Twenty years after the United States invaded Iraq, numerous explanations attempt to clarify the reasons behind this significant military action. While political scientists and journalists initially dominated the scholarly discourse, historians have increasingly contributed their perspectives in recent years, including notable works published this year by Melvyn Leffler and Samuel Helfont.1 The invasion of Iraq remains a pivotal foreign policy decision made by a U.S. president in the 21st century, making the extensive analysis unsurprising.
This article aims to map the evolution of the debate surrounding the Iraq War’s origins over the past two decades. It seeks to objectively present competing schools of thought, clearly outlining their interpretations, identifying areas of disagreement, and considering the influence of politics and ideology on scholarly work. This exploration will demonstrate how diverse interpretations of the war have emerged from the varied perspectives, methodologies, and objectives scholars bring to the subject.
While a single article cannot comprehensively address all aspects of Iraq War scholarship, this essay will concentrate on three crucial questions that remain central to explaining the war’s origins and continue to divide scholars. Firstly, was the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq primarily motivated by security concerns or the pursuit of primacy? Secondly, was the Bush administration’s strategy of “coercive diplomacy” in the fall and winter of 2002–2003 a genuine effort to avert war, or was it a tactic to legitimize a decision for war already made earlier in 2002? Thirdly, what was the extent of the neoconservatives’ influence in the decision to initiate the Iraq War?
The central point of scholarly contention regarding the Iraq War revolves around the first question: security versus hegemony. Security-focused explanations, exemplified by Leffler’s recent book, posit that the Bush administration’s main goal was to protect the nation from future terrorist attacks in the altered post-9/11 environment. This context necessitated a re-evaluation of threats, including Iraq.2 In contrast, scholars of the hegemony school, like Ahsan Butt, argue that the Bush administration leveraged 9/11 and the perceived threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for a war primarily driven by a desire for regional and/or global dominance.3 This fundamental security-hegemony dichotomy influences the understanding of related issues, such as the nature of Bush’s coercive diplomacy and the role of neoconservatives in the lead-up to the war.
Effective historiographical analysis should begin by explaining the current shape of scholarly discourse and then suggest paths for future development. Interpreting history presents inherent challenges, amplified in this case by the limited access scholars have to primary source documentation. Consequently, much of the debate hinges on the interpretation, critique, and contextualization of a relatively small set of available sources. Moreover, political and policy discussions have significantly impacted the scholarship, sometimes in less than ideal ways.4
Methodologically, the security school generally accepts policymakers’ stated motives, both at the time and retrospectively, as genuine unless compelling contradictory evidence emerges. For this perspective, the crucial context for understanding the war is the heightened pressure of the post-9/11 environment, where national security was paramount and Iraq was widely perceived as a significant threat.
Conversely, the hegemony school argues that key aspects of the war are incomprehensible through a security lens alone. These scholars contend against uncritically accepting policymakers’ accounts, pointing to their strong incentive to downplay ideological or unrealistic aspects of their actions. Instead, they situate the Iraq War decision within broader historical contexts, emphasizing factors like the long-held primacist views of figures such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, which they believe offer more relevant explanations than immediate security concerns.
Unsurprisingly, given the recency and contentiousness of the Iraq War, scholarly analysis is intertwined with ongoing political and policy debates, particularly concerning the lessons to be learned. Differing interpretations of the war’s origins have direct implications for U.S. foreign policy in an era of great-power competition. Security school scholars often view the Iraq War as a forgivable error, considering the traumatic post-9/11 context and the widespread belief in Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.5 Consequently, they rarely advocate for substantial changes in post-Iraq U.S. foreign policy. In stark contrast, the hegemony school argues that the war stemmed from a detrimental bipartisan pursuit of global primacy, warning of similar disasters if this grand strategy is not abandoned.
It is important to note that this essay does not aim to defend the security-hegemony dichotomy or favor either side. Instead, it seeks to elucidate its parameters, evolution, and significance. Some may criticize the depiction of two broad interpretive camps as an oversimplification of a nuanced body of scholarship. To address this, the article will explore potential avenues for synthesizing these interpretations. While the security and hegemony perspectives do overlap in certain areas, as discussed below, this division reflects genuine scholarly disagreements about the primary drivers of the war. Finally, this essay concludes by advocating for more global and cultural analyses of the Iraq War to challenge this binary framework.
Nevertheless, “lumping” together perspectives is valuable in historiographical analysis, particularly for those new to the field or non-specialists seeking a comprehensive overview of existing scholarship. This broad approach helps identify the essential questions that continue to define and propel the field, questions that should be addressed in future research on the Iraq War.
Therefore, this essay does not exhaust the entirety of Iraq War scholarship, nor does it offer its own historical or theoretical explanation of the war’s causes. Both tasks would require significantly more space. Consequently, certain topics with substantial existing research receive less attention, including the Baathist regime’s beliefs and decisions, the history of weapons inspections before 2002–2003, pre-war planning shortcomings, and the international diplomacy preceding the war. While crucial for a complete understanding of the war’s origins, these questions have not been the primary focus of scholarly disagreement, which is the central concern of this essay.6
Security vs. Hegemony: The Core Divide
Did the United States invade Iraq primarily due to a misjudged effort to eliminate a security threat in the intensely charged post-9/11 environment? Or did U.S. leaders exploit 9/11 as a pretext to pursue a war of opportunity driven by aspirations for American hegemony?
The most straightforward answer might be “a combination of both” or that this is a false dichotomy. For instance, the U.S. could have pursued security through a hegemonic grand strategy, potentially involving regime change in states like Iraq. Iraq could have been perceived as both a genuine security threat and an impediment to U.S. dominance.7
However, the core divide among scholars is real, reflecting significant differences in interpretation, contextualization, and even political viewpoints. Scholars frequently identify security- or hegemony-based factors as the most critical. Security-focused explanations argue that in the post-9/11 climate, hegemonic ambitions were secondary to urgent security imperatives. Hegemony-focused explanations, while often acknowledging security concerns, maintain that fears about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and terrorist connections served as justifications for pre-existing hegemonic objectives. Each school frames the war within different contexts, with the security school emphasizing the immediate post-9/11 period, and the hegemony school highlighting the preceding decades during which the war’s architects developed their policy perspectives.
The Security School
Melvyn Leffler stands as a leading figure in the security school, which also includes scholars like Robert Jervis, Frederic Bozo, Alexander Debs, Ivo Daalder, James Lindsay, Peter Hahn, Hakan Tunc, and Steve Yetiv. While these scholars do not disregard broader U.S. goals and ideologies, they contend that the Bush administration’s pursuit of security following 9/11 was the primary driver behind the decision to invade. Leffler argues that Bush “went to war not out of a fanciful idea to make Iraq democratic, but to rid it of its deadly weapons, its links to terrorists, and its ruthless, unpredictable tyrant.”8 Jervis, while acknowledging democracy as a secondary motive, asserts that “[t]he fundamental cause of the invasion was the perception of unacceptable threat from Saddam [Hussein] triggered by the combination of pre-existing beliefs about his regime and the impact of terrorist attacks.”9 Bozo concludes that “the choice for war clearly arose first and foremost from a logic of national security.”10
Security school arguments underscore the transformative impact of 9/11 on U.S. national security as essential for understanding the Iraq War. Leffler and Jervis point out that while the Bush administration entered office with regime-change proponents in prominent positions, Iraq was not a primary focus in its initial nine months, nor were significant steps taken toward overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Bush initially opposed nation-building and advocated for strategic restraint.11
However, scholars within the security school concur that the security threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and a rogue state was not merely a pretext but the genuine driving force behind the war.
The 9/11 attacks fundamentally altered U.S. foreign policy and paved the way for the Iraq War. The Bush administration experienced intense anger, fear, and vulnerability after 9/11, prompting a reassessment of other security threats.12 Leffler argues that for the Bush team, “the risk calculus had changed dramatically after 9/11.”13 They could no longer tolerate states pursuing weapons of mass destruction, threatening neighbors or the U.S., and supporting terrorism.
So why target Iraq specifically? The Bush administration viewed Iraq as the “nexus” of these threats.14 As Bush himself argued, Iraq fulfilled these criteria more than any other state: “state sponsors of terror … sworn enemies of America … hostile governments that threatened their neighbors … regimes that pursued WMD [weapons of mass destruction].”15 While top officials may have made significant errors and exaggerations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and terrorist links, they genuinely believed in the reality and growing nature of these threats. Furthermore, at the time, few analysts, even from nations opposing the war, accurately assessed the truth: Saddam was not actively engaged in weapons of mass destruction production. Saddam’s near decade-long obstruction of inspectors also reasonably suggested an intent to resume such production.16
The United States felt it could not afford to wait for the Iraqi threat to fully materialize, given the risk of “the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud,” as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice famously stated.17 Consequently, the administration asserted a right to launch preventive wars to eliminate threats. This presumed right became central to the Bush Doctrine, which, according to the security school, was less a plan for primacy than an adaptation of long-standing concepts regarding the use of force in the face of new dangers.18
From the security school perspective, the Iraq War did not primarily originate from grand designs of expanding U.S. hegemony or promoting liberal values. While overwhelming U.S. military power and the unipolar international system made regime change feasible, these factors were not the primary motivations for the war. Leffler contends that “missionary fervor or idealistic impulses” played a minimal role in the Bush team’s decisions.19 Tunc argues that hegemony as a motive for the Iraq War is illogical, as eliminating this relatively minor rival would not significantly alter the global balance of power.20
Idealistic aspirations and global power imbalances had existed for at least a decade before 9/11. The attacks served as the decisive new variable, prompting a reassessment of national security that ultimately led to the invasion. Leffler summarizes the core, security-focused causes: “They were seeking to safeguard the country from another attack, save American lives, avoid the opprobrium that would come from another assault, and preserve the country’s ability to exercise its power in the future on behalf of its interests.”21
Security school scholars often adopt a more sympathetic stance towards the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. Leffler emphasizes the emotional impact of 9/11, including top officials’ visits to Ground Zero and interactions with first responders and bereaved families. Context is crucial to this interpretation, as he argues, “Critics forget how ominous the al Qaeda threat seemed and how evil and manipulative Hussein really was.”22 He maintains that the Bush team sought to “do the right thing” and protect the nation from what they perceived as an imminent threat.23 Scholars in the security school agree that the perceived threat of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and a rogue state was not a mere pretext but the genuine driving force behind the war. As Jervis argues, considering the consensus about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the post-9/11 need to reassess security threats, “There is little reason to doubt that Bush and his colleagues sincerely believed that Saddam had active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programs.”24
The security school’s perspective aligns significantly with Bush administration officials’ memoirs, which also emphasize security motives for the war.25 These memoirs portray the emotional weight of the post-9/11 moment, where the administration felt responsible for failing to prevent 9/11 and feared another attack. “I could not have forgiven myself had there been another attack,” recalls Rice.26 Bush writes that “before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage.” However, “through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed.”27 Protecting the nation from further terrorist attacks became the paramount priority, and threats like Iraq could no longer be tolerated.28 Official memoirs emphasize that the administration did not desire war with Iraq and sought ways to avoid it, but ultimately, national security concerns dictated removing this menace.29
This overlap is understandable given the reliance of scholars like Leffler on interviews with administration insiders. However, it also raises concerns that the security school might be accepting policymakers’ accounts of events at face value. Bush officials have a clear interest in portraying themselves as open to non-violent solutions to the Iraq problem and as not being idealistic crusaders.30 As we will see, the hegemony school adopts a more critical approach to this issue.
The Hegemony School
The hegemony school includes scholars such as Butt, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, Patrick Porter, Paul Pillar, G. John Ikenberry, David Harvey, John Mearsheimer, and Jeffrey Record. While not exclusively from the realist school of international relations, they tend to lean in that direction. They acknowledge the role of security concerns in motivating the Iraq War, but consider security rationales fundamentally incomplete. Their central argument is that the primary motivation for the invasion was to maintain and expand U.S. hegemony. However, the hegemony school diverges on whether the U.S. sought realist or liberal forms of hegemony.
On the side of realist hegemony, Butt argues that the war stemmed from the “desire to maintain the United States’ global standing and hierarchic order,” with security concerns acting more as a domestically palatable justification than a causal factor.31 9/11 threatened U.S. hegemony, leading the United States to choose a “performative war” to re-establish “generalized deterrence,” or the reputation for unmatched power and willingness to use it that underpins hegemony.32 He quotes Rumsfeld saying on 9/11, “[w]e need to bomb something else [other than Afghanistan] to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks.”33 Butt contends that available intelligence on Iraq offered no evidence of an imminent threat. However, Iraq was a convenient target for demonstrating U.S. power, being militarily weak, diplomatically isolated, lacking weapons of mass destruction, and disliked by the U.S. public.34
Scholars in the realist-hegemony camp view the Iraq War as a means to uphold realist priorities like unipolarity and U.S. freedom of action globally.
Stephen Wertheim concurs, arguing that “the decision to invade Iraq stemmed from the pursuit of global primacy,” aiming to “dissuade other countries from rising and challenging American dominance.”35 Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney agree: “The primary objective of the war was the preservation and extension of American primacy in a region with high importance to American national interests.”36 Record similarly argues that “the invasion was a conscious expression of America’s unchecked global military hegemony that was designed to perpetuate that hegemony by intimidating those who would challenge it.”37
Scholars in the realist-hegemony camp see the Iraq War as a tool to maintain realist priorities, including unipolarity and U.S. freedom of action in the world. The Bush administration seized 9/11 and the alleged Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction threat as a “pretext,” “opportunity,” or “rationale” to advance this agenda, believing it would eliminate the terrorist threat and other challenges to U.S. power.38 Democratization served as a secondary motive to justify a war primarily rooted in the pursuit of power.39
Walt, Porter, and Bacevich agree that the U.S. sought to demonstrate its power and preserve hegemony by invading Iraq, but they argue that the Bush administration specifically aimed to solidify liberal hegemony. This grand strategy involved spreading liberal democracy and capitalism, not just as ends in themselves, but also as means to maintain global dominance.40 The Cold War had constrained this strategy, but the Soviet collapse allowed the U.S. to pursue it with reckless idealism and hubris. The bipartisan foreign policy establishment came to assume the universality of liberal ideals and a presumed U.S. right to intervene globally, either to protect human rights or suppress challenges to American power.41
Following the 9/11 attacks, according to this perspective, the U.S. failed to consider whether liberal hegemony itself might be generating resistance. Instead, the Bush administration, with bipartisan support, escalated the pursuit of liberal hegemony and asserted a unilateral right to change regimes of rival states through preventive war, embodied in the Bush Doctrine. While security school scholars view this doctrine as a response to a new category of threat, the hegemony school sees it as a plan to preserve U.S. primacy, asserting the unilateral American right to eliminate potential threats like Iraq and prevent the rise of peer competitors.42 Some scholars also highlight protecting Israel and advancing U.S. oil interests as additional hegemonic motives, though these remain more contentious explanations.43
For Walt, Porter, and others, the Iraq War arose from the pursuit of liberal hegemony, a revisionist grand strategy aiming to spread democracy and other liberal values, topple tyrants, and thereby construct a more peaceful and cooperative world order. In this vision, the U.S. aimed not just to remove a threat but to fundamentally transform Middle Eastern politics by establishing democracy in Iraq.44 They cite substantial evidence that democracy promotion was a significant motive for the war, especially for Bush, rather than merely a justification for a power-driven war.45 The 2002 National Security Strategy, for example, reflected this universalistic idealism, declaring, “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom — and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”46
This war aligned with the long-held liberal belief among many U.S. policymakers that autocracies inherently threaten long-term peace, prosperity, and security, and that only a democratic international order can guarantee these benefits.47 As Bush argued in a February 2003 speech, “The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder.”48 Liberal idealism, as Michael MacDonald argues, also convinced the Bush administration that regime change in Iraq would be straightforward, as Iraqis would readily embrace democracy after the Baathists were removed.49
Mearsheimer calls the Iraq War “probably the best example of this kind of liberal interventionism” that dominated post-Cold War U.S. thinking.50 Bacevich argues that the weapons of mass destruction threat was a “cover story,” and the war’s main objectives were to “force the Middle East into the U.S.-dominated liberal order of capitalist democracies and assert its prerogative of removing regimes that opposed U.S. interests.”51 As Porter contends, “The Iraq War … was an effort to reorder the world. Its makers aimed to spread capitalist democracy on their terms.”52
To some extent, this division within the hegemony camp reflects the differing worldviews of top Bush administration decision-makers. Rumsfeld and Cheney leaned towards a more realist paradigm, prioritizing reasserting power over spreading democracy. Others, like Wolfowitz, viewed the Iraq War as part of a liberal project. Bush himself embodied a blend of these perspectives.53
However, differences regarding whether the U.S. aimed for realist or liberal hegemony should not obscure the fundamental common ground within the hegemony school. These scholars agree that the U.S. had been pursuing some form of primacy well before 9/11, that 9/11 both threatened that primacy and offered a pretext or opportunity to reassert it, and that Iraq was less a threat than a convenient target for solidifying hegemony.
In terms of contextualization, the pre-9/11 era is more significant for the hegemony school than the security school. The former emphasizes continuities in U.S. foreign policy stretching back into the Cold War.54 These scholars highlight that key architects of the war, like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, had openly supported U.S. hegemony in the decades leading up to 9/11. Many cite the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, drafted by Zalmay Khalilzad and Abram Shulsky under Wolfowitz’s supervision, then serving under Cheney.55 This document advocated a hegemonic grand strategy to maintain indefinite global military dominance and “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.”56 Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and numerous other future Bush administration officials also signed open letters in the late 1990s calling for regime change in Iraq and a primacist grand strategy.57
Following 9/11, these hegemonists immediately linked the Baathist regime to terrorism despite limited evidence, promoted questionable intelligence, exaggerated the Iraqi threat, and downplayed the risks of invasion. For the hegemony school, this demonstrates that the administration “wanted war,” to paraphrase Record’s book, and that subsequent claims of reluctant entry into war are self-serving myths.58
Some Bush administration officials have deviated from the official security-focused explanation and acknowledged the importance of broader ideological or hegemonic designs. CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir that top administration members seemed uninterested in the specifics of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, interpreting this as a decision to invade Iraq using such weapons as a pretext. He stated, “The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. In my view, I doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face put on it.” He pointed to “larger geostrategic calculations, ideology,” and “democratic transformation” as real reasons.59 White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan similarly concluded that “removing the ‘grave and gathering danger’ Iraq supposedly posed was primarily a means for achieving the far more grandiose objective of reshaping the Middle East as a region of peaceful democracies.”60
Synthesizing the Security and Hegemony Schools
Why can’t the hegemony and security schools find common ground? Some scholars have attempted to bridge these perspectives. Works by Michael Mazarr, Robert Draper, and Justin Vaisse examine the post-9/11 national security urgency while acknowledging the historical context of U.S. hegemony and idealism.61 My own synthesis attempts have argued that a bipartisan “regime change consensus” on Iraq formed during the 1990s, predisposing the U.S. foreign policy establishment to support Saddam’s removal and view containment as a failing policy. Broad agreement on U.S. hegemony fueled this consensus, making the Iraq War appear logical to many U.S. elites. Nevertheless, 9/11 was a crucial variable that significantly reduced America’s tolerance for threats like Iraq while providing greater latitude for U.S. leaders to pursue risky strategies.62
One approach to synthesizing these schools is to divide causal labor, with the hegemony school explaining “Why Iraq?” and the security school addressing “Why now?” Hegemony school analysts often ask: If the U.S. was genuinely concerned about weapons of mass destruction proliferation, why not focus on countries with more advanced programs, like North Korea? If terrorism was the real concern, why not prioritize more active state sponsors, such as Iran?
After all, as Pillar and others argue, the Bush administration misused the intelligence process, not in a good-faith effort to accurately assess Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but to gather — if not exaggerate — evidence to support the case for regime change.
These inconsistencies regarding “Why Iraq?” highlight a key weakness in security-based explanations: Iraq, which became the central front in the War on Terror, was neither the most powerful “rogue state” nor involved in 9/11. Instead, within the hegemonic framework, Iraq was more of an opportunity than a threat, and its alleged weapons of mass destruction programs were more a pretext than a primary motive. As former CIA intelligence analyst Paul Pillar bluntly puts it, concern about such weapons “was not the principal or even a major reason the Bush administration went to war.” It was “at most a subsidiary motivator of the policy.”63 After all, as Pillar and others contend, the Bush administration misused the intelligence process, not to accurately assess Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in good faith, but to gather—if not exaggerate—evidence to support the case for regime change.64
However, the hegemony school struggles to answer the “Why now?” question. If the bipartisan pursuit of hegemony and liberal idealism are constants in U.S. foreign policy, why didn’t the Iraq War happen sooner, perhaps after inspectors left Iraq in 1998? By emphasizing how 9/11 reshaped U.S. foreign policy and threat perception, the security school addresses a fundamental point that few analysts dispute: a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is virtually inconceivable without 9/11.
An interesting point of agreement between the security and hegemony schools is that the end of the Cold War was a crucial precondition for the Iraq War. The idea of the U.S. invading a mid-sized country—once a Soviet satellite—to change its regime during the Cold War seems improbable. The hegemony school particularly stresses the importance of unipolarity, which they believe allowed dreams of hegemony, both realist and liberal, to flourish in the U.S. imagination.65 This leads to speculation about whether the return of multipolarity will deter future U.S. attempts at direct regime change.
The relationship between the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War remains an under-explored aspect of this field. Scholars like Helfont, Christian Alfonsi, and myself have argued that the Gulf War’s messy conclusion initiated a pattern of conflict between the U.S. and Iraq that persisted throughout the 1990s, creating a strong desire within the U.S. political establishment to “finish the job,” even before 9/11.66 After all, there was no war with Iran or North Korea in the 1990s, nor was there an Iran or North Korean Liberation Act. However, the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act declared regime change as official U.S. policy toward Iraq.67 Relatively few works systematically trace U.S.-Iraqi relations through this period, although Helfont’s recent book significantly addresses this gap by tracing Iraq’s challenge to the post-Cold War, U.S.-led international order throughout the 1990s.68
Despite synthesis attempts, a meaningful tension between the security and hegemony schools makes complete reconciliation difficult. It is challenging to interpret a war as both predetermined and contingent—and equally challenging to view the Bush administration as both fixated on regime change and open to various methods of disarming Iraq. Moreover, as demonstrated, primary source evidence supports both major interpretations.
The points of contrast between the security and hegemony schools also influence the overall interpretation of the war. Was it an understandable tragedy or an unforced and unforgivable blunder?69 Periodization matters too: were the war’s roots primarily in the response to 9/11, or do they extend decades into U.S. foreign policy history? Finally, does the Iraq War, especially the controversial Bush Doctrine, represent a sharp departure in U.S. diplomatic history or a continuation of previous trends, goals, and ideas?70
What Was “Coercive Diplomacy” All About?
Scholarly leanings in the security-hegemony debate influence their understanding of other key questions about the war’s origins. This essay now addresses two additional issues that divide scholars, starting with the purpose of Bush’s “coercive diplomacy” strategy in late 2002 and early 2003.
In the fall of 2002, under pressure from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush decided to pursue the “diplomatic track” on Iraq. On September 12, at the United Nations, he demanded Iraq readmit weapons inspectors or face overthrow. He also sought congressional authorization to use force against Iraq.71 Concurrently, the U.S. troop buildup in the region provided a credible threat of force backing this final diplomatic effort. Rice describes this strategy as “coercive diplomacy.”72
But what was the objective of coercive diplomacy? Was it a genuine attempt to peacefully disarm Iraq? Or was it a tactic to gain legitimacy and allied and domestic political support for a pre-determined policy of regime change? This debate is crucial for determining when the Bush administration decided on war and the extent to which it was solely focused on regime change, regardless of circumstances. The security-hegemony debate is significant but somewhat deterministic. The coercive diplomacy debate introduces questions about the war’s contingency and potential off-ramps.
Leffler argues that in early 2002, Bush was “not yet ready to choose between containment and regime change” and remained undecided into the fall of 2002.73 Bush was uncertain whether disarmament could be achieved without regime change. Coercive diplomacy was a final attempt to resolve this. By adopting this strategy, he acknowledged the possibility that war might be averted and Saddam could remain in power for the time being. He also temporarily disregarded the advice of more hawkish advisors like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who viewed working through the United Nations as counterproductive.74 As Leffler writes, Bush “decided to see if he could accomplish his key objectives … without war.”75 In this account, Bush did not decide to invade until January 2003, after Iraqi authorities failed to fully cooperate with a new round of weapons inspections.76
Other scholars, particularly within the security school, concur with Leffler’s interpretation of coercive diplomacy. Frank Harvey argues that coercive diplomacy aimed “to re-invigorate a failing containment policy by reinforcing multilateral, U.N. inspections that demanded full and complete compliance.”77 Debs and Nuno Monteiro also agree that in supporting new inspections, the Bush administration genuinely sought to test Iraqi cooperation and avoid war.78
These analyses emphasize the contingent nature of Bush’s approach to Iraq. While some Bush officials may have passionately advocated for regime change, Bush proceeded deliberately, giving peaceful disarmament methods a final chance. He did so because disarmament by any means, not regime change for ulterior motives, was his priority.
Again, this account aligns with U.S. leaders’ descriptions of their own actions. Bush states in his memoir, “My first choice was to use diplomacy” on Iraq.79 Coercive diplomacy was a sincere attempt to avoid war, but Saddam’s failure to comply with inspections compelled Bush to choose war in early 2003.80 Rice similarly claimed, “We invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”81
For scholars like Leffler, the situation remained fluid and contingent until just months before the invasion. For scholars like Mazarr, the war was virtually inevitable once the Bush administration set its sights on Iraq in early 2002.
Michael Mazarr and others challenge Leffler’s account of coercive diplomacy, placing the decision to invade much earlier than early 2003. Mazarr writes that “between September 11 and December 2001 … the Bush administration — while nowhere near what would be defined as the formal ‘decision’ to go to war — had irrevocably committed itself to the downfall of Saddam Hussein.”82 War planning commenced in November 2002, and Bush made several private and public statements before spring 2002 indicating his intention to remove Saddam.83
That fall, Bush sided with Powell in choosing the diplomatic track, but even Powell never questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq.84 There was minimal debate within his administration about the fundamental soundness of invading Iraq, suggesting the decision had been made even before the coercive diplomacy effort began.85 Mazarr adds that a “tidal wave of evidence can be found that many senior officials assumed war was inevitable long before September 2002.”86 The Bush administration quickly judged the inspections as failed in early 2003 and solidified the decision to invade in January.87
My own research aligns with Mazarr’s and further suggests that the idea of Bush seeking to restore containment through coercive diplomacy is illogical. Bush had already argued earlier in 2002 that containment could not address the “nexus” threat. Moreover, most of his advisors and the policy establishment already considered containment obsolete. Finally, the Bush administration was deeply skeptical of inspections’ efficacy and set such a high bar for success that failure was virtually predetermined.88
Hegemony school scholars generally agree with Mazarr’s analysis of coercive diplomacy. They argue that the Bush administration was not interested in a peaceful resolution because it sought an opportunity to assert U.S. power. They view coercive diplomacy as a charade to legitimize a predetermined war. Butt, for example, argues that Iraq could have done nothing to avoid war, as the U.S. had decided to crush a rival to re-establish generalized deterrence.89 John Prados contends that Bush decided on war in early spring 2002, and Richard Haass places the decision in July 2002, both before coercive diplomacy began.90
Similar to the core security-hegemony divide, the debate about coercive diplomacy resists easy resolution. For scholars like Leffler, the situation remained fluid and contingent until months before the invasion. For scholars like Mazarr, the war was virtually inevitable once the Bush administration targeted Iraq in early 2002. A possible synthesis might be that the administration’s deep pessimism about Saddam yielding to U.S. threats and complying with inspections constituted a de facto decision for war, if not a definitively final one.91 If anything, coercive diplomacy might be another under-examined aspect of the Iraq War, overlooked by numerous analyses attributing the war’s origins to security or hegemony.92 This oversight leads to overly deterministic explanations of the war that minimize the role of contingency.
One way to address this impasse is through more analysis of the State Department’s role in the lead-up to war. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage supported the war but were not ardent believers, and many war skeptics held senior positions within the State Department.93 As more sources become available, it will be interesting to see if Powell or others raised critical questions about the fundamental decision to go to war or urged Bush to pursue coercive diplomacy more thoroughly. This could reveal whether genuine uncertainty and openness to non-violent solutions existed within the administration, as Leffler claims, or whether the U.S. was irreversibly on a path to war before fall 2002, as Mazarr argues.94
However, scholars should be cautious about assuming new documentary evidence will fully resolve these disagreements. The British Iraq Inquiry, published in 2016, released a wealth of primary sources and interviews on British policymaking on Iraq from 2001 to 2009.95 Numerous scholars have utilized this fascinating material, but interpretive tensions persist because they analyze this evidence through different lenses. For example, Leffler argues that Blair’s correspondence with Bush after 9/11 shows that neither leader was rushing to war with Iraq, but rather establishing a general timeframe for pressuring the Iraqi regime to disarm.96 This supports his broader argument that the Bush administration was not fixated on war, attempted other means of disarming Iraq, and only decided on war after exhausting other options.
Butt, in contrast, argues that these same sources demonstrate that “war was decided upon very soon after—probably even on-9/11.” Blair, after all, told Bush on October 11, 2001, that “I have no doubt we need to deal with Saddam” and that “we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date.”97 For Butt, this source shows that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in Iraq and reasserting U.S. hegemony in the Middle East almost immediately after 9/11. Blair merely cautioned Bush against rushing into war without building a coalition.98 Porter, author of a book on Britain’s war in Iraq, also draws heavily on the Iraq Inquiry and arrives at a similar conclusion. He contends that the Blair government was as ideologically committed to strategic primacy and spreading liberal democracy as Bush. It never seriously considered alternatives but “worried predominantly about how to create conditions that would legitimize a British military campaign, that would generate enough support.”99
The discrepancies among scholars using the same documents highlight the importance of the interpretative frameworks analysts bring to their sources. Consequently, new sources may not necessarily lead to convergence between interpretive camps.
How Important Were the Neocons?
The final major question this essay addresses regarding the Iraq War’s origins is the role of neoconservatives. Were they the intellectual architects of this war, or were they peripheral to the decision to invade? While the alignment is not perfect, the security school tends to downplay neoconservatives’ influence, while the hegemony school usually emphasizes their central importance.
Neoconservatives are a loosely defined intellectual movement that has evolved significantly since its origins in the 1960s. Vaisse defines third-wave neoconservatism as a nationalistic movement peaking in the 1990s and early 2000s, seeking to promote U.S. primacy, “national greatness,” and democracy promotion, often with a unilateralist approach.100 Several neoconservatives held high-ranking positions in the Bush administration, most notably Paul Wolfowitz.101
While neoconservative intellectuals like Robert Kagan and William Kristol publicly advocated for regime change, the debate about their role in initiating the Iraq War has been contentious. Early commentary often simplistically suggested that a “cabal” of neoconservatives hijacked U.S. foreign policy and led the nation into a disastrous war. For instance, then-Senator Joe Biden, who voted to authorize the Iraq War but later regretted it, stated in July 2003, “They seem to have captured the heart and mind of the President, and they’re controlling the foreign policy agenda.” Frank Harvey convincingly argues that these narratives are not only simplistic but also provide cover for the many political groups who supported what became an unpopular war.102
Harvey, Leffler, and others argue that neoconservatives were either irrelevant or of secondary importance in causing the Iraq War. Harvey takes an extreme stance, arguing they were entirely extraneous and, in fact, lost most debates on Iraq before the invasion.103 Leffler and Mazarr argue that while neoconservatives were present in the Bush administration, neither Bush nor the top echelon of decision-makers were neoconservatives themselves.104 Leffler downplays the role of neoconservatism or any ideology in the administration’s decision-making, focusing instead on security motives.105
Without these ideas, Flibbert concludes, invading Iraq would not have made sense, making the actions of neoconservatives essential to explaining the war.
Daalder and Lindsay argue that Bush and most top advisors were “assertive nationalists,” or “traditional hard-line conservatives willing to use American military power to defeat threats to U.S. security but reluctant as a general rule to use American primacy to remake the world in its image.”106 Jane Cramer and Edward Duggan contend that Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, the three most crucial decision-makers, were not neoconservatives but “primacists” and consistent hard-liners who had never shown concern for democratization or human rights throughout their careers.107 In his history of Bush’s war cabinet, journalist James Mann argues that Bush primarily relied on the “Vulcans”—like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Armitage, and Dov Zakheim—for foreign policy guidance, few of whom were neoconservatives. Instead, these Vulcans “were focused above all on American military power” and maintaining U.S. primacy, especially after the Vietnam War.108
These authors agree that neoconservatives like Wolfowitz may have pushed for regime change, but their presence in the administration was not critical for the war to occur.109 Mazarr also minimizes the role of neoconservatives—but not ideology in general. He contends that “many aspects of the neocons’ foreign policy assumptions reflected the prevailing conventional wisdom in the U.S. national security community,” including primacy, exceptionalism, and the universality of democracy.110
Some scholars in the realist hegemony school agree with this analysis. Butt dismisses the role of neoconservatives, arguing they provided ideological justification for a war truly about power.111 Interestingly, some neoconservatives concur in minimizing their own roles. Kagan, for instance, contends that security concerns drove decision-making and the war “can be understood without reference to a neoconservative doctrine.”112
Many scholars, especially in the liberal hegemony school, argue that neoconservatives played an essential role in initiating the Iraq War. For them, neoconservatism helps answer a crucial question: why, after 9/11, did the U.S. invade a country that had not attacked it?
As Andrew Flibbert argues, neoconservative policy entrepreneurship bridged the conceptual gap between Iraq and terrorism. Figures like Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby interpreted 9/11 through a “larger ideational framework” about America’s global role and acted as policy activists within the administration and in public discourse. They helped set the post-9/11 agenda focusing on Iraq, at a time when figures like Rice and Powell seemed skeptical. They advanced numerous arguments for war: the nexus threat, Saddam’s brutality, protecting U.S. interests in the region, promoting democracy, transforming the Middle East, asserting U.S. power, and even improving Israeli-Palestinian relations. Without these ideas, Flibbert concludes, invading Iraq would not have made sense, making the actions of neoconservatives essential to explaining the war.113
The hegemony school naturally focuses on the role of neoconservatives in constructing a liberal hegemonic war. Pillar argues that “[t]he chief purpose of forcibly removing Saddam flowed from the central objectives of neoconservatism,” the core of which is “the proposition that the United States should use its power and influence to spread its freedom-oriented values.”114 Walt and Mearsheimer concur: “The driving force behind the Iraq War was a small band of neoconservatives who had long favored the energetic use of American power to reshape critical areas of the world.”115 Gary Dorrien notes this band was actually quite large: over 20 neoconservatives held high-ranking positions in the Bush administration, forming an activist core pushing for war with Iraq.116
Vaisse adds that in 2003, Cheney ordered 30 copies of the neoconservative Weekly Standard to the White House each week.117 He notes that while Bush campaigned as a restraint-minded realist, he and Rice essentially adopted a neoconservative worldview after 9/11, frequently speaking of a U.S. obligation to topple tyrants and spread liberal values.118 Other analysts show how neoconservatives spearheaded the promotion of damning, if dubious, information about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs and links to al-Qaeda to help sell the war.119
Journalistic accounts of the Iraq War also tend to emphasize the role of neoconservative networks and personalities in paving the way for war, effectively demonstrating the close personal ties between neoconservative intellectuals and Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi with top Bush administration officials. While they sometimes lack systematic arguments about the war, they clearly show that neoconservative influence permeated the administration and the foreign policy establishment at the time.120
The neoconservative issue is relevant to broader questions about the Iraq War and recent U.S. foreign policy. Was ideology a primary motivator for the invasion or a justification developed to sell the war? To restore balance and restraint to U.S. foreign policy after Iraq, is purging neoconservatives sufficient, or is more profound change needed? Are neoconservatives simply a modern expression of America’s exceptionalist identity and missionary impulses dating back centuries, or are they a distinct and modern ideological movement?121 These are crucial issues for situating the Iraq War within the larger history of ideas and intellectuals in U.S. diplomatic history.
Iraq War Scholarship and U.S. Foreign Policy
The prolonged and costly nature of the Iraq War has shaped discussions about its lessons for U.S. foreign policy, and competing interpretations of the war’s origins are also relevant to these debates. Most scholars in both the security and hegemony schools agree that Iraq was a mistake, if not worse. However, they disagree on its implications for U.S. foreign policy.
Security-centric explanations of the war lend themselves to a less critical portrayal of the Bush administration and the foreign policy establishment. Hal Brands and Peter Feaver refer to an “empathy defense,” arguing that “greater sensitivity to constraints, alternatives, and context can lead to a more favorable view of decisions taken in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.” In this view, Bush faced an unprecedented security threat after 9/11 and launched a flawed war marked by intelligence, planning, and execution errors.122
However, these errors do not necessitate a radical rethinking of U.S. global leadership.123 Many conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberal internationalists conclude that the lesson of Iraq is not to abandon an active global posture, but to avoid ambitious nation-building and democratization projects.124 Brands argues that “the Iraq hangover” should not make U.S. leaders “strategically sluggish just as the dangers posed by great power rivals were growing.”125 They contend that America’s defense of the liberal international order has been overwhelmingly positive for U.S. interests, as well as global democracy, prosperity, and peace.126 The U.S. can continue this role while avoiding obvious mistakes like the Iraq invasion.127 Nor does this war necessitate dismantling the foreign policy establishment.128
Still, this article suggests that even as the United States refocuses toward great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain hotly contested and highly consequential for America’s global role.
U.S. leaders seem to agree with this view of Iraq’s lessons, including those like President Barack Obama, who initially opposed the war. Obama, President Donald Trump, and Biden have all criticized the Iraq War and shown skepticism towards nation-building interventions. Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy, for example, states, “We are also realistic and understand that the American way of life cannot be imposed on others.”129 Nonetheless, their national security strategies all affirm the indispensability of engaged U.S. leadership and military primacy. For these scholars and leaders, the lesson of Iraq might be summarized as “Don’t do stupid shit,” as Obama once quipped. Instead, the country should continue as the linchpin of the liberal world order.130
Unsurprisingly, these figures prefer Leffler’s security-focused narrative of the Iraq War. Figures like Brands, Kagan, John Bolton, and Eric Edelman, Cheney’s deputy national security adviser, favorably endorsed or reviewed Leffler’s book, which offers little critique of U.S. grand strategy.131 Bolton, a neoconservative architect of the war, praises Leffler for recognizing that “Bush was not eager for war … his advisors did not lead him by the nose … they were not obsessed with linking Saddam to 9/11,” and “their objectives did not include spreading democracy at the tip of a bayonet.”132 Brands, who has called the Iraq War a “debacle” and “tragedy,” nevertheless calls Leffler’s book “the most serious scholarly study of the war’s origins” for many of the same reasons as Bolton.133
Hegemony school scholars vehemently disagree about the Iraq War’s lessons. They contend that the war signals the failure of the overly ambitious and hyper-interventionist grand strategy of primacy. Primacy, as Wertheim argues, requires the U.S. to maintain forces globally and prevent the rise of great-power rivals, while fostering a sense of messianic exceptionalism. He concludes that “the invasion of Iraq emerged from this logic,” and if the U.S. fails to fundamentally rethink its global role, it will stumble into more unnecessary conflicts.134
For these critics, the Iraq War also revealed the myopia and conformism of the bipartisan policy establishment and its apparent addiction to an expansive global mission. This establishment, they argue, remains committed to a hegemonic role that has caused unnecessary wars, immense human and financial costs, balancing behavior from rivals, and undermined U.S. leadership at home and abroad.135 Using the Iraq War and other errors as leverage, they aim to challenge the narrow, stagnant conversation within the policy establishment and push U.S. grand strategy towards “realism and restraint,” in Walt’s words, while prioritizing resources for preserving democracy and prosperity domestically.136
In summary, competing interpretations of the war’s origins are intertwined with debates about its lessons. It is appropriate for scholars to contest how this war should inform the future of U.S. foreign policy. However, participants in this debate risk filtering history through ideological lenses and using it to win arguments. Still, this article suggests that even as the United States refocuses toward great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain hotly contested and highly consequential for America’s global role. This is particularly true as the generation that fought in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars enters leadership positions in the military and politics. Their interpretations of that conflict will significantly influence their thinking and actions, just as competing viewpoints about the Vietnam War shaped that generation.
Cultural and Global Turns for the Iraq War
This paper’s central argument is that scholarship on the causes of the Iraq War can be usefully categorized into security and hegemony schools. These categories simplify a wide range of analysis, but they also offer a broad overview of the field 20 years after the war began. Currently, the hegemony school likely has more adherents among war scholars, although the war’s architects tend to align with the security school.
The security-hegemony debate is not merely “academic.” It represents a distinct interpretive divide that shapes scholars’ approaches to sources and leads to differing answers on other key questions. This divide also informs ongoing debates about U.S. foreign policy, with each school suggesting different lessons from the war. The polarization of the debate is real, but not ideal. Scholars should continue attempting to synthesize these perspectives. Historians are particularly well-suited for this task because they prioritize holistic, narrative, and multi-variable analysis, rather than the emphasis on parsimony and generalizability often found in political science.
One way to challenge the security-hegemony binary may be to adopt new methodological approaches to the Iraq War. The security-hegemony divide largely operates within traditional approaches to studying war. Hahn describes these methods as focusing on “the exercise of power, the conduct of diplomacy, the practice of international politics, the interest in domestic politics and public opinion, and the application of military strength by U.S. government officials who calculated the national interests and formulated policies designed to achieve those interests.”137
Many of these scholars have not consistently integrated cultural factors with the study of foreign policy or the causes of war.
New approaches could revitalize this seemingly entrenched binary. The global turn in Cold War historiography, for example, disrupted a debate focused on orthodox and revisionist accounts of the Cold War’s origins. The conversation shifted to how the Cold War reshaped global history and intersected with trends like decolonization, and how smaller powers influenced the superpower struggle.138 Some scholars have already pursued more global accounts of the Iraq War by examining Iraqi sources, the UN’s role, and the regional politics of the conflict.139 Until more sources become available on Bush administration decision-making, this may be a more productive avenue than further entrenchment in the security-hegemony divide.
Additionally, a cultural turn could be constructive for Iraq War scholarship. The cultural turn in diplomatic history led to increased attention on how cultural factors like race, gender, religion, language, and memory shape policy and strategy.140 Discussion of ideas and interests became secondary to construction, imagination, narratives, symbols, and meaning in elite and popular culture.141 The transnational turn, moreover, highlighted the role of nonstate actors as significant forces in the global arena. Scholars in this vein demonstrated how a broader range of actors challenged the nation-state, formed networks, and exchanged ideas across borders, thus contextualizing national politics within a global framework.142
Indeed, interesting work in history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies has explored the role of culture in the Iraq War and the “War on Terror.” Andrew Preston and Lauren Turek examine how religion shaped Bush’s worldview and foreign policy.143 Melani McAlister and Deepa Kumar explore how media and popular culture portrayals of the Middle East helped justify the use of force there to domestic audiences.144 Edward Said, Zachary Lockman, and others argue that the Iraq War should be understood within the context of Orientalist beliefs about supposedly backward, dangerous Arabs and Muslims requiring Western discipline.145
Unfortunately, this work has often remained separate from mainstream scholarship on the Iraq War’s causes. Many of these scholars have not consistently integrated cultural factors with the study of foreign policy or the causes of war.146 Conversely, more traditional scholars often overlook culture, race, gender, religion, and other factors. Students of the Iraq War and all of post-9/11 foreign policy should bridge these gaps by investigating how culture interacts with and shapes policy, perceptions of rivals, and decision-makers’ understanding of themselves and America’s global role.147 There is significant potential for this type of synthesis as Iraq War scholarship progresses.
Joseph Stieb is a historian and an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge, 2021). He is working on a second book about Americans’ interpretations of terrorism since the 1960s. He has published additional work in Diplomatic History, Modern American History, The International History Review, War on the Rocks, and other publications. He can be followed on Twitter @joestieb.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Theo Milonopoulos and Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt for suggestions about this article.
Footnotes
1. Melvyn P. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023); and Samuel Helfont, Iraq Against the World: Saddam Hussein and the Claim of Complete Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
2. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein.
3. Ahsan I. Butt, Hegemony’s Demise: Great Power, State Death, and the International Order (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).
4. For a useful review of this impact, see Daniel Nexon and Benjamin Wright, “What’s at Stake in the Iraq War Debate?” Contemporary Security Policy 30, no. 3 (December 2009): 501–522.
5. For an example, see Lawrence Freedman, “War in Iraq: Mistakes, Misjudgments, or крупная ошибка?” Survival 46, no. 4 (Winter 2004–2005): 5–22.
6. For an overview, see Beatrice Heuser and Clemens Hoffmann, eds., War, Origins and Prevention: Iraq and the First Gulf War (London: Routledge, 2011).
7. William C. Wohlforth, “The Primacy of American Primacy,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (July/August 1999): 20–34.
8. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein, 9.
9. Robert Jervis, “Why the Iraq War Was a Tragedy,” Perspectives on Politics 19, no. 1 (March 2021): 252.
10. Frédéric Bozo, “Saddam’s Fall: The French Perspective,” in The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences, ed. Rick Atkinson et al. (London: Profile Books, 2004), 47.
11. George W. Bush, Remarks on Campaigning in Iowa, August 11, 2000, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush, 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2001), 1168.
12. For a useful overview, see Lawrence Wright, “The Man Behind Bin Laden: How an Egyptian Doctor Became a Master of Terror,” New Yorker, September 16, 2002.
13. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein, 17.
14. Ibid., 23.
15. George W. Bush, Address to the Nation on Iraq, March 17, 2003, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush, 2003, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 308.
16. For an overview, see Judith Miller and William Broad, “U.S. Says Iraq Arms Data Triggered New Worry,” New York Times, September 8, 2002.
17. Condoleezza Rice, Interview with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, September 8, 2002, available at https://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/08/rice.transcript/.
18. For a useful overview, see John Lewis Gaddis, “Grand Strategy in the Age of Surprise,” in Understanding Terror: Origins, Challenges, and Responses, ed. Gus Martin (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 31–44.
19. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein, 276.
20. Hakan Tunc, “Explaining Decisions to Use Force: A Synthetic Approach to the 2003 Iraq War,” Security Studies 25, no. 3 (July 2016): 543–577.
21. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein, 276.
22. Ibid., 277.
23. Ibid.
24. Jervis, “Why the Iraq War Was a Tragedy,” 252.
25. For example, see George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010); and Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011).
26. Rice, No Higher Honor, 5.
27. Bush, Decision Points, 144.
28. Ibid., 216.
29. Ibid., 220.
30. For a useful overview, see Elizabeth Borgwardt, “Diplomacy and Force in the Bush Administration,” in The George W. Bush Years, ed. Robert Kagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 109–132.
31. Butt, Hegemony’s Demise, 151.
32. Ibid., 152.
33. Ibid., 153.
34. Ibid., 155.
35. Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020), 343.
36. G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump,” in Chaos or Concert? The Future of World Order, ed. Miles Kahler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 343.
37. Jeffrey Record, Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2010), 12.
38. For example, see Michael E. O’Hanlon, “A Flawed Masterpiece,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 47–63.
39. Michael Cox, “Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine,” Review of International Studies 30, no. 4 (October 2004): 585–608.
40. Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018).
41. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
42. For a useful overview, see Michael J. Boyle, “U.S. Foreign Policy After the Iraq War,” Survival 48, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 101–120.
43. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
44. Patrick Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion, and the Rise of Great Power Competition (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).
45. For example, see William Shawcross, Allies: The U.S., Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003).
46. White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: White House, 2002), 1.
47. Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
48. George W. Bush, Remarks to the American Enterprise Institute Annual Dinner, February 26, 2003, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush, 2003, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 193.
49. Michael MacDonald, “Why Did We Think It Would Be So Easy?” International Security 31, no. 3 (Winter 2006–2007): 147–180.
50. John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 272.
51. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 183.
52. Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order, 176.
53. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004).
54. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
55. Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop,” New York Times, March 8, 1992.
56. “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival,” New York Times, March 8, 1992.
57. For example, see “Letter to President Clinton on Iraq,” January 26, 1998, Project for the New American Century, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20070818080853/http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm.
58. Record, Wanting War.
59. George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 324.
60. Scott McLellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 189.
61. Michael J. Mazarr, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (Washington, D.C.: PublicAffairs, 2019); Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America to Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2020); and Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010).
62. Joseph় Stieb, The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
63. Paul R. Pillar, “Intelligence, Policy, and the Iraq War,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 16.
64. Ibid.
65. Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise,” International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 5–51.
66. Stieb, The Regime Change Consensus.
67. Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, Public Law 105–338, 105th Cong., October 31, 1998.
68. Helfont, Iraq Against the World.
69. For example, see James Fallows, “Blind Into Baghdad,” Atlantic, January/February 2004.
70. For a useful overview, see Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Right War for the Right Reasons,” Weekly Standard, March 11, 2002.
71. George W. Bush, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush, 2002, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2003), 1524–1529.
72. Rice, No Higher Honor, 12.
73. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein, 105.
74. Ibid., 110.
75. Ibid., 122.
76. Ibid., 203.
77. Frank P. Harvey, “The Neoconservative Threat to American National Security,” Harvard International Review 26, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 40.
78. Alexander Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro, “Compulsion, Domination, and the Logic of Great Power Politics,” International Security 44, no. 4 (Spring 2020): 145–189.
79. Bush, Decision Points, 220.
80. Ibid., 224.
81. Rice, No Higher Honor, 13.
82. Mazarr, Leap of Faith, 181.
83. Ibid., 184.
84. Colin Powell with Joseph Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995).
85. James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006).
86. Mazarr, Leap of Faith, 205.
87. Ibid., 210.
88. Stieb, The Regime Change Consensus.
89. Butt, Hegemony’s Demise, 157.
90. Richard Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009).
91. For example, see Robert J. Lieber and Peter Lieber, “The Bush National Security Strategy,” in The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War, ed. Michael Clarke (London: Routledge, 2004), 13–30.
92. For a useful overview, see Robert J. Art, “Coercive Diplomacy: What Do We Learn from Iraq?” Security Studies 13, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 9–41.
93. Lawrence Wilkerson, “The Secret History of the Iraq War,” New York Review of Books, April 17, 2008.
94. For a useful overview, see James P. Rubin, “Stumbling into War,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 4 (July/August 2003): 47–70.
95. Iraq Inquiry, Report of the Iraq Inquiry (London: The Stationery Office, 2016).
96. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein, 115.
97. Iraq Inquiry, Report of the Iraq Inquiry, vol. 6, 124.
98. Butt, Hegemony’s Demise, 156.
99. Patrick Porter, Britain and the War on Terror: Religion, Rhetoric and Strategy (London: Routledge, 2017), 171.
100. Vaisse, Neoconservatism.
101. Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
102. Frank Harvey, “Delusions of Grandeur: Why America’s Neoconservatives Went to War in Iraq,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 44, no. 2 (June 2011): 269–298.
103. Ibid.
104. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein; and Mazarr, Leap of Faith.
105. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein, 276.
106. Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 22.
107. Jane Cramer and Edward
