Two decades after the United States led an invasion into Iraq, the question of “why did the US invade Iraq in 2003?” remains a subject of intense debate and scrutiny. From the immediate aftermath to the present day, numerous explanations have been offered, analyzed, and contested by political scientists, journalists, and historians. In recent years, historians have increasingly contributed to this complex narrative, offering deeper historical context and challenging earlier interpretations. The 2003 invasion of Iraq stands as a pivotal moment in 21st-century American foreign policy, arguably the most consequential decision made by a US president in this era. The abundance of analysis surrounding this event is, therefore, hardly surprising.
This article delves into the multifaceted debate concerning the origins of the Iraq War, tracing its evolution over the past twenty years. It aims to provide a balanced overview of the competing perspectives, acting as an objective intermediary between different schools of thought. By clearly articulating their interpretations, highlighting areas of disagreement, and considering the influence of political ideologies on scholarly work, this analysis seeks to illuminate the core issues at the heart of this historical controversy. We will explore how varying viewpoints on the war have emerged from the diverse lenses, methodologies, and objectives employed by researchers.
While a single article cannot comprehensively address every facet of Iraq War scholarship, this essay will concentrate on three fundamental questions that are crucial for understanding the war’s genesis and continue to divide experts. Firstly, was the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq primarily motivated by security concerns or by a broader ambition for global dominance? Secondly, was the “coercive diplomacy” strategy pursued by the Bush administration in late 2002 and early 2003 a genuine attempt to avert war, or was it a strategic maneuver to legitimize a pre-determined decision for military action made earlier in 2002? Thirdly, to what extent did neoconservative ideology and actors play a decisive role in the lead-up to the Iraq War?
The first question – security versus hegemony – represents the central point of scholarly contention regarding the Iraq War. Explanations rooted in security concerns, as exemplified by recent works, posit that the Bush administration’s paramount objective was to safeguard the United States from future terrorist attacks in the drastically altered security landscape following the 9/11 attacks. In this context, perceived threats, such as that posed by Iraq, were reassessed and elevated. Conversely, scholars adhering to the hegemony school of thought argue that the Bush administration instrumentalized the 9/11 attacks and the specter of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as justifications for a war primarily driven by a desire for regional and global hegemony. This fundamental divergence between security and hegemony interpretations has cascading effects on other critical aspects of the debate, including the nature of the Bush administration’s coercive diplomacy and the significance of neoconservatives in the decision-making process leading to war.
A robust historiographical analysis must first explain the current state of scholarly discourse and then propose avenues for future research. The inherent challenge of historical interpretation is amplified in this case due to scholars having access to only a limited portion of primary source documents. Consequently, much of the debate has centered on the interpretation, critique, and contextualization of a relatively small set of available sources. Furthermore, contemporary political and policy debates have exerted a substantial, and sometimes distorting, influence on academic scholarship.
Methodologically, the security school largely accepts policymakers’ stated motivations, both at the time and retrospectively, as genuine unless compelling contradictory evidence surfaces. For this perspective, the critical context for understanding the war is the heightened security environment after 9/11, where national protection became paramount, and Iraq was widely perceived as a significant threat.
The hegemony school counters that key aspects of the Iraq War decision are inexplicable through a security-centric lens. These scholars argue against uncritically accepting policymakers’ accounts, pointing to the inherent incentive for officials to downplay ideological or miscalculated aspects of their actions. Instead, they situate the decision to invade Iraq within broader historical contexts, emphasizing factors such as the long-standing hegemonic policy beliefs of key figures like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. These scholars contend that these pre-existing beliefs offer more explanatory power than immediate security concerns.
Given the recency and contentiousness of the Iraq War, it has not only been an object of academic inquiry but also an arena for competing political and policy perspectives, particularly regarding the lessons to be drawn from the conflict. Debates about the war’s origins carry significant real-world implications for shaping future US foreign policy, especially as the nation enters an era of great-power competition. Security school scholars often frame the Iraq War as an understandable error, given the traumatic post-9/11 atmosphere and the widespread belief in Iraq’s WMD programs. Consequently, they rarely advocate for radical revisions to US foreign policy in the post-Iraq era. In stark contrast, the hegemony school argues that the war was a direct outcome of 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 to take sides in this debate. Instead, it seeks to clarify its parameters, historical development, and implications. While some may criticize the depiction of two broad interpretive camps as an oversimplification of a vast and nuanced body of scholarship, this article aims to identify potential avenues for synthesizing these interpretations. While the security and hegemony perspectives do exhibit some overlap, as will be discussed, this divide also reflects genuine disagreements among scholars regarding the primary drivers of the war. Finally, this essay concludes with a call for incorporating more global and cultural analyses of the Iraq War as a way to transcend this binary framework.
Nevertheless, there is value in “grouping” perspectives within historiographical analysis, particularly for those new to the field or non-specialists seeking a broad understanding of existing scholarship. This approach helps identify the essential questions that continue to divide and propel research in this area, questions that future work on the Iraq War should address.
Therefore, this essay does not exhaust the entirety of scholarship on the Iraq War, nor does it offer its own definitive historical or theoretical explanation of the war’s causes, as both tasks would exceed the scope of this article. Consequently, certain important topics that have been the subject of excellent research, such as the beliefs and decisions of the Baathist regime, the history of weapons inspections before 2002–2003, shortcomings in pre-war planning, and the international diplomacy leading up to the war, receive less attention here. While these are vital for a comprehensive understanding of the war’s origins, they have not been the primary axes of scholarly disagreement, which are the focus of this essay.
Security vs. Hegemony: The Core Divide
At the heart of the debate surrounding “why did the US invade Iraq in 2003?” lies the fundamental question: was the invasion a misguided attempt to eliminate a perceived security threat in the heightened post-9/11 environment, or did US leaders exploit 9/11 as a pretext to pursue a war of opportunity driven by hegemonic ambitions?
A seemingly straightforward answer might be “a combination of both,” or that framing it as a strict dichotomy is misleading. For example, the United States could have pursued security objectives through a hegemonic grand strategy, which might have included regime change in countries like Iraq. Iraq could have been simultaneously viewed as a genuine security threat and an obstacle to US global dominance.
Despite these nuances, the core division among scholars between security and hegemony perspectives is real and reflects significant differences in interpretation, contextualization, and even political viewpoints. Scholars themselves frequently identify security-based or hegemony-based factors as the most salient in explaining the war’s origins. Security-focused explanations prioritize the post-9/11 atmosphere, arguing that hegemonic aspirations were secondary to pressing security imperatives. Hegemony-focused explanations, while not entirely dismissing security concerns, contend that anxieties about Iraqi WMDs and terrorist connections served as convenient justifications for pre-existing hegemonic designs. Each school of thought situates the war within different historical contexts, with the security school emphasizing the immediate post-9/11 moment and the hegemony school highlighting the preceding decades during which the architects of the war developed their worldview.
The Security School
Melvyn Leffler is often considered a leading figure of the security school, which also includes scholars such as Robert Jervis, Frederic Bozo, Alexander Debs, Ivo Daalder, James Lindsay, Peter Hahn, Hakan Tunc, and Steve Yetiv. While these scholars acknowledge broader US goals and ideologies, they argue that the Bush administration’s pursuit of security in the aftermath of 9/11 was the primary catalyst for the decision to invade Iraq. Leffler asserts 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.” Jervis, while not dismissing democracy as a secondary motive, posits 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.” Bozo concludes that “the choice for war clearly arose first and foremost from a logic of national security.”
Security school arguments emphasize the transformative impact of 9/11 on US national security thinking as crucial for understanding the Iraq War. Leffler and Jervis point out that while the Bush administration entered office with prominent regime-change advocates in key positions, Iraq was not a central focus in its initial nine months, nor were significant steps taken towards ousting Saddam Hussein. Bush also initially expressed opposition to nation-building and promised a more restrained foreign policy.
However, the 9/11 attacks fundamentally reshaped US foreign policy and laid the groundwork for the Iraq War. The Bush administration experienced profound anger, fear, and vulnerability after 9/11, prompting a reassessment of other perceived security threats. Leffler argues that for the Bush team, “the risk calculus had changed dramatically after 9/11.” They could no longer tolerate states perceived as pursuing WMDs, threatening neighbors or the US, and supporting terrorism.
So, why Iraq specifically? The Bush administration viewed Iraq as the “nexus” of these perceived threats. As Bush himself stated, Iraq ticked more boxes than any other nation: “state sponsors of terror … sworn enemies of America … hostile governments that threatened their neighbors … regimes that pursued WMD [weapons of mass destruction].” While top officials may have made significant errors and exaggerations regarding Iraq’s WMDs and terrorist ties, they genuinely believed these threats were real and growing. Furthermore, at the time, even analysts in nations opposed to the war largely misjudged the reality that Saddam was not actively engaged in WMD production. Saddam’s decade-long obstruction of weapons inspectors also contributed to the reasonable impression that he intended to resume WMD programs.
The US, facing the perceived risk of “the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud,” as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice famously warned, felt it could not afford to wait for the Iraqi threat to fully materialize. This led to the articulation of a right to launch preemptive wars to eliminate threats. This asserted right became a cornerstone of the Bush Doctrine, which, according to the security school, was less a grand design for global dominance and more an adaptation of long-held ideas about the use of force in the face of evolving threats.
For the security school, the Iraq War did not primarily originate from grand schemes of expanding US hegemony or imposing liberal values. While overwhelming US military power and the unipolar international system made regime change feasible, these were not the primary motivating factors. Leffler contends that “missionary fervor or idealistic impulses” played a minimal role in the Bush administration’s decisions. Tunc argues that hegemony as a motive for the Iraq War is illogical, as eliminating a relatively minor rival like Iraq would not fundamentally alter the global balance of power.
Idealistic ambitions and the global power imbalance had existed for at least a decade before 9/11. The attacks were the decisive new variable that prompted a reevaluation of national security, ultimately leading to the invasion. Leffler summarizes the fundamental, security-centric 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.”
Security school scholars often adopt a more sympathetic view of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. Leffler emphasizes the emotional trauma of 9/11, including top officials’ visits to Ground Zero and interactions with first responders and bereaved families. He stresses the importance of context, arguing, “Critics forget how ominous the al Qaeda threat seemed and how evil and manipulative Hussein really was.” He maintains that the Bush team sought to “do the right thing” and protect the nation from what they perceived as an imminent threat. Crucially, scholars within the security school concur that the perceived WMD-terrorism-rogue state nexus was not a mere pretext but the genuine driving force behind the war. As Jervis argues, given the widespread consensus about Iraqi WMDs and the post-9/11 imperative 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.”
The security school’s perspective aligns significantly with Bush administration officials’ memoirs, which also emphasize security motives for the war. These memoirs depict the emotional weight of the post-9/11 period, 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. 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.” Protecting the nation from further terrorist attacks became the overriding priority, and threats like Iraq could no longer be tolerated. Official memoirs emphasize that the administration did not desire war with Iraq and explored ways to avoid it, but ultimately, national security concerns necessitated removing this perceived menace.
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 may be accepting policymakers’ accounts at face value. Bush officials have a vested interest in portraying themselves as having remained open to peaceful solutions and not as ideologically driven crusaders. As we will explore, the hegemony school adopts a more critical stance on this issue.
The Hegemony School
Scholars associated with the hegemony school, including Ahsan Butt, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, Patrick Porter, Paul Pillar, G. John Ikenberry, David Harvey, John Mearsheimer, and Jeffrey Record, tend to lean towards realist perspectives in international relations, although not exclusively. They acknowledge the role of security concerns in motivating the Iraq War but consider security-based rationales as fundamentally incomplete explanations. Their central argument is that the primary motivation for the invasion was to maintain and expand US hegemony. However, the hegemony school diverges on whether the US sought realist or liberal forms of hegemony.
On the realist hegemony side, Butt argues that the war stemmed from a “desire to maintain the United States’ global standing and hierarchic order,” with security acting as a pretext primarily for domestic consumption rather than a genuine causal factor. 9/11, in this view, threatened US hegemony, leading the US to choose a “performative war” to re-establish “generalized deterrence,” or the perception of unchallengeable power and the willingness to use it that underpins hegemony. He quotes Rumsfeld’s statement on 9/11 that “[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.” Butt contends that available intelligence about Iraq did not suggest an imminent threat. However, Iraq was a convenient target for demonstrating US power, being militarily weak, diplomatically isolated, lacking WMDs, and widely unpopular with the US public.
Stephen Wertheim concurs, arguing that “the decision to invade Iraq stemmed from the pursuit of global primacy,” with the aim of “dissuading other countries from rising and challenging American dominance.” 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.” Record similarly contends 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.”
Scholars in the realist-hegemony camp see the Iraq War as a tool to uphold realist priorities like unipolarity and US freedom of action globally. The Bush administration utilized 9/11 and the alleged Iraqi WMD threat as a “pretext,” “opportunity,” or “rationale” to advance this agenda, believing it would eliminate the terrorist threat and other challenges to US power. Democratization, in this view, was a secondary motive to justify a war rooted in the pursuit of power.
Walt, Porter, and Bacevich agree that the US sought to demonstrate its power and preserve hegemony by invading Iraq, but they argue that the Bush administration specifically aimed to solidify liberal hegemony. Under this grand strategy, the US sought to propagate liberal democracy and capitalism, not only as inherently good but also as means to maintain global dominance. The Cold War had restrained this strategy, but the Soviet collapse allowed the US to pursue it with unrestrained idealism and hubris. The bipartisan foreign policy establishment came to accept the universality of liberal ideals and a presumed US right to intervene globally, either to protect human rights or suppress challenges to American power.
According to this narrative, when attacked on 9/11, the US did not question whether liberal hegemony was generating resistance. Instead, the Bush administration, with bipartisan support, escalated the pursuit of liberal hegemony and asserted a unilateral right to change regimes in rival states through preemptive war, embodied in the Bush Doctrine. While security school scholars view this doctrine as a response to a novel category of threat, the hegemony school sees it as a blueprint for preserving US primacy, asserting a unilateral American right to eliminate potential threats like Iraq and deter the rise of peer competitors. Some scholars also highlight the protection of Israel and the advancement of US oil interests as additional hegemonic motives for the war, although these explanations remain more contentious.
For Walt, Porter, and others, the Iraq War arose from the pursuit of liberal hegemony, a revisionist grand strategy aimed at spreading democracy and other liberal values, toppling dictators, and thereby establishing a more peaceful and cooperative global order. Following this vision, the US aimed not only to remove a threat but to fundamentally transform Middle Eastern politics by implanting democracy in Iraq. They cite substantial evidence that democracy promotion was a significant motive for the war, particularly for Bush, rather than merely a justification for a war based on power. The 2002 National Security Strategy, for instance, 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.”
This war aligned with the long-standing and fundamentally liberal belief among many US policymakers that autocracies inherently threaten long-term peace, prosperity, and security, and that only a democratic international order can guarantee these benefits. 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.” 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 Baathist regime was removed.
Mearsheimer terms the Iraq War “probably the best example of this kind of liberal interventionism” that dominated post-Cold War US thinking. Bacevich argues that the WMD threat was a “cover story,” and the war’s primary goals 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.” As Porter contends, “The Iraq War … was an effort to reorder the world. Its makers aimed to spread capitalist democracy on their terms.”
To some extent, this division within the hegemony school reflects the differing worldviews of key decision-makers in the Bush administration. Rumsfeld and Cheney more closely fit a realist paradigm, prioritizing the reassertion of power over spreading democracy. Others, like Wolfowitz, viewed the Iraq War as part of a broader liberal project. Bush himself embodied a blend of these perspectives.
However, disagreements over whether the US sought realist or liberal hegemony should not obscure the fundamental common ground within the hegemony school. These scholars agree that the US had been pursuing some form of primacy well before 9/11, that 9/11 both threatened that primacy and provided a pretext or opportunity to reassert it, and that Iraq was less a genuine threat than a convenient target for solidifying hegemony.
In terms of historical context, the pre-9/11 era is more significant for the hegemony school than the security school, as the former emphasizes continuities in US foreign policy extending back into the Cold War. These scholars highlight that key architects of the war, such as Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, had openly advocated for US hegemony in the decades preceding 9/11. Many cite the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, drafted by Zalmay Khalilzad and Abram Shulsky under Wolfowitz’s supervision while he served under Cheney. This document endorsed a hegemonic grand strategy aimed at maintaining indefinite global military dominance and preventing the re-emergence of a new rival. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and numerous other future Bush administration officials also signed open letters in the late 1990s urging regime change in Iraq and a primacist grand strategy.
Following 9/11, these hegemonists immediately linked the Baathist regime to terrorism despite limited evidence, promoted dubious intelligence, exaggerated the Iraqi threat, and downplayed the risks of invasion. For the hegemony school, this demonstrates that the administration “wanted war,” as Record titled his book, and that subsequent claims of reluctantly going to war are self-serving myths.
Some Bush administration officials have contradicted the official security-focused explanation and acknowledged the significance of broader ideological or hegemonic designs. CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir that senior administration members seemed uninterested in the specifics of Iraq’s WMD programs, interpreting this as evidence that they had decided to invade Iraq using WMDs as a pretext. He argued, “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 the real reasons. 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.”
Synthesizing the Security and Hegemony Schools
The persistent divide between the hegemony and security schools raises the question: can these perspectives be reconciled? Some scholars have attempted to synthesize these approaches. Works by Michael Mazarr, Robert Draper, and Justin Vaisse examine the national security urgency of the post-9/11 era while acknowledging the historical context of US hegemony and idealism. Other attempts at synthesis argue that a bipartisan “regime change consensus” formed on Iraq during the 1990s, predisposing the US foreign policy establishment to favor Saddam’s removal and view containment as a failing policy. Broad agreement on US hegemony fueled this consensus, making the Iraq War seem logical to many US elites. Nevertheless, 9/11 was a critical catalyst that drastically reduced America’s tolerance for perceived threats like Iraq while providing greater latitude for US leaders to pursue risky strategies.
One way to synthesize these schools is to create a division of causal labor, with the hegemony school explaining “Why Iraq?” and the security school addressing “Why now?” Hegemony school analysts often ask: if WMD proliferation was the real concern, why not focus on countries with more advanced programs, like North Korea? If terrorism was the primary worry, why not prioritize state sponsors more directly involved in terrorism, like Iran?
These inconsistencies regarding “Why Iraq?” highlight a key challenge for security-based explanations. Iraq, which became the central front in the War on Terror, was neither the most powerful “rogue state” nor implicated in 9/11. In the hegemonic framework, Iraq was more of an opportunity than a threat, and its alleged WMD programs served as a pretext rather than the primary motive. As former CIA intelligence analyst Paul Pillar succinctly puts it, concern about WMDs “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.” Indeed, Pillar and others argue that the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence process, not in a genuine effort to assess Iraq’s WMD capabilities accurately, but to gather—if not fabricate—evidence to support the pre-determined case for regime change.
However, the hegemony school struggles to fully answer the “Why now?” question. If the bipartisan pursuit of hegemony and liberal idealism were constant features of US foreign policy, why did the Iraq War not occur earlier, perhaps after weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998? By focusing on how 9/11 reshaped US foreign policy and threat perception, the security school highlights a fundamental point: a US invasion and occupation of Iraq is virtually inconceivable without the transformative impact of 9/11.
An interesting point of convergence between the security and hegemony schools is the recognition that the end of the Cold War was an essential precondition for the Iraq War. The notion of the US invading a mid-sized country—formerly a Soviet satellite—to change its regime during the Cold War seems highly improbable. The hegemony school particularly emphasizes the significance of unipolarity, arguing that it fostered hegemonic ambitions, both realist and liberal, within the US imagination. This raises the question of whether the resurgence of multipolarity will deter the US from future attempts at direct regime change.
The relationship between the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War remains an under-explored area within this field. Scholars have argued that the inconclusive end of the Gulf War initiated a pattern of conflict between the US and Iraq that persisted throughout the 1990s, creating a strong desire within the US political establishment to “finish the job,” even before 9/11. Notably, there was no war with Iran or North Korea in the 1990s, nor was there an Iran or North Korean Liberation Act. However, there was the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which declared regime change as official US policy towards Iraq. Despite this, relatively few works systematically trace US-Iraqi relations during this period, although recent scholarship significantly addresses this gap by examining Iraq’s challenge to the post-Cold War, US-led international order throughout the 1990s.
Despite these attempts at synthesis, a meaningful tension persists between the security and hegemony schools, making complete reconciliation challenging. It is difficult to simultaneously interpret the war as both predetermined and contingent—and equally challenging to view the Bush administration as both fixated on regime change and genuinely open to alternative means of disarming Iraq. Moreover, as demonstrated, primary source evidence can be interpreted to support both major interpretations.
The contrasting perspectives of the security and hegemony schools also influence the overall interpretation of the war. Was it an understandable tragedy or an unprovoked and unforgivable blunder? In terms of periodization, were the war’s roots primarily in the response to 9/11, or do they extend back decades in US foreign policy? Finally, did the Iraq War, particularly the controversial Bush Doctrine, represent a radical departure in US diplomatic history or a continuation of pre-existing trends, goals, and ideas?
What Was “Coercive Diplomacy” All About?
Scholarly positions within the security-hegemony debate significantly shape interpretations of other key questions surrounding the war’s origins. One such question, central to understanding “why did the US invade Iraq in 2003?”, is the purpose and nature of the Bush administration’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 agreed to pursue a “diplomatic track” on Iraq. On September 12, at the United Nations, he demanded that Iraq readmit weapons inspectors or face military intervention. He also sought congressional authorization for the use of force against Iraq. Simultaneously, the build-up of US troops in the region aimed to lend credibility to the threat of force underpinning this final diplomatic effort. Rice describes this strategy as “coercive diplomacy.”
However, the fundamental question remains: what was the true objective of this coercive diplomacy? Was it a genuine attempt to peacefully disarm Iraq, or was it a strategic maneuver to gain legitimacy and garner allied and domestic political support for a pre-determined policy of regime change? This debate is crucial for determining when the Bush administration definitively decided on war and the extent to which it was inflexibly committed to regime change, regardless of circumstances. While the security-hegemony debate is important, it is somewhat deterministic. The coercive diplomacy debate introduces questions of contingency and potential alternative paths.
Leffler argues that in early 2002, Bush was “not yet ready to choose between containment and regime change,” remaining undecided into the fall of 2002. Bush was torn between whether disarmament could be achieved without regime change. Coercive diplomacy, in this view, was a final attempt to resolve this question. In adopting this strategy, he accepted the possibility that war might be averted and Saddam could remain in power, at least for the time being. He also temporarily disregarded the advice of more hawkish advisors like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who considered UN involvement counterproductive. As Leffler writes, Bush “decided to see if he could accomplish his key objectives … without war.” According to this narrative, Bush did not decide to invade until January 2003, after Iraqi authorities failed to fully comply with a new round of weapons inspections.
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.” Debs and Nuno Monteiro also agree that the Bush administration genuinely sought to test Iraqi cooperation and avoid war by supporting renewed inspections.
These analyses highlight the contingent nature of Bush’s approach to Iraq. While some Bush officials may have been ardent proponents of regime change, Bush proceeded deliberately and gave peaceful disarmament methods a final chance. He prioritized disarmament by any means, not regime change for its own sake.
Again, this account aligns with US leaders’ own descriptions of their actions. Bush states in his memoir, “My first choice was to use diplomacy” on Iraq. Coercive diplomacy was a sincere attempt to avoid war, but Saddam’s non-compliance with inspections forced Bush to choose war in early 2003. Rice similarly claimed, “We invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”
However, Michael Mazarr and others challenge Leffler’s account of coercive diplomacy, arguing that the decision to invade was made well before 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.” War planning commenced in November 2002, and Bush made several private and public statements before spring 2002 indicating his intention to remove Saddam.
That fall, Bush sided with Powell in choosing the diplomatic track, but even Powell never questioned the fundamental wisdom of invading Iraq. There was minimal debate within the administration about whether invading Iraq was a sound idea, suggesting that the decision had been made even before the coercive diplomacy effort began. Mazarr adds that a “tidal wave of evidence can be found that many senior officials assumed war was inevitable long before September 2002.” The Bush administration quickly deemed the inspections a failure in early 2003 and solidified the decision to invade in January.
Research supports Mazarr’s analysis, further suggesting that the idea that Bush sought to restore containment through coercive diplomacy is unconvincing. Bush had already argued earlier in 2002 that containment was inadequate to address the “nexus” threat. Moreover, most of his advisors and the broader policy establishment already viewed containment as a failed strategy. Finally, the Bush administration was deeply skeptical of the effectiveness of inspections and set such high, and arguably unrealistic, benchmarks for their success that failure was virtually predetermined.
Scholars within the hegemony school generally agree with Mazarr’s analysis of coercive diplomacy. They contend that the Bush administration was not genuinely interested in a peaceful resolution because it sought an opportunity to assert US power. They view coercive diplomacy as a facade to legitimize a pre-ordained war. Butt, for example, argues that Iraq was powerless to avoid war because the US had decided to crush a rival to re-establish generalized deterrence. John Prados argues that Bush decided on war in early spring 2002, and Richard Haass places the decision in July 2002, both preceding the initiation of coercive diplomacy.
As with the core security-hegemony divide, the debate surrounding coercive diplomacy resists easy resolution. For scholars like Leffler, the situation remained fluid and contingent until shortly before the invasion. For scholars like Mazarr, the war was virtually inevitable once the Bush administration focused on Iraq in early 2002. A potential synthesis could be that the administration’s deep pessimism about Saddam’s willingness to concede to US demands and comply with inspections constituted a de facto decision for war, even if not a formally finalized determination. If anything, coercive diplomacy may be an under-examined aspect of the Iraq War’s origins, often overlooked in analyses that attribute the war primarily to security or hegemonic factors. This oversight can lead to overly deterministic explanations of the war, minimizing the role of contingency.
One avenue to potentially break this impasse is through more in-depth analysis of the State Department’s role in the lead-up to the war. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage supported the war but were not fervent advocates, and many skeptics of the war held senior positions within the State Department. As more sources become available, it will be crucial to examine whether Powell or others raised critical questions about the fundamental decision to go to war or pressed 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 suggests, or whether the US was already on an irreversible path to war before the fall of 2002, as Mazarr argues.
However, scholars should be cautious about assuming that new documentary evidence will fully resolve these interpretive disagreements. The British Iraq Inquiry, published in 2016, released a wealth of primary sources and interviews on British policymaking regarding Iraq from 2001 to 2009. Numerous scholars have drawn upon this valuable material, but interpretive tensions persist because they approach this evidence through different analytical frameworks. For instance, Leffler argues that Blair’s correspondence with Bush after 9/11 demonstrates that neither leader was rushing to war with Iraq but merely establishing a general timeline for pressuring the Iraqi regime to disarm. This supports his broader argument that the Bush administration was not fixated on war, explored alternative means of disarming Iraq, and only decided on war after other options were exhausted.
In contrast, Butt 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, “I have no doubt we need to deal with Saddam” and that “we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date.” For Butt, this source indicates that Bush and Blair agreed on the goal of regime change in Iraq and the reassertion of US hegemony in the Middle East almost immediately after 9/11. Blair’s caution was primarily about building a coalition, not questioning the fundamental objective of regime change. Porter, in his book on Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War, also draws heavily on the Iraq Inquiry and reaches a similar conclusion. He argues that the Blair government was as ideologically committed to strategic primacy and the spread of liberal democracy as Bush’s administration. 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.”
The divergent interpretations of the same documents by different scholars underscore the critical role of the analytical frameworks that researchers bring to their sources. Consequently, new sources alone are unlikely to lead to convergence between competing interpretive camps.
How Important Were the Neocons?
Another crucial question in understanding “why did the US invade Iraq in 2003?” is the role of neoconservatives. Were they the intellectual architects of the war, or were they peripheral to the decision to invade? While the alignment is not perfect, the security school tends to downplay the influence of neoconservatives, while the hegemony school typically emphasizes their central importance.
Neoconservatives represent a loosely defined intellectual movement that has evolved significantly since its origins in the 1960s. Third-wave neoconservatism, which peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s, is characterized as a nationalistic movement advocating for US primacy, “national greatness,” and the promotion of democracy, often with a unilateralist approach. A significant number of neoconservatives occupied high-level positions within the Bush administration, most notably Paul Wolfowitz.
While neoconservative intellectuals like Robert Kagan and William Kristol openly advocated for regime change in public discourse, the extent of neoconservatives’ role in instigating the Iraq War has been hotly debated. Initial commentary often simplistically portrayed a “cabal” of neoconservatives hijacking US foreign policy and leading the nation into a disastrous war. For example, then-Senator Joe Biden, who voted to authorize the Iraq War but later regretted his decision, stated in July 2003, “They seem to have captured the heart and mind of the President, and they’re controlling the foreign policy agenda.” However, such narratives are overly simplistic and conveniently overlook the broad political support the war initially enjoyed.
Scholars like Harvey, Leffler, and others argue that neoconservatives were either irrelevant or of secondary importance in causing the Iraq War. Harvey takes a particularly strong stance, asserting that they were entirely extraneous and, in fact, lost most internal debates on Iraq before the invasion. Leffler and Mazarr argue that while neoconservatives were present in the Bush administration, neither Bush nor the top echelon of decision-makers were themselves neoconservatives. Leffler minimizes the role of neoconservatism or any ideology in the administration’s decision-making, focusing instead on security motivations.
Daalder and Lindsay characterize Bush and most of his senior advisors as “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.” Cramer and Duggan contend that Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, the three most influential decision-makers, were not neoconservatives but “primacists” and consistent hard-liners who had never demonstrated concern for democratization or human rights throughout their long careers. Journalist James Mann, in his history of Bush’s war cabinet, argues that Bush primarily relied on the “Vulcans”—figures 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 US primacy, particularly after the Vietnam War experience.
These authors agree that neoconservatives like Wolfowitz may have advocated for regime change, but their presence within the administration was not essential for the war to occur. Mazarr also downplays the role of neoconservatives—though not ideology in general. He argues that “many aspects of the neocons’ foreign policy assumptions reflected the prevailing conventional wisdom in the U.S. national security community,” including beliefs in primacy, exceptionalism, and the universality of democracy.
Some scholars within the realist hegemony school concur with this analysis. Butt dismisses the role of neoconservatives, arguing that they provided an ideological veneer for a war that was fundamentally about power. Interestingly, some neoconservatives themselves downplay their own influence. Kagan, for instance, argues that security concerns drove decision-making and that the war “can be understood without reference to a neoconservative doctrine.”
However, many scholars, especially within the liberal hegemony school, argue that neoconservatives played a crucial role in instigating the Iraq War. For them, neoconservatism helps answer the critical question: why, after 9/11, did the US 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 were instrumental in setting the post-9/11 agenda, focusing on Iraq at a time when figures like Rice and Powell seemed skeptical of such a focus. They promoted a range of arguments for war: the nexus threat, Saddam’s brutality, protecting US interests in the region, advancing democracy, transforming the Middle East, asserting US 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.
The hegemony school naturally emphasizes 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.” 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.” Gary Dorrien notes that this “band” was in fact quite substantial: over 20 neoconservatives held high-ranking positions in the Bush administration, forming an activist core pushing for war with Iraq.
It is also noted that in 2003, Cheney ordered 30 copies of the neoconservative Weekly Standard to be delivered to the White House weekly. While Bush may have campaigned as a restraint-minded realist, he and Rice largely adopted a neoconservative worldview after 9/11, frequently speaking about a US obligation to topple tyrants and spread liberal values. Other analysts demonstrate how neoconservatives spearheaded the promotion of damaging, albeit dubious, information about Saddam’s WMD programs and links to al-Qaeda, which were crucial for selling the war to the public.
Journalistic accounts of the Iraq War also tend to emphasize the role of neoconservative networks and personalities in paving the way for war. They effectively illustrate the close personal connections between neoconservative intellectuals, Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, and senior Bush administration officials. While these accounts may not always present systematic arguments about the war’s causes, they convincingly demonstrate that neoconservative influence permeated the administration and the broader foreign policy establishment at the time.
The question of neoconservative influence is relevant to broader issues surrounding the Iraq War and recent US foreign policy. Was ideology a fundamental motivator for the invasion or merely a justification developed to gain public support? Is simply removing neoconservatives sufficient to restore balance and restraint to US foreign policy after Iraq, or are more profound changes needed? Are neoconservatives a new manifestation of America’s exceptionalist identity and missionary impulses that stretch back centuries, or are they a distinct and modern ideological movement? These are crucial questions for situating the Iraq War within the larger history of ideas and intellectuals in US diplomatic history.
Iraq War Scholarship and US Foreign Policy
The protracted and costly nature of the Iraq War has profoundly shaped discussions about its lessons for US foreign policy. However, the competing interpretations of the war’s origins, as discussed, are also directly relevant to these policy debates. While the majority of scholars across both the security and hegemony schools agree that the Iraq War was a mistake, if not worse, they differ on its implications for future US foreign policy.
Security-centric explanations of the war tend to lead to a less condemnatory portrayal of the Bush administration and the foreign policy establishment. Some scholars invoke 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 initiated a flawed war marked by intelligence failures, planning errors, and execution missteps.
However, these errors, in this perspective, do not necessitate a radical rethinking of America’s global leadership role. Many conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberal internationalists conclude that the lesson of Iraq is not to abandon an active and engaged global posture, but rather to avoid ambitious nation-building and democratization projects. It is argued that the “Iraq hangover” should not make US leaders “strategically sluggish just as the dangers posed by great power rivals were growing.” The US defense of the liberal international order, they contend, has been overwhelmingly beneficial for US interests, global democracy, prosperity, and peace. The US can continue to play this role while learning from past mistakes like the Iraq invasion. Nor does this war necessitate dismantling the existing foreign policy establishment.
US leaders, including those who initially opposed the war like President Barack Obama, appear to share this view of the lessons of Iraq. Obama, President Donald Trump, and President Joe Biden have all criticized the Iraq War and expressed 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.” Nevertheless, their national security strategies all reaffirm the indispensable role of engaged US leadership and military primacy. For these scholars and leaders, the lesson of Iraq might be summarized as “Don’t do stupid shit,” as Obama famously quipped. Instead, the US should continue to serve as the linchpin of the liberal world order.
Unsurprisingly, these figures often favor the security-focused narrative of the Iraq War. Scholars like Brands, Kagan, John Bolton, and Eric Edelman have favorably reviewed or endorsed Leffler’s book, which offers limited critique of US grand strategy. 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.” Brands, while labeling the Iraq War a “debacle” and “tragedy,” still calls Leffler’s book “the most serious scholarly study of the war’s origins” for similar reasons as Bolton.
Scholars within the hegemony school vehemently disagree about the lessons of the Iraq War. They argue that the war demonstrates the failure of an overly ambitious and hyper-interventionist grand strategy of primacy. Primacy, it is argued, requires the US to maintain military forces globally, prevent the rise of great-power competitors, and fosters a sense of messianic exceptionalism. It is concluded that “the invasion of Iraq emerged from this logic,” and that if the US fails to fundamentally re-evaluate its global role, it will inevitably stumble into more unnecessary conflicts.
For these critics, the Iraq War also exposed 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 resulted in unnecessary wars, staggering human and financial costs, balancing behavior from rivals, and the erosion of US leadership credibility both domestically and internationally. Using the Iraq War and other policy errors as leverage, they aim to challenge the narrow and stagnant discourse within the policy establishment and push US grand strategy towards “realism and restraint,” in Walt’s words, while prioritizing resources for domestic democracy and prosperity.
In summary, competing interpretations of the war’s origins are inextricably linked to debates about its lessons. It is appropriate for scholars to debate how this war should inform the future direction of US foreign policy. However, partisans in this debate risk filtering history through ideological lenses and instrumentalizing it to win contemporary political arguments. Nevertheless, even as the US reorients towards great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain intensely contested and deeply consequential for America’s global role. This is particularly true as the generation that fought in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ascends to leadership positions in the military and political spheres. Their interpretations of this conflict will profoundly shape their thinking and actions, much like competing viewpoints on the Vietnam War shaped the preceding generation.
Cultural and Global Turns for the Iraq War
This essay has argued that scholarship on the causes of the Iraq War can be usefully categorized into security and hegemony schools. While these categories simplify a complex and diverse body of analysis, they provide a valuable framework for understanding the field twenty years after the war’s commencement. Currently, the hegemony school arguably has a larger following among scholars of the war, although the war’s architects tend to align with the security school.
The security-hegemony debate is not merely an “academic” exercise. It represents a genuine interpretive divide that shapes how scholars approach their sources and leads to divergent answers to other critical questions. This divide also informs ongoing debates about US foreign policy, with each school suggesting different lessons from the war. While the polarization of this debate is real, it is not necessarily ideal. Scholars should continue to seek avenues for synthesizing these perspectives. Historians, in particular, are well-suited for this task due to their emphasis on holistic, narrative, and multi-variable analysis, in contrast to the focus on parsimony and generalizability often found in political science.
One way to move beyond the security-hegemony binary may be to adopt new methodological approaches to studying the Iraq War. The security-hegemony divide largely operates within traditional frameworks for studying war. These methods typically focus 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.”
New approaches could revitalize this seemingly entrenched binary. The global turn in Cold War historiography, for example, disrupted a debate centered on orthodox and revisionist accounts of the Cold War’s origins. The conversation shifted to focus on how the Cold War reshaped global history, intersected with trends like decolonization, and how smaller powers influenced the superpower rivalry. Some scholars have already begun to advance more global accounts of the Iraq War by examining Iraqi sources, the role of the United Nations, and the regional politics of the conflict. Until more sources become available on decision-making within the Bush administration, this may be a more productive path than further entrenchment within the security-hegemony divide.
Furthermore, a cultural turn could be beneficial for Iraq War scholarship. The cultural turn in diplomatic history has led to increased attention on how cultural factors like race, gender, religion, language, and memory shape policy and strategy. Discussions of interests and ideas have taken a back seat to the study of construction, imagination, narratives, symbols, and meaning in elite and popular culture. The transnational turn, moreover, has highlighted the role of non-state actors as significant forces in the global arena. Scholars in this vein have demonstrated how a broader range of actors challenged the nation-state, formed networks, and exchanged ideas across borders, thus situating national politics within a global context.
Indeed, valuable work in history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies has already explored the role of culture in the Iraq War and the broader “War on Terror.” Scholars have examined how religion shaped Bush’s worldview and foreign policy. Others have explored how media and popular culture portrayals of the Middle East helped legitimize the use of force in the region to domestic audiences. Some argue that the Iraq War should be understood within the context of Orientalist beliefs about supposedly backward and dangerous Arabs and Muslims in need of Western guidance.
However, this body of work has often remained separate from mainstream scholarship on the Iraq War’s causes. Many of these scholars have not consistently integrated cultural factors into the study of foreign policy or the causes of war. Conversely, more traditional scholars often overlook culture, race, gender, religion, and other cultural factors. Students of the Iraq War and all of post-9/11 foreign policy should bridge this gap by investigating how culture interacts with and shapes policy, perceptions of rivals, and decision-makers’ understanding of themselves and America’s role in the world. Significant opportunities exist for this kind of synthesis as scholarship on the Iraq War continues to evolve.
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.
