I’ve been quite delinquent in posting here due to procrastination over a book review which guilts me out of more active participation in the blogosphere. But this comment from Greg seemed to merit being made into a post of its own:
There were a number of people in (and some outside of) the Bush Administration that supported the invasion of Iraq and were in a position to influence that decision. Different people had different reasons. What were those reasons? Mostly I don’t know, although for some people I have a pretty good idea. No one should make the mistake of assuming that these people must have had some sort of rational-strategic reason – if nothing else, because people aren’t all that rational, and second because you can’t construct even a a reasonable facsimile of such a reason when you’re profoundly ignorant of the relevant facts, as essentially all of the key players were and are. Or when the idea makes no sense.
I don’t think they were the most important, but wannabe Israeli nationalists like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith apparently thought that invading Iraq was a good opportunity to reshape the Middle East in ways that furthered the interests of Israel. Again, I don’t think that you can construct a rational-strategic reasons for this – certainly not one based on US interests. It is not as if Baathist Iraq had ever played a significant role in the Arab-Israeli wars, or in the struggle with the Palestinians. Feith and Perle (and the Wurmsers) seem to have thought that it would be possible to install the Hashemites in Iraq and get Iraqi Shi’ites to be supporters of Israel (judging from discussions in ‘A Clean Break’) and of course that’s just crazy. On a cruder level, getting American armed forces on the ground fighting Arabs must have seemed like a good idea, even if there was no immediate payoff to Israeli strategic interests.
Paul Wolfowitz seems to have had fundamentally different ideas: he seems to have thought that Iraq was mostly Shi’ite [true] and essentially secular [what?!?] , and that it could be transformed into something like Turkey. Kemalist Turkey, natch. The main source for these strange notions seems to have been his girlfriend, Shah Ali Riza. Who better to feel the pulse on the Iraqi street than a Saudi feminist?
Cheney was much more important, but I don’t know what his reasons were. I’ve heard it said that 9-11 shook him to his core, that he was genuinely afraid and thought that all measures should be used. Including using nuclear weapons – naturally on countries that had nothing to do with 9-11 [anyone other than Saudi Arabia or Pakistan]. And that’s more than a guess: apparently it took the threat of mass military resignations to block that. And some have said that he was thinking about Iraqi oil – Iraq is potentially as large a producer as Saudi Arabia. Of course it seems unlikely that American oil companies could ever garner profits as large as the amount the US Government spent on Iraq, but then a lot of people in the Administration thought that the Iraq War was going to be easy. They thought there would a cooperative general running the place, and that we would be down to 30,000 troops by September 2003. Of course Bremer eliminated that possibility by dissolving the Iraqi Army, even though the President and the NSC had decided against doing so. Nobody seems to know who gave that order: personally, I think it’s that telepathic Sirian lizard that really runs the show. The one with the twisted sense of humor.
By the way, those American oil majors aren’t getting the prime oil-development contracts, although they are getting subcontracts. We have technical expertise, but the Iraqi government doesn’t want a major American presence. For some reason.
Cheney’s poor health suggests that he might not survive extensive waterboarding, which is really too bad. I figure that’s the only way we could determine whether he’s really an Iranian agent who had his back shaved, as suggested by the War Nerd.
I might point out that almost all the key US players seem never to have even heard of nationalism or patriotism. Who wouldn’t want to be run by a US-installed and controlled regime? I’m sure that they were surprised when Allawi, a known CIA agent, got only only 11% of the vote in Iraq. But I was not surprised. Do I have some sort of magical ability that the US government lacks?
George W. Bush. Again, forget about some elaborate rational-strategic reason. Some think that it was personal, revenge for an attempt on his father’s life. I doubt if that attempt actually occurred: I think it was a Kuwaiti fabrication, made for obvious reasons that were rational for Kuwait. I particularly doubt it because years of occupation in Iraq, and the total destruction of the Baathist regime, never turned up any evidence that it ever occurred, even though any such informant would have been richly rewarded. And he leaned heavily on Cheney [born Wormtongue]. Again some think that Bush was a Jacobin, who really believed that an irresistible desire for freedom burned in the heart of every man, a fire that has managed to hide successfully for all of recorded history. You merely had to give a freedom a chance, and everyone in the Middle East would stop being Arabs. I do think that he clung to that idea as all the other reasons melted away and the whole thing began to resemble an explosion in a well-used Porta-Potty – the alternative was admitting that he’d made a mistake, and Presidents don’t do that. I doubt if that was much of the initial reason.
Iraq had never been a major player in international terrorism terrorism. They became one retroactively, once we decided to invade, but that was just a lie. Still, there have been cases in which high mucketymucks have been told things that the underlings thought they wanted to hear and eventually came to believe them – drinking their own bathwater.
There were weird ingredients in the Administration’s talk about terrorism. Laurie Mylroie came up with a theory that Al-Qaeda was really a front for the Iraqis (the Mukhabarat). She was wrong, and nuts, but she influenced many of the others reptiles at AEI (American Enterprise Institute) – although most now think she’s full of it. Wolfowitz believed her, as did Perle, and James Woolsey (ex-Cia director, well-known for being unusually stupid]. Cheney believed her, and still does for all I know. Her theory made a number of specific predictions: none of them ever turned out to be true. By the way, I was once invited to give a talk at AEI. I declined, but I still wonder if I should have gone. After all, vermin are always in season.
I don’t know how important this was at high levels, but there were certainly a lot of people who wanted to bust some Arab chops, whether they had anything to do with 9-11 or not. I know that John Derbyshire thought this way. I told him that he was a bloodthirsty fool, and that he would come to agree that it was a mistake. Which he did, a couple of years later.. To be fair, I probably had the same feeling for a while myself, but I got over it well before we invaded Iraq.
Entitled to an Opinion 
August 7, 2013 at 8:02 pm
A very nice post. I think what’s missing from this road-to-war is the ‘thorn in the side’ / ‘target of opportunity’ / ‘never waste a crisis’ psychological aspect of it.
American National Security thought thinks of the world in Whig-History terms something like ‘on-side’, ‘converted-but-developing’, and ‘rogue state’ – putting even massive potentially peer-competitor powers like China and Russia in the ‘rogue state’ category, since the end state is, obviously, everyone takes America’s lead, does the Fukuyama dance, and joins the Secular Social Democracy party at The End of History. We thought we could do for anywhere what we did to the Confederacy, Germany, Japan, etc.
It’s hard to overstate the popularity of the the idea that the basic problem with rogue states was merely a crazy, wicked regime, which, if you just ‘cut the head off the snake’, wrote a constitution, and had elections, would unleash the magical liberty-loving and economy-flourishing powers of grass-roots populations everywhere. People really believed this crap, even at the highest levels. Kissinger/Lutwak types (hawkish yet realist) were trying to talk sense, but no one would listen. When you look back at the experience of 12 years in Afghanistan and reflect that policy makers really thought that place could be Americanized if only we got rid of that Taliban, it seems stupid and naive and insane, but such was the milieu at the time (I’m hoping the Arab spring proves a long-term correction to this notion, but I’m not holding my breath).
This kind of thinking leads US policy makers into thinking of their role as a kind of ‘take ’em out, one at a time, when the opportunity presents itself’ ratchet of that Whig History. In my experience, that how the NS structure really thinks and operates. There a kind of ‘usual suspects’ enemies list, against which we constantly produce and refine plans for operations, and when events occur, it’s natural to want to put those plans into execution. There’s of course a Machiavellian geopolitical aspect to it at well (if Al Qaeda’s in the country, and it coincidentally happens to be a place that’s constantly making trouble for us throughout the region, then, you know, ‘win-win’!)
The obvious candidate for this today (and, indeed, in 2001 too) is Iran, and the Iranians know it. That’s why when 9/11 happened they made some conciliatory movements toward rapprochement with the US. We now know that these were merely talk and they never had any intention of actually moderating the relationship, but they were smart enough to know how the US operates and that they weren’t going to give the US any excuses. Saddam wasn’t that smart, and also, he was part of the Sunni Arab world, and the US conceived of its problem as being mostly with the Sunni Arabs, which we could solve by providing a kind of focoist toppling, spurring democratic movements, and thereby liberating them from their horrible regimes and unleashing the peaceful, democrat, prosperous Middle East we know and love today.
Except that last part didn’t quite work out I guess.
August 7, 2013 at 11:03 pm
I think the opportunistic explanation hold some water, but I don’t know if it was as well thought out as all that. Libya started cooperating with us under Bush, but we still decided to jump on the bandwagon because … maybe we’ll think of a reason some day.
Iran was serious in their cooperation against the Taliban. They’d nearly gone to war with Afghanistan not too long before, a number of warlords there are (or were, such as Ahmad Shah Massoud) Iranian clients. Knuckling under to our middle east policies would be another story though.
August 8, 2013 at 6:14 am
I think Cheney really believed his 1% doctrine: if there’s a 1% chance that a nuclear terrorist could kill 1 million Americans, then the expected value is 10,000 American deaths, or more than 3 9/11s, so that would justify doing a lot, even if it turns out to be wrong.
I suspect that Cheney developed a predilection for thinking this way because in the 1980s, he and Rumsfeld were the prime participants in practicing in underground bunkers to be Acting Presidents of post-apocalyptic America in case the Soviets nuke Washington. Oliver North put together this plan and picked Cheney and Rumsfeld as the two Republicans of the younger generation who had the most administrative experience. So, about once a month they’d spend a weekend underground giving practice nuclear war and reconstruction orders to about 70 bureaucrats. I suspect Cheney dwelled on how horrible even one nuclear bomb would be and became somewhat obsessive on the subject.
August 11, 2013 at 4:37 pm
I think that Cheney was perfectly willing to generate a number of other >1% hazards as part of an unsuccessful try at eliminating the original 1-percenter. Low math score.
August 12, 2013 at 6:44 pm
“eliminating the original 1-percenter”
Who?
August 9, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Opportunism implies the opportunity to do something specific. What opportunity did people like Cheney see? One possibility is that he is a hyper-nationalist who resents the notion that his country needs allies. It would explain a puzzling feature of the period immediately before the invasion. One moment the Bush administration would loudly insist that Iraq was a menace which could not wait five minutes, and in the next breath scornfully dismiss countries as important as Germany and China with haughty talk about ‘irrelevance’. Does anybody find it plausible that some of them saw a positive opportunity to alienate as many allies as possible?
August 9, 2013 at 5:10 pm
The opportunity to overthrow a government we didn’t like.
August 23, 2013 at 3:35 pm
You’re not answering the question you pose. You’re answering the question, “What are the causes of the U.S. strategy in the Iraq War and its ultimate strategic failure.” If you want to answer the question “Why did the Iraq war occur” you necessarily have to introduce at least 2 actors, the U.S. and Iraq, the bargaining range created by distrust and imperfect information. You’d need to bring up weapons inspections, UN resolutions, illegal oil sales, and the like. You’re answering a straw man argument, “Why did the big bad evil Bush administration attack a perfectly innocent country,” but of course that’s not what happened. While it may have been the case that Saddam did not possess a near-term workable nuclear weapons program, the facts are that he made a strategic decision to do everything possible to promote the idea that he might have. That this deliberate strategy of misinformation ended up being believed by U.S. intelligence and that the U.S. administration’s willingness to go to war was understated by Iraqi intelligence and that this combination of poor information resulted in a negotiating strategy that led to a MID is pretty much standard Fearon IR theory.
Nobody starts a war because they’re in the thrall of the evil Israeli cabal that runs the world. Not even Israelis. People and nations engage in bargaining strategies because of their view of the world, the information they receive, and the heuristic they use to interpret that information. This leads to war, but nobody “starts” a war, everyone thinks they are just going to make one more show of force to make it clear they mean business and the other side will see reason and give in. The fact is that the coalition made a credible threat to Saddam to comply with the terms of the (unanimous) UN Resolution 1441. Saddam refused; you can’t make credible threats in negotiation unless you maintain credibility, so the coalition went ahead with the invasion.
Now, the real question is, given that Saddam did not have (or at least was not prepared to use) the WMD everyone else feared he had, why did the coalition screw up such an apparently simple operation? Occupying and pacifying a militarily weaker country where the majority of the people like you better than their own government hasn’t proved particularly difficult in the past. You’d think the British might have been able to give the U.S. some advice, but apparently not.
August 24, 2013 at 7:57 am
The question is not “Why did the U.S follow a particular strategy” but “Why did anyone consider it a good idea in the first place”, for which the strategy followed may have some informative value. And a war can occur regardless of what one side does, the other side declaring war and attacking is sufficient. As it happens I think Saddam did want his neighbors to suspect he might still have some hidden weapons and was trying to thread the needle between seeming non-threatening to the west but dangerous to others in the region.
Starting wars for no good reason is not unheard of. There’s lots of things governments (and other organizations and individuals) do for no good reason.
“Occupying and pacifying a militarily weaker country where the majority of the people like you better than their own government hasn’t proved particularly difficult in the past”
Did people like the U.S government much? I’m not sure that they did. Plenty of Lebanese didn’t like Black September after the latter was kicked out of Jordan, but the Israelis still managed to get the Shi’ite majority pissed at them. I think the British were in a different position because of changes in communication technology. Newspapers & literacy are related to the rise of nationalism in Europe, now you don’t even need that. It’s also not clear that U.S thought they’d have to do much occupying & pacifying, having special forces install a new client regime and leaving things in their hands was Rumsfeld’s strategy in Afghanistan. They might have thought they could do something similar.
August 27, 2013 at 3:52 pm
Pretty much everything you’re saying is false. Saddam never did anything to try and convince the world that he and nuclear weapons. I he had, you could give an example, right?
At the end, scared to death, the Baathists let the UN inspectors go everywhere. They found nothing, but it made no difference.
As for the majority of the population of Iraq “liking us more” than Saddam – try ” hating us less”. That would be closer to the truth.
My predictions came true, more or less. I’m thinking yours didn’t.
August 24, 2013 at 5:14 pm
What do we think of ye olde two-minute Greenspan video, where one day he suggests Hussein might’ve gotten a nuke and then taken control of all Gulf oil . . . then another day suggests he might have sought control of all Gulf oil in order to get (purchase) a nuke?
Well, which is it?
I accept, since I don’t know any better, Cochran’s claim that he couldn’t possibly have afforded to develop a nuke — but could he, either before or after knocking over Kuwait/Saud, have afforded to buy one? Comment from Cochran would be appreciated, but perhaps the answer is not known.
Notice how Greenspan scenario #2 makes, I think, very limited sense, since a conventional Saddam would have been kicked in the conventional ass in short order if he moved on Kuwait/Saud. Maybe he could have set a bunch of oil fields on fire or something, which he did in Golf War A, but what’s the point really. I don’t see why moving on foreign lands, and having maybe 15 minutes to tuck some foreign oil in his jacket pocket before getting clotheslined by USA, would render him more able to purchase a device than he had previously been. It would seem to render him less able.
Why is Mr Green shopping two temporo-reciprocal stories, at least one of which seems to make no sense?
August 27, 2013 at 4:00 pm
Because Greenspan’s a damn fool, like most of the people running the show. He doesn’t understand the military capabilities of the players, or for that matter their motives.
Saddam could hardly have knocked over Kuwait and/or Saudi Arabia circa 2003. We had forces in the area, and we wouldn’t have let him. And his army has in terrible shape, slowly rotting.
But it could have been worse: Greenspan could have condemned Saddam for refusing to pork Ayn Rand.
August 25, 2013 at 10:10 pm
Everyone forgets how gung-ho the *Clinton* administration was, to achieve regime change in Iraq. It was under Clinton that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 became law. It was a Clinton Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, who went on TV with a five-pound bag of sugar, saying this much anthrax could kill half of Washington DC. It is *very* likely that Bush 43 came to office, intending that Saddam should finally fall on his watch.
Cochran mentions Mylroie and her backing from Woolsey, only to dismiss the idea of an Iraqi connection to 9/11. But there is lots and lots of weirdness surrounding 9/11 and its precursor in 1993. The 1993 attempt to destroy the WTC with a truck bomb started as a much humbler bomb plot among some NYC jihadis. It escalated when they were joined by an Iraqi, Musab Yasin, and by “Ramzi Yousef”, later known as Abdul Basit Karim, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later identified as the mastermind of 9/11. These last two characters are Baluch-Pakistanis with ties to Kuwait, who also studied in the west in the 1980s.
Part of Mylroie’s theory is that they were just random innocent guys who happened to be in Kuwait when Iraq invaded, whose passports were subsequently used by Iraqi agents who liaised with the jihadis. KSM has a brother, Zahid Sheikh Muhammad, also known in jihadi circles for a long time, so the “passport theory” is probably dead. But there’s just something weird about these guys. Why the connection to *Kuwait*? Why are members of the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood, masterminds of the big terror attacks on America? Note that according to the 9/11 Commission, the 1993 attack wasn’t even the work of Al Qaeda, it just came from somewhere else in the jihadi underworld! The whole thing stinks, but whether it’s 1980s blowback or Iranian subterfuge or something else I haven’t conceived, there is undoubtedly stuff at work here, at the covert level, way beyond what Cochran knows about.
And oh yeah, “WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX”.
August 26, 2013 at 7:48 pm
I had always been under the impression WTC 1993 was al Qaeda.
August 27, 2013 at 5:17 am
See the 9/11 Commission report.
First, section 2.4, where membership in the jihadi world is described. There are various organizations, such as bin Laden’s. And then there are “rootless but experienced operatives… not necessarily formal members of someone else’s organization”, such as… for example… Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who only happened to be the masterminds of 1993 and 2001 respectively.
And a few pages later, the nature of bin Laden’s involvement in the 1993 bombing is described as “at best cloudy”.
And then see the history of KSM in chapter 5. His nephew Ramzi Yousef decided to attack the USA, and KSM pitched in by wiring $600 to one of the conspirators, but otherwise did nothing. But KSM was so inspired that a few years later, in 1996, he went to see his old pal bin Laden in Afghanistan, who he had last seen in 1987, with a smorgasbord of ideas for terror plots.
It all makes sense to me… not, as we used to say in the 1990s.
August 27, 2013 at 4:09 pm
I forget how ‘gung-ho’ Clinton Administration was to overthrow Saddam because it wasn’t so. True, if Clinton could have overthrown Saddam by, say, getting a blowjob, likely he would have done so. But sending in troops? That he didn’t want to do. And that is a big difference in the levels of enthusiasm. On the Richter scale of enthusiasm, Clinton was a 3, Bush was a 9. And remember, that’s a logarithmic scale.
” the whole thing stinks” – maybe so, but you undoubtedly have a model for how this sort of thing ought to happen, one that reality doesn’t quite fit. What’s your model?
August 28, 2013 at 7:22 am
I take you to be asking, not what I think happened, but what I think didn’t happen – i.e. what is the failed normative model, on the basis of which I say that the available data doesn’t add up.
Maybe I would emphasize two things that I don’t believe. I don’t believe that Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were “rootless”; and I don’t believe that the anthrax letters following 9/11 were independent of the history of scaremongering about Iraqi anthrax weapons, before and after that date.
August 28, 2013 at 8:13 pm
Why a “normative” model?
Do you think the anthrax letters were sent by Americans or foreigners?
August 30, 2013 at 2:49 am
normative model = “a model for how this sort of thing ought to happen”
As for who sent the letters, I wouldn’t know. The FBI says the spores originally came from a BW testing facility a few hours’ drive from the University of Utah, so Gregory Cochran might have something to say in this regard, too…
August 30, 2013 at 12:45 pm
Ivins was mildly psychotic/nutty for sure: it’s attested by a large number of people. But psychosis is common. Then there’s these funny lesions some 9-11 hijackers may have shown at some point. But I don’t really have an opinion.
September 2, 2013 at 10:10 pm
I had never heard of any 9/11 lesions.
September 1, 2013 at 12:40 pm
Here is an interesting idea on the motive for taking out Hussein:
> Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power. Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.
I’m not sure the author means to suggest that this was literally the sole motive.
It may not be that interesting an idea, because it makes fairly limited sense. We already knew Iraqi Shia were interested in rising against Saddam in the 80s. The possibility that they would more or less clash with Sunnis and therefore align with Irani Shia therefore seems predictable enough.
October 25, 2013 at 1:34 am
People who believe the 19 Arabs with boxcutters story are not adults.
October 25, 2013 at 5:19 pm
There are no adults. Even the people on the planes who called others reporting Arabs with boxcutters were a bunch of babies. No wonder they crashed flight 93.