Translation Introduction:
Why did the U.S. really invade Iraq? And what does this invasion tell us about the neoconservative politics that still cast a shadow over American politics today? In this article, published in Foreign Affairs, Stephen Wartheheim, a senior fellow in the American State Administration Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University, argues that the doctrine of American supremacy was the real cause of the disastrous invasion, and that it still threatens to spark wider wars unless the United States changes its worldview.
Translation text:
Twenty years ago, the United States invaded Iraq, spent a decade dismantling the country and trying to reinstall it, and then spent another decade trying to forget what happened. "We have done our duty, and now it's time to turn the page," former U.S. President Barack Obama told his people in 2010 when he announced the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq (which soon proved to be a short end). By 2021, it was President Joe Biden's turn to urge his country to move forward and move beyond the disasters of the post-September 11 world: "We turned the page." But has the US really turned the page on the Iraq war?
Over the past two decades, Americans have refused to move forward and forget about Iraq, partly because the U.S. military is still fighting there and in a few other locations, and more importantly because the country cannot turn the page without reading and understanding it. It can be painful to go back to the motives of American leaders to invade a country that has never attacked, never planned to attack, the United States. Washington has already learned many harsh lessons from its war on Iraq, and American policymakers, politicians and experts generally reject the principle of waging war to change a ruling regime or rebuild a country, and have discovered that democracy is rarely created by imposing it through the barrel of a gun, and it takes hard work to establish and protect it, even in the most powerful democracies such as the United States itself.
Obama became known for his opposition to the war in October 2002, calling it "stupid" and "foolish." His stance on Iraq was perhaps his main point of advantage in his campaign for the Democratic nomination. (Reuters)
Those lessons are necessary, but not sufficient, as they reduce the Iraq war to a policy mistake that can be corrected as the United States seeks to assume its position as the world's hegemon, a position it granted itself at the end of the Cold War. In reality, however, the decision to invade Iraq resulted from the same task of seeking global primacy. The desire for hegemony has led the United States to fund a huge army and deploy it all over the world primarily for the preventative purpose of discouraging any other country from rising and challenging American hegemony. After today's attacks, the architects of the Iraq War sought to strengthen America's presence in the Middle East and beyond, and by showing firmness in targeting a troublesome adversary who was not involved in the September 11 attacks, Washington demonstrated that there was no point in resisting American power.
But the strategy of "shock and awe" quickly opened the door to chaos, destruction, death, and a wave of insurgency against U.S. forces, and the failures of the war were supposed to pull the rug out from under the project of American hegemony that produced that war. But the mission of global dominance and primacy has survived. Today, as American power faces increasing resistance around the world, Washington seeks to counter most of that resistance everywhere, insisting on mixing the concept of American interests with the concept of global American power. The result of that mentality during the "unipolar" moment twenty years ago was destructive enough, and insisting on it today in the face of major powers armed with nuclear warheads would only create even more severe destruction.
The inevitable thug
The ideological foundations of the Iraq War were formed before U.S. tanks advanced on Baghdad in 2003. A decade before the war broke out, three Pentagon men who later became senior officials in the George W. Bush administration were developing a new concept for steering American strategy in the post-Cold War world: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, these three wanted Washington to continue to broadcast its military superiority across the length and breadth of the territory. In 1992, Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it very bluntly in a speech to Congress, saying that the United States must have "sufficient strength" to "deter any rival from even dreaming of challenging us on the stage of the international system. I want to be the thug on the corner of the lane."
Paul Wolfowitz (Reuters)
Cheney did not disagree much with this goal: He served as Secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and tasked his vice president, Wolfowitz, with overseeing the drafting of the Defense Planning Manual, a comprehensive framework for U.S. security policy written in 1992. Wolfowitz and his colleagues explained in 46 pages how to maintain US global dominance in the absence of a strong competitor. They said that the key to thinking and acting preventively, that is, that the United States should act to prevent the emergence of new competitors in the first place as long as it was not facing a real serious competitor (at the time)*, and that it should discourage "potential competitors from even looking to play a larger regional or international role." To achieve that goal, the United States needs to have a large army dwarfed by the rest that can fight two major wars at the same time, as well as maintain its alliances and position its forces in every region of the world that Washington considers strategically important. In short, Washington had to replace the previously established balance-of-power system with the dominant presence of American power.
Under that vision of American hegemony, the United States was supposed to pursue "for good" policies, that is, accommodate the core interests of its allies and work for the prosperity of almost the entire world. In formulating that foreign policy, Pentagon officials recommended that their country take "the interests of advanced industrialized countries into account enough to discourage them from challenging their leadership or overthrowing the existing economic and political order." This means that the definition of American hegemony involved not only discouraging the security presence of US enemies, but also of its allies. Two fundamental problems with that theory came to the fore as soon as a copy of the Wolfowitz Handbook was leaked to the press in March 1992: First, Washington's quest for hegemony might lead others to resist it.
As Russia healed its wounds after the fall of the Soviet Union at the time, and China continued to seek to emerge from poverty, the United States found that it would face no concrete opposition for years to come. But, whenever the world's only superpower expands its defense commitments and military presence, it can face opposition to it, and indeed spur its own appearance. Second, Washington quickly overloaded itself, risking wars that had nothing to do with American interests, except those promoted as part of the necessity of global hegemony in the first place.
What the Pentagon under Cheney wanted from American hegemony was to make resistance from the United States useless, so that no one would try to engage in it in the first place. (Getty Images)
As soon as the Pentagon Handbook was published in 1992, it sparked a backlash, with conservative analyst Pat Buchanan slamming it, saying the plan was "a recipe for endless U.S. interventions." Similarly, the ambition for outright dominance infuriated the most prominent Democrats, who preferred Washington to assume only its share of the responsibilities for peace and collective security in the world. Biden, then a congressional senator, sarcastically commented on the evidence, saying, "The Pentagon takes us back to an outdated idea of the United States as the world's policeman." A general consensus among Western countries was formed to contain Soviet communism in response to a real threat from existing great powers. For the United States to act as a policeman for a post-Cold War world full of challenges but no apparent major enemy was a new and untested argument that many in Washington did not digest at the time.
What the Pentagon under Cheney wanted from American hegemony was to make resistance from the United States useless, so that no one would try to engage in it in the first place. But what if it is the resistance that has already sprung up that has rendered that American hegemony useless?
The thug that no one wants
The nineties marked the pinnacle of America's unipolar system, but signs of international opposition and apathy within America were also evident. China and Russia resolved their bilateral differences and began establishing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In 1997, in a letter to the UN Security Council, they declared that "no country shall seek hegemony, engage in a policy of conflict between major powers, or monopolize international affairs." Two years later, French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine said the United States had become "hyper-power" and called for "true multipolarity."
The most provocative countries to the United States at the time were "adverse states" such as Iran, Libya, North Korea, and especially Iraq. After the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. military did not attempt to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but U.S. officials looked forward to his downfall and encouraged the uprising by supporting uprisings by the Shiite majority in the south and the Kurdish minority in the north. When Saddam maintained his power and suppressed those uprisings and killed thousands of Iraqis, Washington did not back down from its goal. For a decade, the United States has contained Iraq's power by imposing no-fly zones across the country, occasional bombings, inspections for weapons of mass destruction, and economic sanctions against the regime. To achieve those goals, the United States has stationed thousands of troops in the Gulf region for the first time in its history.
(Getty Images)
Bill Clinton embraced his predecessor's goal of extending U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and pursued a policy of "mutual containment" of Iran and Iraq, but that was not enough to satisfy right-wing hawks. In 1997, the thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan launched the Project for the New American Century think tank, which devoted its research to formulating a foreign policy based on "military toughness and moral clarity." For both men, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an underfinished task, as the Iraqi "dictator" was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction that could be used, they said, to challenge U.S. forces and their allies in the region. So the United States had to seek regime change in Iraq, according to a 1998 open letter to the think tank, adorned with signatures by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others who became officials a few years later in the Bush administration.
The goal quickly became official U.S. policy when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act by an overwhelming majority. The rise of this "regime-change consensus," as Joseph Steppe, a national security teacher at the U.S. Naval College, called it, did not have the real possibility of an all-out invasion of Iraq before September 11. But he delegitimized his alternative vision, which said to leave Saddam in place while implementing a policy of containment. Washington has set its sights on an explicit desire to remove Saddam.
Many in Washington usually remember Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. secretary of state, declaring that the United States had become an "indispensable nation" (for international order, security and world peace)* but forgetting that she said this during a televised meeting in 1998 in Ohio, defending U.S. policies toward Iraq, and that she was met with a torrent of hostile questions, sometimes directly attacked. But the first decade after the end of the Cold War proved that this kind of opposition will not crystallize into an effective political force as long as Washington manages to exercise global hegemony at little cost.
The useless thug
The September 11 attacks stoked a sense of existential danger that gave American power a specific purpose after a decade of painstaking search for a new one. However, the attacks can be interpreted in a very different way to those in which they were then interpreted. In the days and weeks after the attacks, no more than a few Americans tried to think about understanding why 19 "terrorists" sacrificed their lives to kill people on the other side of the globe. Susan Sonntag wrote at the time that the attacks "were carried out as a result of certain U.S. alliances and actions." Osama bin Laden had already announced years before launching a war on the United States, and justified his announcement by the US military presence in Saudi Arabia, what Washington is doing in terms of twisting the arm of Iraq, and American support for Israel. Mark Danner, a journalist for the New York Times, noted that "the forces and battleships in the Gulf, and the unpopularity of our presence there, are all facts that are no secret to anyone, but they are not widely known among Americans."
The September 11 attacks represented an opportunity for the Bush administration. (Island)
These facts could have become more widely known after September 11, especially if the US had focused its attention on the specific enemy that attacked it, al-Qaeda. Perhaps the Americans could conclude that the most effective way to secure themselves from "Middle Eastern terrorists" was to stop occupying the region and killing people there. They could also have asked whether the pursuit of global hegemony itself was eroding their national security at home. But for President George W. Bush and his administration's foreign-policy architects, the country had to come to a different conclusion: the problem is not that American power is excessive, but that it is too little. The Bush administration assured their citizens that the attackers acted out of sheer evil, not because of anything the US might have done. "Americans are asking: Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms," Bush said in an address to the nation nine days after the attacks.
Equally important, the "these" referred to in the speech did not mean only "al-Qaeda jihadists," as the focus on the group that attacked New York and Washington may have distracted people from the larger battle of protecting U.S. global hegemony against any attempt to oppose it. As Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense, said in an October 4, 2001 address to Congress, "Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and other authoritarians want to see America outside important parts of the world." For them, the September 11 attacks were just one example of resistance to U.S. hegemony, a resistance that must generally stop.
From this perspective, the September 11 attacks represented an opportunity for the Bush administration. By launching a lightning response, the US could have nippled any emerging resistance in the bud and dissuaded a wide range of tolerant adversaries from "even aspiring" to play a larger role internationally, as described in the 1992 Defense Planning Manual. This time, U.S. leaders can galvanize popular support, so that the trend toward American global hegemony becomes a living doctrine of the American people, not just an implicitly accepted trend.
To achieve that goal, not only was it a "global war on terror," but the United States had to descend "with all its weight," Rumsfeld told one of his aides four hours after the World Trade Center towers fell. According to Rumsfeld's aide remarks during the interview, the defense secretary at the time said, "Sweep everything, what has to do and what has nothing to do with it," meaning hitting "Saddam Hussein simultaneously, not Osama bin Laden alone."
وعلى وجه السرعة، حدَّدت الاستخبارات الأميركية القاعدة بوصفها المسؤول عن اختطاف الطائرتين، لكن "رامسفيلد" و"وولفويتز" وغيرهما من مسؤولين شرعوا في الدعوة إلى ضرب العراق، وهي دعوة رآها "ريتشارد كلارك"، مُنسق مكافحة الإرهاب بمجلس الأمن القومي الأميركي، منافية للعقل والمنطق، حيث قال يوم 12 سبتمبر/أيلول: "أن تهاجمنا القاعدة فنذهب الآن لضرب العراق هو أشبه بأن نغزو المكسيك بعد أن هاجمتنا اليابان في بيرل هاربر". وبينما بدأت الولايات المتحدة تخوض غمار حرب غير واضحة في أفغانستان، في مواجهة عدو مُبهَم لربما استطاع شنَّ هجمة أخرى؛ كان لافتا أن ينظر كبار مسؤولي البلاد في أمر غزو العراق أيضا، ناهيك بتخصيص 130 ألف جندي لهذه المهمة بالفعل في غضون 18 شهرا فقط.
البلطجي في فخٍّ من صُنعِه
إن التفسير الأفضل لهرولة إدارة بوش إلى الحرب يكمن في رغبتها في تعزيز الهيمنة الأميركية بعد الهجمات المُدمِّرة التي طالت أراضي الولايات المتحدة. إنه "تأثير استعراض القوة" كما سمَّاه "آرون فريدبِرغ". (غيتي)
قدَّمت إدارة بوش عدة مُسوِّغات لغزو العراق، لكن أبرزها ادعاؤها بأن صدام أخذ يراكم الأسلحة البيولوجية والكيماوية، وسعى لتطوير سلاح نووي. ولربما لم يتم الغزو في النهاية لو علم المسؤولون يقينا أن مشروع أسلحة الدمار الشامل العراقي كان مجرد وَهم، وهي أكذوبة هدفوا من ورائها سابقا إلى التضخيم من قوة صدَّام وردع أعداء مثل إيران. ولكن بينما علم الجميع أن صدام لن يستخدم أسلحة الدمار الشامل ضد الولايات المتحدة نفسها، فإنهم تيقَّنوا لا شك بأن تلك الأسلحة الافتراضية يُمكن أن تعوق خطط أميركا للشرق الأوسط.
ففي أثناء الاستعداد للحرب، قال "دوغلاس فيث"، مساعد وزير الدفاع الأميركي، إن عدم وجود نية لدى صدام لمهاجمة الولايات المتحدة لا يغير شيئا في الموضوع، بل وأقرَّ بنفسه أن "صدام لعله يُفضِّل أن يتركنا لِحالِنا، لكن القضية هي ما إن كانت أسلحة الدمار الشامل المُحتمل وجودها عنده تسمح لنا بأن نتركه لِحالِه". باختصار، ما قصده "فيث" هو أن إسقاط صدام يجعل الهيمنة الأميركية في وضع آمن، لكنه ليس بصدد النظر فيما إذا كان إسقاط صدام السبيل الأمثل لحماية الولايات المتحدة نفسها.
Fear of Saddam's arsenal is not an appropriate explanation for the Bush administration's rush to invade Iraq after September 11, especially since they knew that Iraq was not about to acquire a new high-calibre weapon. Nor is it an explanation for why the Bush administration withdrew UN inspectors from Iraq in March 2003, after the team had already completed 550 inspections in which it did not notice remarkable activity and made significant progress that it wanted to complete to completion. Had Saddam's disarmament been the main motivation, the Bush administration would have allowed inspections to continue, and it might have avoided war altogether. By contrast, war supporters, including Cheney, never wanted to give weapons inspection teams a chance to get started.
The best explanation for the Bush administration's rush to war lies in its desire to consolidate American hegemony after the devastating attacks on the US mainland. It's the "show of force effect," as Aaron Friedberg, Cheney's deputy national security adviser at the time, called it. "We were dealt a severe blow, and we wanted to clearly demonstrate the price to anyone who wanted to support or harbour those who were planning these attacks. It wasn't just about playing the resolute man, it was about re-establishing deterrence," Friedberg said in an interview.
War architects undoubtedly believed that they were protecting American national security. What they have tried to achieve on the ground, however, is something different: strengthening the United States' global dominant position through preventive warfare. Although they assumed that hegemony was primarily necessary for American security, their arguments for the Iraq war itself suggested the opposite, with Saddam's removal from Washington needing it to pay a price from its treasury and the blood of its sons in exchange for highly unclear advantages. Although the cost seemed low at the start of the war, it did so because supporters of the war underestimated the likelihood that US forces would be met as invading and occupying forces, with Cheney promising in March 2003, "In fact we will be received as conquerors." U.S. partners in the region could have gained advantages from toppling Saddam, but has the United States itself been able to strengthen its own security by reducing its involvement in the region? No one asked this question then in the painstaking quest for hegemony, paradoxically distracted by its deadly cost of opening up more new and deadly fronts.
The thug is under the accountability of his sons
Over the next ten years, Americans heard countless reasons for their country's failures in the war: that the Bush administration failed to develop a postwar reconstruction plan, that it allowed the Iraqi state to fall into civil conflict, that democracy is rarely imposed by arms, and that the architecture of nations does not seem to work. Those reasons seem real and valid, but they are inadequate. Those small lessons distracted us from learning the big lessons, and allowed war supporters to escape questioning their main perceptions of war.
One year after the invasion, Kristol and Kagan acknowledged that Bush had not always made the right decisions about the next steps in rebuilding Iraq, while urging the U.S. military to stay for its mission no matter how long. In a wide-ranging book on the war published in 2005, George Packer attacked the Bush administration for its "criminal negligence," saying the problem with the invasion was its implementation, not the idea itself. In 2006, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged thousands of tactical mistakes, but insisted that the invasion itself was strategically effective.
By then, the American public was turning against the war and Washington's justifications. Over the next decade, American voters delivered three election surprises that showed the depth of their anger with the Bush administration. The first surprise came in the 2006 congressional elections, when the Bush White House predicted that it would succeed in using the war as propaganda to tip the balance in favor of the Republican Party, while accusing the Democrats of "inaction and defeatism," as Cheney put it. But on the eve of the election, Republicans appeared to be the losers in the debates, with Nancy Pelosi calling the Iraq war a "farcical mistake," and Democrats winning the House of Representatives after 12 years of Republican domination. A majority of voters at the time saw the Iraq war as the most important topic to them, and expected Democrats to reduce or end U.S. military activity in Iraq altogether.
The subsequent election in 2008 produced an even bigger surprise: Barack Obama, a young black liberal, defeated rivals from veteran congressional politicians such as Hillary Clinton and John McCain who had previously voted to invade Iraq. Obama was known for his opposition to the war in October 2002, calling it "stupid" and "foolish." His stance on Iraq was perhaps his main point of advantage in his campaign for the Democratic nomination. "I don't just want to end the war, I want to end the mentality that dragged us into war in the first place," Obama said at the time. Obama withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011, kept the war in Afghanistan and even sent troops back to Iraq in 2014, maintained and expanded the security partnerships he inherited from his predecessors, and launched its program to target terrorists with drones and special forces.
Then Donald Trump came to take advantage of the anger of the American public, which did not heal its anger, and the third resounding surprise of the ruling establishment was the rise of a man like him to power in 2016. He attacked the war as the "worst decision" in US history, and although he lied when he claimed to have opposed the invasion from the start, he recognized its disastrous at least before it was too late, proof enough for many voters of the usefulness of trusting him as commander-in-chief and ignoring the ruling elite's propaganda campaign against the man as unfit to lead the US.
A page that hasn't been turned yet.
Today, U.S. leaders are once again turning the page on the Iraq war. Sometimes the war seems to have truly disappeared from the American collective memory. Biden recently stood up and pointed to Russia's war on Ukraine as the only all-out invasion the world has seen in eight decades. "The idea of sending 100,<> troops to invade another country hasn't happened like this since World War II," he said a month before the <>th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a war that Senator Biden voted for at the time.
Trying to forget is the best way to ensure that Americans fail to learn their lesson. If the United States implements the same desire to extend the hegemony it once dragged into Iraq, with its current rivals much stronger than Iraq, the consequences will be dire, because the next adventure could be a war between two major powers. Few Americans are looking forward to such a conflict, but few have called for an invasion of Iraq before September 11.
The justifications for hegemony and primacy helped show the war as necessary and worth the cost for, justifications that will continue to put the United States on a collision course with other countries. First, Washington has long mixed its direct interests with its sprawling military positions and commitments to its allies, completely ignoring the possibility of transferring some of these burdens to its allies, and the potential to enhance U.S. security and improve U.S. strategy. Second, Washington always downplays the threat its power poses to others, who ultimately react to it. These two mistakes push American foreign policy to fight the natural tendency to strike a balance of power, when the US itself needs that tendency rather than extend its power beyond its capacity.
Since February 2022, the US has helped Ukraine defend itself against the "brutal Russian invasion," and is a valid aid. But Washington has still avoided seriously considering the mistakes of U.S. policy that have set the stage for this and other conflicts that could erupt in the future. By expanding NATO's reach in an open operation, the United States has extended its dominance on the issue of European security, while hoping that Russia will not turn to hostile behavior. This hope was naïve from the start, because creating a dividing line within Europe, and craving further closer to Moscow, ultimately made countries that were not covered by NATO more vulnerable.
NATO has expanded at the expense of Ukraine, and indeed the United States itself. As it solidifies its dominance over European security, it is more incumbent upon the United States to engineer the international support campaign for Ukraine today, planning to put its troops in the line of fire if Russia attacks a NATO country in the future. The only way out of this self-created predicament is to put an end to the logic of American superiority and gradually and definitively transfer European defense leadership to the Europeans themselves.
While Washington faces greater risks in Europe, it is also sliding into confrontation with Beijing. There is a budding bipartisan consensus for a tougher policy than ever before, with the world's second power now. But what the United States wants for its relationship with China in the coming decades remains unclear and superficial. Amid the avalanche of objections to Chinese behavior, it usually seems as if the US opposes China's rise altogether. After the Trump administration identified China as a threat to the United States, Biden took potentially fateful actions, such as undermining the "One China" policy that allowed the two countries to coexist without a deal on Taiwan and restricting China's free access to technology, such as advanced semiconductors. We don't yet know how China will respond to these actions, but it has a fair potential to hurt the United States.
In defending its position as the world's foremost power, the US is taking enormous risks without appreciating the possibility that intensified global competition will make Americans less secure and poorer than before. But there are better options: the United States dissolves itself from engaging in the Middle East, shifts its defense burden to its European allies, and seeks a coexistence that is not without competition with China. If it sometimes seems to policymakers in Washington that they are really doing so, the facts on the ground do not. Despite what they consistently say about strategic discipline, the number of U.S. troops in the Middle East today stands at 50,<>, just as it was at the end of the Obama administration. Moreover, Washington remains captive to a notorious superiority and dominance that makes it rise from a smaller predicament to a larger one, without reconsidering the former or breaking away from the latter. In this sense, the Iraq war is a page that has not been turned, and a task that is not finished, at least for the US.
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Translation: Nour Khairy
This report is translated from Foreign Affairs and does not necessarily reflect Meydan's website.