OPINION:
The passage of 20 years has not healed the wounds inflicted by the U.S. invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on March 20, 2003. According to the conservative estimates of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the invasion, occupation, and ensuing Sunni-Shia civil war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, displaced millions, and will cost the U.S. Treasury something like $3 trillion. Iraq today is a corrupt kleptocracy.
For many Americans who watched this mayhem from a safe distance, the 20th anniversary of the war dredged up feelings of anger and betrayal. But it is important to revisit the story. It is impossible to understand the rise of anti-establishment populism in our politics without considering the failures of our institutions over the past two decades.
Enter the University of Virginia’s Melvyn P. Leffler, an eminent historian of U.S. foreign policy. In “Confronting Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Leffler recounts the Bush administration’s motives and aims in pursuing regime change in Iraq. Through exhaustive research of an albeit limited documentary record — most of the relevant U.S. documents remain classified — Mr. Leffler addresses the most serious accusations leveled against President George W. Bush and his top advisers.
Mr. Leffler concludes that the decision to invade was not born from ideological bombast or missionary zeal about spreading democracy. Neither was it primarily the result of naivete, sheer stupidity, incompetence, or outright lies. The Bush administration, U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies, members of both parties in Congress, and much of the mainstream press truly believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Rather, Mr. Leffler argues, the key decision-makers were driven by fear of another terrorist attack, excessive confidence in U.S. military might, and hubris. They adopted a policy of “coercive diplomacy,” which reasoned that Saddam would give up his weapons only if threatened with invasion.
“When critics blame Bush personally or his advisers more broadly, however, they tend to obfuscate the larger dilemma of statecraft … in the aftermath of 9/11,” Mr. Leffler concludes. “Bush failed not because he was a weak leader, a naive ideologue, or a lying, manipulative politician. Critics forget how ominous the al-Qaeda threat seemed and how evil and manipulative Hussein really was.”
“Coercive diplomacy” became a trap that made war more likely. In the end, Saddam could not give up weapons he did not have. But the absence of weapons was viewed by the White House as evidence that Saddam was hiding something. As Mr. Leffler tells it, Mr. Bush confided to his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in January 2003 that their approach was not working, but “neither the president nor his national security adviser mentioned the possibility that Hussein might not have the weapons they assumed he had.”
Mr. Leffler may give the Bush team too much benefit of the doubt. In dozens of press conferences, speeches, and televised interviews, top administration figures such as Vice President Dick Cheney expressed “no doubt” about Saddam’s arsenal. But the record shows — as Mr. Leffler himself makes clear — that few officials were privately certain of the accuracy of the intelligence. For instance, despite internal warnings about the veracity of the claim that Iraq once tried to purchase 500 pounds of yellowcake uranium in Niger, a charge based on forged documents, Mr. Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Despite concerns about the credibility of an Iraqi exile in Germany known as Curveball, his fantastic lies about Saddam’s chemical weapons made it into Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. Moreover, administration officials publicly played up an al Qaeda-Iraq nexus that did not exist.
These and other false claims, whether deliberate lies or not, influenced public opinion in favor of war. Saddam Hussein’s hollowed-out Iraq had to be made into an existential threat — or, as Mr. Bush put it, part of “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” Still, in Mr. Leffler’s balanced perspective, the president was a reluctant warrior. Although it would become an article of faith among his critics, Mr. Leffler debunks the notion that Mr. Bush decided to invade Iraq days after 9/11.
If “Confronting Saddam Hussein” does not resolve the debate over whether Mr. Bush and the neocons lied about weapons of mass destruction, it still sharpens our understanding of what led to this unnecessary conflict.
From its political leaders to most ordinary citizens, the U.S. believed it had a right in the post-9/11 climate to invade a sovereign nation to topple its government. The world’s security depended on it. Our heroic soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. If two decades of disastrous war-making and nation-building are cause for reflection, we might want to start with these assumptions. As Melvyn Leffler’s excellent study reminds us, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
• Martin Di Caro is host of the “History As It Happens” podcast for The Washington Times.
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Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq
By Melvyn P. Leffler, professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia
368 pages, Hardcover, by Oxford University Press
First published Feb. 1, 2023