions, and insisting upon their own agency. That seems like real progress. Not everything that happens is about the United States, and Washington-centric approaches to foreign policy can have profoundly distorting effects — erasing the brutal realities and human costs of war in favor of abstractions and political infighting.

That’s the context from which I approached a new academic history of the decision to invade Iraq written by the eminent historian Melvyn Leffler. The approach is decidedly old-school when it comes to whose voices are included. Leffler’s focus is almost exclusively on the internal deliberations of Bush administration officials, based on documents and interviews with them. Of 22 original interviews, none are with Iraqis. Of 54 memoirs, only Ali Allawi’s is by an Iraqi. Out of some 150 books and articles cited, only Kanan Makiya’s book is by an Iraqi. Perhaps a response might be that Iraqi views really don’t matter for reconstructing deliberations inside the White House, since they would not have insights into what was going on. And this may be just the way certain types of diplomatic history are done. But it’s a problem. Reproducing the insularity of Washington policymakers makes it difficult to move beyond or to find ground to critique their assumptions and blind spots. Read against the grain of what we know about what has happened in Iraq since 2003, the absence of Iraqis from the research and narrative seems glaring.

The book presents the Bush administration in an empathetic (if not sympathetic) light, seeking to accurately convey their worldview and intentions. It was an enjoyable read, vividly written and punctuated with sharp analytical notes throughout. Leffler is an accomplished historian and his erudition shows. The book makes a strong case for the centrality of Bush himself to the decision, with abundant testimony to the President’s active engagement with every aspect of the path towards war. And it does a fine job of presenting the world as it looked to the principals in the Bush administration - the post-9/11 perception of risk, fear, and uncertainty, along with concern about the long unraveling of the US policy of containing Iraq. It’s a sympathetic portrayal of Bush, but not an apologetic: Leffler renders critical judgments on Bush and his advisers, and registers his own disagreement with the decision to invade and subsequent mistakes during the early days of the occupation. He shows the internal dysfunction and backstabbing, the absence of planning for the postwar period, and all that.

But he seems more interested in pushing back against Bush’s critics than on Bush himself, more keen to explain and justify their decisions than to outline the catastrophic consequences of their deceptions and decisions. Leffler’s determination to channel the “real” thinking of Bush and his key officials leads him to reproduce some of their deeply questionable assumptions. He wants readers to remember “how ominous the al Qaeda threat seemed and how evil and manipulative Hussein really was… how imprecise the intelligence was… how difficult it was to measure the threat Hussein constituted.” That may accurately reflect the administration’s recollections and experiences (and self-justifications), but it downplays the magnitude of their deception in selling the war, the hubris in their assumptions, the severity of their miscalculations and the horrific consequences of their decisions. It’s a narrative trapped in their bubble.

The stakeholders in the intra-Washington reputation wars will quibble with this and seize on that, and I suppose that all matters in its own way. But it all feels like so much strategic narcissism, so focused on the inside baseball of what Cheney did and how Rumsfeld reacted and why Powell tried to push back and on and on. It’s revealing how little new information his research actually uncovered. All of these officials have already been interviewed and their views represented repeatedly in countless books, articles and profiles that maybe there’s just not much left to uncover. Robert Draper’s 2020 contribution To Start a War covers similar ground, more critically, as have so many other journalistic takes on the war (the best of the lot still being Fiasco by Thomas Ricks). Did we really need to recover the marginalized voices of those Bush administration officials who have been largely silenced about Iraq, except for dozens of memoirs, interviews in hundreds of books, frequent op-ed columns, regular appearances on television, and continued high profile governmental and think tank appointments?

What’s missing most is a real sense of what this felt like to Iraqis on the ground, the sheer scale of the horrors which the American invasion unleashed and the visceral realities behind the abstract Washington debates. For that, you’d be better served picking up Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s new memoir of the war, which at least conveyed some of those realities from an Iraqi perspective, or reading any of the Iraqi retrospectives published this year that I linked above.