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Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence
The almost universally accepted explanation for the Iraq war is very clear and consistent – the US decision to attack Saddam Hussein's regime on March 19, 2003 was a product of the ideological agenda, misguided priorities, intentional deceptions and grand strategies of President George W. Bush and prominent 'neoconservatives' and 'unilateralists' on his national security team. Despite the widespread appeal of this version of history, Frank P. Harvey argues that it remains an unsubstantiated assertion and an underdeveloped argument without a logical foundation. His book aims to provide a historically grounded account of the events and strategies which pushed the US-UK coalition towards war. The analysis is based on both factual and counterfactual evidence, combines causal mechanisms derived from multiple levels of analysis and ultimately confirms the role of path dependence and momentum as a much stronger explanation for the sequence of decisions that led to war.
360 pages, Hardcover
First published October 20, 2011
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March 23, 2016
First to review! And sorry, Frank Harvey, I'm not sold.
Counterfactual history is usually best for bar conversations, but Harvey uses it to make a fairly interesting point. What if Gore had been President? Would the Iraq War have happened? Well, Harvey argues, virtually all of the conditions that helped create the war would have been the same: support from the Brits, a consensus that he had some kind of WMD program, SH's non-compliance with inspections and generally threatening posture, domestic support for tough action after 9/11. Moreover, Gore was pretty hawkish about IQ as VP, and most of his likely advisors (Holbrooke, Fourth, Lieberman) were also hawkish on this topic. As a result Gore would have been pressured to get an international coalition together to get inspections into Iraq and threaten him with military force if he didn't comply. Harvey treats this as the first step towards war given Saddam Hussein's failure to take the threat seriously and his strategy of cultivating ambiguity about his WMD to scare off Iran and domestic opponents as well as the mounting political pressure to "do something" to prevent future attacks.
This is the upside of Harvey's book. In fact, it's one of the main points I want to make in my dissertation: most of the American political spectrum and a good deal of the public and intellectual spectrums thought since the mid to late 90's that no meaningful change could come to our relationship with IQ without removing SH from power. In other words, it wasn't just a neoconservative plot, but something that a wide variety of Americans thought was necessary for different reasons. The hypothetical is useful for making us think more broadly about American politics and foreign policy, especially in regards to IQ.
If Harvey had stopped here, I would have been somewhat on board. However, he uses this counterfactual to make the absurd argument that the neocons didn't really matter at all in causing the US to invade and actually didn't get their way because the US went to the UN first. Here he mistakes tactics and strategy, so to speak. Bush's wise decision to go to the UN in the fall of 2002 was a gesture towards multilateralism, and certainly a tactical defeat for the unilateralist neocons. However, they still won the bigger strategic victories in the intra-administration debates leading up to 9/11. They put Iraq on the table right after 9/11, and continued to press its importance to the GWOT until in clicked with the President in late 2001. They hammered home the point in private and public that normal deterrence or containment could not work against a rogue state with WMD that could hand those weapons to terrorist groups, i.e. the Bush Doctrine of preventative war. They were the ones who were anti-Saddam warriors since the 1990's, who funneled the most damning (and inaccurate) intelligence to the government, told everyone this would be easy, and boosted the Iraqi National Congress as a group that could take over Iraq once we knocked out the Baathists. They were the ones who pushed WMD information the hardest and in the least ambiguous terms, publicly citing information that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had already rejected. In sum, their crucial role was shaping our threat perception post 9/11 and articulating the central logic of the Iraq War. Harvey engages with none of this material in any systematic way.
The real mistake this book makes in dismissing the importance of neocons and asserting that Gore would have done the same thing is mistaking initiating a policy with supporting an already proposed policy. The importance of the neocons was putting Iraq on the table and making it stick. No one else after 9/11 did this: not Great Britain, not any other country, not the non-neocon advisors like Powell or Rice, not most public intellectuals. The more interesting question for me is why once the neocons had put Iraq on the table so many other groups went along with their logic and their proposals. Lastly, the multilateral strategy tried out in late 2002-2003 was really just a way to gain international support for going to war, something that most inside the Cabinet (including Bush and the neocons) thought was inevitable. Harvey erroneously portrays this strategy as the cause of the war, when it was really more of a temporary diversion, albeit one that could have halted the war.
He brings up a lot of neocon-centered narratives about Iraq but doesn't really engage with their personal and ideological influence on the President and their shaping of public perception of the Iraq/WMD/terrorism threat. The book's tone is also way too combative and dismissive. He basically calls neoconism a conspiracy theory, and is utterly fixated on getting the facts into his model. This is definitely a guy who gets all the data, but his method, and his conclusions, are deeply flawed. Not strongly recommended.
Counterfactual history is usually best for bar conversations, but Harvey uses it to make a fairly interesting point. What if Gore had been President? Would the Iraq War have happened? Well, Harvey argues, virtually all of the conditions that helped create the war would have been the same: support from the Brits, a consensus that he had some kind of WMD program, SH's non-compliance with inspections and generally threatening posture, domestic support for tough action after 9/11. Moreover, Gore was pretty hawkish about IQ as VP, and most of his likely advisors (Holbrooke, Fourth, Lieberman) were also hawkish on this topic. As a result Gore would have been pressured to get an international coalition together to get inspections into Iraq and threaten him with military force if he didn't comply. Harvey treats this as the first step towards war given Saddam Hussein's failure to take the threat seriously and his strategy of cultivating ambiguity about his WMD to scare off Iran and domestic opponents as well as the mounting political pressure to "do something" to prevent future attacks.
This is the upside of Harvey's book. In fact, it's one of the main points I want to make in my dissertation: most of the American political spectrum and a good deal of the public and intellectual spectrums thought since the mid to late 90's that no meaningful change could come to our relationship with IQ without removing SH from power. In other words, it wasn't just a neoconservative plot, but something that a wide variety of Americans thought was necessary for different reasons. The hypothetical is useful for making us think more broadly about American politics and foreign policy, especially in regards to IQ.
If Harvey had stopped here, I would have been somewhat on board. However, he uses this counterfactual to make the absurd argument that the neocons didn't really matter at all in causing the US to invade and actually didn't get their way because the US went to the UN first. Here he mistakes tactics and strategy, so to speak. Bush's wise decision to go to the UN in the fall of 2002 was a gesture towards multilateralism, and certainly a tactical defeat for the unilateralist neocons. However, they still won the bigger strategic victories in the intra-administration debates leading up to 9/11. They put Iraq on the table right after 9/11, and continued to press its importance to the GWOT until in clicked with the President in late 2001. They hammered home the point in private and public that normal deterrence or containment could not work against a rogue state with WMD that could hand those weapons to terrorist groups, i.e. the Bush Doctrine of preventative war. They were the ones who were anti-Saddam warriors since the 1990's, who funneled the most damning (and inaccurate) intelligence to the government, told everyone this would be easy, and boosted the Iraqi National Congress as a group that could take over Iraq once we knocked out the Baathists. They were the ones who pushed WMD information the hardest and in the least ambiguous terms, publicly citing information that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had already rejected. In sum, their crucial role was shaping our threat perception post 9/11 and articulating the central logic of the Iraq War. Harvey engages with none of this material in any systematic way.
The real mistake this book makes in dismissing the importance of neocons and asserting that Gore would have done the same thing is mistaking initiating a policy with supporting an already proposed policy. The importance of the neocons was putting Iraq on the table and making it stick. No one else after 9/11 did this: not Great Britain, not any other country, not the non-neocon advisors like Powell or Rice, not most public intellectuals. The more interesting question for me is why once the neocons had put Iraq on the table so many other groups went along with their logic and their proposals. Lastly, the multilateral strategy tried out in late 2002-2003 was really just a way to gain international support for going to war, something that most inside the Cabinet (including Bush and the neocons) thought was inevitable. Harvey erroneously portrays this strategy as the cause of the war, when it was really more of a temporary diversion, albeit one that could have halted the war.
He brings up a lot of neocon-centered narratives about Iraq but doesn't really engage with their personal and ideological influence on the President and their shaping of public perception of the Iraq/WMD/terrorism threat. The book's tone is also way too combative and dismissive. He basically calls neoconism a conspiracy theory, and is utterly fixated on getting the facts into his model. This is definitely a guy who gets all the data, but his method, and his conclusions, are deeply flawed. Not strongly recommended.
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