Two decades after the United States launched its invasion of Iraq, the question of why this momentous war occurred continues to be a subject of intense scrutiny and debate. From the initial analyses by political scientists and journalists to the more recent contributions of historians, including notable works this year by Melvyn Leffler and Samuel Helfont, the body of scholarship dedicated to understanding the origins of the Iraq War is vast and multifaceted. Given that the decision to invade Iraq stands as arguably the most consequential foreign policy choice made by a U.S. president in the 21st century, this extensive analysis is hardly surprising.
This article aims to navigate the complex landscape of explanations for the Iraq War’s origins as they have unfolded over the past 20 years. It seeks to provide a balanced overview of the competing perspectives, clearly outlining their interpretations, identifying areas of contention, and acknowledging the influence of political and ideological viewpoints on scholarly analysis. We will explore how differing interpretations of the war have emerged from the diverse lenses, methodologies, and objectives that scholars bring to this critical historical event.
While a single article cannot comprehensively address every facet of Iraq War scholarship, this essay will focus on three pivotal questions that are fundamental to understanding the war’s origins and remain points of scholarly division. First, was the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq primarily motivated by security concerns or the pursuit of global primacy? Second, was the “coercive diplomacy” strategy employed by the Bush administration in the fall and winter of 2002–2003 a genuine effort to avert war, or was it a tactic to legitimize a decision for war that had already been made earlier in 2002? Third, what was the extent of the neoconservative influence in the decision-making process leading to the Iraq War?
The first question – security versus hegemony – represents the central axis of scholarly disagreement regarding the Iraq War. Security-focused explanations, exemplified by Leffler’s recent work, posit that the Bush administration’s paramount motive was to protect the United States from future terrorist attacks in the transformed security landscape after 9/11. In this view, threats like Iraq had to be reassessed in this new context. In contrast, scholars subscribing to the hegemony school, such as Ahsan Butt, argue that the Bush administration leveraged 9/11 and the specter of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to justify a war primarily driven by the ambition for regional and global hegemony. This fundamental divide between security and hegemony perspectives branches out to influence interpretations of other critical aspects of the war’s origins, including the nature of Bush’s coercive diplomacy and the role of neoconservatives.
A robust historiographical analysis requires not only explaining the current state of scholarly debate but also suggesting pathways for future research and understanding. The inherent challenge of interpreting history is amplified in this case by the limited access scholars have to primary source documentation. Consequently, much of the debate has centered on the interpretation, critique, and contextualization of a relatively small pool of available sources. Furthermore, political and policy debates have exerted a significant, though not always constructive, influence on the academic discourse.
Methodologically, the security school tends to accept policymakers’ stated motives, both at the time and retrospectively, as genuine unless compelling evidence to the contrary is presented. For this perspective, the crucial context for understanding the war is the heightened pressure of the post-9/11 environment, where national security was paramount and Iraq was widely perceived as a significant threat.
Conversely, the hegemony school argues that key aspects of the war decision are inexplicable through a security-centric lens. This school contends that scholars should be skeptical of policymakers’ accounts, particularly given their inherent motivation to downplay ideological or miscalculated aspects of their actions. Instead, these scholars situate the Iraq War decision within broader historical contexts, emphasizing factors such as the long-held primacist policy 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 explanatory power than immediate security concerns.
Unsurprisingly, 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, especially concerning the lessons to be drawn from it. Debates about the war’s origins have tangible implications for shaping future U.S. foreign policy, particularly as the nation enters an era of great-power competition. Security school scholars often view the Iraq War as an understandable, albeit regrettable, error given the traumatic post-9/11 context and the widespread belief at the time that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, they rarely advocate for radical shifts in post-Iraq U.S. foreign policy. In stark contrast, the hegemony school argues that the war was a product of a detrimental bipartisan pursuit of global primacy and warns that similar catastrophes are likely if this grand strategy is not abandoned.
Before proceeding, several caveats are necessary. This essay does not aim to defend the security-hegemony dichotomy or to advocate for either side of the debate. Instead, its purpose is to clarify the parameters, evolution, and stakes of this scholarly divide. Some may argue that depicting the debate as two broad interpretive camps oversimplifies a vast and nuanced body of work. To mitigate this, this article will explore potential avenues for synthesizing these interpretations. While the security and hegemony schools exhibit some overlaps, as discussed below, this division also reflects genuine disagreements among scholars about the primary causal factors driving the war. Finally, this essay concludes with a call for more global and cultural analyses of the Iraq War as a means to move beyond this binary framework.
Nevertheless, there is value in “lumping” in historiographical analysis, particularly for those new to the field or non-specialists seeking a broad understanding of existing scholarship. This approach helps to identify the core questions that continue to divide and drive the field, questions that should be addressed in future research on the Iraq War.
Therefore, this essay does not exhaustively cover all Iraq War scholarship, nor does it offer its own definitive historical or theoretical explanation of the war’s causes – tasks far too expansive for this format. Certain important topics, despite significant scholarly contributions, receive less attention, including the beliefs and decisions of the Baathist regime, the history of weapons inspections prior to 2002–2003, shortcomings in pre-war planning, and the international diplomacy preceding the war. While crucial for a complete understanding of the war’s origins, these aspects have not been the primary points of scholarly divergence, which are the focus of this essay.
Security vs. Hegemony: The Central Point of Contention
Did the United States invade Iraq as a miscalculated attempt to eliminate a perceived security threat in the intensely charged post-9/11 environment? Or did U.S. leaders exploit 9/11 as a pretext to pursue an opportunistic war fundamentally about asserting American hegemony?
A seemingly straightforward answer might be “a combination of both,” or that this is a false dichotomy. For instance, the United States could have pursued security objectives through a hegemonic grand strategy, potentially involving regime change in countries like Iraq. Iraq could have been viewed simultaneously as a genuine security threat and an impediment to U.S. primacy.
However, the scholarly divide between security and hegemony perspectives is real, reflecting significant differences in interpretation, contextualization, and even underlying political viewpoints. Scholars themselves frequently identify security-based or hegemony-based factors as the most salient. Security-focused explanations maintain that in the post-9/11 context, hegemonic ambitions were secondary to pressing security imperatives. Hegemony-focused explanations, while not entirely dismissing security concerns, argue that anxieties about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism served as justifications for pre-existing hegemonic designs. Each school frames the war within different contexts, with the security school emphasizing the immediate post-9/11 period and the hegemony school highlighting the preceding decades during which the architects of the war developed their policy worldviews.
The Security School Perspective
Melvyn Leffler stands as a leading figure in the security school, which 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 the broader U.S. goals and ideological influences, they contend that the Bush administration’s pursuit of security in the aftermath of 9/11 was the primary driving force behind 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, 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.”
Security school arguments emphasize the transformative impact of 9/11 on U.S. national security thinking as essential for understanding the Iraq War. Leffler and Jervis argue that while the Bush administration entered office with some proponents of regime change in prominent positions, Iraq was not a central focus in its first nine 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 fundamentally reshaped U.S. 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 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 weapons of mass destruction, threatening their neighbors and/or the United States, and supporting terrorism.
Why, then, Iraq specifically? The Bush administration viewed Iraq as the “nexus” of these threats. As Bush himself argued, Iraq fulfilled these criteria more comprehensively than any other state: “state sponsors of terror … sworn enemies of America … hostile governments that threatened their neighbors … regimes that pursued WMD [weapons of mass destruction].” Top officials might have made critical errors and exaggerations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties, but they were not intentionally deceiving the public. Rather, they genuinely believed these threats were real and growing. Furthermore, at the time, very few analysts, even in nations opposed to the war, accurately assessed the reality that Saddam was not actively engaged in significant weapons of mass destruction production. Saddam’s obstruction of inspectors for nearly a decade also reasonably suggested an intention to resume such weapons programs.
The United States felt it could not afford to wait for the Iraqi threat to fully materialize, given the risk of “the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud,” as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice famously stated. Consequently, the Bush administration asserted a right to launch preemptive wars to neutralize threats. This claimed right formed the core of the Bush Doctrine, which, from the security school’s perspective, was less a blueprint for primacy than an adaptation of long-standing concepts of the use of force in the face of a novel threat environment.
For the security school, the Iraq War did not primarily originate from grand designs of expanding U.S. hegemony or promoting liberal values. While overwhelming U.S. military power and the unipolarity of the international system made regime change feasible, these factors were not the primary motivations for the war. Leffler contends that “missionary fervor or idealistic impulses” played a minimal role in the Bush team’s decisions. Tunc argues that hegemony is an implausible motive for the Iraq War, as eliminating a relatively minor rival like Iraq would not have significantly altered the global balance of power.
Idealistic aspirations and the global imbalance of power 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 perspective on 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 grieving families. Context is crucial to this interpretation, as he argues: “Critics forget how ominous the al Qaeda threat seemed and how evil and manipulative Hussein really was.” He maintains that the Bush team sought to “do the right thing” and protect the nation from what they genuinely believed was an imminent threat. Scholars in the security school agree that the perceived weapons of mass destruction-terrorism-rogue state security threat was not a mere pretext but the actual driving motive for the war. As Jervis argues, considering the consensus regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction 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 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, in which 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 mandated removing this menace.
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 accepting policymakers’ portrayals of events at face value. Bush officials have a clear vested interest in presenting themselves as having been open to non-violent solutions to the Iraq problem and as not being driven by idealistic crusades. As we will explore, the hegemony school adopts a more critical stance towards these claims.
The Hegemony School Perspective
Scholars associated with the hegemony school include Butt, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, Patrick Porter, Paul Pillar, G. John Ikenberry, David Harvey, John Mearsheimer, and Jeffrey Record. They generally lean towards the realist school of international relations, though not exclusively. They acknowledge the role of security concerns in motivating the Iraq War but consider security rationales fundamentally incomplete explanations. Their central assertion 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 stemmed from the “desire to maintain the United States’ global standing and hierarchic order,” with security concerns acting more as a pretext for domestic consumption than a genuine causal factor. 9/11 threatened U.S. hegemony, prompting the United States to opt for a “performative war” to re-establish “generalized deterrence,” or the reputation for unchallengeable power and the willingness to use it, which underpins hegemony. He quotes Rumsfeld stating on 9/11, “[w]e need to bomb something else [other than Afghanistan] to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks.” Butt argues that available intelligence about Iraq did not suggest an imminent threat. However, Iraq was a convenient target for demonstrating U.S. power, as it had not yet developed weapons of mass destruction, was militarily weak and diplomatically isolated, and was disliked by the U.S. public.
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 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 view the Iraq War as a means to uphold realist priorities like unipolarity and U.S. freedom of action in the world. The Bush administration seized 9/11 and the purported Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction threat as a “pretext,” “opportunity,” or “rationale” to advance this agenda, believing it would eliminate the terrorist threat and other challenges to U.S. power. Democratization was a secondary motive, used to justify a war rooted in the pursuit of power.
Walt, Porter, and Bacevich concur that the United States aimed to demonstrate its power and maintain hegemony by invading Iraq, but they argue that the Bush administration specifically sought to solidify liberal hegemony. Under this grand strategy, the United States aimed to spread 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 allowed the U.S. to pursue it with unchecked idealism and hubris. The bipartisan foreign policy establishment came to accept the universality of liberal ideals and a presumed U.S. right to intervene anywhere globally, either to protect human rights or suppress challenges to American power.
Following the 9/11 attacks, this narrative suggests that the United States 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 new category of threat, the hegemony school sees it as a blueprint for preserving U.S. primacy, asserting a unilateral American right to eliminate potential threats like Iraq and aiming to prevent the rise of peer competitors. Some scholars also emphasize protecting Israel and advancing U.S. oil interests as additional hegemonic motives for the war, although these remain more controversial explanations.
For Walt, Porter, and others, the Iraq War emerged from the pursuit of liberal hegemony, a revisionist grand strategy aimed at spreading democracy and other liberal values, overthrowing tyrants, and thereby building a more peaceful and cooperative world order. Driven by this vision, the United States aimed not only to remove a threat but to revolutionize Middle Eastern politics by establishing 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 grounded in 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-held and essentially liberal belief among many U.S. policymakers that autocracies inherently threaten long-term peace, prosperity, and security, and that only a democratic international order can guarantee these benefits. 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 because Iraqis would readily embrace democracy after the removal of the Baathists.
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 weapons of mass destruction threat was a “cover story” and that the war’s primary 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.” 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 camp reflects the differing worldviews of top Bush administration decision-makers. Rumsfeld and Cheney aligned more with a realist paradigm, emphasizing power reassertion more than democracy promotion. Others, like Wolfowitz, viewed the Iraq War as part of a liberal project. Bush himself embodied a blend of these perspectives.
However, differences over whether the U.S. sought realist or liberal hegemony should not obscure the fundamental common ground within the hegemony school. These scholars agree that the United States 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 contextualization, the pre-9/11 era holds greater importance for the hegemony school than for the security school, as the former emphasizes continuities in U.S. 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 U.S. hegemony in the decades preceding 9/11. Many cite the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, authored by Zalmay Khalilzad and Abram Shulsky under the supervision of Wolfowitz, 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 dubious intelligence, exaggerated the Iraqi threat, and downplayed the risks of invasion. For the hegemony school, this suggests that the administration “wanted war,” to paraphrase Record’s book title, and that its later claims of reluctantly going to war are self-serving myths.
Some Bush administration officials have deviated from the official security-focused explanation and acknowledged the significance of broader ideological or hegemonic objectives. CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir that top administration members seemed uninterested in the details of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, interpreting this as indicating a pre-decision to invade Iraq using WMD 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 more likely 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
Why is it difficult to reconcile the hegemony and security schools? 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 moment while acknowledging the historical context of U.S. hegemony and idealism. In my own efforts at synthesis, I have argued that a bipartisan “regime change consensus” on Iraq formed during the 1990s, predisposing the U.S. foreign policy establishment to support Saddam’s removal and to view containment as a failing policy. Broad agreement on U.S. hegemony reinforced this consensus, making the Iraq War appear logical to many U.S. elites. Nevertheless, 9/11 was a critical variable that drastically reduced America’s tolerance for threats like Iraq while providing U.S. leaders with greater latitude to pursue risky strategies.
One way to synthesize these schools is to create a division of causal labor, where the hegemony school helps explain “Why Iraq?” and the security school addresses “Why now?” Hegemony school analysts often question: If the U.S. was truly concerned about weapons of mass destruction proliferation, why not prioritize countries with more advanced programs, like North Korea? If terrorism was the primary 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. In the hegemonic framework, Iraq was more of an opportunity than a threat, and its alleged weapons of mass destruction programs were a pretext rather than a primary motive. As former CIA intelligence analyst Paul Pillar bluntly states, concern about such weapons “was not the principal or even a major reason the Bush administration went to war.” It was “at most a subsidiary motivator of the policy.” Indeed, as Pillar and others argue, the Bush administration utilized the intelligence process not in a good-faith effort to accurately assess Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities, but rather to gather – if not inflate – evidence to support a pre-determined case for regime change.
However, the hegemony school struggles to answer the “Why now?” question. If the bipartisan pursuit of hegemony and liberal idealism are constants in U.S. foreign policy, why did the Iraq War not 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 that few analysts dispute: a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is virtually unimaginable without the catalyst of 9/11.
An interesting point of convergence between the security and hegemony schools is that the end of the Cold War is a crucial precondition for the Iraq War. The notion of the United States invading a mid-sized country – previously a Soviet satellite – to change its regime during the Cold War seems improbable. The hegemony school particularly emphasizes the significance of unipolarity, which it believes fostered hegemonic ambitions, both realist and liberal, within the U.S. imagination. This raises the question of whether the resurgence of multipolarity will deter future U.S. attempts at direct regime change.
The relationship between the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War remains an under-explored area. Scholars like Helfont, Christian Alfonsi, and myself have argued that the Gulf War’s inconclusive outcome initiated a pattern of conflict between the U.S. and Iraq that festered throughout the 1990s, creating a strong desire within the U.S. political establishment to “finish the job,” even before 9/11. There was, after all, no war with Iran or North Korea in the 1990s, nor was there an Iran or North Korean Liberation Act. However, the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act declared regime change as official U.S. policy towards Iraq. Relatively few works, however, systematically trace U.S.-Iraqi relations throughout this period, although Helfont’s recent book significantly addresses this by tracing Iraq’s challenge to the post-Cold War, U.S.-led international order throughout the 1990s.
Despite attempts at synthesis, a significant tension remains between the security and hegemony schools, making full reconciliation challenging. It is difficult to simultaneously view the war as both predetermined and contingent – and equally difficult to portray the Bush administration as both fixated on regime change and genuinely open to alternative means of disarming Iraq. Moreover, as this analysis demonstrates, primary source evidence can be interpreted to support both major perspectives.
The points of divergence between the security and hegemony schools also influence the overall interpretation of the war. Was it an understandable tragedy or an avoidable and unforgivable blunder? In terms of periodization, were the war’s roots essentially in the post-9/11 response, or do they extend back decades in U.S. foreign policy? Finally, does the Iraq War, especially the controversial Bush Doctrine, represent a radical departure in U.S. diplomatic history or a continuation of prior trends, goals, and ideas?
What Was the True Purpose of “Coercive Diplomacy”?
Scholars’ positions in the security-hegemony debate inevitably shape their understanding of other key questions surrounding the war’s origins. This essay now addresses two additional issues that have divided scholars, starting with the question of why Bush pursued a “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 12th, at the United Nations, he demanded that Iraq readmit weapons inspectors or face forceful removal. He also sought congressional authorization for the use of force against Iraq. Simultaneously, the build-up of U.S. troops in the region provided a credible threat of force to back this final diplomatic effort. Rice describes this strategy as “coercive diplomacy.”
But what was the real objective of this coercive diplomacy? Was it a genuine attempt to peacefully disarm Iraq? Or was it a tactic to gain legitimacy and allied and domestic political support for a pre-determined policy of regime change? This debate is crucial for determining when the Bush administration made the decision for war and the extent to which it was simply determined to achieve regime change regardless of circumstances. While the security-hegemony debate is somewhat deterministic, the coercive diplomacy debate raises questions about the war’s contingency and potential off-ramps.
Leffler argues that in early 2002, Bush was “not yet ready to choose between containment and regime change,” and remained undecided into the fall of 2002. Bush was conflicted about whether disarmament could be achieved without regime change. Coercive diplomacy represented a final attempt to resolve this question. In adopting this strategy, he accepted the possibility that war might be averted and Saddam might remain in power, at least temporarily. He also, for the moment, disregarded the advice of more hawkish advisors like Cheney and Rumsfeld who believed working through the United Nations would be counterproductive. As Leffler writes, Bush “decided to see if he could accomplish his key objectives … without war.” In this account, Bush did not decide to invade until January 2003, after Iraqi authorities failed to fully comply with the renewed 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 in supporting new inspections, the Bush administration genuinely sought to test Iraqi cooperation and avoid war.
These analyses emphasize the contingency of Bush’s approach to Iraq. While some Bush officials may have been passionate advocates for regime change, Bush nonetheless proceeded deliberately and gave peaceful disarmament methods a final opportunity. He did so because his priority was disarmament, regardless of the means, not regime change for ulterior motives.
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” regarding Iraq. Coercive diplomacy was a sincere attempt to avoid war, but Saddam’s non-compliance with inspections 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 and place the decision to invade much earlier than early 2003. Mazarr argues 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 began 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 virtually no debate within his administration about whether invading Iraq was a sound idea, suggesting that the decision had already been made 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.
My own research aligns with Mazarr’s and further suggests that the idea that Bush sought to restore containment through coercive diplomacy is implausible. Bush had already argued earlier in 2002 that containment was inadequate to address the “nexus” threat. Moreover, most of his advisors and the policy establishment already viewed containment as a failed strategy. Finally, the Bush administration was deeply skeptical of 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. They therefore view coercive diplomacy as a façade to legitimize a pre-decided war. Butt, for example, argues that Iraq could not have taken any action to avoid war because the U.S. had decided to crush a rival to re-establish generalized deterrence. John Prados argues that Bush made the decision for war in early spring 2002, and Richard Haass places the decision in July 2002, both predating the start of coercive diplomacy.
As with the core security-hegemony divide, the debate about coercive diplomacy resists easy resolution. For scholars like Leffler, the situation remained fluid and contingent until just months before the invasion. For scholars like Mazarr, the war was virtually inevitable once the Bush administration focused on Iraq in early 2002. A possible synthesis might 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, if not a fully finalized determination. If anything, coercive diplomacy might be another under-examined aspect of the Iraq War, often overlooked by analyses that attribute the war’s origins solely to security or hegemony concerns. Such oversights can lead to overly deterministic explanations that leave little room for contingency.
One way to address this impasse might be through more analysis of the State Department’s role in the lead-up to war. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage supported the war but were not fervent advocates, and many skeptics of the war held senior positions within the State Department. As more sources become available, it will be valuable 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 could illuminate whether there was genuine uncertainty within the administration and openness to non-violent solutions, as Leffler suggests, or whether the U.S. was 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 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 tensions persist because they approach this evidence through different analytical lenses. For example, Leffler argues that Blair’s correspondence with Bush after 9/11 indicates that neither leader was rushing to 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’s caution was merely against rushing into war without building a coalition. Porter, author of a book on Britain’s war in Iraq, also draws heavily on the Iraq Inquiry and arrives at a similar conclusion. He contends that the Blair government was as ideologically committed to strategic primacy and 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 interpretation among scholars using the same documents underscore the importance of the interpretative frameworks analysts bring to their sources. Consequently, new sources will not automatically lead to a convergence of interpretive camps.
The Role of Neoconservatives: How Significant Was Their Influence?
The final major question this essay addresses regarding the Iraq War’s origins is the role of neoconservatives. Were they the intellectual architects of this war, or were they peripheral to the decision to invade? While the alignment is not perfect, the security school tends to downplay the influence of neoconservatives, while the hegemony school usually argues for their central importance.
Neoconservatives represent a loosely defined intellectual movement that has evolved considerably since its origins in the 1960s. Vaisse defines third-wave neoconservatism as a nationalistic movement that peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s, advocating for U.S. primacy, “national greatness,” and the spread 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 debate about their role in instigating the Iraq War has been contentious. Initial commentary often crudely suggested that a “cabal” of neoconservatives hijacked U.S. foreign policy and steered the nation into a disastrous war. For instance, then-Senator Joe Biden, who voted to authorize the Iraq War but later regretted it, stated in July 2003, “They seem to have captured the heart and mind of the President, and they’re controlling the foreign policy agenda.” Frank Harvey convincingly argues that these narratives are not only simplistic but also provide cover for the many 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 strong stance, arguing they were entirely extraneous and, in fact, lost most of the debates on Iraq prior to the invasion. Leffler and Mazarr argue that while neoconservatives were present in the Bush administration, neither Bush nor the top tier of decision-makers were neoconservatives themselves. Leffler downplays the role of neoconservatism or any ideology in the administration’s decision-making, emphasizing security motives 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 crucial decision-makers in the administration, were not neoconservatives but “primacists” and consistent hard-liners who had never shown concern for democratization or human rights in their long 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 experience.
These authors agree that neoconservatives like Wolfowitz may have pushed for regime change, but their presence in the administration was not essential for the war to occur. Mazarr also minimizes 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 they provided an ideological veneer for a war that was fundamentally about power. Interestingly, some neoconservatives themselves concur with minimizing their own roles. 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 in the liberal hegemony school, argue that neoconservatives played a crucial role in causing the Iraq War. For them, neoconservatism helps answer a key 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 both within the administration and in public discourse. They helped set the post-9/11 agenda with a focus on Iraq, at a time when figures like Rice and Powell seemed skeptical of such a focus. They advanced various arguments for war: the nexus threat, Saddam’s brutality, protecting U.S. interests in the region, promoting democracy, transforming the Middle East, asserting U.S. power, and even improving Israeli-Palestinian relations. Without these ideas, Flibbert concludes, invading Iraq would not have made sense, making the actions of neoconservatives essential to explaining the war.
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 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 each week. He notes that while Bush may have campaigned as a restraint-minded realist, he and Rice essentially adopted a neoconservative worldview after 9/11, frequently speaking of a U.S. obligation to topple tyrants and spread liberal values. Other analysts demonstrate how neoconservatives spearheaded the promotion of damning, though questionable, information about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs and links to al-Qaeda, which helped to sell the war.
Journalistic accounts of the Iraq War also tend to highlight the role of neoconservative networks and personalities in paving the way to war. They effectively illustrate the close personal connections between neoconservative intellectuals and Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi with top Bush administration officials. While these accounts may not always present systematic arguments about the war, they certainly demonstrate that neoconservative influence permeated the administration and the foreign policy establishment at the time.
The neoconservative issue is relevant to broader questions about the Iraq War and recent U.S. foreign policy. Was ideology a fundamental motivator for the decision to invade, or was it a justification developed to gain public support for the war? Is simply removing neoconservatives the solution to restoring balance and restraint to U.S. foreign policy after Iraq, or is more profound change needed? Are neoconservatives simply a modern 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 broader history of ideas and intellectuals in U.S. diplomatic history.
Iraq War Scholarship and its Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy
The prolonged and costly nature of the Iraq War has profoundly shaped discussions about its lessons for U.S. foreign policy, and the competing interpretations of the war’s origins are directly relevant to these debates. The majority of scholars in both the security and hegemony schools agree that the Iraq War was a mistake, if not worse. However, 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 foreign policy establishment. Hal Brands and Peter Feaver refer to an “empathy defense,” arguing that “greater sensitivity to constraints, alternatives, and context can lead to a more favorable view of decisions taken in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.” In this view, Bush faced an unprecedented security threat after 9/11 and launched a misguided war marred by intelligence failures, planning deficiencies, and execution errors.
However, these errors do not necessarily mean that the United States needs to fundamentally rethink its position of global leadership. Many conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberal internationalists have concluded 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. Brands argues that “the Iraq hangover” should not make U.S. leaders “strategically sluggish just as the dangers posed by great power rivals were growing.” America’s defense of the liberal international order, they contend, has been overwhelmingly beneficial for U.S. interests as well as global democracy, prosperity, and peace. The United States can continue to play this role while avoiding obvious mistakes like the Iraq invasion. Nor does this war necessitate a wholesale dismantling of the foreign policy establishment.
U.S. leaders appear to broadly agree with this interpretation of the lessons of Iraq, including figures like President Barack Obama, who initially opposed the war. Obama, President Donald Trump, and President Biden have all criticized the Iraq War and have 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 affirm the indispensability of engaged U.S. leadership and military primacy. For these scholars and leaders, the lesson of Iraq might be summarized as “Don’t do stupid shit,” as Obama famously quipped. Instead, the country should continue to function as the linchpin 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 advisor, favorably reviewed or endorsed Leffler’s book, which offers minimal critique of U.S. grand strategy. Bolton, a neoconservative architect of the war, praises Leffler for acknowledging 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,” nonetheless 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 strongly disagree with this interpretation of the Iraq War’s lessons. They argue that the war demonstrates the failure of an overly ambitious and hyper-interventionist grand strategy of primacy. Primacy, as Wertheim argues, requires the United States to maintain military forces globally and prevent the rise of great-power challengers, while also fostering a sense of messianic exceptionalism. He concludes that “the invasion of Iraq emerged from this logic,” and that unless the United States fundamentally rethinks its global role, it will inevitably stumble into more unnecessary conflicts.
For these critics, the Iraq War also highlighted the narrow-mindedness and conformity 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 led to unnecessary wars, staggering human and financial costs, balancing behavior from rivals, and the erosion of U.S. leadership credibility both domestically and internationally. Using the Iraq War and other missteps as leverage, they aim to challenge the limited, stagnant discourse within the policy establishment and push U.S. grand strategy towards “realism and restraint,” in Walt’s words, while prioritizing resources for preserving democracy and prosperity at home.
In summary, competing interpretations of the war’s origins are deeply intertwined with debates about its lessons. It is appropriate for scholars to contest how this war should inform the future of U.S. foreign policy. However, participants in this debate risk distorting history through ideological lenses and using it to bolster pre-existing arguments. This article suggests that even as the United States shifts its focus towards great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain hotly contested and profoundly consequential for America’s global role. This is particularly true 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 future actions and thinking, just as differing perspectives on the Vietnam War influenced a previous generation.
Moving Beyond the Binary: Cultural and Global Perspectives on 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 broad spectrum of analysis, they offer a valuable overview of the field 20 years after the war began. Currently, the hegemony school likely has a larger following among war scholars, although the war’s architects tend to align with the security school.
The security-hegemony debate is not merely “academic.” It represents a distinct interpretive divide that shapes how scholars approach their sources and leads to divergent answers to other key questions. This divide also informs ongoing debates about U.S. foreign policy, with each school suggesting different lessons from the war. The polarization of this debate is real but not ideal. Scholars should continue to strive to synthesize these perspectives. Historians are particularly well-suited for this task because they prioritize holistic, narrative, and multi-variable analysis, rather than the emphasis on parsimony and generalizability often found in political science.
One way to move beyond the security-hegemony binary might be to adopt new methodological approaches to the Iraq War. The security-hegemony divide largely operates within traditional approaches to the study of 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 example, disrupted a debate focused on orthodox and revisionist accounts of the Cold War’s origins. The conversation shifted to how the Cold War reshaped global history and intersected with trends like decolonization, as well as how the agency of smaller powers influenced the superpower rivalry. Some scholars have already advanced more global accounts of the Iraq War by exploring Iraqi sources, the role of the United Nations, and the regional politics of the Iraq conflict. Until more primary sources on Bush administration decision-making become available, this may be a more productive path than further entrenchment in the security-hegemony divide.
Additionally, a cultural turn could be constructive for Iraq War scholarship. The cultural turn in diplomatic history led to greater attention on how cultural factors such as race, gender, religion, language, and memory shape policy and strategy. Discussion of interests and ideas took a backseat to construction, imagination, narratives, symbols, and meaning in both elite and popular culture. The transnational turn, moreover, highlighted the role of nonstate actors as important forces in the global arena. Scholars in this vein demonstrated how a wider range of actors challenged the nation-state, formed networks, and exchanged ideas across borders, thus placing national politics in a global context.
Indeed, there has been valuable work in history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies on the role of culture in the Iraq War and the broader “War on Terror.” Andrew Preston and Lauren Turek examine how religion shaped Bush’s worldview and foreign policy. Melani McAlister and Deepa Kumar explore how media and popular culture portrayals of the Middle East helped justify the use of force there to domestic audiences. 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 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 these gaps 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. There is significant potential for this type of synthesis as Iraq War scholarship progresses.
Joseph Stieb is a historian and an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge, 2021). He is working on a second book about Americans’ interpretations of terrorism since the 1960s. He has published additional work in Diplomatic History, Modern American History, The International History Review, War on the Rocks, and other publications. He can be followed on Twitter @joestieb.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Theo Milonopoulos and Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt for suggestions about this article.
