2

Breaking States

The Ideological Roots of Regime Change

In interpreting Iraq’s warnings, commentators rightly call for a more rigorous, self-critical process of decision in government. They call for the revival of the cabinet committee system, and advocate more ‘red-teaming’, or the organized probing of assumptions through creative exercises.¹ To its credit, Britain’s Ministry of Defence has extracted warnings from Iraq about the need for critical thinking, careful defining of problems, attention to the gap between ambitions and capabilities, and wariness of the non-linear and wild tendencies of war.²

Since we can never be too sure that our assumptions are warranted, embedding scrutiny in decision-making is a valuable step. But the Iraq blunder flowed from something more profound than an error in Whitehall machinery. In his response to the publication of ‘Chilcot’, political scientist Robert Jervis observed that flawed process on its own does not sufficiently explain the recourse to war:

If it turned out that Saddam had had active Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs, few people would have cared or even noticed that intelligence had expressed too much certainty, had failed to examine its assumptions, or exaggerated the reliability of its sources. In parallel, the degree to which Prime Minister Blair overstated the intelligence and short-circuited standard procedures would have seemed like the normal ways of handling a crisis. Had the American and British forces been greeted as liberators and the local population been able to manage a peaceful transition, the lack of preparation for the less happy events that actually unfolded would not have been seen as a major failure, although it still would have been one.³

Accordingly, the problem was not closed decision-making or a dogmatic mindset in isolation. In an alternative universe, if the Blair government undertook exactly the same process but there was a WMD arsenal, and Iraq was ripe for stable, democratic evolution, there would now be less inquest. There would be less lamentation about poor decision-making process. The failure over Iraq is not just that the war initiators were dogmatic, but that they held bad ideas dogmatically. Former Prime Minister David Cameron claimed, on Chilcot’s release, that government had already learned the lessons, but as historian James Ellison observes, ‘those seem mostly about process. The question of principle remains.’⁴ Dangerous principles thrived because the instruments of government allowed them to, and because the marketplace of ideas were receptive to them.⁵ The invaders assumed that it was in the gift of certain great powers to reorder part of the world as it suited them, all the way into the political interior of states. At the same time, they regarded it as a strategic and moral duty, and that the globalized world demanded it.

From the outset, this was an ambitious war. The architects of Britain’s effort always intended the toppling of the Iraqi Ba’ath regime to transform world order. It really was an attempt to change the world for the better, with all the deadliness such good intentions can carry. ‘Our ambition is big’, Blair wrote privately to Bush one week into the hostilities.⁶ The last chapter demonstrated the chronology of these beliefs. Blair’s later memoirs were not a retrospective platitude, but an accurate reprisal of his thinking all along: the Middle East ‘was urgently in need of modernization. It was an alarming melange of toxic ingredients: a wrong-headed view of the future; a narrative about Islam that was at best inadequate and at worst dangerous; [regimes] under immense internal strain’, and it needed a ‘fundamental reordering’.⁷ The causes of democracy promotion, ‘freeing up’ the Middle East, and modernization were not post hoc inventions designed to provide cover for a counterproliferation war that had found no weapons. The inner circles of Washington and London were led by ‘daydream believers’ from the very beginning.⁸ Though they presented their final reckoning with Saddam Hussein as a regrettable step to remove a defiant rogue after all reasonable efforts to induce ‘behaviour change’, it was from early on intended to bring about the forcible, externally driven removal of a government and the remaking of the state’s institutions, thereby inspiring a benign domino effect.

How did warmakers persuade their countries to share their warlike idealism? Deception is not a sufficient explanation. As Chilcot found, Blair’s circle successfully persuaded its domestic audience that the confrontation with Saddam was intended primarily for disarmament, they presented weak and ambiguous evidence as cast iron, and delayed debate about military action until the point of maximum pressure to rally around the flag. But deception could only achieve so much. Remorseful war supporters offer a suspect alibi, that they only gave their support because they believed what they were told. No amount of misinformation or duplicity, however sly, would have sufficed on its own to take Britain to war. Other major states—Germany, France, and China—agreed that Saddam’s weapons programme and evasion represented a security problem, but refused to infer that it was an intolerable risk, and argued that more time for weapons inspections was preferable to a hasty invasion. In Britain, as in the US, beneath the immediate arguments about Iraq there was a structure of general ideas about power and security. Because of these well-entrenched assumptions, Members of Parliament, much of the media, the professional military and the public were persuaded that war could work, and that the risks of the status quo outweighed the risks of full-scale invasion. If, as Chilcot found, the war was powered by assumptions that were ‘seldom challenged’, it is to those assumptions we now turn.⁹

Before the invasion of Iraq, there was an idea, and an ideology, of regime change. This idea meant more than the literal overthrow of governments. It stood for an ascendant assumption within government, that countries like the UK could only secure themselves properly by eliminating rather than handling threats. Ultimately, this meant breaking and remaking nation states. This revolutionary idea, that the world demands the application of systemic solutions by far-sighted statesmen, took root so deeply that it became a ‘common sense’. The 9/11 attacks heightened the doctrine and made it more politically achievable. It amounted not only to a zero-sum conception of ‘absolute security’. It also entailed a form of anti-diplomacy. In the desire to cut the Gordian Knot of problems like Iraq, it flowed from an impatience with and frustration towards the notion that major powers must manage, limit, and contain threats, husband their resources, both compete and bargain even with despotic states, and accept trade-offs. British foreign policy argument as a whole—even mainstream anti-war opinion—had become captured by the conceit that the West’s duty is to correct problems, ‘fix’ or ‘sort out’ the Middle East, and eradicate the ‘root cause’ of terror. These developments generated a particular mixture of confidence and fear, and emerged out of the interregnum between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks.

In this chapter, I trace the ideological roots of regime change. After contrasting it with traditions of limited war, I track its origins to older arguments about Western power, in frustration with the Gulf War settlement, and in the pathologies of a type of warlike liberalism when applied to foreign policy. I then identify the flaws of the ‘regime change’ mindset. I argue that the Iraq War marked a loosening of restraint, a tragic forgetting of limitations and the agency of Iraqis, the rise of an undisciplined set of concepts, and a confusion around the concepts of rationality and irrationality.

From Limited War to Regime Change

The essence of strategy is limitation, the balancing of power and commitments in ways that rank interests, prioritize, and trade off things that are valued, and compromise with lesser evils. Limitation involves refraining from expending all resources at one’s disposal. It also involves tempering expectations of what military force can usefully achieve when applied. In the tradition of realpolitik is the realization that in a world of scarce resources, multiple dangers, and imperfect knowledge, decision-makers most of the time can hope only to restrain dangers and reduce threats, and always with an eye to the unintended consequences of action and inaction. In a nuclearized Cold War world, the concept of limited war gained fresh salience. After Korea, it became apparent that the US could contain Soviet Communism while limiting the scale and intensity of its military activity, and that the nuclear revolution gave them little choice. Western debate about limited war in a global conflict drew on these constraining conditions.¹⁰ Even ‘minor’ wars remain dangerous enough, as they can aggregate into major wars. Seemingly peripheral struggles can unexpectedly wear down and exhaust major powers.¹¹ The essence therefore lies not in the size of the opponent, but in the scale of the policy and ambition. Military forces, if husbanded carefully, can be effective means of deterrence, defence, and disruption—but only with great hazard can they be wielded effectively beyond those functions.

A useful point of entry is Edward N. Luttwak’s interpretation of the grand strategy of the Byzantine Empire. In Luttwak’s history, the Byzantines looked out on a hostile environment, surrounded by adversaries. They developed an austere ‘operational code’, and survived by holding on to the concept of limits:

To wear out their own forces … in order to utterly destroy the immediate enemy would only open the way for the next wave of invaders. The genius of Byzantine grand strategy was to turn the very multiplicity of enemies to advantage, by employing diplomacy, deception, payoffs, and religious conversion to induce them to fight one another instead of fighting the empire … In the Byzantine scheme of things, military strength was subordinated to diplomacy instead of the other way around, and used mostly to contain, punish, or intimidate rather than to attack or defend in full force.¹²

Luttwak used this Byzantine ideal-type to offer strategic counselling to America in 2009, as it reeled from the Global Financial Crisis and its two grinding wars in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Replace the battle of attrition and occupation of countries with manoeuvre warfare—lightning strikes and offensive raids to disrupt enemies, followed by rapid withdrawals … avoid consuming combat forces, and patiently whittle down the enemy’s strength. This might require much time. But there is no urgency because as soon as one enemy is no more, another will surely take his place. All is constantly changing as rulers and nations rise and fall. Only the empire is eternal—if, that is, it does not exhaust itself.¹³

The refusal to pursue absolute war aims, and the preference for limited ‘raids’, offers other dividends beyond the conservation of resources and the avoidance of self-exhaustion. A successful deterrence relationship rests on the deterrer’s willingness to be vulnerable, and to hold back if the ‘deterree’ complies. Whereas an enemy on the receiving end of a war of annihilation, waged by powers inflexibly committed, has little to lose. In turn, successful deterrence relies upon the continued self-restraint of states that do have the capability to go further. If they wish to deter, they must learn to live with frustrating compromise settlements, and the survival of adversaries that they would ideally prefer to perish.

As Chapter 1 demonstrated, Blair’s circle resolved early on to abandon the tenets of limited war, and the associated concepts of deterrence and containment, and use war instead as a problem-solving tool that they hoped would have a major, pacifying impact. They refused to be insecure, and believed they could wipe out one source of insecurity. Blair’s rationales for the Iraq War departed from the limited-war tradition. The Iraq War, and the wider War on Terror, at its core was based on an unbounded concept of Western security interests, and the conviction that the liberal order championed by the West could only be properly secured by defeating and uprooting its rivals, in particular ‘rogue’ actors and the more amorphous force of ‘extremism’, and replacing them with constitutional governments and free markets. This entailed a rejection of the doctrine that had defined the long contest with the Soviet Union, that the battle of ideas had to be bounded.

Where does the idea of ‘regime change’ come from? The Bush and Blair doctrines arose in permissive conditions, namely prolonged economic growth which powered a growth in relative strength, and a relatively benign threat-environment. In such conditions, the governments of major powers were more confident than their predecessors, confident enough to attack distant threats and contemplate military adventures to topple the governments of middling and minor states. A determination to destroy an enemy state, or alter it beyond recognition, and replace that regime is implicit in preventive war. States launch pre-emptive wars to forestall a feared imminent threat, as Israel did in June 1967 and Egypt did in October 1973, to revise the balance of power or seize particular territories without usually wishing to topple those regimes directly. By contrast, states do not usually launch preventive wars just to cut an adversary down to size but to take that adversary off the board, if not to annihilate it. The fewer the ‘checks’ on this option, the more tempting it becomes.

In the chronicle of preventive wars, war initiators usually wish their gamble of first strike against a more distant threat to result in gains well beyond disrupting their opponent’s capacity to harm them. From Stalin’s ‘winter war’ to reduce Finland to a protective buffer in 1939, to the Kaiserreich’s preventive strike against feared Franco-Russian encirclement in 1914, to Imperial Japan’s effort to evict the US from East and South Asia in 1941,¹⁴ the pay-off was supposed to be the absolute elimination of a threat and the creation of a new security order. Such is the scale of the undertaking and the diversion of resources that lesser goals might seem disproportionate. The more wary decision-maker eschews preventive war for that reason. Chancellor Bismarck considered in his memoirs ‘the question whether it was desirable, as regards a war which we should probably have to face sooner or later, to bring it on anticipando before the adversary could improve his preparations’ and concluded that ‘one cannot see the cards of Providence far enough ahead’.¹⁵ To shoot on suspicion is to be frightened enough that the threat is so grave as to be intolerable, even if it lurks over the horizon, yet to be confident enough in one’s power and foresight that acting now can succeed. The Bush Doctrine was based on the premise that the potential intersection of terrorism with WMD required the adoption of a militarized precautionary principle. In Bush’s words, America ‘must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud’.¹⁶

The idea of ‘regime change’ echoes older arguments about how America should wield its preponderant levels of power. If the master concept that guided strategic debate during the Cold War was ‘containment’, that concept always implied a level of threat tolerance. The notion that the US should limit and abide threats until they withered always attracted opposition. ‘Rollback’ was the main alternative offered up.¹⁷ The point of division was the question of time. Containment implicitly held that time was ultimately on the side of the United States and its allies against Soviet Communism. It counselled a firm and vigilant but slow wearing down of threats until they failed of their own internal contradictions. Because time favoured the ultimate victory of its political model over competitors, America could avoid a catastrophic major war, deter its major opponent from first-order aggression, preserve its constitution and way of life, and wait out and wear down the threat. The advocates of ‘rollback’ were more impatient and more pessimistic. Time was against them, as it allowed adversaries to grow and become bolder, and those adversaries could not be reliably deterred. These lines of division were first evident in the 1952 presidential election and periodically revived, with their climax under Ronald Reagan’s anti-détente stance in the early 1980s, as ‘rollbackers’ accused containment’s architects of mounting a passive and static strategy, which failed to deter revolutionary adventurism, wrongly appeased a totalitarian regime, and legitimized its conquests in Eastern Europe. The mere existence of the threat, rollbackers argued, was intolerable. Containment settled for more relative security; rollback for a more absolute security. Rollback involved regime changes, such as the subversion of puppet officials or covert operations to support overthrow from within, and led governments to entertain the possibility of preventive war. In practice, even administrations like Eisenhower and Reagan that publicly called for rollback ended up holding on to central tenets of containment, for fear that unrestrained rollback would escalate dangerously.

The same debate about time, and the trade-offs between containment and rollback, resurfaced in Washington after 1991, but without the restraining structure of the Cold War.¹⁸ The issue arose in practical form around the long confrontation with Saddam Hussein between 1991 and 2003. The West’s relationship with Iraq was centre stage in the long debate of whether to accept a limited victory for limited gains in 1991, and whether to tolerate imperfect outcomes in exchange for limited costs. Calls for going further and ‘regime change’ flowed partly from discontentment about the outcome and uncertain trajectory of that Gulf War. The war of 1990–1 was a brief and territorially confined struggle. Although it succeeded in its deliberately circumscribed direct goals, it earnt increasing complaints over time, especially as it became apparent that it was only an opening chapter in the West’s protracted struggle with Saddam Hussein. Even while that limited war was raging, it attracted more extravagant goals. The posse led by US forces on one level ended operations once Saddam’s forces had been expelled from Kuwait, and President Bush halted the punitive bombing campaign against retreating Republican Guard units, and resisted the call to drive on to Baghdad and overthrow the regime. On another level, the course of that war enlarged American ambitions. While the campaign was on foot, Washington and London pursued a twin formula of not moving directly against Saddam Hussein beyond his expulsion from Kuwait, but openly hoping and expecting that his defeat would result in regime collapse.¹⁹ President Bush in February 1991 incited the Iraqi people to force Saddam out, and in March 1991, intelligence briefings forecast Saddam’s downfall within a year. In the twelve years following, this ambition was frustrated but never-ending. Any relief from sanctions was made conditional on Saddam’s departure: until then Iraq’s Western opponents branded it a delinquent and outlaw state, and a ward of the international community. Neoconservatives and some right-wing nationalists regarded the failure to remove Saddam in 1991 and beyond as symptomatic of weakness, and through the Project for a New American Century, they pushed to make Saddam’s removal a test of American leadership. Their letter of January 1998 to President Clinton warned that ‘If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk’.²⁰

In an increasingly predominant America, it proved difficult even for strategic minds who had once defended Bush’s limited war to remain content with the outcome. Consider leading defence intellectual Eliot Cohen, who in July 1992 argued that the campaign had scored serious gains:

Were Kuwait’s borders restored? Was its territorial integrity sustained? … Was Saddam Hussein’s attempt at extortion frustrated? Were nations the world over assured of continuing access to oil at reasonable world prices? Was Iraq’s capacity to wage nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare crushed, if not as yet … totally eliminated? Was relative stability in the Middle East secured?

The answers were ‘affirmative’.²¹ Yet by December 2001, Cohen advocated war on Saddam and resolved that overthrowing ‘a menace and a monster’ and purveyor of terror that was also ‘far weaker’ would be easier than the ‘cakewalk’ of 1991, and ‘begin a transformation of the Middle East’.²² Saddam’s Iraq, once a containable limited threat, had become both a peril and an easy target. Blair would share this logic, and critics such as Robin Cook in his Commons resignation speech, attacked the contradiction.

Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.²³

Hawks may have countered that Saddam could pose dangers with WMD even while his conventional forces were depleted, but that rests too on a dubious assumption that sanctions devastated the latter while not affecting the former. Despite these fallacies, the marriage of superpower capability and post 9/11 insecurity led American and British Atlanticists alike to lose their patience with the ‘first’ Gulf War settlement.

Externally forced regime change became tempting partly because of a dilemma, that a defeated Saddam would neither capitulate nor go away. Throughout the 1990s, statesmen, inspectors, and diplomats were exasperated at Saddam’s refusal to comply with international inspections and demands. But he had little incentive to do so, given his Western adversaries had demanded his demise, and given they had attempted to make it happen through CIA-backed coups, mutinies, and failed assassination attempts. ‘Disarmament’ as a discrete and limited demand was never attempted. It was always mixed up with—and compromised by—an absolute demand for overthrow. This is the flaw with Tony Blair’s persistent claim that only ‘diplomacy backed by force’ could bring Saddam to heel, a claim based on only a limited set of overlearned historical analogies. In circumstances where the power exercising such diplomacy is effectively insisting that its target commit suicide, giving the target no secure path to survival if it capitulates, we should not be surprised that the targeted state resisted and refused to moderate its conduct.

Most of the momentum behind the ‘regime change’ era flowed from Washington. ‘Blair’s wars’, too, had involved military action to defeat sitting heads of state, with an aspiration to bring about their prosecution, from Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic to the British-backed coercion of Liberia’s Charles Taylor. The British version of regime change placed greater stress on the internationalism of law enforcement, even while selectivity over UN mandates suggested that the policing might be conducted through vigilantism. In the era of liberal intervention grew a doctrine that misbehaving states could forfeit their sovereignty, and be subject to the remedy of overthrow by other parties,²⁴ beyond the replacement of a government to include an overhaul of the institutions of state and their mode of civic life. Iraq loomed as a decent candidate, as it had not been a truly sovereign state since Gulf War One.

The notion that certain regimes are intolerable, even ones that did not command the resources of major states, rested also on assumptions about ‘regime type’. Namely, it assumed that the internal political and economic attributes of a state determine state behaviour, and that conversion to democracy promotes general peace. This dubious half-truth advocates for war treated as a law of history, drawing explicitly on international relations theory. With a typically neat antithesis, Tony Blair in July 2003 claimed that ‘any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police’.²⁵ This kind of argument rested partly on a selective reading of former Soviet dissident and Israel cabinet minister Natan Sharansky, whose book The Case for Democracy Bush bought for Blair, losing sight of the historical conditions and contingencies that make stable democracy possible in the first place.²⁶ At the time of writing this book in April 2017, according to Freedom House, post-Saddam Iraq, even with regular elections, remains ‘not free’, with political rights and civil liberties scoring at 5 and 6 respectively out of the lowest score of 7 on the ‘free’ scale.²⁷ Assumptions that Iraqis yearned to be free and therefore would embrace democratic peace were naïve. People yearn for security, too, and the introduction of ballots into a fractured population demonstrably made parts of the country more violent, not less. Majority rule did not remove secret detention sites and death squads from the state’s apparatus.²⁸ A majority government, representing majority will, in Iraq at that historical posed a threatening prospect to minorities. Even if democratic peace theory is true in the long run, the process of democracy creation is historically often violent. It was ironic that the leaders of two countries whose own constitutional governments were formed through revolution and civil war would overlook that possibility.

Regime Change: The Liberal Conscience, the Revolutionary Moment

‘Regime change’ can also be traced to two traditions in foreign policy, of liberalism and revolution. It was haunted by the ghosts of William Gladstone, and possibly Leon Trotsky.

Before dealing with the undeniable force of liberalism, or a form of it, that drove the invasion, there is another possible ideological source. This source is harder to prove. Britain’s war in Iraq attracted the support of notable ex-communists. Blair himself has recently admitted that Isaac Deutcher’s biography of Leon Trotsky, the communist and Red Army founder, ‘changed my life’,²⁹ and a number of high-ranking colleagues who supported the war also had Trotskyite revolutionary pasts, such as Alan Johnson, John Reid, Stephen Myers, and Alan Milburn.³⁰ While they had long repudiated revolutionary socialism, it is possible that a structure of belief remained in their idealistic internationalism, their vision of foreign policy as a crusade and a planet reordered, that lent itself to ambitious projects to overthrow an ancient regime via effective cadres deftly waging political combat.³¹ Equally important was what they rejected: conceptions of foreign policy built around the ‘national interest’, narrowly conceived, or the balance of power. Blair himself explicitly rejected these concepts in addressing the US Congress.³² If American military power had become the last remaining revolutionary instrument, Iraq was a revolutionary project, both in the basic sense that it was the toppling of a fascistic ruler intended to help the emancipation of the region, and because it was inspired by a Trotskyite impulse and tradition, or one reading of it. In America, certainly, the case for war attracted Trotskyite company. Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi-American anti-Saddamist was a leading Arab member of the Fourth International. Muscular pro-war idealists like Paul Berman and former labor organizer Stephen Schwartz argued for the ‘psychological, ideological and intellectual continuity’ between Trotsky and neoconservatism, and noted Trotsky’s ‘militaristic’ and pre-emptive disposition.³³ Leading US neoconservatives had been formed in the intellectual tradition of Trotskyism as purveyed by the commanding American figure Max Schachtman.

The revolution that was to be exported, though, was more directly and primarily a liberal one. By ‘liberalism’, I do not mean the pluralist tradition of John Stewart Mill and the assumption of fallibility and the value of dissenting opposition. I mean firstly the family of associated ideas that combine ideals of individual liberty, free markets, democratic representation, and equality of opportunity, and a belief in the possibility of irreversible progress. I mean also one strain of ‘security’ liberalism, the assumption that security is tied to the active spread of liberal institutions and values, if necessary at gunpoint. The strain of liberalism that prevailed in Washington and London in the early twenty-first century resists the notion of limitation. Of necessity, the belligerent liberal impulse is not satisfied with armed efforts that fall short of the toppling of regimes. Those efforts imply the tolerance and management of threats rather than their decisive defeat. Such restraint, they judge, is both immoral and strategically unwise. Liberalism contains the seeds of illiberalism, as it is a jealous faith that is intolerant of rival creeds and ideologies and feels threatened by them. The versions of liberalism held by Blair and Bush were belligerent because they idealized and universalized their country’s material interests, conflating them with a global struggle that knew few limits.

Consider the striking parallels between Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–98) and Blair, who was dubbed ‘Tony Gladstone’ after his Labour conference speech in October 2001 where he urged solidarity with the poor ‘in the mountain ranges of Afghanistan’.³⁴ Gladstone argued in 1876 for an armed intervention after the Ottoman Empire’s atrocious suppression of the April Uprising, demanding that the British government should ‘apply all its vigour to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria’, and in 1882, invoked Britain’s ‘moral duty’ in the invasion of Egypt to convert it ‘from anarchy and conflict to peace and order’.³⁵ Gladstone, like Blair, advocated war as a moral duty, on behalf of the international community but not necessarily with its unanimous consent, with the end goal of ending regimes and starting new ones. And the campaign in Egypt, as in Iraq, lasted far longer than a liberal prime minister intended or expected. In the hands of Gladstone or Blair, liberals at war believe themselves to be essentially peaceable, that the enemy (in this case, Saddam Hussein) embodies the belligerent spirit, so that overthrowing it on behalf of the civilized world serves the cause of peace. At a Press Conference in the earlier crisis with Saddam in December 1998, Blair claimed that ‘the first stirrings of a new global reality are upon us. Those who abuse force to wage war must be confronted by those willing to use force to maintain peace, otherwise the simple truth is that war becomes more likely’.³⁶ Left untempered by realism and a sense of the tragic, the tradition of armed liberalism becomes, as Michael Howard noted, ‘the efforts of good men to abolish war but only succeeding thereby in making it more terrible’.³⁷

Contrary to some interpretations, the Iraq project was not mainly the product of a cabal of neoconservative fanatics with sinister motives, or the sudden rise of a new and alien ideology. Instead, it drew upon a deeper, broader, and more familiar ideological source, namely the ambitious transatlantic neoliberalism of the post–Cold War era. As scholars who trace the war’s intellectual origins observe, the prevailing ‘common sense’ of the time was a restless form of liberalism that sought to remake the world in its own image.³⁸ The 9/11 attacks ‘re-bellicized’ it, or reawakened its war-like logic. It bred an underlying confidence in the prospects of regime change. With war underway, Blair averred that the vast majority of Iraqis were ‘desperate’ to be liberated, for its government to be ‘representative of the people’, and ‘for the human rights of the people to be cared for’.³⁹ In the odd, fleeting moment, Blair acknowledged the risks of post-war chaos.⁴⁰ Overall, however, diplomats and academic experts reported that the government’s setting was one of unscrutinized optimism, aversion to contrary advice, and incuriosity about whether occupying Iraq would work.⁴¹ Chilcot’s verdict was that the government failed to analyse or manage risks adequately, and planning assumed that ‘the UK would be able quickly to reduce its military presence in Iraq and deploy only a minimal number of civilians’.⁴² A clue to this failure lies in Blair’s later confession that he did not realize, amidst the liberal war to release universal human propensity for democratic liberty, that Iraqis would reject their liberation.⁴³ This mentality was also evident in the leaked memo of a the two-hour meeting between Blair and Bush on 31 January 2003, authored by David Manning and authenticated confidentially by two officials to The New York Times, indicating that the two leaders ‘envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment’.⁴⁴ In other words, inadequate planning derived from assumptions about the relative ease of the mission. The liberators expected the liberated to align themselves with the new state in short order, and wanted it to be true, more in hope than in hard-headed calculation. It was a necessary corollary, too, of Blair’s conviction that the threat of ‘extremism’ had to be decisively confronted and corrected, not merely contained.⁴⁵ Such a doctrine dictated regime change, no matter the chances of civil strife and disorder.

Optimism also had an Iraqi face: Iraqi anti-Saddam exiles, organized around the Iraqi National Congress, encouraged belief that native Iraqis would welcome their diaspora compatriots as leaders, and there was an underground democratic movement that would naturally prevail after the decapitation of the regime. Hand-in-hand with this assumption was the view of Saddam’s regime as a detachable group that would be separated from the body politic, rather than a whole political movement that had over three decades embedded itself through Iraq’s institutions.⁴⁶

The sum of these hopes was an optimism that the US-led strike on Iraq would succeed quickly, without a tortured political aftermath. President George W. Bush’s declaration of the end of combat operations on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003 may have been overhyped. The banner announcing ‘Mission Accomplished’ was not his creation, and his speech acknowledged that there was ‘difficult work to do in Iraq’. But the occasion overall signalled the sense of triumphant finality that also tinged Bush’s address to troops in Afghanistan in June of that year, that ‘America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished.’⁴⁷

American and British versions of warlike liberalism commonly believed themselves to be liberating Iraqis to advance their own security. They were not identical, but Iraq marked a powerful point of intersection and agreement. If the ‘Bush Doctrine’ was articulated in the form of a strident American hyper-nationalism, the ‘Blair Doctrine’ consciously sought to build a consensual international community around a vision of progress and liberation, championed by Western arms. True to the tensions within Atlantic neoliberalism, the process of liberation was seen as natural yet necessarily coercive. Iraqis, the objects of liberation, would be made to be free, remade as politically and economically rational citizens, entitled to make a rational choice to become friendly states whose interests self-evidently coincided with the West’s. With an illegitimate regime separate from Iraqi society, and then surgically removed, rational individuals would exercise their natural choice to be free. Iraqis, they mostly assumed, were not groups formed by the weight of history and potentially vulnerable to a destructive security dilemma, needing security guarantees from one another in order to reinvent their polity. Rather they were individuals to be exposed quickly in the ‘year zero’ of liberation to the competitive processes of market democracy, their loyalties to the new state reinforced by development aid. There would be little choice in the matter. New Labour, like the Conservatives, sought to persuade people to accept capital and the discipline of the market as facts of life. It drew upon a crude dualism between the modern and premodern, the old and the new.⁴⁸ Globalization was a given fact rather than a set of political decisions. Iraq would be subject to the same logic. Blair’s domestic agenda they projected onto the regency in Iraq. As Blair once exhorted trade unions, ‘modernise or die’.⁴⁹

Emphatically, not all liberals behave or think in this way. Liberal opponents of the war, such as Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell, identified liberalism with strict adherence to international institutions and obedience to international law, and the preservation of the United Nations’ unity. Against crusading liberalism, they countered with legalist liberalism. Liberalism for them was supposed to be a restraint, not an enabler, of military adventures, and it prized unity and process more highly than the enforcement of credibility. Warlike liberalism in 2003, however, associated liberalism with the determined application of power to enforce the United Nations’ credibility even in defiance of its veto-wielding members.

Blair’s strategic outlook evolved through his experience as a warfighting prime minister. He deployed armed forces five times, from Africa and the Balkans to Central Asia and the Middle East, deployments that mostly resulted in an overthrow. Blair acknowledged the power of these historical experiences, and drew confidence from them. In his speech at College Station, the day after the April 2002 Crawford meeting with Bush, he spelled it out: ‘If necessary, the action should be military, and, again, if necessary and justified, it should involve regime change. I have been involved, as British Prime Minister, in three conflicts involving regime change: Milosevic, the Taliban and Sierra Leone’.⁵⁰ His judgement, he claimed, was vindicated in these campaigns, against the critics.⁵¹ It was the wars in the Balkans, and the possibilities of military action in the age of the Pax Americana, that most roused Tony Blair’s liberal conscience, and the campaign over Kosovo in particular that defined his moral and strategic worldview.⁵² April to May of 1999 were the most formative months for him. As he formulated his doctrine of the ‘international community’ and lobbied Washington to threaten the use of ground troops to coerce Serbia’s regime to end its butchery of Kosovar Muslims, Blair was also visibly shocked by his encounter with refugee camps in Bosnia. His ‘first rudimentary thinking on regime change’ took shape at this time as the bombardment of Serbia continued. That this unexpectedly protracted campaign eventually succeeded, after making Blair fear it could be his ‘Suez’ moment, fortified his ambitions about what political will and force could achieve. The ousting of Milosevic became the minimum for the reintegration of Serbia into the civilized world, or in his own words, ‘We can then embark on a new moral crusade to rebuild the Balkans without him’.⁵³ Blair drew from a flawed world-historical vision that was evident in his address to the Romanian parliament:

In 1945 Germany was still under Hitler. Within ten years, it had re-established its democracy, rebuilt its cities, joined NATO and was in at the birth of what is now the European Union. Germany reconstructed itself within a decade as a peace-loving nation and an impeccable member of the international community, and today is a resolute and leading player in Operation Allied Force. Serbia can re-join the world community too. But that prospect will only be a reality when its corrupt dictatorship is cast out and real democracy returns to the former Republic of Yugoslavia.⁵⁴

Blair’s potted history, on which he built his demand for ‘regime change’, is misleading. Firstly, in the late 1990s the ‘world community’ he spoke of included powers with authoritarian and illiberal regimes, from China to Saudi Arabia, that his government conducted high-level diplomacy with. Historically, the post-war ‘Germany’ Blair referred to was in fact West Germany. East Germany was a Soviet satellite. The fragile peace between East and West Germany was kept partly by mutual deterrence—a concept Blair would disown—and maintained and policed by a deliberate division in the form of the Berlin Wall. West Germany did not recover and prosper simply by casting out its old order. It did not have elections for its first four years, and its proud social democracy, like NATO, retained officials who had been security elites in the Third Reich.⁵⁵ Former Nazi mandarins stuffed the Interior ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Justice Ministry and the highest levels of government. The complicity of its officials and bureaucrats ranged from membership of the Nazi Party to involvement in formulating and executing its repressive policies. Several former Nazi generals would later become senior commanders in the Bundeswehr, West Germany’s army. The reasons for this continuity were likely both practical—to retain the capabilities of experienced civil servants, armed personnel and lawyers—and political, geared towards the new emphasis on countering the Soviet threat. Understandable or execrable, it was a compromise that stands in marked contrast to the De-Ba’athification purge of the bureaucracy and the security services carried out by the occupying powers in Baghdad from 2003. Blair’s case for absolute regime change as the baseline standard, like the case for occupation of Iraq, relied upon the wrongly remembered case of West Germany’s post-war reconstruction.

This was not the last time he would offer a dangerously innocent account of history. In a remembrance service for the 9/11 victims, he claimed that for the generation that ‘went through the Blitz’, America was ‘the one country that stood by us’.⁵⁶ This was not only untrue of America’s diplomatic stance in 1940, but overlooked the solidarity of Commonwealth and European anti-fascist states such as Greece. Blair’s oversimplified and sanitized historical narrative underpinned an oversimplified and sanitized account of political change, which he presented as a bold turning of the page, without compromise or negotiation with the past. Blair and like-minded Atlanticist hawks also sanitized the memory of the campaign in Kosovo. Held up as an exemplar of righteous force, prudently applied, it also accelerated the flight of Kosovar refugees and enabled counter-ethnic cleansing by the Kosovar Liberation Army, who drove 200,000 Serbs out of Kosovo. These unintended consequences exposed the failure of the war’s architects to assist victims by preparing in detail. The acclamation of rescued Muslims, cheering Blair’s name as he visited camps, overshadowed the brutal reciprocities of a civil war, and cemented the episode as a case of the strong rescuing the weak from the predator. Tragic historical cases, old and recent, became useful accounts of history, as stripped of ambiguities and problems as the September Dossier.

Blair’s original doctrine, adumbrated in his Chicago speech of April 1999, contained the seeds of these errors, but it would take cumulative experience to turn them into dogma. The Chicago speech was not an untempered, crusading outburst. With the input of Sir Lawrence Freedman, who is as much sober strategist as principled liberal, the speech was formulated to bound interventionism with serious preconditions, tests, and caveats. The Chicago doctrine was an attempt to capture an equilibrium between the stability of a world of sovereign states, and the revisionist ambition to topple oppressive regimes that forfeited their sovereignty. As Freedman recalls:

The question in my mind was not how could the interventionist impulse that had developed during the 1990s be taken to the next stage of toppling dictators—which had not been attempted with Saddam nor in any of the interventions in the former Yugoslavia—but how to keep the impulse under control. On one hand, it seemed that in the circumstances of the time and in the context of the West’s apparent predominance, demands to intervene would be regular and in many cases justified. Yet on the other, not all these demands could be met even when the case to act might be morally compelling. It was also important to meet the criticisms surrounding Kosovo that the West was acquiring for itself a carte blanche.⁵⁷

The tragedy of Chicago is not that it was originally a pure doctrine of armed liberalism, but that the limitations it included, the clauses of self-restraint, faded over time.

Around Blair were gathered determined minds, who helped to articulate his vision and impose it on the reluctant. It was not the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office or the Ministry of Defence that were the main sources of Blair’s evolving doctrine. If anything, the Kosovo template strengthened his aversion to using Whitehall machinery for advice. Blair neglected orthodox channels of advice, wrote the lion’s share of his own speeches in a personalized process, literally on the fly in April–May 1999, and when he turned to others for intellectual input, he tapped trusted outsiders. Advisor Jonathan Powell, former diplomat from the British embassy in Washington, was a committed Atlanticist and ‘true believer’ in the cause.⁵⁸ Also central was Secretary of State for Defence and future NATO Secretary General George Robertson. This son of a village policeman, from a long family tradition of policing, would become a hawkish Labour grandee and member of the transatlantic foreign policy establishment, and would retain a constabulary view of the West’s global role. He pronounced in his NATO capacity four days before 9/11 that ‘in the global village, I am the bobby on the beat’.⁵⁹ There is great confidence implicit in such statements, framing the world as a domesticated small place that can be pacified by the authority of the transatlantic alliance ‘cop’. Robertson was significant not only ideologically, but because he believed in backing up liberal ambitions with ground troops. To US officials, he had repeatedly pledged ‘50,000 troops’ to a proposed NATO ground force campaign in the Kosovo conflict. Rightly sceptical about the promise of air power as a self-sufficient instrument, ‘regime change’ visionaries believed in armies as the tools of democratic modernization.

Robertson had overseen the Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) of 1998.⁶⁰ The Review did not offer a hardened doctrine of regime change or preventive war, but the early traces of the core assumptions can be found there. Saddam Hussein’s regime is a ranked focus—appearing four times, more often than any other named adversary, embodying with his military forces and WMD projects the ‘significant sources of instability’, threats that ‘may grow’. There is a strong emphasis on anticipatory security measures, a preventive orientation, assuming Britain’s ability to avert conflicts long in advance, while paying little heed to the potential unintended consequences of well-intentioned activism. Evident overall is a desire to forestall threats with the confident application of power. The fading of great power threats is treated not as an impermanent development incidental to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but almost as a permanent transformation of the world, licensing expeditionary ventures to suppress instability far beyond Britain’s region:

In the Cold War, we needed large forces at home and on the Continent to defend against the constant threat of massive attack from an enemy coming to us. Now, the need is increasingly to help prevent or shape crises further away and, if necessary, to deploy military forces rapidly before they get out of hand.

Robertson’s underlying notion of the West using anticipatory measures to bring order into chaos was echoed by Secretary of Defence Geoff Hoon in December 2001, that the only certainty in a complex world was that problems had to be met ‘upstream’.⁶¹ Above all, Robertson’s Review was founded on the ‘Munich’ worldview, where one model of muscular diplomacy wielded by righteous nations will always work, and is universally applicable:

Our forces must also be able to back up our influence as a leading force for good in the world and meet our responsibilities towards the UN, by helping to prevent or manage crises. In the words of the UN Secretary General after this year’s climbdown by Saddam Hussein, ‘You can do a lot more with diplomacy backed up by firmness and force’.

This was only a half-truth. Diplomacy that emphasizes the threat of force and punishment is not always the most effective approach to hostile regimes. Not every regime is analogous to the unappeasable and undeterrable Nazi Germany, and attempts at constructive engagement that de-emphasize military threats can succeed. As the most in-depth study of this tradition argues,

Long-standing rivalries tend to thaw as a result of mutual accommodation, not coercive intimidation. Of course, offers of reconciliation are sometimes rebuffed, requiring that they be revoked. But under the appropriate conditions, reciprocal concessions are bold and courageous investments in peace. Obama is also right to ease back on democracy promotion as he engages adversaries; even states that are repressive at home can be cooperative abroad.⁶²

It was not with overt threats of force, or ideologically fundamentalist claims to be a ‘force for good’, that Nixon’s Washington engaged and rebuilt relations with Mao’s China in 1972, likewise when Australia’s Keating government forged a security agreement with Suharto’s Indonesia in 1995, another case where a bloodstained regime at home could cooperate abroad.

Whether Saddam’s Iraq would fit this model is uncertain. It had certainly never been given the chance. The West had not been conducting coherent ‘diplomacy’ with Iraq from 1991. Instead, it had demanded that for Iraq to return to the international fold, its ruling regime must abdicate. From the outset, the assumption that Saddam must and will depart under international pressure was stubbornly held, even as the evidence mounted that he was determined to ride out the campaigns to bring him down. Perennial escalations against Iraq were not delivering on the hope of regime change, but rather entrenching the status quo. Ironically, in SDR the success of Western strategy in achieving its more realistic and limited aim, of weakening Saddam’s capacity for external aggression, did not get the credit it was due. The worldview inscribed in the SDR of 1998 takes for granted that the currency of international life is one of resolve versus weakness, of forces for good standing up to hostile states and forcing them to climb down, a world where threats remain deadly or get even worse. Any sense of the Byzantine alternative, of judicious management of potential threats, and proportional threat assessment, let alone the possibility of turning enemies into neutrals or friends, or dividing them against one another, goes missing in action. With these assumptions, Britain was already primed for the road to Basra.

The jurist and former national security official Philip Bobbitt both articulated and probably helped define Blair’s worldview, through two macro-historical works, The Shield of Achilles and its follow-up, Terror and Consent. Blair endorsed the latter, that applied Blairite ideas to war on terrorism, as the ‘first really comprehensive analysis of the struggle against terror’.⁶³ In both works, the victorious West, according to historical pattern, must impose world order on the vanquished. Bobbitt’s overall prescription drew on a reading of world history, where major powers could pursue peace by expanding the principles of a vaguely defined ‘market state’ globally and at home, requiring sustained military domination and an ability to fight constant minor wars. Ominously, this must include ‘preclusive’ wars, waged by societies based on consent against those who practice and embody ‘terror’. The leaning towards long, universal, and existential struggles of ideas, waged by increasingly powerful states with moral vision of enforcing rule of law, followed by grand constitutional settlements that restore order to the world, was an oversimplification of history. But it appealed to the type of ‘visionary world-making’ that is a tendency of the most powerful states,⁶⁴ and an obvious fit with Blair’s emerging worldview since before 9/11, one that he intended to guide Washington towards.

The manifestoes of Robert Cooper, former diplomat and senior advisor on foreign policy, did most in writing to define and reinforce Blair’s case for world reordering. Cooper’s public called for a new ‘liberal imperialism’ drew on his earlier analysis at the think tank Demos, was coined in an attention-grabbing article published in April 2002, and later turned into a treatise, The Breaking of Nations.⁶⁵ Cooper was close to the Blair circle. He was accorded a high status, exempted from the normal civil service prohibitions on publishing his opinions. He was also asked to provide a position paper on the WMD threat, and had access enough to supply the Prime Minister’s Christmas reading. Cooper mirrored Blair’s assumption, that the central crisis manifested on 9/11 was the proliferation of WMD and ‘pre-modern’ actors threatening the breakdown of order in a ‘borderless’ world. His offerings amounted largely to a hyperbolic and rambling discourse about world order. But he was precise on one point. If the world had a civilized core, there was a barbarous periphery, creating a warrant for open-ended force. Cooper’s advice was self-fulfilling:

Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era—force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.

The timing was significant, calling for anticipatory force just as the British government was getting sure signals of Washington’s determination to strike Iraq. Cooper, like Blair, framed the issue in stark terms. The choice was intervention in zones of ‘pre-modern chaos’, that could be risky and unsustainable, but the only other option was ‘letting countries rot’. Less ambitious containing measures, from deterrence to counter-terrorism to shoring up defences, let alone diplomatic bargaining, he did not consider. Alongside imperialist military methods, Cooper like Blair advocated systemic neoliberal solutions to ‘solve’ the ‘underlying problems’. He called for a cosmopolitan empire in which the pre-modern voluntarily submit themselves to the discipline of financial institutions, and European technocrats, soldiers, and police keep the peace in disorderly regions. The book version, produced in 2004 as the difficulties of occupying Iraq were becoming apparent, was more chastened than the earlier appeal for a new imperialism. In The Breaking of Nations, wars—presumably including the preventive ones he had called for—can ‘weaken and destroy’ states, and fuel and empower fanaticism. ‘Without the wars in Afghanistan there would have been no Osama Bin Laden’, Cooper observes, yet still he still sympathizes with the ‘doctrine of preventive action’ out of which emerged al-Qaeda in Iraq. Like Blair’s conception of world order, Cooper’s was self-contradictory and reductionist, offering a false choice of regime change versus passive threat-tolerance. It inflated threats. And it was presumptuous of the West’s power and knowledge. His liberal imperialism was impressed with its own cosmopolitan modernity, not knowing its own complicity in disorder.

Threat Inflation, Power Inflation: The False Logic of Rogue States

The case for war rested on a broader appraisal of the dangers of globalization and the promise of Western power. The West’s free way of life, so it was said, could be gravely threatened from anywhere and any time, and the intensifying circulation of capital, materials, and ideas made the rise of ‘rogue states’ dangerous. This worldview penetrated the rhetoric and practices of Anglo-American strategic behaviour abroad throughout the War on Terror. It offered a powerful and dangerously overreaching account of national security and how it should be pursued. It inflated threats, underestimated the risks of military action, and was insensitive to the conditions in which liberal democracy and free markets historically need to thrive.

At the core of the case for military action was the notion of the ‘rogue state’, often invoked and rarely scrutinized. On closer inspection, the idea is overblown and self-contradictory. The notion of the ‘rogue’ state dates back at least to the early 1980s, when the US government both formally and informally attributed roguery to the suspect states of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. All were charged with offences from state sponsorship of terrorism to the pursuit of WMD, along with oppressive internal behaviour that supposedly proved they were externally subversive and sub-rational. By Gulf War One, the archetype was in place, whereby a rogue was ‘an aggressive developing country that militarily threatened its neighbours and region while seeking to overturn the international order through the sponsorship of terrorism and the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction’.⁶⁶ The ‘rogue’ classification had its obvious uses. It served as a ‘certificate of political insanity’⁶⁷ and thus licensed anticipatory measures and rougher treatment. It also bore disadvantages. States that technically fit the category Washington may wish to bargain with in pursuit of larger goals. Syria before its latest civil war, for instance, was an important part of the ‘Middle East Peace Process’, just as Gaddafi’s Libya was hostile to Al-Qaeda. Branding a state with pariah status made it harder to conduct crisis diplomacy, as was the case, for instance, with North Korea in the 1994 confrontation with the US over its nuclear programme. And the ‘rogue’ charge was potentially embarrassing. Saddam Hussein’s roguery was at least enabled by other states, at times with their active connivance, in his largest scale aggression against Iran, and the debts he accrued in the course of his campaign came from supporting Gulf states. Saddam, as Blair once said, ‘had choices’, but he was historically able to act because of the wider complicity of other states. The Clinton administration abandoned the category precisely because it limited its political flexibility. The Bush II administration, however, restored it in February 2001. And even the Clinton administration took the actual idea seriously. There was a distinct class of states, that were ‘outlaw’, ‘backlash’, or ‘renegade’, as articulated in detail by National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, with the imputation of irrationality, that the adversary cannot be deterred.⁶⁸

The ‘rogue’ category rests on a perception of power capabilities and a perception of the rogue’s irrationality. It also rests on an assumption that there is a family of such states sharing common disorders, a family that can be effectively combated by treating it as a whole. Blair in November 2002 warned of the danger of ‘extremism driven by fanaticism, personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states’, claiming that ‘States which are failed, which repress their people brutally, in which notions of democracy and the rule of law are alien, share the same absence of rational boundaries to their actions as the terrorist.’⁶⁹ Blair maintained the potential threat of Saddam deploying a WMD-armed terrorist group as a proxy, asking in his autobiography,

Would Saddam want al-Qaeda to be powerful inside Iraq? Absolutely not. Would he be prepared to use them outside Iraq? Very possibly. Was there a real risk of proliferation, not only from Iraq but elsewhere, leaching into terrorist groups who would not be averse to using WMD? I certainly thought so … I still think so.⁷⁰

Because there was a family of such states sharing common pathologies, the strategy of ‘taking out’ one rogue state would deter and dissuade other rogues. The driving fear behind Bush’s post-9/11 grand strategy was the perceived danger of WMD transfer, in order to use weapons by proxy, while gaining anonymity and deniability, thus avoiding punitive retaliation by the targeted state. The central countermeasure was to inhibit proliferation beyond deterrence and counter-terrorism, through preventive war. Bush claimed that ‘States like [Iraq], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred’.⁷¹ This was the rationale for elevating terrorism to a threat level of first rank in official national security strategy.⁷² The likes of Saddam were fundamentally irrational, or at least wildly incautious and risk-prone actors, who could not be deterred and contained. War proponents dismissed deterrence as too passive and noted that Baghdad’s development of WMD would have permitted one of ‘the world’s most dangerous regimes … to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons’. ‘A WMD-armed Saddam would have, in their view, broken out of his containment box and then threatened vital American interests. Finally, war supporters chastised those advocating deterrence as immoral, blind to the terrible suffering of the Iraqi people under the tyrannical Baathist regime’.⁷³ Secretary of State Powell likewise argued that Saddam ‘does have a proclivity toward terrorist activity and he is developing weapons of mass destruction that he might use or perhaps could make available to other terrorist organizations’.⁷⁴ National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice repeated that claim.⁷⁵

Blair invoked the rogue state–WMD–terrorist nexus in every signature expression of threat and need for regime change. WMD terrorism with a rogue state as intermediary was his main summary of the threat picture, anticipated in his 1999 Chicago speech, and spelt out in his speech to Parliament on 18 March 2003, his letter to Bush on 26 March 2003, where ‘terrorists and rogue states come together in hatred of our values’, and in his Sedgefield Speech of 2004. His testimony before the Iraq Inquiry was that 9/11 changed the calculus of risk for this reason, so that living with dangers was the risk, whereas taking action to exterminate those dangers was the ‘safe’ option: ‘The point about this act in New York was that, had they been able to kill even more people than those 3,000, they would have, and so, after that time, my view was you could not take risks with this issue at all’.⁷⁶

The rogue-WMD threat perception suffers both empirical and logic defects. It is not clear that such a family exists. Most of the states earmarked as rogues have different risk calculus, and vary in their willingness to compromise. Most were not more likely than other states to be involved in militarized interstate disputes, not more likely to initiate such disputes, and not more likely to use force when such disputes turned violent. Iraq and North Korea had a greater tendency than the other candidates to get involved in militarized interstate disputes and to use force first, but were not usually the initiators of the row.⁷⁷ It also conflates North Korea, which has decided to build a deliverable nuclear bomb, with states like Iran, that have historically desired the ‘breakout’ capacity but not the complete capability. And confidence that destroying one regime would clearly signal a ‘deterrence message’ to onlooking states was suspect. Demonstrating the will and capability to kill off one regime can be interpreted by other regimes as an added incentive to develop a deterrent of their own, given that it also demonstrates what can happen to vulnerable adversaries, and given that those regimes may not wish to exist only at the permission of the West. The other difficulty with deterrence-via-regime change is that deterrence requires forbearance if the target agrees to be deterred, and thus it requires later governments to respect the precedent, by also restraining themselves from attacking regimes that have, in fact, disarmed. Post-Iraq events worked otherwise. Looking back, Richard Betts summarized the problem as Washington debated whether to attack Iran. The costs

might seem justifiable if launching a war against Iran dissuaded other countries from attempting to get their own nuclear deterrents. But it might just as well energise such efforts. George W. Bush’s war to prevent Iraq from getting nuclear weapons did not dissuade North Korea, which went on to test its own weapons a few years later, nor did it turn Iran away. It may have induced Libyan leader Muammer al-Qaddafi to surrender his nuclear programme, but a few years later, his reward from Washington turned out to be overthrow and death—hardly an encouraging lesson for US adversaries about the wisdom of renouncing nuclear weapons.⁷⁸

The notion that Saddam was an irrational and undeterrable rogue who would transfer WMD to terrorist groups was not uniformly the advice that government received. A psychological profile commissioned by Downing Street in November 2002, based on earlier Defence Intelligence Service appraisal,⁷⁹ and received by Manning and Powell, portrayed Saddam as committed above all to survival, a ‘judicious political calculator’ who was ‘by no means irrational’, more likely to be aggressive when feeling his back against the wall, otherwise calibrating risks carefully. Likewise, JIC assessments judged that Saddam with his WMD arsenal was potentially aggressive and unpredictable but ultimately only below a certain threshold, and ultimately concerned for survival. In November 2001, the JIC judged that Saddam would consider WMD terrorism, but if his regime was under serious and imminent threat of collapse. In other circumstances, the threat of WMD terrorism is slight, because of the risk of US retaliation’;⁸⁰ in September 2001, the JIC estimated that Saddam in calculating whether to use his chemical and biological weapons pre-emptively would weigh up the military utility against their political costs, and would only be likely to use them in desperation with conflict underway or ‘at the death’;⁸¹ and another in January 2003 judged that ‘there is no sign’ that Saddam ‘is unstable or losing the capacity to make rational tactical decisions’.⁸²

Despite the fact that this alternative interpretation of Saddam’s rationality was available, the possibility that a regime that had determinedly stayed in power for decades was not recklessly incautious, or effectively suicidal, hardly touched internal debate. The JIC itself departed from its own profiles of Saddam and fell prey to incoherent views of the problem. While preparing the September dossier, a JIC meeting at which Manning was present spelt out an ‘important message’,

which needed to be brought out more clearly in the draft, was that if the chips were down, and Saddam believed his regime to be under real threat of extinction, nothing was going to deter him from using such weapons. Readers of the paper needed to be reminded of Saddam’s unpredictability, and of the fact that his thought processes did not work in a recognisably Western, rational and logical way. The draft should also distinguish more clearly between the three different ways in which Iraq might use its offensive chemical or biological capabilities: in weaponised form against military targets; in an unconventional attack on military targets; or as part of a sponsored terrorist attack aimed at spreading fear and influencing public attitudes.⁸³

There are several difficulties here. Firstly, note the flattering portrait of rational and logical thought processes as predominantly ‘Western’ qualities, with the implied assumption that deterrence logic was applicable to Westerners only. It is also unclear why using WMD under ‘real threat of extinction’ amounts to irrational, illogical behaviour. After all, the threat of punitive retaliation is central to British deterrence doctrine. If backed into a corner, would not a ‘rational and logical’ actor be moved to use every weapon at its disposal? This account also suggests that Saddam has waited until then to use them, suggesting a more careful calculus on his part.

There was an overarching tension in pro-war argument about rationality and irrationality. The family of rogues, hawks argue, is oblivious to the normal patterns of deterrence or conventional diplomacy, thus deserving of special treatment. Yet the nuclear transfer scenario begs the question, why transfer in the first place? Those same irrational rogues will take rational steps to survive by transferring WMD rather than using it directly. The very fact that the offending state would place itself at one remove from nuclear use indicates a rational concern to avoid detection, remain anonymous, and duck punishment, in turn suggesting a commitment to survival and a capacity for sane means-ends calculation. If, on the other hand, the state contemplating nuclear transfer is aware that nuclear transfer would probably be detected and punished, and attract significant retaliation, therefore that kind of state would probably be deterrable from such behaviour. A risk-prone ‘irrational’ regime, heedless of its survival, fanatically committed to aggression, and willing to court the retaliation of a major power, by definition would not worry about detection and retaliation. Indeed, it would not bother transferring nukes in the first place with the ‘command and control’ downsides that would bring, but would use them openly. The wider argument, that a powerful precedent would teach other rogues (or potential rogues) a lesson, likewise suggests that undeterrable ‘mad’ regimes can be rationally dissuaded and cowed into submission by a strong signal, after one of their number has been made an example of. That implies a process of rational calculation and risk aversion that the ‘rogue state’ label denies. In the case of a rational state recklessly betting on the possibility of getting away with a nuclear transfer, there are measures short of war that could drive down the risk of such a misperception through signalling measures short of war, as Chapter 5 will argue.

The Bush administration’s intra-war posture towards Iraq in the build-up to war rested on a similar contradiction, claiming Saddam was undeterrable yet making punishment threats to induce him to refrain from using the chemical and biological weapons Washington believed it to possess, thereby relying on the very deterrence that it insisted was impossible in relations with Iraq.⁸⁴ While stressing the unstable predatory nature of rogue regimes, Blair simultaneously invited Iran and Libya to abandon their nuclear programmes. The orders that were allegedly oblivious to cost–benefit logic were the same orders that were open to diplomatic persuasion backed by force.

The same have-it-both-ways illogic pervaded the parliamentary debates of February and March 2003. Supporting the case for war, Iain Duncan Smith warned that ‘if the international community backs away from dealing with Saddam Hussein now, that will be seen as a green light by every rogue state and terrorist group around the world’.⁸⁵ But ‘green light’ suggests a rational motorist, awaiting a clear signal, not a fanatical driver determined to accelerate. David Trimble MP argued that ‘containment and deterrence will not work in the situation that confronts us’, in the world of ‘WMD, terrorist movements and rogue states’, yet also noted that Saddam would only have disarmed ‘if he believed that massive force would be used against him if he did not comply’, suggesting the rogue ruler was sensitive to the threat of punishment after all.⁸⁶ William Hague MP warned about ‘rogue states’ in a changed post–Cold War world, yet urged action to ensure ‘that those who aspire to be rogue states or sponsors of terrorism know what happens and know how the Western alliance responds to such a threat’.⁸⁷ That baseline had already been drawn by the retaliation against Al-Qaeda and its host government in Afghanistan, and the argument that clear deterrent lines could be drawn presupposed a limitation on the aggression of rogues. Containment, an active strategy of monitoring, sanctions, occasional military strikes, and embargo, hawks misrepresented as passivity, while at the same time lamenting the devastation wrought on Iraq by the same containment programme.

In the cumulative vision of regime change and its calculus about threat and solution, there was a flip side, an under-scrutinized assumption that in a ‘globalised’ world, civilized countries could not abide risks linked to WMD. Globalization imperilled liberal world order, Blair reasoned, warranting the direct removal of threats. Interdependence, as Bush and Blair insisted, erased any distinction between values and interests. In plainer language, evil regimes in middling minor states like Serbia or Iraq, or impoverished pariah states like Afghanistan, were not only morally abhorrent, but strategically intolerable. This was the consistent basis for Blair’s Chicago speech in April 1999, his address to the US Congress on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and one he unrepentantly maintains.⁸⁸ To rapturous applause, Blair before Congress portrayed a systemic virus that changed the rules of the international life. Coming together as a species

provides us with unprecedented opportunity but also makes us uniquely vulnerable … the threat comes because in another part of our globe there is shadow and darkness … in the combination of these afflictions a new and deadly virus has emerged. The virus is terrorism whose intent to inflict destruction is unconstrained by human feeling and whose capacity to inflict it is enlarged by technology.⁸⁹

Blair made the formation and spread of WMD terrorism sound easy, an almost inevitable fact of life that had to be countered with determined and far-reaching preventive measures, and beyond a mere cordon sanitaire.

This was a bad case of ‘threat inflation’, or ‘concern for a threat that goes beyond the scope and urgency that a disinterested analysis would justify’.⁹⁰ WMD terrorism, whether chemical, biological, or nuclear, is difficult to carry off, especially against well-prepared developed states. Executing a bioterrorist attack entails a multi-step process of obtaining, preserving, moving, and detonating the weapon, while employing specialist skills, maintaining secrecy, and moving through highly policed territory. A successful bioterrorist attack requires that

one must obtain the appropriate strain of the disease pathogen. One must know how to handle the organism correctly. One must know how to grow it in a way that will produce the appropriate characteristics. One must know how to store the culture, and to scale-up production properly. One must know how to disperse the product properly.⁹¹

To execute nuclear terrorist attack, as John Mueller calculates, the atomic terrorists’ task might involve a twenty-step process, from successfully obtaining HEU (highly enriched uranium), to assembling a team of highly skilled scientists and technicians, the smuggling of the improvised nuclear device weighing a ton or more, to the successful detonation.⁹² It requires the secure procurement, preparation, and secret movement of a heavy instrument through increasingly monitored space and across borders. Chemical weapons terrorism has also proven more difficult than feared. They are largely ineffective against well-prepared and well-equipped armed forces. To achieve lethality levels against civilian targets sufficient for ‘mass destruction’, it requires ‘access to sophisticated delivery means capable of disseminating CW agents efficiently over large areas’.⁹³

WMD terrorism is not impossible. It is, though, considerably more remote a prospect than advocates of regime change assumed. Just as importantly, it is capable of being disrupted by less expensive and high-risk ‘rollback’ measures. Contrary to Blair’s claim that globalization renders every security problem intimate and urgent, states can disrupt threats and reduce them at many points along the chain between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’, with gradual, incremental, patient containment to lower probabilities that are already low, reducing the threat into a third-order, chronic nuisance. This would entail measures already underway, but without the inflated rhetoric of threat eradication, without the rushed dismantling of civil liberties, and without the entrapment of living in a perpetual state of emergency and its continual drive to escalation. Combinations would bring together ordinary police work, international cooperation, the cultivation of intelligence within the wider community, continued efforts to secure stored weapons-grade nuclear material, with a more measured and discriminate programme of raids and drone killings to keep ‘havens’ unsafe. Blair’s government blithely brushed off unspectacular, patient counter-terrorism, as an alternative to regime change.

The case for war, therefore, was muddled. It suffered self-contradictions that deserved greater consideration. And it overlooked a basic question.

Would War Work?

In a memo of 25 March 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked a question that hardly engaged the war’s architects:

We have also to answer the big question—what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything. Most of the assessments from the US have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq’s WMD threat. But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better.⁹⁴

Straw’s question went neglected. The utility of war, the elementary issue of what it could deliver, and whether it could deliver with acceptable costs, deserved dispassionate probing in cold blood. Those charged with making the decision ought to have drawn on a wide body of historical analogies, to explicitly test assumptions and weigh up counterfactual scenarios.

Overthrowing states followed by military occupations is a difficult undertaking, historically, that usually intensifies security competition within states, and sometimes between them.⁹⁵ It has an impressive record of failure. Since 1815, there have been twenty-six completed military occupations where a victor has chosen to stay, reform, and rebuild, but only in seven such cases were occupying powers able to achieve their interests sustainably. Except in unusually propitious conditions where a threatening external power creates a level of consent for the occupier, occupations tend to fall short of their goals, and at a high cost compared to most other forms of statecraft. A ‘selection effect’ means that the difficulties of occupation are usually inherent. The very fact that a particular state is targeted suggests a level of interior dysfunction and prior conflict, a fraught situation into which the occupier is stepping. ‘Outsiders’ occupying can all too easily seem alien, thus energizing and internationalizing resistance, breeding hardened forms of violent politics it is supposed to suppress, placing the cost-tolerance of the occupier under strain. Israel in Lebanon, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, France in Algeria and the US in Vietnam should have stood out as cautionary tales for would-be liberators, alongside more successful examples of West Germany, Japan, and Malaya, and these projects too were long and expensive. Foreign-imposed regime change is frequently a gamble in which the costs outstrip the gains.⁹⁶

Unfortunately, any intellectual process of careful judgement, with these considerations, was not the dominant one. Instead, the issue was clouded by emotive mythologies about power and weakness, appeasement and resolve, good and evil. The plausibility and reasonable probability of ‘worst-case’ scenario was largely assumed, namely a suicidal rogue state anonymously transferring WMD to terrorists. The state hardly considered other potentially ironic outcomes, such as the empowerment of other rogue states or the spread of the same terrorist networks into Iraq.

Dominating historical memory was the regnant ‘Munich’ analogy of Churchill, Chamberlain, and Hitler. That particular retelling of history has propelled states into regrettable conflicts from Suez to Vietnam. It does violence to the strategic and moral complexities of the late 1930s. Chamberlain’s Britain in the late 1930s had a weak hand. It was depleted by the Great Depression and far-flung commitments left it overstretched. It was gradually rearming to prepare against multiple totalitarian states in Europe and Asia, without economic dislocation. Any preventive war would have lacked the vital support of the United States and the largest Commonwealth countries, and any counter-balancing of Nazi Germany would have inevitably involved appeasing the territorial demands of Stalin’s Soviet Union. As it was, its diplomacy bought valuable time, and ensured that when Hitler struck in 1939, Britain could at least defend its waters and airspace, and that Nazi Germany was positioned unquestionably as the aggressor.⁹⁷

Munich analogies in 2003 damaged the capacity to debate the Iraq issue properly. Appeasement is the unilateral, persistent giving of concessions to a potential aggressor, in order to secure peace. No one in mainstream debate was proposing giving Saddam Hussein Kuwait. If war was moral duty, and refraining from war a moral collapse, there was little room for scrutinizing whether war would serve British security interests better than alternative forms of coercive diplomacy. Some advocates for war were sheepish about their Hitler and appeasement similes, yet they pressed them all the same.⁹⁸ Others such as the Murdoch press were less inhibited. The late 1930s—and the vocabulary of the mythologized interwar period—was the main interpretive prism.

Serious calculation was made all the more difficult by a primordial reaction to 9/11 and what it all meant. To belligerent idealists, the terrorist attacks of September 2001 were the outcome of Western weakness, even appeasement. Military action would signal the West’s toughness and deter future aggressions, as though Al-Qaeda trafficked on a popular grievance that the West didn’t project power often enough. Consider the rationale of George Osborne MP eight months after the invasion, who saw the Iraq War

as a necessary demonstration of Western resolve. For, with the hindsight forced upon us all by 9/11, it was clear that the West had been woeful in its response to the escalating menace of international terrorism throughout the 1990s. We had also been feeble in our efforts to get Saddam to comply with the will of the UN. Together they created the impression that the West was weak, and that we were not prepared to defend our values or protect our citizens. The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have been potent demonstrations that we will stand up to, and defeat if necessary, those intent on causing us harm, and that we can improve people’s lives by doing so. That is why it is so important in both countries to show we can also win the peace—which, contrary to the relentlessly negative impression given by the anti-war lobby and their fellow travellers in the media, we are now actually doing.⁹⁹

So much for the liberation of Kuwait, and the downfall of Milosevic and the Taliban. Osborne celebrated the winning of the peace in late 2003, no doubt a claim he is waiting to revisit in print. He dismissed pre-war crippling sanctions as ‘feeble’: what would serious sanctions look like? His was also an odd account of the causes of international terrorism, which traded on the propaganda that the United States was the ‘far enemy’ and leader of a Zionist-Crusader occupation of holy soil. It was a strange interpretation of the intentions behind Al-Qaeda’s jihad, which hoped to bait the US into an escalation, occupation, and a polarizing armed conflict. It was a naively ahistorical expectation of what potentially long peripheral wars could achieve. And it set a high standard for the struggle, demanding nothing less than the ‘defeat’ of threats, not their reduction. In any event, those two campaigns Osborne praised for their potency have foreseeably not worked out that way. The Islamic State made its assaults apparently undeterred by the displays of resolve Osborne commended, with their billions invested and thousands of casualties.

The unfounded optimism that war would work, and the pessimism that there was simply no alternative choice, also drew on a facile doctrine of ‘newness’ shared by the Bush administration. Blairism emphasized modernization and change. The need to fundamentally alter his party and his country was his signature theme, which he now enlarged to the reformation and modernization of the Middle East. He extended it to global politics generally, announcing that in the wake of 9/11 and globalization, ‘traditional theories of security’ had to be discarded.¹⁰⁰ This lent itself to a self-deluding ‘year zero’ worldview, where denying or erasing the past was part of creating a better future. Briefed by Foreign Office expert Dr Michael Williams on the weight of history in Iraq, its legacies of ethnic and sectarian division, Blair dismissively replied ‘That’s all history, Mike. This is about the future’.¹⁰¹ To dwell on Iraqi’s historical legacies was to resist the thrust of revolutionary liberalism, ‘for in comparison with the glorious future they would create, the past counted for nothing’.¹⁰² Similar conceits were heard from the Bush administration. Leading hardline ‘vulcans’ insisted that time had only just begun. Richard Perle asserted that ‘The world began on 9/11. There’s no intellectual history’;¹⁰³ Richard Armitage, that ‘History begins Today’;¹⁰⁴ Cofer Black, ‘all you need to know is there was a “before 9/11” and an “after 911”’.¹⁰⁵ These statements were at odds with the frequent invoking of the historical lessons of the interwar period. And by dismissing history except the badly remembered atypical case of Munich and Hitler, by repudiating the only guide we have, it foreclosed the doubts that a reflective account of the past might have raised, and left a want of proportionality.

A consciousness of historical legacies does not imply, as some critics do, that Arabs or Iraqis are historically incapable of developing constitutional democracy. But awareness of the past could help to resist the equal and opposite illusion that outside powers can induce others to change in their way, at their timetable, at will. Peoples can change—the democratic wave that spread through post-Soviet Eastern Europe proved that—but not under conditions of outsiders’ choosing. Iraqis emerging from the Saddamist period, both from the oppressed majority and from the once-hegemonic ruling minority, had powerful reasons to be fearful of a new, competitive politics, where democratic contest could become a winner-takes-all struggle. Neither is this only a hindsight judgement. As the Iraq Inquiry found,

Mr Blair told the Inquiry that the difficulties encountered in Iraq after the invasion could not have been known in advance. We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and Al Qaida activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.¹⁰⁶

They were identified—and rejected—because of the delusion that foreseeable and familiar historical dangers were a thing of the past to be overcome, and that the Pax Americana had permanently transformed the world.

There was also a broader flaw in the consensus of the time, an unrealistic view of foreign policy as the search for decisive solutions. Blair and Bush in this respect resembled Margaret Thatcher, who

tended to see foreign policy, not as a continuum, the stream, largely beyond governments’ control, on which, to use Bismarck’s image, the powers are borne, but on which they can navigate with more or less skill, the stream on which Lord Salisbury would occasionally put out a punt pole to forestall a collision, but rather as a series of disparate problems with attainable solutions, or even as zero-sum games, which Britain had to win. She regularly complained that her advisers brought her problems but no answers. The thought that for a middling power in a disorderly world there would be few answers in the crossword-puzzle sense and many compromises seemed not to occur.¹⁰⁷

In this respect, Blair was indeed an heir to Thatcher.

Liberal Managerialism and The ‘Phase IV’ Fallacy

Fifteen years on from the invasion of Iraq, there are fewer unambiguous defenders of the Iraq War. Yet defenders of the general idea of ‘regime change’ are many. It is vital to counter a widespread, convenient and dangerous misinterpretation of the ‘lessons’ of Iraq. This is what we can term the managerialist ‘Phase IV’ Fallacy, also known as the ‘incompetence dodge’, the seductive idea that the war wasn’t a bad idea, just its execution.¹⁰⁸ Phase IV is shorthand for the ‘aftermath’ and ‘reconstruction’ phase of the operation. It often comes twinned with the assertion that the idea of regime change and intervention more broadly is respectable, indeed inevitable, and that the three-week war to remove Saddam is blameless in the post-mortem. The error in Iraq, allegedly, lay mainly in the maladministration of Iraq by the occupiers, and the invaders went wrong when they lost the peace, especially in the first crucial months.

According to that account, peddled most often by voices keen to hold on to maximalist interventionism as a doctrine, the avoidable errors of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003–4 and the American proconsul Paul L. Bremer III were the difference between success and failure. If Iraq holds out lessons, they are administrative and implementational, not deliberative. The inferences drawn by Foreign Secretary David Miliband in February 2008 typified the logic: the lesson to draw was not that Iraq was a mistake but that there were ‘mistakes in Iraq’, and that ‘interventions in other countries must be more subtle, better planned, and if possible undertaken with the agreement of multilateral institutions’.¹⁰⁹ How a United Nations mandate would have forestalled Iraq’s sectarian civil war, he did not explain. In particular, the ‘planning failure’ storyline blames the wrong-headed De-Ba’athification Order, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and intelligence services, and the failure to provide enough occupying troops and prepare capabilities for civil reconstruction, steps that created a large pool of alienated Sunni Arab Iraqis who then revolted. This is a widespread interpretation of the Iraq experience in the US. It is also endemic in British political and security circles. It has been offered by other participants, officials, and observers: retired ambassador to the UN Sir Jeremy Greenstock;¹¹⁰ Major General Tim Cross;¹¹¹ Britain’s logistical component commander; Secretary of Defence Sir Michael Fallon;¹¹² former Secretary of International Development Andrew Mitchell, who cites Libya as an example of government actively ‘learning’ from Iraq, as though that strengthens his case;¹¹³ and Lord Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown drew this conclusion as the violence climaxed in mid-2007:

Plan even harder for peace than for war; you will probably need more troops to provide security after the war than you needed to win it; make the most of the ‘golden hour’ after the war ends; creating security should be the first priority; get the economy going fast; you may have to remove those at the top of the old regime, but you will need the rest to run the state; work with the local population and its traditions.¹¹⁴

This is a sunny account of post-war reconstruction. It assumes that other societies want, or can be made to want, what the intervening powers want for them. It assumes that the population is a unity with ‘traditions’ that can be worked with, rather than a disparate and conflicting plurality of groups with conflicting memories and anxieties. It assumes that a limited purge of the old order will satisfy the majority. And like advocates of war, Ashdown bases this account of Iraq as an educational case study on the atypical case of allied occupation of Germany, where successful occupation was possible over a population shattered by global war, held together by fear of the Soviet Union and relatively unified. The contrast with Iraq is pronounced.

Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon interpreted the report of the Iraq Inquiry in similar terms. Fallon stressed the need to enhance the working of institutions and prevent failures of planning, and the imperative to act preventively to rescue fragile states, ‘to promote good governance, tackle corruption, and build capacity in defence and security forces’. Paying tribute to the service personnel who had overthrown Saddam, Fallon framed the issue suggestively:

the initial war-fighting phase was a military success. They did fight to help topple a tyrant who had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people and the subsequent failures in the campaign at whoever’s door they are laid, cannot and should not be laid at the door of those who did the fighting on our behalf.

Notice that ‘failures’ began only later, and are divorced from the act of invasion. He then placed a limit on the Iraq case, asserting that ‘Despite the report and the Iraq campaign, we must still be ready to act’.¹¹⁵ Neither the Iraq Inquiry nor many of the war’s critics suggest otherwise, but the emphasis drives towards quarantining Iraq into merely a cautionary tale about execution and implementation, treating the management of foreign societies as an engineering and logistical problem more than a political one. Ashdown and Fallon’s managerial accounts of how to make occupation succeed, bounded by an undisturbed belief in the essential wisdom of ambitious military action, helps explain why their appetite for armed intervention remains undimmed.

Consider also the memoir of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Britain’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003. Greenstock’s interpretation is a notable case of the drive to quarantine Iraq and its lessons, and reduce its failures to planning failures. Greenstock argues that

The fundamental error of the Coalition was to have lost control of security almost immediately after the invasion was over … [we] needed to deliver not just an Iraq without Saddam, but a secure and functioning Iraq without Saddam. This would have required pre-invasion planning for at least a full year after the Iraq forces had been defeated, with detailed estimations of the resources necessary to lay the foundations for the next stage.¹¹⁶

Greenstock contrasts Iraq with two atypical cases, the careful planning for administration and recovery of Germany and Japan after 1945, selecting on the dependent variable of occupation success, and not considering the many cases of occupation failure. As Greenstock makes clear, invaders must ‘deliver’ security and design a better future for the liberated through careful preparation (‘Libya and Afghanistan are still teaching us that’.) Amongst other vital tasks, invaders must identify and elevate a ‘visibly capable leader to assume power after the dirty work has been done’. For Greenstock, the overarching insight is that we should respond to the problems of invasion not by questioning the prudence of invasion in the first place, but by making invasions more efficient. Reluctance to commit ground forces and ‘refusal to engage in messy regional conflicts has led to criticism of US passivity in Syria, Libya and indeed Iraq itself’. Greenstock goes further, alleging that ‘perceptions of withdrawal from proactive engagement in the Middle East’ fed into calculations by China and Russia that America could be challenged more assertively, claiming American retreat contributed to Russia’s actions in Ukraine and China in the South China Sea.

Greenstock’s critique is partly technocratic and managerial, in its assumptions about how bureaucratic preparation can overcome the security dilemmas of invading a country like Iraq. This argument hardly considers the possibility that the idea of invading itself might be reckless. And the vision is partly colonial. It suggests that Iraqis, like Libyans and Afghans, need to be more efficiently and intensively administered into stable market democracy. It reduces host populations into passive recipients of the foreigners’ gift. Missing here is any sense of the wiliness and politics of the host peoples and exiles who presume to speak for them. In 2011, with the fall of Colonel Gaddafi imminent, Libyan revolutionaries made clear to coalition allies of the UK, France, and the US that they would not accept international ground forces. It was their country and they were in charge. Likewise, as we will see, Iraqi political elites representing the majority demanded, and did not oppose, the policies Greenstock blames for fuelling chaos, an American purge of Sunni Arabs from the civil service, police, and army. No amount of planning could have eliminated the sectarian fractures that would later be wrenched apart. Greenstock’s assertion that Iraq is a lesson in the need to find a prominent national leader after the ‘dirty work’ is done suggests a strangely apolitical concept of state-building. In the case of Iraq, Washington and London believed that in Ahmad Chalabi, the tireless Iraqi exiles and the Iraqi National Congress, they had found such a talisman. These Iraqis in exile effectively exploited their links to the anti-Saddamist ‘vulcans’ inside the government, and promoted the cause of driving Saddam from office. They helped persuade policymakers that swift, successful liberation was achievable. Chalabi’s network supplied willing Iraqi defectors to offer up dubious evidence of Iraq’s WMD programme and its alleged ties to Al-Qaeda hijackers, intelligence that was eagerly devoured by the Bush administration to confirm its hypothesis, also attracting a wide media coverage that extended to the British press.¹¹⁷ ‘Dirty work’, then, does not finish with regime overthrow, but with the ensuing power struggle.

Contrary to Greenstock, America did not then withdraw from Iraq because its own leaders were feckless. Iraq’s government and parliament demanded it, and insisted otherwise that any remaining US troops would be subject to Iraqi law.¹¹⁸ This reality undermines Greenstock’s loose accusation of ‘passivity’ in Iraq. As for Afghanistan, developmental and governance failures were not primarily a problem of insufficient pre-war planning but flowed from the willing corruption of ruling kleptocratic elites, who have a different vision for their country. Foreign peoples often act as agents, not objects.

The calamitous Syrian civil war, which interventionists falsely present as a case of ‘Western non-intervention’ has become the counterpoint for those who wish to limit the power of Iraq as a cautionary case. But in Syria, the Obama administration and the British government in fact intervened intensively, along with their Gulf clients. By branding the Assad regime illegitimate and sponsoring a revolt that by 2012 had already become infiltrated by Islamists, they internationalized the conflict and raised the stakes. Washington supported elements of the Syrian rebels with over $1 billion a year through the CIA, training, and equipping approximately 10,000 vetted ‘moderate’ fighters, supplying intelligence, and coordinating logistical supply, in league with a broader, multi-billion-dollar effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey to bolster a coalition of militias known as the Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army.¹¹⁹ This active programme had perverse results, inadvertently empowering al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the al-Nusra Front, and allowing weapons and money to fall into the hands of the Islamic State, a movement energized by conflict in Iraq. In other words, Syria suggests not the defects of restraint as a ‘counter-case’ to Iraq, but rather the hazards of intervention in support of insurgent forces. Contrary to the claim of a general withdrawal, Obama reduced troop levels in the Middle East to over 30,000 troops, a level of garrisoning that reverted to Reagan/Bush I levels; it was hardly a retreat. Greenstock offers no evidence that Western policies in Middle Eastern conflicts emboldened China’s expansion in the South China Sea or Russia’s lunge in the Crimea. China’s land grabs in contested waters predated America’s policies in Syria during the Arab Spring era, and the more likely proximate catalyst was America’s military and alliance build-up in Asia. For its part, Putin’s Russia did not need to be emboldened by perceptions of American disengagement. After all, Moscow had forcefully pursued its regional interests by invading Georgia in 2008, a strategic partner of Washington and at the height of America’s deployment in Iraq. It was more likely moved by the strategic value it saw in the Crimea, Sebastopol, and the Black Sea that it saw threatened, and the fear of EU expansion into its orbit that it denounced, than by Obama’s reluctance to commit ground troops in Syria. It is alarming that a diplomat of Greenstock’s stature could overlook all of these details, and the profound problems of ‘regime change’ suggested by the very cases he cites. Despite his title (The Costs of War), he treats these costs only as lessons in implementation, and leaves undisturbed a Western-centric view where the US and UK must intervene regularly and intensively, placing themselves in the centre of civil wars and revolutions.

The ‘Phase IV’ explanation for failure is flawed in several respects. Firstly, it assumes, as a counterfactual, that the ascending power holders in post-Saddam Iraq who represented the majority, in particular the main Shia religious parties and the Iraqi National Congress, would have acquiesced to a new order where the apparatus of Saddam’s rule was left intact or only dismantled at the top echelons. It assumes that, given the right physical conditions and equilibrium, the significant Iraqi actors would have aligned their interests and ambitions with those of the occupiers. This was obviously not the case.

Firstly, failure to purge the Baathist order would have alienated the most important wielders of power amongst the Iraqi Shia. At the ‘aftermath’ meeting on 16 May 2003 between Bremer and seven leaders of Iraqi groups, the Iraqi representatives present demanded that de-Ba’athification proceed quickly and thoroughly, against the threat of Ba’ath resurgence. With the support of all present including Chalabi and the Kurdish leader Talibani, Dr Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shiite Dawa Party voiced concern ‘about signs that the Baath Party is regrouping. The Coalition must never let this happen. We hope that you act decisively to nip this resurgence in the bud’.¹²⁰ Bremer’s aide Dan Senor likewise recalled that ‘if we hadn’t [moved against the Baath Party], there may have been severe retribution against the Sunnis. And the Shia and Kurds might not have cooperated with us. Those symbolic steps were very important early on’.¹²¹ Bremer and Senor had an obvious interest in emphasizing that the momentum for the purge came from Iraqis and the instruction of the Pentagon. But their accounts are supported by former cabinet minister Ali Allawi, who was critical of the order but recognized that De-Ba’athification enjoyed overwhelming initial support, had long predated the invasion, was a staple of exile literature and a demand of Shia and Kurdish parties.¹²² Iraqi Shia parties’ demands for the sacking of the old order were so great that when the CPA handed over the implementation of the policy to Iraqi politicians, ‘they broadened the decree’s impact far beyond our original design. That led to such unintended results as the firing of several thousand teachers for being Baath Party members’.¹²³ De-Ba’athification was not just a fantasy of American officials in the Department of Defence and Vice President’s office. It had a strong Iraqi constituency, both of exiles returning and indigenous Iraqis.

Iraq was not in a political condition where the chances of a transcendent shared nationalism were strong. With its dictator overthrown, the country was already a violent and volatile place. Between the completed fall of Baghdad (a few weeks after the recorded fall on 9 April) and before the Bremer purge even took force on 25 May 2003, the Baghdad city morgue was already recording a sharp rise in deaths by bullet or explosive, 458 in May compared to 246 in January 2003, rising again to 612 in June.¹²⁴ Much of this is attributable to the onslaught of criminal gangs, but conditions were forming for general heightened insecurity. Political relations were already so disfigured, the sense of the Iraqi nation state as the common property of its citizens so weak, that there was widespread looting across cities and towns as soon as the regime collapsed, with participation by government employees, targeting civilian infrastructure such as power plants and hospitals, Ba’ath elites’ property, and national symbols of Iraqi heritage such as the National Museum in Baghdad. It began on the day Saddam’s government fell, six weeks before the De-Ba’athification Order, and climaxing on the weekend of 11–12 July with what Patrick Cockburn called a ‘social revolutionary ferocity’.¹²⁵ Crucially for our understanding of cause and effect, Shia Iraqis, at this moment when the occupiers were tilting the balance of power in their favour, still took part energetically in the plunder, especially of Sunni homes and businesses. This all suggests that the majority political groupings would not have peacefully reconciled to a less favourable political settlement. One of the most pivotal power figures of the new order, the charismatic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, in May issued a fatwa that entitled his followers to take part in looting, provided they donated a share of the spoils to their local Sadrist office. Sadr himself with his considerable leverage was opposed to the occupation of Iraq from the very outset. Even the most intensively planned and even-handed dispensation that gave greater protection to Sunnis and balanced the claims of all groups would probably not have met with broad support.

The failure to recognize the situation in Iraq in that transitional period also points to a deeper fallacy, the assumption of an alignment between the ambitions of the occupiers and the perceived interests of the host population. Evidently, from the very outset, critical players in the drama and their Iranian patron did not want the creation of a new order of social harmony and equitably distributed power and wealth. They wanted to strip away and plunder the old order in its entirety, seize the institutions of the state, pursue vengeance, treat elections as a winner-takes-all contest, and pursue security in a zero-sum competition. Shia parties insisted on the prompt holding of free elections, not out of a desire for a unified democratic state, but because they were rightly confident that they had the numbers. If this was their competitive orientation in conditions where American policies effectively favoured them, it is hard to see how they (or their international sponsors) would have moderated their behaviour if the Ba’ath state and army were left largely intact.

As with many cases of intervention crisis, there was a ‘misalignment problem’.¹²⁶ It is difficult to bring stable governance to fragile states by increasing their technical capacity to govern, if the new ruling elites don’t share the intervening power’s vision. Other actors, empowered by Western intervention, often have a separate, and sometimes conflicting view of their interests. Providing predatory or partisan governments with weapons, skills, and money may reinforce rather than reform abusive or kleptocratic behaviour, and implicate the occupier in what victims see as repression, stoking resistance and hardening division. If a host government is predatory on parts of its population, for instance, this can undermine security sector reform, as it did later in Iraq. Given the intense centrifugal forces that were already in play in the spring and summer of 2003, it is naïve to assume that the roots of the problem lay in inadequate administrative preparations. The rapid sectarianization of Iraq in the wake of the regime’s fall flowed from an older struggle over competing Iraq visions for the state’s identity, ownership, and legitimacy, entrenched in the 1990s era of sanctions, Ba’ath governance, and US-sponsored opposition in exile, which saw the rise of an assertive Iraqi Shia consciousness. Iraqis were not primordial beings forever on a default setting of internal conflict, but neither were they merely subjects to be administered badly or well. They were political agents who made choices, in pre-existing circumstances that ‘proved conducive to the advent of identity politics’¹²⁷ and the exploitation of such politics by skilful entrepreneurs. The main defect of the regime change project was the idea itself, which is inherently flawed in most cases. As soon as the occupiers kicked in the door and decided to stay, there was an appointment with strife.

This is not to pronounce on the wisdom, or folly, of the post-Saddam purge. No doubt, the purge did alienate Sunni Arab Iraqis. The flip side, however, was that without de-Ba’athification, or with a more limited purge, this would court the serious risk of resistance among the Shia groups that were treating the fall of Saddam as an opportunity not to forge a reconciled power-sharing federal democracy, but to compete for power advantage. Either way, the invaders in 2003 could not easily have avoided civil turmoil that would flow, given the strong majority demand for the overturning of the old Ba’ath order, and minority fear of that process of change. The task of imposing order and balance on the post-Saddam settlement, to offset pre-existing centrifugal forces, would have required a very adroit manipulation of competing groups with bribes and threats of abandonment. To meet an adequate troops-to-civilians ratio, it would have taken an estimated 380,000–500,000 troops in total to ensure Iraq’s post-Saddam stability.¹²⁸ That would have been an unsustainable and indeed imprudent commitment given the demands for deployments elsewhere and the need to relieve and rotate those deployed. The very improbability of getting all of this right makes the whole venture simply too difficult and too complex, beyond acceptable costs. The root problem lay in an intractable and older problem, of competing political visions among Iraqis who in a new and fluid environment had powerful reasons to fear one another, both the Shiite majority with its experience of oppressive minority rule, the Sunni minority who feared retribution (and whose Saddamist elements had long planned a guerrilla resistance should this day come), Kurdish Iraqis who would view restoration of the old order as threatening, other actors from Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda franchise, and Iran, which also had a stake in supporting competition over cooperation. These potentialities would very probably have erupted into open conflict whether the occupiers dismantled the old order, purged only part of it, or kept it entirely in place under a milder Sunni strongman. There is no simple resolution of this dilemma. That the choice lay between different poisons was—and is—a powerful reason in itself not to invade in the first place.

A Liberal War After All

We now turn to an argument that challenges my interpretation. According to G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, two of the world’s most sophisticated observers of international relations, this war, for all its democracy-promoting effort and ambitious doctrine, was predominantly a realist war, not a ‘liberal’ one.¹²⁹ Declarations of a higher purpose were merely gestures to carry opinion, especially after WMD claims were proved false. Instead of asking, as others do (Van Rythoven, 2016; Schmidt and Williams, 2008)¹³⁰ why anti-war realists failed in their advocacy for restraint and were trumped by neoconservatives and liberal hawks, they suggest that a different faction of realists carried the day. If America’s most disastrous war since Vietnam had intellectual foundations, those foundations were allegedly laid more by hegemonic realists like John Mearsheimer, who opposed the war, than ‘liberal internationalists’ like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who supported it.

In laying the groundwork for Operation Iraqi Freedom, which intellectual tradition is more to blame, realism or liberalism? Policymakers may baulk at the suggestion that theory shapes their behaviour, but theory simply means the map with which we interpret the world, and besides, the Iraq War more than most attracted intellectualized discussion. What theory led them to Baghdad? This historical question has high stakes. By shifting the blame and giving American liberalism an alibi for the disaster, by arguing that the Iraq War mostly reflects the pathologies of a species of realism, the authors try to clean liberalism’s scorecard. In other outlets, both give liberal ideas credit for the successes of the post-war international order, like the Bretton Woods financial system and the Marshall Plan.¹³¹ Here, they absolve those same ideas of failure. And if disasters like Iraq are not built into Washington’s post-war design, but are instead the result of deviations from liberalism, the argument is stronger that America should persist in leaning forward, maintaining a ‘liberal’ kind of hegemony, using its power to spread free markets and democracy, a project that is more peace-producing than war-generating.¹³² Thus, for their grand strategic vision, the unimportance of liberal ideas to the Iraq War is convenient.

To their credit, Deudney and Ikenberry remind us that realism is heterogeneous and does not necessarily counsel restraint. Realism does indeed contain streams of thought that warrant wars for dominance through ‘regime change’. There is such a thing as ‘primacy realism’. Officials in the operational policy world espouse it, even if their academic counterparts don’t. Their argument also shifts the question. Instead of asking, as others do,¹³³ why realists failed in their advocacy for restraint and were trumped by neoconservatives and liberal hawks, they suggest that a different faction of realists carried the day. To make their case, however, they offer only an impoverished potted history of the Iraq War’s origins and conduct, a re-telling that does little justice to the ideas that shaped it.

The issue is not whether realpolitik can inspire hegemonic wars. It can. The issue is whether the Iraq War was primarily ‘the product of liberalism’ or ‘straightforwardly the result of the pursuit of American hegemonic primacy’. As I demonstrate, liberals and liberalism were deeply implicated. The Bush administration’s forceful reassertion of American primacy was not an amoral exercise in power maximization. It was infused with an idealism that has deep historical roots. Moreover, liberalism and the pursuit of hegemony are not antithetical, as the authors imply. Liberalism married with the capabilities of a superpower gives America a proclivity for reckless military adventures. So long as liberalism, untempered by prudential balance-of-power realism, remains a central engine of American grand strategy, the US will be prone to further such tragedies.

This section divides into three parts. In Part I, I define liberalism, realism, and ‘liberal’ wars, as Ikenberry and Deudney’s treatment of all three requires some definitional untangling. The authors don’t offer a clear or falsifiable account of what a ‘liberal’ war is or what it would look like, against which to test the Iraq case and identify its conceptual underpinnings. In Parts II and III, I demonstrate the flaws in Ikenberry and Deudney’s effort to get American liberalism off the hook. Firstly, their account is bad and reductionist history. It narrows the causes of the war to three policymakers whose views they wrongly elide, neglecting other significant voices and the wide coalition of liberal minds whose account of security led them to support a preventive and hegemonic war, not as the antithesis but the necessary condition for the spread of liberal values. Secondly, for two internationalists this is a strangely parochial account of the Iraq War. Other international agents also shaped the struggle, from Prime Minister Tony Blair to Iraqi exiles, and their visions are not reducible to narrow realpolitik.

Part I. Liberalism, Realism, and War

A restatement of definitions is in order, as well as an account of ‘liberal wars’ and how to recognize them. Deudney and Ikenberry frame the issue in a way that ‘games’ the argument.

Realism is a pessimistic intellectual tradition that views international life as insecure and defined by the possibility of war, because the world is anarchic, or lacking a supreme, supranational sovereign.¹³⁴ Without a ‘Leviathan’ to keep the peace, this condition of anarchy places a premium on self-help and a sensitivity to dangerous power imbalances. Realists often disagree on specific policies but are generally concerned for stability over progress, emphasize material capabilities, are wary of overzealous crusading, and are above all averse to the impulse to reinvent the world, and transform other countries, in one’s own image and at one’s own timetable. This translates into a general unease with waging wars to export American values. Most realists who whisper in princes’ ears—from George Kennan to Henry Kissinger to Brent Scowcroft—share this orientation, though not all.

As America became a ‘unipolar’ superpower without a peer competitor to restrain it, most American academic realists directed their energy both to theory-building and to prophesying about the impermanence of unipolarity and the perils of overstretch. There were limits even to American power, they warned. Despite appearances, the triumph of Atlantic democratic capitalism under Washington’s stewardship would not permanently transform the world. Americans were not immune from the historical patterns whereby overexpansion generated resistance and counter-power. And they argued that America’s commitment to primacy, often euphemized as ‘leadership’, and to spreading the ‘democratic peace’ made the country dangerously war-prone, and endangered the very democratic institutions they were supposed to protect. This critique grew more urgent as the Global War on Terror unfolded.¹³⁵

Most senior realists of the academy opposed the Iraq War.¹³⁶ They argued that the military adventure was not in the national interest, that overthrowing the Iraqi state would spread instability in the Middle East, that invading this divided society would lead to occupation for years, and that the US should focus its efforts on combating Al-Qaeda and to deterring Saddam’s adventurism. More broadly, they warned that the Iraq War was part of Washington’s overexpansion, an expansion driven by the lack of a major power competitor and by the motor of liberal ideology. Some observers, including realists critical of the Iraq War, trace a lineage from Woodrow Wilson to the ‘Bush Doctrine’ in which the Iraq War was grounded.¹³⁷

For Ikenberry and Deudney, realists who argued that their faith dictated opposition to Iraq, failed to understand the breadth and multiplicity of their own tradition. Realism, they rightly note, has several variants. The realism that apparently inspired Iraq was more to be found amongst the ‘practical-operational’ stable of realists within government. These realists proffered a twofold form of realism that has strong purchase in Washington. It was firstly ‘hegemonic realism’ or the pursuit of American primacy on the basis that order flows from favourable concentrations of power, and ‘interdependence realism’ that stresses the dangers of violent interdependence and the need to alleviate anarchy in an increasingly lethal industrial and nuclear age by reversing weapons proliferation. For realists of this stripe, there was obvious appeal to the reassertion of American dominance in a vital oil-rich power centre, and the preventive removal of a WMD threat. Even when liberal internationalists joined them in supporting war, they were actually following a narrower counterproliferation agenda, being driven more by worries about interdependence in a nuclear age than by Wilsonian idealism.

And then there is the family of liberal theories. In the field of foreign policy, American liberalism is committed to the possibility of progress and change. Liberalism combines ideals of individual liberty, free markets, democratic representation, and equality of opportunity. It is optimistic about the ability to replace international anarchy with trustful, harmonious relations, and to forge lasting cooperation. Liberals typically identify three pathways to a better world, through economic interdependence, through the spread of democracy, and through the creation of international institutions. Liberals generally are oriented to a strategic vision where the world is, or should be, a harmony of interests, altering the political and economic character of other states in order to achieve common security. In the Wilsonian tradition, liberals seeks to institute peace by spreading liberty and creating liberal subjects abroad. ‘Wilsonianism’ is a conflicted thing. Some liberals emphasize President Woodrow Wilson’s historic stress on international law and institutions, others the need to spread democratic freedom at the point of a bayonet if necessary, but Wilsonians agree on the ‘basic proposition that America’s national security requires a liberal world order’.¹³⁸ In turn, that liberal world order flowed from and was underwritten by American primacy, a primacy anchored and legitimized in international institutions.¹³⁹

The American neoconservatives, as they had evolved by the time of the late 1990s, blended democratic idealism and military assertiveness. Like liberals, ‘neocons’ believe that American security rests on the ‘regime type’ of other states, and that the world’s security relies upon America’s benign superintendence. Like liberals, neocons self-consciously reject what they see as an amoral, deluded realism that is alien to the best traditions of the republic. Their frame of reference is the interwar period, the failures of appeasement and the resulting catastrophe. Washington should use its unprecedented power not merely to acquire more material advantage, but to expand the sphere of market democracy. Unlike liberals, who worry more about international institutions, legality, and the cultivation of allies, neocons prefer the unabashed and unfettered assertion of American power, where allies or institutions are means, not ends.¹⁴⁰ But for their common missionary impulse and their presumption in favour of military action, liberals and neocons both belong to the Wilsonian family. As we will see, the ‘Bush Doctrine’ that embodied neocons’ ideas, and the Iraq War that was their signature project, drew on liberal ideas about security.

At first glance, Ikenberry and Deudney’s treatment of ‘realism’ and ‘hegemony’ seems tautological. As the illogic goes, realism of a certain kind prescribes hegemonic war, Iraq was a hegemonic war, therefore the Iraq War was realist. But a closer look suggests that their error is a historical and conceptual one, not a logical fallacy. They equate the pursuit of ‘hegemony’ and wars to perpetuate it exclusively with realism, so that the pursuit of ‘hegemonic primacy’ is assumed to be antithetical whatever is ‘liberal’.¹⁴¹ If there is such a thing as a non-realist ‘liberal’ war, at Ikenberry and Deudney’s hands it becomes such a small target that it almost disappears, thus setting up the inquest to make practically any assertive military project or enforcement of US dominance necessarily ‘realist’. This will not do.

Ikenberry and Deudney skate over it, but a significant wing of liberalism is hawkish. There are anti-war liberals, but there also does exist a group of liberal hawks with privileged access to government and the commentariat, who support the forceful pursuit of material power to promote liberal goals. This group was especially galvanized by debate over intervention in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. If there is a true divide between liberals and realists over hegemony, it lies not in a disagreement about whether or not to pursue it. The belief that hegemony is a desirable, peace-promoting and security-producing state is a monopoly neither of realists or liberals. It was, after all, Ikenberry’s seminal work that cast America approvingly as the post-World War II ‘Liberal Leviathan’, exercising its hegemony to transform the world, its institutions, and norms in a liberal direction.¹⁴² In that moment of creation, American pre-eminence lay at the core.

A fairer test would be for what purposes, and according to what theory of security, hegemonic wars are intended. A ‘realist’ hegemonic war would eschew larger ideological goals or the creation of a constitutional system of government in Iraq as a result, and focus instead on war generating changes in the distribution of material power as a valued end in itself. It would be conservative, fearing that democratization would increase rather than decrease security threats in the region. Realists of this kind might countenance the preaching of human rights but only as an enabling ‘cover’ for an exercise in austere geopolitics. A ‘liberal’ hegemonic war would proceed on a different basis: that accommodation with dictatorships in the region was itself the source of the security problem, and that the purpose of the war would be to alter the destructive convergence of weapons proliferation, rogues, and radical Islamist ideology by replacing dictatorship and corruption with democracy and free markets, beginning in Iraq as part of a benign domino effect. A realist hegemonic war would aim to bring the monarchies and dictatorships of the Gulf under American tutelage; a liberal war would aim to transform their very character.

Part II. The Liberal Road to Baghdad

It is artificial to ascribe major foreign policy initiatives to a single intellectual source. Both idealist liberals and cut-throat realists, for instance, have their reasons for supporting NATO expansion.¹⁴³ The resort to arms, too, normally requires a domestic coalition of factions, interests, and lobbies. Deputy Secretary of Defence and hawkish intellectual Paul Wolfowitz recalled there were multiple rationales within the administration for attacking Iraq. Decision-makers settled on WMD as the central rationale because ‘it was the one reason everyone could agree on’.¹⁴⁴ Among multiple agendas was a genuine drive to assert American hegemony, eliminate competitors, and demonstrate strength to great power competitors. Momentum built for ‘regime change’ in the wake of the grave fears caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax attacks that followed soon after. Exhilarated by unexpected early success in Afghanistan, US decision-makers felt the wind at their back. A visceral ‘rally around the flag’ emotion took hold. Henry Kissinger, who had been sceptical of earlier interventions, supported the invasion ‘Because Afghanistan was not enough. The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. And we need to humiliate them.’¹⁴⁵ It will not suffice, however, to settle on the banal observation that wars are caused by a combination of factors. Was liberal idealism central, or marginal?

With startling brevity, Ikenberry and Deudney claim that the principal architects of the Iraq War were three ‘hegemonic realists’ within the executive, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz. ‘There are many ways to describe the political ideologies of these three figures’, they note, ‘but “liberal-internationalist” is not among them.’

Strangely, in Ikenberry and Deudney’s account, the most senior figure who had to sign off on the war is missing in action. Over Iraq, President George W. Bush was a driving force. He was not a puppet of his court, but independent and strong-willed in his decision-making style.¹⁴⁶ If the ideas and assumptions carried by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are deemed to be evidence of the war’s origins, it also matters what the President believed he was doing. Every account from close observers, who independently agree, suggest that Bush’s private sentiments about Iraq, and the War on Terror, were predominantly liberal ones that invested American power with ideological ambition. Bush told his counsellor Karen Hughes a week after 9/11, ‘We have an opportunity to restructure the world toward freedom, and we have to get it right.’ Officials, congressional representatives, and other confidantes agree that the President in private interpreted the historic juncture opened by 9/11 in ‘grand, emphatic and even Manichaean terms’, his belief in the ‘goal of wiping out terrorism’,¹⁴⁷ his ‘strong moral streak’,¹⁴⁸ and his ‘propensity to be idealistic and see that democracy is the innate right of mankind’.¹⁴⁹ In an otherwise critical memoir, Bush’s estranged former Press Secretary Scott McLellan affirmed the strength of the President’s commitment to the ‘Freedom Agenda’: ‘There was nothing I would ever see him talk more passionately about than this view, both publicly and privately’.¹⁵⁰ These rationalizations were not merely post hoc ones used to justify the war in public, but prior beliefs articulated in private. The sincerity of Bush’s public enthusiasm for idealist visions such as Natan Sharansky’s manifesto, The Case for Democracy, is suggested by his underreported private meetings with exile groups. If Bush secretly doubted the doctrines he articulated intensely when away from the cameras, those doubts were very secret. And if, as the authors argue, the privately held convictions of Cheney and his ‘one per cent doctrine’ are admissible as evidence for the war’s ideological drivers, then so too are those of Bush. Indeed, in assessing the evidential value of rhetoric and what ideas underpinned the Iraq War, the authors are methodologically inconsistent. They treat spoken rationalizations as a reflection of real motives and causes when it supports their case, and as mere surface gloss when it doesn’t.

The consistency of Bush’s beliefs suggests that there was authenticity to the ‘Bush Doctrine’, which predated and supplied the rationale for the Iraq War and was laid out in the President’s West Point address of 1 June 2002 and the White House’s National Security Strategy of that year.¹⁵¹ The Doctrine codified liberal assumptions about security and American interests,¹⁵² and its namesake invoked the Wilsonian tradition in advancing it.¹⁵³ These ideas were: that the ‘regime type’ of foreign states is the primary determinant of their behaviour; that globalized security threats, culminating in the potential marriage of terrorism, destructive technology, and revisionist states, must be met with anticipatory measures such as preventive war; and that the promotion of democracy and capitalism, universally applicable, can transform the world into a more peaceful and secure place. That is not to say that the Doctrine in its entirety conformed with the preferences of liberals. Even pro-war liberals were critical of its unilateralism above collective endeavour and institutions. But in the heavy emphasis on the ascent of American ideology, there was far more for realists to dislike than liberals. Iraq, then, flowed primarily from a liberal view of the sources of foreign policy, namely the character of regimes themselves in which America has a large stake, and a liberal view of the solution, namely enforcing a democratic peace. The proposition of a democratized Iraq that would be better for Iraqis and Americans helped swing American liberals behind the effort.

The summary of the three ‘architects’ of Iraq is also a simplistic treatment of Wolfowitz. Cheney and Rumsfeld, it is true, were clearly not liberal ideologues. They were conservative nationalists, sceptical of declared liberal war aims such as democracy promotion and nation-building. (Indeed, Rumsfeld for these reasons advocated for a quick withdrawal from Iraq after Baghdad fell, and his failure on this front also suggests hardline realists were not in the ascendancy). Paul Wolfowitz, however, cannot usefully be grouped with these two figures. Wolfowitz long held an idealistic concept of the purposes of American hegemony. In battles over dictatorship, democracy, and American patronage, for instance, over ending Washington’s support for the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986, and in his criticisms of Henry Kissinger’s alternative vision of stable equilibriums among major powers, Wolfowitz spearheaded a school of foreign policy ‘willing to forsake the status quo in pursuit of democratic ideals’.¹⁵⁴ The same Wolfowitz co-drafted the notorious ‘Defence Planning Guidance’ document of 1992, which envisaged America generating overwhelming military superiority to prevent the re-emergence of rivals.¹⁵⁵ Again, liberal idealism can work in synthesis with ruthless hegemonic assertion. It was Wolfowitz who in late November 2001 oversaw the secret advisory paper ‘Delta of Terrorism’, that anticipated a two-generation war with radical Islam and called for the overthrow of Saddam’s Iraq in order to transform the Middle East out of its ‘malignancy’. This went beyond the assertion of material power, and called for a regional political transformation, to reverse what Wolfowitz called the ‘stagnation’ that produced ‘radicalism and breeds terrorism’. The paper had great influence on Bush.¹⁵⁶ As it was not meant for wider consumption or public discussion, and was written fifteen months before the invasion of Iraq, it is hard to dismiss the paper as a rhetorical posture ‘to sustain public support for the war and provide a template for post-war Iraqi reconstruction’.

It did not just take a handful of well-placed individuals to translate the idea of war into policy. It took the formation of a broad, bipartisan, and civil-military consensus. What were liberals doing on the eve of war? ‘In reality’, assert the authors without evidence, ‘most liberal internationalists opposed the war’. This is a puzzling claim, since in 2008, Ikenberry wrote that ‘After all, many liberals did in fact support the invasion’.¹⁵⁷ He was correct the first time. While there is no exact count available, there was significant support for war among self-identifying liberal commentators and policymakers. Support came from liberal intellectuals, some of whom had been in and out of the revolving door between academia and government: Paul Berman, David Remnick, Peter Beinart, Leon Wieseltier, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya, Harvard professor and The New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Ignatieff, and former senior officials such as Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright. Liberals in Congress lent their full-throated support, including Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator John Kerry. A critical shaper of liberal opinion was Bill Clinton’s former national security advisor Kenneth Pollack, whose The Threatening Storm was ‘the most influential book of the season’, helping persuade commentators at the main East Coast liberal organs from op-ed regulars at The Washington Post and the editors of The New Yorker to The New Republic and Slate.¹⁵⁸ Liberals’ rationales were always mixed but included avowedly liberal causes: ‘to liberate the Iraqi people from their dungeon’ and to establish ‘a beachhead of Arab democracy’, for ‘Iraq as a secular democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens’.¹⁵⁹ Liberal visions viewed the humanitarian and strategic grounds for war as mutually complementary. As Leon Wieseltier wrote, ‘it is quite easy to defend the necessity and the justice of separating Saddam Hussein from his lethal devices, which is the same thing as separating him from his power, which is the same thing as aiding in the formation of a democratic government in Baghdad’.¹⁶⁰

Ikenberry and Deudney deploy the term ‘liberal internationalist’ in ways that obfuscate. Does ‘internationalist’ encompass foreign policy liberals of any kind, since it would be difficult to be a non-internationalist liberal? Elsewhere, Ikenberry has defined the essence of liberalism as follows: ‘Autocratic and militarist states make war; democracies make peace. In retrospect, this is the cornerstone of Wilsonianism and, more generally, the liberal international tradition’.¹⁶¹ In which case, this must include liberals who believe that American primacy is the best vehicle towards that peace, and that the liberal international order needs occasional muscular enforcement. A vocal and influential war party has resided within the ranks of American liberalism and has been at the core of America’s most significant wars since Korea. These numbered John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson in the era of Vietnam, and the likes of Wesley Clark and Bill Clinton in the era of Kosovo. It includes the influential liberal hawks Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Anne-Marie Slaughter who urged President Barack Obama to conduct airstrikes against Libya in 2011.¹⁶² The latter two also supported the invasion of Iraq, undermining Ikenberry and Deudney’s ahistorical claim that liberals with a preference for ‘international arms control and security regime-building’ are against ‘preventive war and hegemonic rule’.¹⁶³ This is also true of the majority of Senate Democrats whose consent to use force in Iraq the President requested and obtained.

Another historical problem confronts the liberal alibi. If America was driven narrowly just to strengthen its hegemonic rule, it went to a great deal of extra trouble voluntarily. Nowhere in their account is there an explanation for the bold experiment in ‘year zero’ reconstruction and nation-building in Iraq. How do we reconcile cold realpolitik with the determination to purge the old order through De-Ba’athification? This decision was driven partly by Chalabi and Shia and Kurdish demands, partly by America’s dogmatically idealistic proconsul Paul Bremer III (who is missing from Ikenberry and Deudney’s history), and was approved by Bush at least after the fact and possibly before.¹⁶⁴ The purge of the bureaucracy and army was justified as a wise ideological purification, through appeals to the examples of earlier democracy-promoting efforts in post-war Japan and West Germany. America could have installed a client dictatorship and exerted minimal institutional impact, perhaps with a protective garrison, as it had done in other cases where it wanted a strategic foothold. Instead, it embarked on an ambitious nation-building programme to remake the Iraqi state along liberal lines. Is that realism?

Part III. Beyond Washington

Coalition partners and international policy entrepreneurs go missing in Ikenberry and Deudney’s parochial account. Whatever happened to Prime Minister Tony Blair? Iraq was primarily America’s war, and it could and probably would have been fought without others’ participation. But Blair’s inner circle was at the forefront of crafting the international case for war, and the pursuit of an international mandate. The logic and appeal of Blair’s arguments cannot adequately be explained by pointing to hegemonic realist theory, to put it mildly. For Blair, this was a great struggle of ideas. Britain’s alignment with the US over Iraq was partly fuelled by an attempt to bandwagon for influence in Washington. But it also had a genuine ideological element. Saddam’s Iraq, Blair and his circle believed, embodied a growing systemic threat. Removing his regime would begin the positive transformation of the Middle East. A leaked memorandum from Secretary of State Colin Powell to President Bush in the lead-up to the Crawford talks in April 2002 neatly summarized it: ‘On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary. He is convinced on two points: the threat is real; and success against Saddam will yield more regional success.’¹⁶⁵ This is consistent with the record of Blair’s private deliberations in Downing Street, his personal notes to Bush, his memoirs, and the public case he settled on in March 2003 on the eve of invasion. With invasion underway later in March 2003, Blair wrote privately to Bush that ‘Our fundamental goal is to spread our goals of freedom, democracy, tolerance and the rule of law. Though Iraq’s WMD is the immediate justification for action, ridding Iraq of Saddam is the real prize’.¹⁶⁶

It is not clear how far his advocacy helped build a bipartisan consensus in Washington for regime change in Iraq. But it helped internationalize the war. America’s coalition in invading Iraq was larger than the coalition it mustered for the Korean War. And it led to Britain occupying southern Iraq, suffering 179 fatalities and almost 6,000 non-fatal casualties. Blair’s liberalism reinforced the hopeful ambitions of hawkish liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, that the Iraq War should be waged within a wider effort to advance the Middle East Peace Process, accelerate the economic and social development of the region, refracted through the social democratic and internationalist idiom of Britain’s New Labour.¹⁶⁷ These hopes would be disappointed, but they helped build initial domestic and international support.

Whatever happened, also, to Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi exile and later president? Chalabi’s network of Iraqi exiles also invested the war with liberal, indeed revolutionary impulse, and had a tangible intellectual effect on the lobby for creating a new order in Baghdad. Long before 9/11, Chalabi and his network prepared and strengthened the case for regime change in Washington, in the hope that favourable conditions would emerge. Chalabi also cannot be bracketed amongst the hegemonic primacists. Alongside his talent for political operation, he had a life-long dream of a liberated Iraq with himself as the ‘Shia’s great emancipator’. That is a long way from Machiavelli.

For wars to happen, adversaries must agree to fight each other. There is one other figure whose calculations, and miscalculations, also made war possible, but who is also absent from the liberal alibi: Saddam Hussein. He could have chosen otherwise, to run the risks of complete capitulation to weapons inspections during the escalating crisis. He could have taken up the offer to leave. As invasion was at hand, he could have taken up President Bush’s offer to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours to settle abroad in voluntary exile and immunity,¹⁶⁸ an offer backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Britain. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy also offered Saddam an opportunity to abdicate, yet he refused. Bahrain’s King Hamad made an offer, hours before the expiry of America’s ultimatum for he and his sons to leave Iraq.¹⁶⁹ Past rulers have sometimes fled and survived in exile, such as Kaiser Wilhelm II. Of course, survival couldn’t be guaranteed. A certifiably disarmed Saddam could have been overthrown internally. A Saddam in exile could have been killed or arrested. These options were bad, but conceivably offered higher odds of success than accepting war and the near-certain consequence of flight, and violent death. In a meaningful sense, Saddam chose war.

It is strange that Ikenberry and Deudney fail to consider these other figures. Given that the authors believe in an international order of ‘cooperative problem-solving’ and ‘broad international coalitions’, writing a more international history of the episode would have been a good place to start.

In trying to get liberalism off the hook, Ikenberry and Deudney stretch definitions, concepts, and history to breaking point. Realism in their hands is a grubby business, tainted by a pursuit of power that is morally empty and self-defeating. Liberalism, by contrast, almost stands outside time as a set of pristine concepts. At the heart of their framework is an ahistorical innocence about liberalism, as though liberalism cannot be complicit in empire, in the assertion of hegemony, in preventive war or other projects of imperial domination. Theirs is the antiseptic liberalism of Davos, with its clean vocabulary of the ‘rules-based world order’ and ‘global norms’. Liberals who fall prey to these conceits seem unaware of the coercive and violent pathologies of their own tradition. It was Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy Ikenberry works so hard to distinguish from Bush, who made war and toppled governments often in the belief that benevolent force would create lasting peace, from Mexico and Latin America to the Russian civil war. Like Bush, Wilson argued in World War I that the US had entered the war for ‘the overcoming of evil, by the defeat once [and] for all of the sinister forces that interrupt peace and render it impossible’, to leave ‘utterly destroyed’ the old ‘balance of power’ order.¹⁷⁰ In 1916, Wilson drafted a speech that claimed ‘It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be’. His Secretary of State added in the margin ‘Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama’.¹⁷¹ This is the imperialism that doesn’t know itself.

Ikenberry and Deudney conclude by inviting realists to engage with the central security crisis of our time, the need to transform a world threatened by ‘violence interdependence’ and weapons proliferation, and implicitly, to downgrade deterrence as a foundation of security. Bush and Blair worked from the same diagnosis. This led them to preventive war and liberal hegemony. That these ideas lead consistently to bad results suggests that the very obsession with fictitious, undeterrable rogue states recklessly transferring WMD to terrorists, the exaggeration of threats linked to globalization, and the temptation to try systemic new ‘solutions’ to threats, is itself part of the problem. If academic liberals, to adapt their words, ‘seek to return to engaging with the pressing security issues of this time’, they might consider realists’ argument that even in a globalized world, deterring, disrupting, and containing threats is a more prudent path.¹⁷² But first they might reckon with the realization of the young journalist Karl Marx, who noticed in another moment of anxiety over globalization, the mid-nineteenth century, that it was the modernizing liberals who now preached ‘red hot steel’.¹⁷³

Conclusion

Regime change as a system of ideas rested on a series of misconceptions. There was the warped relationship with history. The makers of war held that the post-9/11 world had transformed from an era marked by the deterrence and containment of threats, changing the rules of the game and demanding a focus on the future as a year zero. Yet still, Britain had to be guided by cherry-picked historical cases showing the failure of appeasement from the late 1930s, and of successful post-war reconstruction in Germany and Japan. Supposing that they were embarking on a new project, decision-makers were in fact conditioned by the cumulative experience of short victorious wars in the recent past. There was also the claim that rogue actors like Saddam were irrational, pathologically aggressive, and undeterrable. Yet they were also apparently calculating survivalists, and would transfer weapons to terrorists for fear of reprisal, and could be disciplined into compliance by example and precedent. Regime change was necessary to deter other undeterrable rogues. Saddam’s Iraq, hawks argued, posed a clear and present threat to neighbours and the UK with its growing WMD arsenal. Yet war was necessary because it would relieve the country of sanctions that had shattered its economy and degraded its infrastructure, while somehow leaving its WMD programme intact to grow quickly. The Iraq of 2003, beggared by sanctions, somehow retained the capabilities of the Iraq of twenty years earlier. As Chapter 3 explores, the government and the Parliament made one more weighty calculation that the self-styled modernizers drew from the past, that by taking part in the war, Britain could guide the American superpower.

¹ Michael Clarke, RUSI Briefing Note: ‘Chilcot, The Judgement of History’, 7 July 2016, https://rusi.org/commentary/chilcot-judgement-history; Jean Seaton, ‘Chilcot Report: Introduction’, Political Quarterly 87:4 (2016), pp. 476–80.

² Ministry of Defence, The Good Operation: A Handbook for Those Involved in Operational Policy and its Implementation (London: Ministry of Defence, 2017).

³ Robert Jervis, ‘The Mother of All post-mortems’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 40:1–2 (2017), pp. 287–94, p. 288.

⁴ James Ellison, ‘War guilt, Blair and the Chilcot Inquiry’, 12 July 2016, http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/hss/178983.html (accessed 15 July 2016).

⁵ See, in the US context, Chaim Kauffman, ‘Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas’, International Security 29:1 (2004), pp. 5–48; on the ideological roots of the war in the United States, see Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 7–99; Benjamin Miller, “Explaining Changes in US Grand Strategy: 9/11, the Rise of Offensive Liberalism, and the War in Iraq,” Security Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2010), pp. 26–65.

⁶ Prime Minister Tony Blair, Note to President George W. Bush, 26 March 2003.

⁷ Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Arrow Books, 2010, 2011 edn.), pp. 386–7.

⁸ A phrase I borrow from Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (New York: Wiley, 2008).

⁹ The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary, HC 264, p. 82.

¹⁰ Robert Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

¹¹ See Hew Strachan, ‘Strategy and the limitation of war’, Survival 50:1 (2008), pp. 31–54, p. 32.

¹² Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 415.

¹³ Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Take me Back to Constantinople’, Foreign Policy, 15 October 2009.

¹⁴ On these and other cases, noting the confusion of terms in the title, see Matthew J. Flynn, First Strike: Pre-emptive War in Modern History (New York: Routledge, 2008).

¹⁵ Cited in Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (New York: Cosimo, 2007) vol. 2, p. 103.

¹⁶ ‘Bush: Don’t Wait for Mushroom Cloud’, CNN, 8 October 2002.

¹⁷ On this background, see Robert S. Litwak, Regime Change: US Strategy through the Prism of 9/11 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 109–10.

¹⁸ On the debate in the context of the War on Terror, see Stephen D. Biddle, American Grand Strategy after 9/11: An Assessment (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, 2005), p. vi.

¹⁹ See Lawrence Freedman & Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), pp. 411–12.

²⁰ Letter, 26 January 1998, PNAC to President William Jefferson Clinton.

²¹ Letter, Eliot A. Cohen, Commentary, 1 July 1992.

²² Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Iraq Can’t Resist Us’, Wall Street Journal, 23 December 2001.

²³ Robin Cook, Hansard, 17 March 2003, column 727.

²⁴ See W. Michael Reisman, ‘Why Regime Change is (Almost) Always a Bad Idea’, American Journal of International Law 98 (2004), pp. 504–13.

²⁵ ‘Tony Blair’s Speech to the US Congress’, The Guardian, 18 July 2003. On the comic Jon Stewart show in 2008, Blair also surmised that democratization translates into benign external behaviour, as liberal democracies never fight one another.

²⁶ Chris Suellentrop, ‘My Sharansky: Bush’s Favourite Book Doesn’t Always Endorse his Policies’, Slate, 26 January 2005.

²⁷ Freedom in the World 2017, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017.

²⁸ Amnesty International, Annual Report, 2016–17, pp. 196–8, at https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/iraq/report-iraq/.

²⁹ Anushka Asthana, ‘Blair reveals he toyed with Marxism after reading book on Trotksy’, The Guardian, 10 August 2017.

³⁰ George Eaton, ‘Tony Blair Isn’t the Only Labour Figure with a Far-Left Past’, New Statesman, 10 August 2017; ‘How Labour’s Contenders See the War’, The Guardian, 21 February 2007.

³¹ The ideological linkage of Trotskyism, or one strand of it, and neoconservatism is better documented in the American than the British case: see John B. Judis, ‘Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution’, Foreign Affairs 74:4 (1995), pp. 123–9; Stephen Schwartz, ‘Trotskycons?’, National Review, 11 June 2003. For the argument that it also applied in Britain, see Peter Hitchens, ‘Usefully Idiotic’, 20 April 2015, at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/04/usefully-idiotic.html.

³² Text of Blair’s Speech, BBC News, 17 July 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3076253.stm.

³³ Jeet Heer, ‘Trotsky’s Ghost wandering the White House’, National Post, 7 June 2003.

³⁴ R. Shannon, ‘History Lessons’, The Guardian, 4 October 2001; T.G. Ash, ‘Gambling on America’, The Guardian, 3 October 2002.

³⁵ John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1859), II, pp. 121, 241.

³⁶ Report of the Iraq Inquiry, vol. 1, Transcript of Press Conference, 20 December 1998, p. 104.

³⁷ Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Hurst, 1978, 2007 edn.), p. 115.

³⁸ Toby Dodge, ‘Coming face-to-face with bloody reality: Liberal common sense and the ideological failure of the Bush doctrine in Iraq’, International Politics 46:2/3 (2009), pp. 253–75, pp. 262–5.

³⁹ Tony Blair, ‘Remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair on Iraq War, Camp David, Maryland, 27 March 2003’, in We Will Prevail: President George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, and Freedom (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 244.

⁴⁰ In a note of 24 January 2003, Blair warned Bush, ‘The biggest risk we face is internecine fighting between all the rival groups, religions, tribes, etc. in Iraq when the military strike destabilises the regime. They are perfectly capable, on previous form, of killing each other in large numbers’.

⁴¹ This is the dominant view of academic experts and ex-diplomats who warned of country’s intercommunal resentments: cited in Jonathan Steele, Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008), pp. 18–19, 163–4.

⁴² Executive Summary, Report of the Iraq Inquiry, p. 122.

⁴³ Blair, Journey, p. 372.

⁴⁴ As reported in Don Van Natta Jr, ‘Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says’, The New York Times, 27 March 2006.

⁴⁵ Blair laid out this logic in his testimony on 21 January 2011, p. 6.

⁴⁶ As Toby Dodge observed, in Alan George, Raymond Whitaker & Andy McSmith, ‘Inside story: the countdown to war’, The Independent on Sunday, 17 October 2004.

⁴⁷ Judy Keen, ‘Bush to Troops: Mission Accomplished’, USA Today, 6 June 2003.

⁴⁸ See Alan Finlayson, ‘Tony Blair and the Jargon of Modernisation’, Soundings 10 (1998), pp. 11–27, pp. 18–19.

⁴⁹ Barrie Clement, ‘Abrasive Blair tells unions, modernise or die’, The Independent, 9 September 1997.

⁵⁰ ‘Full Text of Tony Blair’s Speech in Texas’, The Guardian, 8 April 2002.

⁵¹ Jackie Ashley, ‘No Moving a Prime Minister Whose Mind is Made Up’, The Guardian, 1 March 2003.

⁵² As Oliver Daddow demonstrates, ‘Tony’s War? Blair, Kosovo and the interventionist impulse in British Foreign Policy?’, International Affairs 85:3 (2009), pp. 547–60.

⁵³ From John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 55–6, 59–60; Tony Blair, ‘A New Moral Crusade’, Newsweek, 13 June 1999.

⁵⁴ ‘Blair: Cast Out Milosevic’, BBC News, 4 May 1999.

⁵⁵ See ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany’, Spiegel Online, 6 March 2012; Stefan Wagstyl, ‘Postwar West German Ministry “burdened” by ex-Nazis, study says’, The Financial Times, 10 October 2016.

⁵⁶ ‘We Share Grief, Blair tells America’, BBC News, 20 September 2001.

⁵⁷ Lawrence Freedman, ‘Force and the International Community: Blair’s Chicago Speech and the criteria for Intervention’, International Relations 31:2 (2017), pp. 107–24, p. 115.

⁵⁸ According to Sally Morgan, cited in Rawnsley, The End of the Party, p. 114.

⁵⁹ Mark Thomas, ‘I’m the Global Bobby on the Beat’, Liverpool Echo, 7 September 2001.

⁶⁰ Strategic Defence Review: Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Defence by Command of Her Majesty (London 1998): the following references in order refer to pp. 14, 17, 68, 29, 7.

⁶¹ Geoff Hoon, ‘11 September: A New Chapter for the Strategic Defence Review’, speech to King’s College London, 5 December 2001.

⁶² Charles A. Kupchan, ‘Enemies into Friends: How the United States can Court its Adversaries’, Foreign Affairs 89:2 (2010), pp. 120–34, p. 121.

⁶³ And Blair’s speech on Iraq, March 2004 may have drawn on Bobbitt’s work, as he spoke of the old Westphalian order being surpassed in an age of globalization.

⁶⁴ As Nicholas Kitchen argues, there is a ‘tendency of great powers with a surfeit of material capabilities to attempt visionary world-making. With their territorial and political integrity secured, interests offer few constraints to check the progress of grand ideas in the policymaking process, and the international system poses few constraints on a state whose material power and ideational dominance largely defines international structure. The question “what must we do?” is replaced by “what shall we do?”’ Nicholas Kitchen, ‘Systemic Pressures and Domestic Ideas: A Neoclassical Realist Model of Grand Strategy Formation’, Review of International Studies 36:1 (2010), pp. 117–43, p. 141.

⁶⁵ Robert Cooper, ‘The New Liberal Imperialism’, The Guardian, 7 April 2002; The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), pp. x, 64.

⁶⁶ Mary Caprioli & Peter Trumbore, ‘Rhetoric versus Reality: Rogue States in Interstate Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 49:5 (2005), pp. 770–91, p. 777; on the persistent use of the term with similar meanings, see K.P. O’Reilly, ‘Perceiving Rogue States: The Use of the “Rogue State” Concept by U.S. Foreign Policy Elite’, Foreign Policy Analysis 3 (2007), pp. 295–315.

⁶⁷ Barry Rubin, ‘US Foreign Policy and Rogue States’, Middle East Review of International Affairs 3:3 (1999).

⁶⁸ Robert S. Litwak, Rogue States and US Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 41.

⁶⁹ ‘Prime Minister’s Address to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet’, The Guardian, 11 November 2002.

⁷⁰ Blair, Journey, pp. 386–7.

⁷¹ Bush, ‘State of the Union Address’, 29 January 2002.

⁷² White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: White House, September 2002), pp. 13–16.

⁷³ As summarized by Elbridge Colby, ‘Restoring Deterrence’, Orbis, 51:3 (2007), pp. 413–28, p. 417.

⁷⁴ ‘Interview by Tony Snow and Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday’ at https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/13324.htm.

⁷⁵ Condoleezza Rice, speech given to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Chicago, Illinois, 8 October 2003.

⁷⁶ Tony Blair, IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 11.

⁷⁷ See Caprioli & Trumbore, ‘Rhetoric versus Reality’.

⁷⁸ Richard Betts, ‘The Lost Logic of Deterrence’, Foreign Affairs 92:2 (2013), pp. 87–99, 94–5.

⁷⁹ Letter PS/C to Scarlett, 14 November 2002, ‘Iraq: Psychological Profile of Saddam’ attaching Paper ‘Saddam Hussein, DIS Psychological Profile Updated’.

⁸⁰ JIC Assessment, ‘Iraq After September 11—The Terrorist Threat’, 28 November 2001.

⁸¹ JIC Assessment, ‘Iraq Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons’, 9 September 2002.

⁸² JIC Assessment 29 January 2003, ‘Iraq: The Emerging View from Baghdad’.

⁸³ JIC Minutes, 4 September, p. 2.

⁸⁴ As Robert Jervis argued before the invasion: ‘intra-war deterrence implies that goals as well as means will be kept limited, and since the US now seeks regime change it has few coercive tools at its disposal. If Saddam is the monster Bush sees him as, why should he care what happens to his country if he is going to die? And if the US could deter his WMD use in a war, why would extended deterrence fail in peacetime?’ ‘The Confrontation between Iraq and the US: Implications for the Theory and Practice of Deterrence’, European Journal of International Relations 9:2 (2003), pp. 315–37, p. 327.

⁸⁵ Hansard, 3 February 2003, column 23.

⁸⁶ Hansard, 18 March 2003, column 845.

⁸⁷ Hansard, 18 March 2003, column 792.

⁸⁸ Tony Blair, ‘What I’ve Learned’, The Economist, May 31, 2007; Owen Bowcott, ‘Tony Blair: Military Intervention in Rogue Regimes “More Necessary Than Ever”’, The Guardian, 1 September 2010.

⁸⁹ ‘Transcript of Blair’s Speech to Congress’, CNN, 17 July 2003, at http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/07/17/blair.transcript/.

⁹⁰ Jane K. Kramer & Trevor A. Thrall (eds), ‘Introduction: Understanding Threat Inflation’, American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation since 9/11 (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 2.

⁹¹ Milton Leitenberg, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bio-Terrorism Threat (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2005), p. 46.

⁹² John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 186.

⁹³ As Stephen Biddle observes, ‘Assessing the Case for Striking Syria’, Council on Foreign Relations, 10 September 2013, p. 5.

⁹⁴ Memo, Jack Straw to Tony Blair, 25 March 2002.

⁹⁵ See David M. Edelstein, Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 2, 5, 8, 9; Stephen Walt, ‘Why They Hate Us (1): On military occupation’, Foreign Policy, 23 November 2009.

⁹⁶ Alexander B. Downes & Jonathan Monten, ‘Forced to be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratisation’, International Security 37:4 (2013), pp. 90–131.

⁹⁷ See Gerhard L. Weinberg, ‘No Road from Munich to Baghdad’, The Washington Post, 3 November 2002; Christopher Layne, ‘Security Studies and the Use of History: Neville Chamberlain’s Grand Strategy Revisited’, Security Studies 17 (2008), pp. 397–437; Norrin Ripsman & Jack S. Levy, ‘Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? The Logic of British Appeasement in the 1930s’, International Security 33:2 (2008), pp. 148–81.

⁹⁸ ‘Blair Likens Saddam to Hitler’, CNN, 1 March 2003 (this was a misleading headline, Blair’s actual claim was that the war party of the 1930s would have been called warmongers, and the anti-war protesters would have fallen prey to the appeasement arguments of the time); Anton La Guardia, ‘Straw warns of dangers threatened by NATO split’, The Daily Telegraph 12 February 2003; see also R. Gerald Hughes, The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 164–7; accusations of appeasement were made in both houses of parliament: William Hague MP claimed ‘The Prime Minister said that analogies with the 30s can be taken too far, and of course they can, yet in some of the opposition to the Government’s stance there is a hint of appeasement’, and Julian Lewis MP in the Commons argued that arguments for appeasement ‘were wrong then, and they are wrong now’ (Hansard, 2003, p. 333), and Baroness Sharples in the Lords indicated that the ‘present situation’ brings memories of the 1930s ‘flooding back’ (Hansard, pp. 194–5).

⁹⁹ George Osborne, ‘A Soldier Breaks Ranks’, The Spectator, 1 November 2003.

¹⁰⁰ Text of Blair’s speech, BBC News, 17 July 2003.

¹⁰¹ Cited in Rawnsley, The End of the Party, p. 185.

¹⁰² As John Gray argued, ‘The End was Nigh’, Times Higher Education, 31 August 2017.

¹⁰³ George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 41.

¹⁰⁴ Armitage cited in Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), p. 88.

¹⁰⁵ Mikel Thorrup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), p. 186.

¹⁰⁶ Statement, Sir John Chilcot, 6 July 2016, at http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-inquiry/sir-john-chilcots-public-statement/.

¹⁰⁷ Percy Cradock, In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major (London: John Murray, 1997), p. 22. I am grateful to Dr Robert Saunders for bringing this to my attention.

¹⁰⁸ Sam Rosenfeld, ‘The Incompetence Dodge’, The American Prospect, 23 October 2005; see also Benjamin H. Friedman, Harvey M. Sapolsky & Christopher Preble, ‘Learning the Right Lessons from Iraq’, Policy Analysis 610, 13 February 2008.

¹⁰⁹ Foreign Secretary Speech on the Democratic Imperative, 12 February 2008.

¹¹⁰ Jeremy Greenstock, Iraq: The Cost of War (New York: William Heinemann, 2016), see passages below.

¹¹¹ Maj. General Tim Cross, Witness Statement, ‘Post Invasion Iraq: The Planning and Reality after the Invasion from Mid 2002 to the End of August 2003’, Iraq Inquiry, pp. 25, 27; Cross recalls briefing the Prime Minister on 18th March that ‘he did not believe post-war planning was anywhere near ready’. In public, however, Cross struck a cautiously optimistic note and reinforced the impression that the invasion would succeed without major disruption: he dismissed critics for ‘overplaying the problems there’ and being ‘almost disappointed that things weren’t worse when we first went in’, asserting that ‘The coalition fought a magnificent campaign, the humanitarian crisis was not there, the reconstruction crisis was not there’. ‘Interview with Major General Tim Cross’, BBC News, 25 May 2003. Cross reserved his public criticisms for later.

¹¹² See passages below.

¹¹³ Andrew Mitchell, ‘Chilcot Report: Department for International Aid’, The Political Quarterly 87:4 (2016), pp. 497–7. In limiting and marginalizing Iraq as an educational case in what he euphemistically calls ‘stabilisation challenges’, Mitchell frames the issue in the typical binary way of warlike liberals: (at p. 497) ‘Will we continue to support the cause of liberal interventionism, as we successfully did in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, or will we turn our back on discretionary intervention—even under UN auspices—and be prepared to stand idly by if, God forbid, another Rwanda takes place?’ Kosovo came at considerable human cost, as it enabled the counter-terror of the Kosovo Liberation Army. And the case against warlike liberalism need not be that we should abandon intervention outright, but that Britain should restrain itself from state-breaking interventions that overthrow political orders and regimes, and adopt the principle ‘first do minimal harm’.

¹¹⁴ Paddy Ashdown, ‘When I look to the future in Iraq, I start by studying the past’, The Guardian, 27 May 2007.

¹¹⁵ Michael Fallon, Hansard v.613 House of Commons, 14 July 2016.

¹¹⁶ Jeremy Greenstock, Iraq: The Cost of War (New York: William Heinemann, 2016), pp. 418, 419, 423–4.

¹¹⁷ Jane Meyer, ‘The Manipulator: Ahmad Chalabi Pushed a Tainted Case for War’, The New Yorker, 7 June 2004; Richard Bonin, Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Anchor, 2013), pp. 194–200.

¹¹⁸ Chapter 4 will demonstrate this point further.

¹¹⁹ Greg Miller & Karen de Young, ‘Secret CIA Effort in Syria faces large funding cut’, The Washington Post, 12 June 2015; Gareth Porter, ‘How America Armed Terrorists in Syria’, American Conservative, 22 June 2017; Julia Harte & R. Jeffrey Smith, ‘Where Does the Islamic State Get Its Weapons?’, Foreign Policy, 6 October 2014; academic and ‘grey’ literature suggests that external support for rebels, especially in wars as complex as that in Syria, tends to make wars longer, more violent, and more intractable: Doug Mataconis, ‘Arming the “Good” Syrian Rebels Would Not Have Prevented the Rise of ISIS’, Outside the Beltway, 12 August 2014; David E. Cunningham, ‘Blocking Resolution: How External States can Prolong Civil Wars’, Journal of Peace Research 47:2 (2010), pp. 115–27; The Political Science of Syria’s Civil War, 18 December 2013, pp. 5, 34–6, 61–3; a CIA study prepared for President Obama reached the same conclusion: Mark Mazzetti, ‘CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels’, The New York Times, 14 October 2014.

¹²⁰ Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 48.

¹²¹ Cited in Richard Lowry, ‘What Went Wrong?’, National Review, 25 October 2004.

¹²² Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 150–1.

¹²³ L. Paul Bremer, ‘What We Got Right in Iraq’, The Washington Post, 13 May 2007.

¹²⁴ ‘Violence Continues to Plague Bagdhad’, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 5 April 2004.

¹²⁵ Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr And the Shia Insurgency in Iraq (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 161.

¹²⁶ Stephen Biddle, ‘Afghanistan’s legacy: Emerging lessons of an ongoing war’, The Washington Quarterly 37:2 (2014), pp. 73–86, pp. 80–1.

¹²⁷ See Fanar Hadad, Shia-Centric State-Building and Sunni Rejection in Post 2003 Iraq (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), p. 12.

¹²⁸ James Quinlivan, ‘Force Requirements in Stability Operations’, Parameters (1995), pp. 59–69; also James Dobbins, ‘Who Lost Iraq?’, Foreign Affairs 86:5 (2007), pp. 61–74.

¹²⁹ Daniel Deudney & G. John Ikenberry, ‘Realism, Liberalism and the Iraq War’, Survival 59:4 (2017), pp. 7–26.

¹³⁰ Eric Van Rythoven, ‘The Perils of Realist Advocacy and the Promise of Securitization Theory: Revisiting the tragedy of the Iraq War debate’, European Journal of International Relations 22:3 (2016), pp. 487–511; Brian Schmidt & Michael Williams, ‘The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists’, Security Studies 17:2 (2008), pp. 191–220.

¹³¹ Daniel Deudney & G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order’, Review of International Studies 25 (1999), pp. 179–96; ‘Democratic Internationalism’ (Working Paper, Council on Foreign Relations, 2012), pp. 7–12, 13.

¹³² Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry & William C. Wohlforth, ‘Lean Forward: In Defence of American Engagement’, Foreign Affairs 92:1 (2013), pp. 130–42.

¹³³ On this issue, see Eric Van Rythoven, ‘The Perils of Realist Advocacy and the Promise of Securitization Theory: Revisiting the tragedy of the Iraq War debate’, European Journal of International Relations 22:3 (2016), pp. 487–511; Brian Schmidt & Michael Williams, ‘The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists’, Security Studies 17:2 (2008), pp. 191–220.

¹³⁴ On the realist tradition and its unifying facets, see Joseph M. Parent & Joshua M. Baron, ‘Elder abuse: How the moderns mistreat classical realism’, International Studies Review 13 (2011), pp. 193–213; Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones & Steven E. Miller, The Perils of Anarchy: Contemporary Realism and International Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 45.

¹³⁵ See Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Pressc & Harvey M. Sapolsky, ‘Come Home America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation’, International Security 21:4, (1997), pp. 5–48; Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International Security 19 (1994), pp. 5–49; Sebastian Rosato, ‘The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory’, American Political Science Review 97: 4 (2003), pp. 585–602.

¹³⁶ See the advertisement that a group of academic realists placed in the The New York Times: ‘War with Iraq is not in America’s National Interest’, The New York Times, 26 September 2002; see also John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy 134 (2003), pp. 50–9; Paul Starobin, ‘The Realists’, National Journal 39:37 (2006), pp. 24–31.

¹³⁷ Michael C. Desch, ‘America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy’, International Security 32:3 (2007), pp. 7–43; Christopher Layne, ‘Wilson’s Ghost: Spreading Freedom around the World Will Destroy It at Home’, The American Conservative 4:4 (28 February 2005), pp. 9–11; Lloyd E. Ambrosius, ‘Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush: Historical Comparisons of Ends and Means in Their Foreign Policies’, Diplomatic History 30 (2006), pp. 509–43; David M. Kennedy, ‘What “W” owes to “WW”’, The Atlantic 30:5 (2005), pp. 36–40.

¹³⁸ John A. Thompson, ‘Wilsonianism: The Dynamics of a Conflicted Concept’, International Affairs 86:1 (2010), pp. 27–48, p. 28.

¹³⁹ Though Ikenberry has separately argued that Washington could create the institutional framework to ‘lock in’ the liberal world order even after the decline of American power: ‘The Future of the Liberal World Order: Internationalism after America’, Foreign Affairs 90:3 (2011), pp. 56–68.

¹⁴⁰ On the history of neoconservatism, see Michael C. Williams, ‘Morgenthau Now: Neoconservatism, National Greatness, and Realism’, in Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 216–41, pp. 217–27; Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

¹⁴¹ The authors claim that ‘the Iraq War … was straightforwardly the result of the pursuit of American hegemonic primacy. Its origins flowed readily from an ancient and prominent body of realist thought’; they characterize neoconservatism as ‘partially liberal and partially primacist’. These statements imply a necessary separation of liberalism from the commitment to ‘primacy’, which is presented as exclusively a realist concern.

¹⁴² John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

¹⁴³ Liberals could point to the benefit of locking in and extending the democratic peace, realists to the geopolitical gain of acquiring new allies and territorial predominance. See Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, ‘Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion’, International Security 40:4 (2016), pp. 7–44.

¹⁴⁴ Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair, May 2003; Wolfowitz specified also that the main four reasons were WMD, terrorism, the criminal mistreatment of the Iraqi people, and the linkage between the first two: Jamie McIntyre, ‘Pentagon Challenges Vanity Fair Report’, CNN, 30 May 2003.

¹⁴⁵ Cited in Mark Danner, ‘Words in a Time of War’, Asia Times, 2 June 2007.

¹⁴⁶ For instance, against lobbying by Vice President Dick Cheney, Bush insisted on appointing Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. Bush dismissed Donald Rumsfeld, and refused to pardon ‘Scooter’ Libby, both against Cheney’s opposition. He resisted Cheney’s urging for a more hardline stance on North Korea and Iran. And at one stage in 2004 he considered dismissing Cheney from the presidential ticket. See Julian E. Zelizer, ‘5 Myths About George W. Bush’, The Washington Post, 7 November 2010.

¹⁴⁷ Cited in Frank Bruni, ‘A Nation Challenged: White House Memo’, The New York Times, 22 September 2001. See also the idealistic fervour reported by Bob Woodward from their conversations: Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 340.

¹⁴⁸ Condoleezza Rice, cited in Amy Zegard, ‘The Legend of a Democracy Promoter’, The National Interest 97 (2008), p. 51.

¹⁴⁹ According to Victor Davis Hanson, a classical historian who had private talks with both Bush and Cheney, comparing Bush’s idealism to Cheney’s more ‘tragic’ view: cited in Barton Gellman, The Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 250–1; Eliot Cohen reported Bush’s real, core belief in the Freedom Agenda and the rejection of the practice of accommodation with ‘thuggish regimes’. Cited in Stephen Dyson, Leaders in Conflict: Bush and Rumsfeld in Iraq (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 46; and John Lewis Gaddis, also in contact with the White House, saw the Bush Doctrine as powered by a recurrent Wilsonian view of the spread of American values as the path to security: John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Bush’s Security Strategy’, Foreign Policy 133 (2002), pp. 50–7.

¹⁵⁰ Scott McLellen, What Happened: Inside the White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), p. 197.

¹⁵¹ ‘Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the Unites States Military Academy’, White House Press Release, 1 June 2002; President of the United States, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2002).

¹⁵² See Robert Jervis, ‘Understanding the Bush Doctrine’, Political Science Quarterly 118:3 (2003), pp. 365–88, p. 367; Andrew Flibbert, ‘The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and intellectuals in explanations of the Iraq war’, Security Studies 15:2 (2006), pp. 310–52.

¹⁵³ ‘From the fourteen points to the four freedoms to the speech at Westminster (Ronald Reagan), America has put its power at the service of principle’. Speech in Whitehall, November 2003, G.W. Bush, ‘Both Our Nations Serve the Cause of Freedom’, The New York Times, 20 November 2003.

¹⁵⁴ James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 134, 76.

¹⁵⁵ Patrick E. Tyler, ‘U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop’, The New York Times, 8 March 1992.

¹⁵⁶ Bob Woodward, State of Denial (London: Pocket Books, 2006), pp. 83–5; Wolfowitz on ‘stagnation’ in The Jerusalem Post (2003) cited in T. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 30.

¹⁵⁷ G. John Ikenberry, Introduction, to G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter & Tony Smith, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the twenty-first century (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 2.

¹⁵⁸ Bill Keller, ‘The I Can’t Believe I’m a Hawk Club’, The New York Times, 8 February 2003; Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002); Michael Tomasky, ‘Beyond Iraq: Toward a New Liberal Internationalism’, in Neil Jumonville & Kevin Mattson (eds), Liberalism for a New Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 209–19.

¹⁵⁹ Cited in George Packer, ‘The Liberal Quandary over Iraq’, The New York Times Magazine, 8 December 2002, pp. 104–7.

¹⁶⁰ Leon Wieseltier, ‘Against Innocence’, The New Republic, 3 March 2003.

¹⁶¹ G. John Ikenberry et al., The Crisis of American Foreign Policy, p. 10.

¹⁶² Michael Hastings, ‘Inside Obama’s War Room’, Rolling Stone, 13 October 2011.

¹⁶³ Benjamin H. Friedman, ‘The Real Problem with a Secretary of State Susan Rice’, CATO Institute Commentary, 27 November 2012; Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.’, The New York Times, 18 March 2003.

¹⁶⁴ Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 150–1; Bremer, My Year in Iraq, p. 48.

¹⁶⁵ Internal memo to Bush ahead of Crawford meeting, ‘Memorandum for the President, Your Meeting with the United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, April 5–7 2002 at Crawford’.

¹⁶⁶ Blair to Bush, private note, ‘The Fundamental Goal’, 26 March 2003.

¹⁶⁷ See also Tim Dunne, ‘“When the shooting starts”: Atlanticism in British security strategy’, International Affairs 80:5 (2004), pp. 893–909, p. 898.

¹⁶⁸ ‘Straw backs Exile Deal for Saddam’, BBC News, 20 January 2003.

¹⁶⁹ Gerald Butt, ‘Bahrain offers exile as Egypt reviles Saddam’, The Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2003.

¹⁷⁰ Woodrow Wilson, War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers, 2 vols (New York: Harper, 1927), 1: pp. 255, 342–3, 547–8, 129.

¹⁷¹ Cited in Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 476.

¹⁷² On the salience of deterrence and the need to adapt it to today’s conditions rather than abandon it, see Keir Lieber and Daryl G. Press, ‘Why States Won’t Give Nuclear Weapons to Terrorists’, International Security 38:1 (2013), pp. 80–104; Elbridge Colby, ‘Restoring Deterrence’, Orbis 51:3 (2007), pp. 413–28.

¹⁷³ Cited in Douglas Hurd, The Arrow War: an Anglo-Chinese Confusion 1856–60 (London: Collins, 1967), p. 56.