Twenty years after the United States led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the question of “Why Did The United States Invade Iraq?” remains a subject of intense debate and scrutiny. Numerous explanations have been offered, initially dominated by political scientists and journalists. However, historians have increasingly contributed to the discourse, providing deeper historical context and analysis. This enduring interest is understandable, as the Iraq War stands as a pivotal foreign policy decision of the 21st century for the U.S., warranting extensive investigation.
This article delves into the multifaceted debate surrounding the origins of the Iraq War, tracing its evolution over the past two decades. It aims to present a balanced overview of the competing viewpoints, clearly outlining different interpretations, identifying areas of contention, and acknowledging the influence of political perspectives and ideologies on scholarly analysis. By examining the diverse lenses, methodologies, and objectives employed by researchers, we can understand the emergence of divergent explanations for this significant historical event.
While a single article cannot comprehensively cover all aspects of Iraq War scholarship, this essay will focus on three critical questions that are central to understanding the war’s origins and continue to be debated by experts. First, was the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq primarily motivated by national security concerns or by a desire to assert and expand American primacy? Second, was the “coercive diplomacy” strategy pursued in late 2002 and early 2003 a sincere effort to avert war, or was it a tactic to legitimize a pre-determined decision for military intervention? Third, to what extent did neoconservative ideology influence the decision-making process leading to the Iraq War?
The fundamental disagreement among scholars revolves around the first question: security versus hegemony. The “security school” interpretation, exemplified by scholars like Melvyn Leffler, posits that the Bush administration’s primary objective was to safeguard the United States from future terrorist attacks in the drastically altered security landscape following 9/11. From this perspective, threats like Iraq were reassessed with heightened urgency. Conversely, the “hegemony school,” represented by figures like Ahsan Butt, argues that the Bush administration leveraged 9/11 and the purported threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as a pretext. They contend that the underlying motivation for the war was the pursuit of regional and global dominance. This fundamental security-hegemony divide shapes the understanding of subsequent issues, including the nature of coercive diplomacy and the impact of neoconservatives.
A thorough analysis of this historical debate requires understanding why the scholarly landscape is structured as it is and suggesting directions for future research. Interpreting history, particularly recent and contentious events like the Iraq War, is inherently challenging, especially given the limited access scholars have to primary source documentation. Consequently, much of the debate has centered on interpreting, critiquing, and contextualizing a relatively small pool of available sources. Furthermore, political and policy debates have significantly influenced, and at times complicated, scholarly analysis.
Methodologically, the security school tends to accept policymakers’ stated motivations at face value, both during and after the events, unless compelling contradictory evidence surfaces. For this school, the crucial context for understanding the war is the intense post-9/11 atmosphere, where national security became paramount and Iraq was widely perceived as a significant threat.
In contrast, the hegemony school argues that the security-focused lens fails to adequately address key questions about the war. They contend that scholars should critically examine policymakers’ accounts, recognizing their potential incentive to downplay ideological or less rational aspects of their decisions. Instead, this school emphasizes broader historical contexts, highlighting factors such as the long-held “primacist” views of key figures like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, which they believe offer more insightful explanations than immediate security concerns.
As expected with such a recent and controversial event, the Iraq War is not merely an academic subject but also a battleground for competing political and policy perspectives, particularly regarding the lessons to be learned. Differing interpretations of the war’s origins have tangible implications for shaping future U.S. foreign policy, especially as the nation navigates an era of great-power competition. Scholars aligned with the security school often view the Iraq War as an understandable error in judgment, given the traumatic post-9/11 context and the widespread belief in Iraq’s WMD programs. Consequently, they rarely advocate for radical shifts in post-Iraq U.S. foreign policy. Conversely, the hegemony school argues that the war stemmed from a detrimental bipartisan pursuit of global primacy and warns of similar catastrophes if this grand strategy is not abandoned.
It is important to note that this analysis does not aim to defend the security-hegemony dichotomy or take sides in this debate. Instead, it seeks to clarify its parameters, evolution, and significance. While some may criticize the depiction of two broad interpretive camps as an oversimplification of nuanced scholarship, this article aims to identify potential avenues for synthesizing these interpretations. Despite overlaps, the security and hegemony camps reflect genuine scholarly disagreements about the primary drivers of the war. Finally, this essay advocates for incorporating more global and cultural perspectives into the analysis of the Iraq War to challenge this binary framework.
Nevertheless, there is value in broad categorization in historiographical analysis, particularly for those new to the field or non-specialists seeking a comprehensive overview of existing scholarship. This approach also helps identify the fundamental questions that continue to divide and propel the field, questions that should be addressed in future Iraq War research.
Therefore, this essay does not exhaustively cover the entirety of Iraq War scholarship, nor does it offer its own definitive historical or theoretical explanation for the war’s causes. Such undertakings would exceed the scope of this article. Consequently, certain important topics, such as the beliefs and decisions of the Baathist regime, the history of weapons inspections prior to 2002-2003, pre-war planning deficiencies, and the international diplomacy preceding the war, receive less attention. While crucial for a complete understanding of the war’s origins, these issues have not been the primary focus of scholarly disagreement, which are the central concern of this essay.
Security vs. Hegemony: Unpacking the Central Divide
Did the United States invade Iraq primarily to eliminate a perceived security threat in the heightened atmosphere following 9/11? Or did U.S. leaders exploit 9/11 as a pretext to pursue a pre-planned war driven by ambitions of American hegemony?
While a simplistic answer might be “a combination of both,” or that this is a false dichotomy, the core division between security and hegemony interpretations among scholars is significant. It reflects genuine differences in interpretation, contextualization, and even political perspectives. Scholars themselves frequently identify security-based or hegemony-based factors as the most critical. Security-focused explanations argue that in the post-9/11 context, hegemonic aspirations were secondary to urgent security imperatives. Hegemony-focused explanations, while not entirely dismissing security concerns, posit that anxieties about Iraqi WMDs and terrorist links were largely pretexts for long-term hegemonic objectives. Each school of thought 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 architects of the war developed their worldviews.
The Security School Perspective
Melvyn Leffler is 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 acknowledge broader U.S. goals and ideological influences, they maintain that the Bush administration’s pursuit of security in the aftermath of 9/11 was the primary catalyst for the decision to invade. 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.” Similarly, Jervis argues 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.”
Arguments from the security school underscore the transformative impact of 9/11 on U.S. national security thinking as essential for understanding the Iraq War. Leffler and Jervis point out that while the Bush administration included proponents of regime change, Iraq was not a central focus in its initial months, nor were significant steps taken towards ousting Saddam Hussein. Bush initially opposed nation-building and advocated for strategic restraint.
However, the 9/11 attacks dramatically reshaped U.S. foreign policy and paved the way for the Iraq War. The Bush administration experienced profound anger, fear, and vulnerability after 9/11, prompting a re-evaluation of existing security threats. Leffler argues that for the Bush team, “the risk calculus had changed dramatically after 9/11.” They believed they could no longer tolerate states that pursued WMDs, threatened neighbors or the U.S., and supported terrorism.
So, why Iraq specifically? The Bush administration viewed Iraq as the “nexus” of these threats. Bush himself argued that Iraq met the criteria more 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 acknowledging potential mistakes and exaggerations regarding Iraq’s WMDs and terrorist connections, security school scholars believe that top officials genuinely perceived these threats as real and growing. Furthermore, at the time, even analysts in countries opposing the war largely underestimated the extent to which Saddam had ceased meaningful WMD production. Saddam’s decade-long obstruction of inspectors further fueled the perception that he intended to resume WMD programs.
Given the perceived risk of “the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud,” as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice famously stated, the U.S. felt it could not afford to wait for the Iraqi threat to fully materialize. This led to the articulation of a right to launch preventive wars to eliminate threats. This presumed right became the cornerstone of the Bush Doctrine, which, according to the security school, was not primarily a blueprint for primacy but rather an adaptation of established ideas about the use of force in the face of an evolving threat landscape.
For the security school, the Iraq War was not primarily driven by 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 motivators. Leffler maintains that “missionary fervor or idealistic impulses” played a minor role in the Bush team’s decisions. Tunc argues that hegemony is an implausible motive for the Iraq War, as eliminating a relatively minor adversary like Iraq would not significantly alter the global balance of power.
Idealistic aspirations and the unipolar distribution of power had existed for years before 9/11. The attacks were the critical new variable that triggered a reassessment of national security, ultimately leading to the invasion. Leffler summarizes the core, security-focused motivations: “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 perspective on 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 grieving 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 contends that the Bush team sought to “do the right thing” and protect the nation from what they genuinely believed to be an imminent threat. The consensus within the security school is that the perceived WMD-terrorism-rogue state threat was not a mere pretext but the genuine driving force behind the war. As Jervis argues, given the widespread belief in 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 narrative aligns significantly with Bush administration officials’ memoirs, which also emphasize security motivations 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 paramount priority, and threats like Iraq could no longer be tolerated. Official memoirs emphasize that the administration did not desire war with Iraq and explored avenues to avoid it, but ultimately, national security imperatives necessitated removing this threat.
This alignment 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 uncritically accepting policymakers’ self-serving accounts of events. Bush officials have a vested interest in portraying themselves as open to peaceful resolutions and not as ideologically driven crusaders. As we will see, the hegemony school adopts a more critical stance on this issue.
The Hegemony School Perspective
Scholars in the hegemony school, including Butt, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, Patrick Porter, Paul Pillar, G. John Ikenberry, David Harvey, John Mearsheimer, and Jeffrey Record, often draw from realist international relations theory, though not exclusively. They acknowledge the role of security concerns in motivating the Iraq War but consider security-based explanations 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.
Within the realist hegemony camp, Butt argues that the war originated from the “desire to maintain the United States’ global standing and hierarchic order,” with security serving more as a justification for domestic consumption than a genuine causal factor. He posits that 9/11 threatened U.S. hegemony, prompting the U.S. to undertake a “performative war” to re-establish “generalized deterrence,” or the reputation for unmatched power and the willingness to use it, which 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 argues that available intelligence on Iraq did not indicate an imminent threat. However, Iraq was a convenient target for demonstrating U.S. power, being militarily weak, diplomatically isolated, and unpopular with the U.S. public, while not yet possessing WMDs.
Stephen Wertheim concurs, arguing that “the decision to invade Iraq stemmed from the pursuit of global primacy,” aimed at “dissuading other countries from rising and challenging American dominance.” Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney echo this, stating, “The primary objective of the war was the preservation and extension of American primacy in a region with high importance to American national interests.” Similarly, Record 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 school view the Iraq War as a tool to uphold realist priorities like unipolarity and U.S. freedom of action globally. The Bush administration leveraged 9/11 and the supposed Iraqi WMD 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. Democratization was a secondary motive, used to justify a war primarily driven by power considerations.
Walt, Porter, and Bacevich agree that the U.S. sought to demonstrate its power and maintain hegemony by invading Iraq, but they specifically argue that the Bush administration aimed to solidify liberal hegemony. This grand strategy involved spreading liberal democracy and capitalism, seen not only as inherently good but also as means to maintain global dominance. The Cold War had constrained this strategy, but the Soviet collapse enabled the U.S. to pursue it with unchecked idealism and hubris. The bipartisan foreign policy establishment embraced the universality of liberal ideals and a perceived U.S. right to intervene globally, to protect human rights or suppress challenges to American power.
According to this narrative, when attacked on 9/11, the U.S. failed to consider whether liberal hegemony was generating resistance. Instead, the Bush administration, with bipartisan support, escalated the pursuit of liberal hegemony, asserting a unilateral right to regime change through preventive war, formalized as the Bush Doctrine. While the security school views this doctrine as a response to a new type of threat, the hegemony school interprets it as a plan to preserve U.S. primacy, asserting a unilateral American right to eliminate potential threats like Iraq and prevent the rise of peer competitors. Some scholars also highlight protecting Israel and securing U.S. oil interests as additional hegemonic motivations, though these remain more contested explanations.
For Walt, Porter, and others, the Iraq War stemmed from the pursuit of liberal hegemony, a revisionist grand strategy aimed at spreading democracy and liberal values, overthrowing tyrants, and thereby establishing a more peaceful and cooperative world order. Driven by this vision, the U.S. aimed not only to remove a threat but to revolutionize Middle Eastern politics by establishing democracy in Iraq. They cite considerable evidence that democracy promotion was a significant motive, particularly for Bush, and not merely a justification for a power-driven war. 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.”
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. As Bush stated 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 led the Bush administration to believe that regime change in Iraq would be straightforward, assuming Iraqis would readily embrace democracy after the Baathist removal.
Mearsheimer calls the Iraq War “probably the best example of this kind of liberal interventionism” that dominated post-Cold War U.S. thinking. Bacevich argues that the WMD 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.” Porter contends, “The Iraq War … was an effort to reorder the world. Its makers aimed to spread capitalist democracy on their terms.”
The division within the hegemony school partly reflects the different worldviews of top Bush administration decision-makers. Rumsfeld and Cheney leaned towards a realist paradigm, emphasizing power reassertion over democracy promotion. Others, like Wolfowitz, saw the Iraq War as part of a liberal project. Bush himself embodied a blend of these perspectives.
Despite differences on whether the U.S. sought realist or liberal hegemony, the hegemony school shares fundamental common ground. These scholars agree that the U.S. had been pursuing some form of primacy well before 9/11, that 9/11 both threatened and provided 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 crucial for the hegemony school than the security school, as the former highlights continuities in U.S. foreign policy extending back into the Cold War. These scholars emphasize that key architects of the war, such as Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, had openly advocated for U.S. 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, then serving under Cheney. This document endorsed a hegemonic grand strategy aimed at maintaining indefinite global military dominance and preventing the rise of new rivals. 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.
Following 9/11, these hegemonists immediately linked the Baathist regime to terrorism despite limited evidence, promoted questionable intelligence, exaggerated the Iraqi threat, and minimized the risks of invasion. For the hegemony school, this demonstrates that the administration “wanted war,” and its later 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 motives. CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir that top administration officials seemed uninterested in the details of Iraq’s WMD programs, suggesting they had decided to invade Iraq using WMDs 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. 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 Perspectives
Is it possible to reconcile the security and hegemony schools of thought? Some scholars have attempted to bridge this divide. Works by Michael Mazarr, Robert Draper, and Justin Vaisse consider the national security urgency of the post-9/11 moment while also acknowledging the historical context of U.S. hegemony and idealism. In attempts at synthesis, some argue that a bipartisan “regime change consensus” on Iraq formed during the 1990s, predisposing the U.S. foreign policy establishment to favor Saddam’s removal and view containment as a failing policy. Broad agreement on U.S. hegemony reinforced this consensus, making the Iraq War seem logical to many U.S. elites. Nevertheless, 9/11 was a critical catalyst that significantly reduced America’s tolerance for threats like Iraq and gave U.S. leaders greater latitude to pursue risky strategies.
One way to synthesize these schools is to assign a division of causal labor: the hegemony school explains “Why Iraq?” and the security school addresses “Why now?”. Hegemony school analysts often question why, if WMD proliferation was the primary concern, the U.S. didn’t focus on countries with more advanced programs, like North Korea. Similarly, if terrorism was the main concern, why not focus on more active state sponsors, like Iran?
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. Within the hegemonic framework, Iraq was seen more as an opportunity than a direct threat, and its alleged WMD programs served as a pretext rather than the core motive. As former CIA intelligence analyst Paul Pillar bluntly states, 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.” Pillar and others argue that the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence process not to genuinely assess Iraq’s WMD capabilities, but to gather, or even fabricate, evidence to support a pre-determined decision 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 U.S. foreign policy, why didn’t the Iraq War occur earlier, perhaps after weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998? By focusing on how 9/11 reshaped U.S. foreign policy and threat perception, the security school addresses a fundamental point largely accepted by analysts: a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is almost unimaginable without 9/11.
An interesting point of convergence between the security and hegemony schools is the recognition that the end of the Cold War was a crucial precondition for the Iraq War. The idea of the U.S. invading a medium-sized country—formerly a Soviet satellite—to impose regime change during the Cold War seems improbable. The hegemony school particularly emphasizes the role of unipolarity, which they believe fueled hegemonic ambitions, both realist and liberal, within the U.S. political and intellectual landscape. This raises the question of whether the emerging multipolar world will deter the U.S. from future attempts at direct regime change.
The relationship between the 1990-1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War remains a relatively under-explored area. Scholars like Helfont, Christian Alfonsi, and others argue that the Gulf War’s inconclusive outcome 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. Notably, there were no comparable wars with Iran or North Korea in the 1990s, nor were there Iran or North Korean Liberation Acts. However, the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act explicitly declared regime change as official U.S. policy towards Iraq. Despite this, relatively few studies systematically trace U.S.-Iraqi relations during this period, although Helfont’s recent work significantly addresses this gap by analyzing Iraq’s challenge to the post-Cold War, U.S.-led international order throughout the 1990s.
Despite attempts at synthesis, a significant tension persists between the security and hegemony schools, making complete reconciliation difficult. It is challenging to simultaneously view the war as both predetermined and contingent—and to perceive the Bush administration as both fixated on regime change and genuinely open to various 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 shape the overall interpretation of the war. Was it an understandable tragedy or an avoidable and unforgivable blunder? In terms of historical periodization, were the war’s roots primarily in the post-9/11 response, or did they extend back decades in U.S. foreign policy? Finally, did the Iraq War, particularly the controversial Bush Doctrine, represent a radical departure in U.S. diplomatic history or a continuation of pre-existing trends, goals, and ideas?
Understanding “Coercive Diplomacy” in the Lead-Up to War
Regardless of which side scholars favor in the security-hegemony debate, their chosen perspective influences their understanding of other crucial questions about the war’s origins. This essay now examines two additional issues that have divided scholars, beginning with the purpose behind Bush’s “coercive diplomacy” strategy in late 2002 and early 2003.
In the fall of 2002, influenced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush decided to pursue a “diplomatic track” on Iraq. On September 12, at the United Nations, he demanded that Iraq readmit weapons inspectors or face potential military intervention. He also sought congressional authorization for the use of force against Iraq. Concurrently, the build-up of U.S. troops in the region provided a credible threat of force to support this final diplomatic effort. Rice describes this strategy as “coercive diplomacy.”
However, the true purpose of this coercive diplomacy is debated. Was it a genuine attempt to peacefully disarm Iraq? Or was it primarily a tactic to gain legitimacy and secure allied and domestic political support for a regime change policy that had already been decided upon? This debate is crucial for determining when the Bush administration made the definitive decision for war and to what extent it was inflexibly committed to regime change, regardless of circumstances. While the security-hegemony debate is important but somewhat deterministic, the coercive diplomacy debate introduces questions about the contingency of the war and potential opportunities to avert it.
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. Bush wrestled with whether disarmament could be achieved without regime change. Coercive diplomacy was a final attempt to determine this. By adopting this strategy, he acknowledged the possibility that war might be avoided and Saddam might remain in power for the foreseeable future. He also temporarily disregarded the advice of more hawkish advisors like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who viewed working through the United Nations as counterproductive. As Leffler writes, Bush “decided to see if he could accomplish his key objectives … without war.” According to this interpretation, 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 view 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 by supporting new inspections, the Bush administration genuinely sought to test Iraqi cooperation and avoid war.
These analyses emphasize the contingent nature of Bush’s approach to Iraq. While some Bush officials may have strongly advocated for regime change, Bush nonetheless proceeded deliberately and gave peaceful disarmament methods a final chance. He did so because disarmament, by any means, was his priority, not regime change for other underlying reasons.
Again, this account aligns with U.S. 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 avert war, but Saddam’s non-compliance with inspections ultimately compelled Bush to choose war in early 2003. Rice similarly claimed, “We invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”
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 wisdom of invading Iraq. There was minimal debate within his 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 swiftly concluded that inspections had failed in early 2003 and finalized the decision to invade in January.
Research corroborates Mazarr’s view, further suggesting that the notion that Bush sought to revive containment through coercive diplomacy is unconvincing. Bush had already argued earlier in 2002 that containment was inadequate to address the “nexus” threat. Furthermore, most of his advisors and the policy establishment already considered containment a failed strategy. Finally, the Bush administration harbored deep skepticism about the effectiveness of inspections and set such a high bar for their success that failure was virtually predetermined.
Scholars in the hegemony school generally agree with Mazarr’s analysis of coercive diplomacy. They argue that the Bush administration was not genuinely interested in a peaceful resolution because it sought an opportunity to assert U.S. power. Therefore, they view coercive diplomacy as a deceptive tactic to legitimize a pre-ordained war. Butt, for example, argues that Iraq was essentially powerless to avoid war because the U.S. had already decided to crush a rival to re-establish generalized deterrence. John Prados contends that Bush made the decision for war in early spring 2002, and Richard Haass places the decision in July 2002, all before coercive diplomacy began.
Similar to the core security-hegemony divide, the debate surrounding coercive diplomacy remains unresolved. For scholars like Leffler, the situation remained fluid and contingent until just months before the invasion. For scholars like Mazarr, the war was practically inevitable once the Bush administration targeted Iraq in early 2002. A potential synthesis could be that the administration’s deep pessimism about Saddam’s willingness to concede to U.S. demands and comply with inspections constituted a de facto decision for war, even if not a formally finalized one. If anything, coercive diplomacy might be an under-examined aspect of the Iraq War, often overlooked in analyses that attribute the war’s origins to security or hegemony. This oversight can lead to overly deterministic explanations that minimize the role of contingency.
One way to move beyond this impasse is to further analyze the State Department’s role in the lead-up to war. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage supported the war but were not ardent proponents, 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 urged Bush to pursue coercive diplomacy more thoroughly. This would shed light on whether genuine uncertainty and openness to non-violent solutions existed within the administration, as Leffler suggests, or whether the U.S. was irrevocably on a path to war before the fall of 2002, as Mazarr argues.
However, scholars should be cautious about expecting new documentary evidence to fully resolve these 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 utilized this valuable material, but interpretive differences persist because they approach this evidence with differing analytical frameworks. For instance, Leffler argues that Blair’s correspondence with Bush after 9/11 indicates that neither leader was rushing into war with Iraq but rather 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 other means of disarming Iraq, and only decided on war after exhausting other options.
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, 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.” For Butt, this source reveals that Bush and Blair agreed on the goal of regime change in Iraq and the reassertion of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East almost immediately after 9/11. Blair merely advised Bush to proceed cautiously and build a coalition before resorting to war. Porter, who authored a book on Britain’s role 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. 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 discrepancies in interpretations among scholars using the same documents highlight the crucial role of analytical frameworks that analysts bring to their sources. Consequently, new sources alone may not necessarily lead to convergence between different interpretive camps.
The Role of Neoconservatives in the Iraq War
The final key question regarding the Iraq War’s origins concerns 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 the influence of neoconservatives, while the hegemony school often emphasizes their central importance.
Neoconservatism is a loosely defined intellectual movement that has evolved significantly since its emergence in the 1960s. Vaisse defines third-wave neoconservatism as a nationalistic movement that peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s. It advocated for U.S. primacy, “national greatness,” and the promotion of democracy, often with a unilateralist approach. A significant number of neoconservatives held high-level positions in the Bush administration, most notably Paul Wolfowitz.
While neoconservative intellectuals like Robert Kagan and William Kristol publicly advocated for regime change in Iraq, the extent of neoconservatives’ influence 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 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.” Frank Harvey convincingly argues that such narratives are not only simplistic but also provide cover for the many other political groups who supported what became an unpopular war.
Harvey, Leffler, and others argue that neoconservatives were either irrelevant or of secondary importance in causing the Iraq War. Harvey takes a more extreme position, suggesting they were entirely extraneous and, in fact, lost most internal debates on Iraq prior to the invasion. Leffler and Mazarr argue that while neoconservatives were present in the Bush administration, neither Bush nor the core decision-making echelon were neoconservatives themselves. Leffler minimizes the role of neoconservatism or any ideology in the administration’s decision-making, emphasizing security motivations instead.
Daalder and Lindsay argue that Bush and most of his 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.” Jane Cramer and Edward 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 careers. In his history of Bush’s war cabinet, journalist James Mann 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. Rather, these Vulcans “were focused above all on American military power” and maintaining U.S. primacy, especially after the Vietnam War.
These authors contend that while neoconservatives like Wolfowitz may have pushed for regime change, their presence in the administration was not essential for initiating the war. Mazarr also downplays the role of neoconservatives, but 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 primacy, exceptionalism, and the universality of democracy.
Some scholars in the realist hegemony school align with this analysis. Butt dismisses the role of neoconservatives, arguing that they provided an ideological veneer for a war 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.”
Conversely, many scholars, particularly within the liberal hegemony school, argue that neoconservatives played a crucial role in causing the Iraq War. For them, neoconservatism helps answer a central 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 of such a focus. 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. Flibbert concludes that without these ideas, 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,” primarily “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 actually quite large: over 20 neoconservatives held high-ranking positions in the Bush administration, forming an activist core pushing for war with Iraq.
Vaisse adds that in 2003, Cheney ordered 30 copies of the neoconservative Weekly Standard to the White House weekly. He notes that while Bush campaigned as a restraint-minded realist, he and Rice largely adopted a neoconservative worldview after 9/11, frequently speaking of a U.S. obligation to overthrow tyrants and promote liberal values. Other analysts demonstrate how neoconservatives spearheaded the promotion of damaging, though often dubious, information about Saddam’s WMD programs and links to al-Qaeda, which helped sell the war to the public.
Journalistic accounts of the Iraq War also tend to highlight the role of neoconservative networks and personalities in paving the path to war. They effectively illustrate the close personal connections 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 broader foreign policy establishment at the time.
The issue of neoconservatives’ role is relevant to broader questions about the Iraq War and recent U.S. foreign policy. Was ideology a fundamental driver of the invasion decision, or was it a justification developed to gain public support for a war driven by other motives? Is purging neoconservatives the solution to restoring balance and restraint to U.S. foreign policy after Iraq, or are more fundamental changes needed? Are neoconservatives simply a modern manifestation of America’s long-standing exceptionalist identity and missionary impulses, or are they a distinct and modern ideological movement? These are critical questions for situating the Iraq War within the larger history of ideas and the role of intellectuals in U.S. diplomatic history.
The Iraq War’s Legacy and Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy
The protracted and costly nature of the Iraq War has profoundly shaped discussions about its lessons for U.S. foreign policy. However, these debates are intertwined with the competing interpretations of the war’s origins. While most scholars, regardless of their alignment with the security or hegemony school, agree that the Iraq War was a mistake, if not a graver error, they diverge on its implications for future U.S. foreign policy.
Security-centric explanations of the war tend to lead to a less critical portrayal of the Bush administration and the broader foreign policy establishment. Hal Brands and Peter Feaver propose 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 missteps, and execution errors.
However, these errors, according to this perspective, do not necessitate a fundamental re-evaluation of America’s global leadership role. Many conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberal internationalists conclude that the primary lesson of Iraq is not to abandon an active and engaged global posture, but rather to avoid ambitious nation-building and democratization projects. Brands argues that “the Iraq hangover” should not render U.S. leaders “strategically sluggish just as the dangers posed by great power rivals were growing.” 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. The U.S. can continue to play this role while learning from and avoiding obvious mistakes like the Iraq invasion. Nor does this war necessitate a wholesale dismantling of the existing foreign policy establishment.
U.S. leaders, including those like President Barack Obama who initially opposed the war, appear to share this view of Iraq’s lessons. 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.” Nonetheless, their national security strategies all reaffirm 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 famously quipped. Instead, the U.S. should continue to serve as the cornerstone of the liberal world order.
Unsurprisingly, these figures tend to favor Leffler’s security-focused narrative of the Iraq War. Figures like Brands, Kagan, John Bolton, and Eric Edelman, Cheney’s deputy national security adviser, have favorably endorsed or reviewed Leffler’s book, which offers minimal critique of U.S. 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, who has labeled 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.
Scholars in the hegemony school vehemently disagree about the lessons of the Iraq War. They argue that the war reveals the failure of the overly ambitious and hyper-interventionist grand strategy of primacy. Primacy, as Wertheim argues, necessitates maintaining U.S. forces globally and preventing the rise of great-power challengers, while simultaneously fostering a sense of messianic exceptionalism. He concludes that “the invasion of Iraq emerged from this logic,” and that if the U.S. fails to fundamentally rethink its global role, it will inevitably stumble into more unnecessary conflicts.
For these critics, the Iraq War also exposed the shortsightedness and conformity of the bipartisan policy establishment and its seeming addiction to an expansive global mission. They argue that this establishment remains committed to a hegemonic role that has resulted in unnecessary wars, staggering human and financial costs, balancing behavior by rivals, and the erosion of U.S. leadership at home and abroad. Using the Iraq War and other missteps as leverage, they aim to challenge the narrow, entrenched perspectives within the policy establishment and steer U.S. grand strategy towards “realism and restraint,” in Walt’s words, while prioritizing resources for domestic needs, including preserving democracy and prosperity at home.
In conclusion, competing interpretations of the war’s origins are inextricably linked to debates about its lessons. It is appropriate for scholars to contest how this war should inform the future trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. However, participants in this debate risk filtering history through ideological lenses and using it to bolster pre-existing arguments. Nevertheless, this analysis suggests that even as the U.S. shifts its focus towards great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain intensely contested and profoundly consequential for America’s global role. This is especially pertinent as the generation that fought in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars assumes leadership positions in the military and political spheres. Their interpretations of that conflict will significantly shape their perspectives and actions, just as differing viewpoints on the Vietnam War influenced a previous generation.
Towards New Perspectives: Cultural and Global Turns in Iraq War Scholarship
This essay has argued that scholarship on the causes of the Iraq War can be effectively organized into security and hegemony schools. These categories, while simplifying a complex body of analysis, provide a valuable framework for understanding the field 20 years after the war began. Currently, the hegemony school appears to have gained more traction among scholars, although the war’s architects tend to align with the security school.
The security-hegemony debate is not merely an “academic” exercise. It is a genuine interpretive divide that shapes scholars’ approaches to sources and leads to divergent answers on other critical questions. This division also informs ongoing debates about U.S. foreign policy, with each school suggesting different lessons from the war. The polarization of this debate is real but not necessarily ideal. Scholars should continue to seek syntheses of these perspectives. Historians, in particular, are well-suited for this task due to their emphasis on holistic, narrative, and multi-variable analysis, contrasting with the emphasis on parsimony and generalizability often found in political science.
One way to move beyond the security-hegemony binary is to adopt new methodological approaches to the Iraq War. The security-hegemony divide largely operates within traditional frameworks for 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.”
New approaches could revitalize this seemingly entrenched binary. The global turn in Cold War historiography, for instance, disrupted a debate centered on orthodox and revisionist accounts of the Cold War’s origins. The conversation shifted to examine how the Cold War reshaped global history and intersected with trends like decolonization, as well as how smaller powers influenced the superpower rivalry. Some scholars have already advanced more global accounts of the Iraq War by delving into Iraqi sources, the role of the United Nations, and the regional politics of the Iraq conflict. Until more sources become available on decision-making within the Bush administration, this may be a more productive avenue than further entrenchment in the security-hegemony divide.
Additionally, a cultural turn could enrich Iraq War scholarship. The cultural turn in diplomatic history has led to increased attention on how cultural factors such as race, gender, religion, language, and memory shape policy and strategy. Discussions of interests and ideas have been supplemented by considerations of construction, imagination, narratives, symbols, and meaning in both elite and popular culture. Furthermore, the transnational turn has highlighted the role of nonstate 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 contextualizing national politics within a global framework.
Indeed, there has been valuable work in history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies examining the role of culture in the Iraq War and the broader “War on Terror.” Andrew Preston and Lauren Turek explore how religion shaped Bush’s worldview and foreign policy. Melani McAlister and Deepa Kumar analyze how media and popular culture portrayals of the Middle East contributed to justifying the use of force in the region to domestic audiences. 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 in need of Western guidance.
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 into the study of foreign policy or the causes of war. More traditional scholars, in turn, often overlook culture, race, gender, religion, and other cultural dimensions. 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 adversaries, and decision-makers’ understanding of themselves and America’s role in the world. There is significant potential for this type of synthesis as Iraq War scholarship continues to evolve.
U.S. President George W. Bush addresses the nation to announce the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19, 2003.
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.
