Twenty years after the United States led the invasion of Iraq, numerous explanations attempt to clarify the motivations behind this pivotal war. Initially, political scientists and journalists dominated the discourse, but historians have increasingly contributed to the scholarship in recent years, including significant new works by Melvyn Leffler and Samuel Helfont published this year. The invasion of Iraq remains a defining foreign policy decision of the 21st century for the U.S. presidency, making the extensive analysis unsurprising.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the debate surrounding the origins of the Iraq War as it has evolved over the past two decades. It aims to objectively present the competing perspectives, clearly outlining their interpretations, identifying areas of disagreement, and considering the influence of politics and ideology on scholarly work. This exploration will demonstrate how varying interpretations of the war have arisen from the diverse lenses, methodologies, and objectives employed by scholars.
It is important to note that this article cannot cover every aspect of Iraq War scholarship. Therefore, the focus will be on three crucial questions that are central to understanding the war’s origins and continue to be debated among scholars. 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 adopted 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, to what extent did neoconservatives influence the decision-making process leading to the Iraq War?
The first question—security versus hegemony—represents the primary point of contention among scholars analyzing the Iraq War. Security-focused interpretations, exemplified by Leffler’s recent work, argue that the Bush administration’s main objective was to protect the United States from further terrorist attacks in the altered post-9/11 environment. This perspective suggests that threats, such as the one posed by Iraq, needed to be reassessed in this new context. In contrast, scholars adhering to the hegemony school, like Ahsan Butt, argue that the Bush administration leveraged 9/11 and the perceived threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as a pretext. They posit that the war was primarily driven by a desire to achieve regional and global hegemony. This fundamental divide between security and hegemony perspectives influences the understanding of related issues, including the nature of Bush’s coercive diplomacy and the role of neoconservatives in the lead-up to the war.
A valuable historiographical analysis must begin by explaining the current scholarly landscape and suggesting future directions for research. Interpreting history is inherently challenging, particularly in this case, as scholars have access to only a limited amount of primary source documentation. Consequently, much of the debate has centered on how to approach, critique, and contextualize the same set of sources. Furthermore, political and policy discussions have significantly impacted the scholarship, sometimes in less than ideal ways.
Methodologically, the security school largely accepts policymakers’ stated motives, both at the time and retrospectively, as genuine unless compelling contradictory evidence emerges. For this school, the critical context for understanding the war is the intense post-9/11 atmosphere, where national security was paramount and Iraq was widely perceived as a significant threat.
Conversely, the hegemony school argues that key aspects of the war are inexplicable through a security-focused lens. They contend that scholars should be skeptical of policymakers’ accounts, especially given the incentive to downplay ideological or unrealistic aspects of their actions. Instead, these scholars interpret the Iraq War decision within 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. They believe these pre-existing views are more relevant to explaining the war than immediate security concerns.
Given the recency and contentiousness of the Iraq War, it has not only been a subject of academic inquiry but also a battleground for competing political and policy perspectives, especially regarding the lessons to be learned. Debates about the war’s origins have tangible implications for U.S. foreign policy as it navigates an era of great-power competition. Security school scholars often view the Iraq War as an understandable, albeit significant, error given the traumatic post-9/11 context and the widespread belief in Iraq’s WMD programs. Consequently, they typically do not advocate for radical changes to post-Iraq U.S. foreign policy. In sharp contrast, the hegemony school argues that the war was a result of a detrimental bipartisan pursuit of global primacy and warns that similar disasters are likely if this grand strategy is not abandoned.
It is important to note that this article does not aim to defend the security-hegemony dichotomy or to take sides in this debate. Instead, it seeks to clarify its parameters, evolution, and significance. Some may criticize the depiction of two broad interpretive camps as an oversimplification of nuanced scholarship. To address this, this article will explore potential avenues for synthesizing these interpretations. While the security and hegemony camps do have some overlap, as discussed below, this division also reflects genuine scholarly disagreements about the primary drivers of the war. Finally, this essay concludes by advocating for more global and cultural analyses of the Iraq War to move beyond this binary framework.
Nevertheless, there is value in “lumping” perspectives in historiographical analysis, especially for those new to the field or non-specialists seeking a broad understanding of existing scholarship. This approach helps to identify the key questions that continue to divide and shape the field, questions that should be addressed in future research on the Iraq War.
Therefore, this essay does not exhaustively cover all scholarship on the Iraq War, nor does it offer its own historical or theoretical explanation of the war’s causes. Both tasks would require significantly more space. 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 failures, and the international diplomacy preceding the war, receive less attention. While these are crucial for a complete understanding of the war’s origins, they have not been the primary focus of scholarly disagreement, which is the central concern of this essay.
Security vs. Hegemony: The Core Divide
Was the United States’ invasion of Iraq a misguided attempt to neutralize a security threat in the heightened post-9/11 environment, or did U.S. leaders exploit 9/11 as a pretext to pursue a war of opportunity driven by hegemonic ambitions?
While “a little of both” or the idea of a false dichotomy might seem like obvious answers, the scholarly divide between security and hegemony is significant. It reflects genuine differences in interpretation, contextualization, and even political perspectives. Scholars themselves often identify security- or hegemony-based factors as most salient. Security-focused explanations prioritize security imperatives in the post-9/11 context, while hegemony-focused explanations view security concerns about Iraqi WMDs and terrorist ties as pretexts for long-term hegemonic goals. Each perspective frames the war within different contexts: the security school emphasizes the post-9/11 moment, and the hegemony school highlights the preceding decades shaping the worldviews of war architects.
The Security School
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 acknowledging broader U.S. goals and ideologies, they argue that the Bush administration’s pursuit of security after 9/11 was the primary driver for invading Iraq. Leffler argues that Bush went to war “not out of a fanciful idea to make Iraq democratic, but to rid it of its deadly weapons, its links to terrorists, and its ruthless, unpredictable tyrant.” Jervis also emphasizes 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” as the fundamental cause. Bozo similarly 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 as crucial to understanding the Iraq War. Leffler and Jervis point out that while the Bush administration included regime-change proponents, Iraq was not a primary focus in its initial months, nor were significant steps taken towards toppling Saddam Hussein. Bush initially opposed nation-building and advocated strategic restraint.
Alt Text: President George W. Bush addresses the nation on television following the September 11th terrorist attacks, conveying a sense of national urgency and resolve in the face of unprecedented threats.
However, the 9/11 attacks dramatically reshaped U.S. foreign policy and paved the way for the Iraq War. The Bush administration experienced intense anger, fear, and vulnerability, prompting a re-evaluation of security threats. Leffler argues that for the Bush team, “the risk calculus had changed dramatically after 9/11.” They could no longer tolerate states pursuing WMDs, threatening neighbors or the U.S., and supporting terrorism.
Iraq, in particular, was viewed by the Bush administration as the “nexus” of these threats. Bush argued that Iraq uniquely combined “state sponsors of terror … sworn enemies of America … hostile governments that threatened their neighbors … regimes that pursued WMD [weapons of mass destruction].” While mistakes and exaggerations regarding Iraq’s WMDs and terrorist ties occurred, the security school argues that top officials genuinely believed these threats were real and growing. Furthermore, the consensus at the time, even among nations opposing the war, underestimated the extent to which Saddam had ceased meaningful WMD production. Saddam’s obstruction of inspectors for nearly a decade also created a reasonable impression that he intended to restart 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 wait for the Iraqi threat to fully materialize. This led to the declaration of a right to launch preventive wars, which became central to the Bush Doctrine. The security school interprets this doctrine not as a grand design for primacy but as an adaptation of established concepts regarding the use of force in response to new threats.
According to the security school, the Iraq War was not primarily driven by ambitions of U.S. hegemony or spreading liberal values. While U.S. military dominance and unipolarity made regime change feasible, these were not the primary motivations. Leffler asserts that “missionary fervor or idealistic impulses” played a minor role in the Bush team’s decisions. Tunc argues that hegemony is an unlikely motive, as removing a relatively weak rival like Iraq would not significantly alter the global balance of power.
Idealistic visions and global power imbalances existed before 9/11. The attacks were the critical new element that triggered a reassessment of national security, ultimately leading to the invasion. Leffler summarizes the security-centric 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 view the Bush administration’s Iraq policy with more empathy. Leffler emphasizes the emotional impact of 9/11, including officials’ visits to Ground Zero and interactions with first responders and bereaved families. He stresses 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 perceived as an imminent threat. Crucially, the security school maintains that the WMD-terrorism-rogue state threat was not a pretext but the genuine driving force behind the war. Jervis argues that given the widespread belief about Iraqi WMDs and the post-9/11 security reassessment, “There is little reason to doubt that Bush and his colleagues sincerely believed that Saddam had active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programs.”
This perspective aligns with Bush administration officials’ memoirs, which also emphasize security motives. These accounts highlight the emotional weight of the post-9/11 period, where the administration felt responsible for failing to prevent 9/11 and feared another attack. Rice recalled, “I could not have forgiven myself had there been another attack.” Bush wrote that “before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage,” but “through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed.” Protecting the nation from further terrorist attacks became the top 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 imperatives necessitated removing this threat.
This alignment is understandable given security school scholars like Leffler’s reliance on interviews with administration insiders. However, it also raises concerns about potential bias in accepting policymakers’ accounts at face value. Bush officials have a vested interest in portraying themselves as open to non-violent solutions and not driven by idealistic crusades. The hegemony school adopts a more critical approach to these claims.
The Hegemony School
The hegemony school includes scholars such as Butt, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, Patrick Porter, Paul Pillar, G. John Ikenberry, David Harvey, John Mearsheimer, and Jeffrey Record. While not exclusively realists in international relations theory, they often lean in that direction. They acknowledge security concerns but consider them radically incomplete explanations for the Iraq War. Their central argument is that the primary motivation was maintaining and expanding U.S. hegemony. However, the hegemony school diverges on whether the U.S. sought realist or liberal forms of hegemony.
Regarding realist hegemony, Butt argues that the war stemmed from the “desire to maintain the United States’ global standing and hierarchic order,” with security concerns serving as a pretext for domestic consumption rather than a causal factor. 9/11 threatened U.S. hegemony, leading to a “performative war” to re-establish “generalized deterrence”—the reputation for unchallengeable power and willingness to use it, which underpins hegemony. Butt 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 did not suggest Iraq was an imminent threat but was a convenient target to demonstrate U.S. power, being militarily weak, diplomatically isolated, and unpopular with the U.S. public.
Stephen Wertheim agrees, arguing that “the decision to invade Iraq stemmed from the pursuit of global primacy,” aimed at “dissuad[ing] other countries from rising and challenging American dominance.” Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney concur: “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, “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.”
Alt Text: A convoy of U.S. military vehicles patrols a dusty Iraqi road in 2004, illustrating the extensive and sustained American military presence in Iraq following the invasion.
Scholars in the realist-hegemony camp see the Iraq War as a tool to maintain unipolarity and U.S. freedom of action. They argue the Bush administration used 9/11 and the Iraqi WMD threat as a “pretext,” “opportunity,” or “rationale” to advance this agenda, believing it would eliminate terrorist threats and other challenges to U.S. power. Democratization was a secondary motive to justify a war driven by power politics.
Walt, Porter, and Bacevich also believe the U.S. sought to demonstrate power and preserve hegemony by invading Iraq, but they argue the Bush administration specifically aimed to solidify liberal hegemony. This grand strategy sought to spread liberal democracy and capitalism, seen as both inherently good and means to maintain global dominance. The Cold War had restrained this strategy, but the Soviet collapse allowed the U.S. to pursue it with excessive 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 view, when attacked on 9/11, the U.S. did not question whether liberal hegemony was generating resistance. Instead, the Bush administration, with bipartisan support, intensified the pursuit of liberal hegemony and asserted a unilateral right to change regimes of rival states through preventive war—the Bush Doctrine. While the security school sees this doctrine as a response to new threats, the hegemony school views it as a plan to preserve U.S. primacy, asserting a unilateral right to eliminate potential threats like Iraq and prevent the rise of peer competitors. Some scholars also point to protecting Israel and U.S. oil interests as additional hegemonic motives, although these are more controversial.
For Walt, Porter, and others, the Iraq War arose from the pursuit of liberal hegemony—a revisionist grand strategy to spread democracy and liberal values, topple tyrants, and create a more peaceful and cooperative global order. The U.S. aimed not only to remove a threat but to transform Middle Eastern politics by establishing democracy in Iraq. They cite evidence that democracy promotion was a significant motive, particularly for Bush, not just a justification. The 2002 National Security Strategy reflected this 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 U.S. policymakers that autocracies inherently threaten long-term peace, prosperity, and security, and only a democratic international order can ensure these. Bush argued in 2003, “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 also convinced the Bush administration that regime change in Iraq would be easy, with Iraqis readily adopting democracy after Baathist removal.
Mearsheimer calls the Iraq War “probably the best example of this kind of liberal interventionism” dominant in post-Cold War U.S. thinking. Bacevich argues WMDs were a “cover story,” and the war’s main aims 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.”
This internal divide within the hegemony school partly reflects the different worldviews among top Bush administration officials. Rumsfeld and Cheney leaned towards a realist paradigm, prioritizing power over democracy promotion, while figures like Wolfowitz saw the Iraq War as part of a liberal project. Bush’s views encompassed elements of both.
Despite these differences, the hegemony school shares core commonalities. They agree that the U.S. had been pursuing primacy before 9/11, that 9/11 both threatened and provided an opportunity to reassert it, and that Iraq was a convenient target for solidifying hegemony rather than a genuine threat.
Contextually, the pre-9/11 era is more significant for the hegemony school than the security school, emphasizing continuities in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War. They highlight that key war architects like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz had long advocated for U.S. hegemony. Many cite the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, authored by Zalmay Khalilzad and Abram Shulsky under 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 other future Bush officials also signed open letters in the late 1990s advocating for regime change in Iraq and a primacist grand strategy.
Following 9/11, these hegemonists quickly linked the Baathist regime to terrorism despite limited evidence, promoted questionable intelligence, exaggerated the Iraqi threat, and downplayed invasion risks. The hegemony school sees this as evidence that the administration “wanted war,” and its later claims of reluctant entry into war are self-serving myths.
Some Bush administration officials have contradicted the official security-focused explanation and acknowledged the role of larger ideological or hegemonic goals. CIA Director George Tenet wrote that top administration members seemed uninterested in WMD program details, suggesting they used WMDs as a pretext to invade Iraq. 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 real reasons. White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan similarly concluded that “removing the ‘grave and gathering danger’ Iraq supposedly posed was primarily a means for achieving the far more grandiose objective of reshaping the Middle East as a region of peaceful democracies.”
Synthesizing the Security and Hegemony Schools
Can the security and hegemony schools find common ground? Some scholars have attempted to bridge these perspectives. Works by Michael Mazarr, Robert Draper, and Justin Vaisse examine the post-9/11 national security urgency while acknowledging the historical context of U.S. hegemony and idealism. In his own synthesis, Joseph Stieb argues that a bipartisan “regime change consensus” on Iraq emerged in the 1990s, predisposing the U.S. foreign policy establishment to support Saddam’s removal and view containment as a failing policy. Broad agreement on U.S. hegemony fueled this consensus, making the Iraq War seem logical to many U.S. elites. However, 9/11 was a critical factor that drastically reduced America’s tolerance for threats like Iraq and provided greater latitude for risky strategies.
One way to synthesize these schools is to assign causal roles: the hegemony school explains “Why Iraq?” and the security school addresses “Why now?” Hegemony school analysts question why, if WMD proliferation was the real concern, the U.S. didn’t focus on countries with more advanced programs like North Korea, or if terrorism was the issue, why not target more active state sponsors like Iran?
These inconsistencies regarding “Why Iraq?” highlight a weakness in security-based explanations. Iraq, which became central to 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 WMD programs were a pretext, not the primary motive. Paul Pillar, former CIA analyst, states that WMD concern “was not the principal or even a major reason the Bush administration went to war” but “at most a subsidiary motivator.” He and others argue that the Bush administration misused intelligence not to accurately assess Iraqi WMDs but to gather or inflate evidence to justify regime change.
After all, as Pillar and others argue, the Bush administration used the intelligence process not in a good-faith effort to accurately assess Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction but to gather — if not inflate — evidence to support the case for regime change.
However, the hegemony school struggles to answer “Why now?” If the bipartisan pursuit of hegemony and liberal idealism were constant U.S. foreign policy features, why didn’t the Iraq War occur earlier, perhaps after inspectors left Iraq in 1998? By focusing on how 9/11 reshaped U.S. foreign policy and threat perception, the security school highlights a crucial point: a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is almost unimaginable without 9/11.
An area of agreement is that the Cold War’s end was a crucial precondition for the Iraq War. A U.S. invasion of a mid-sized country, once a Soviet satellite, to change its regime during the Cold War seems implausible. The hegemony school emphasizes unipolarity as enabling hegemonic ambitions, realist or liberal, to dominate U.S. thinking. This raises questions about whether the return of multipolarity will deter future U.S. regime change attempts.
The relationship between the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War is an under-examined area. Scholars like Helfont, Christian Alfonsi, and Stieb argue that the Gulf War’s unresolved outcome initiated a pattern of conflict between the U.S. and Iraq throughout the 1990s, creating a desire within the U.S. political establishment to “finish the job” even before 9/11. Unlike Iran or North Korea, Iraq was subject to the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, declaring regime change as official U.S. policy. However, few studies systematically trace U.S.-Iraqi relations during this period, although Helfont’s recent book addresses this gap by analyzing Iraq’s challenge to the post-Cold War, U.S.-led international order throughout the 1990s.
Despite synthesis attempts, a significant tension remains between the security and hegemony schools, making reconciliation difficult. It is challenging to view the war as both predetermined and contingent, or to see the Bush administration as simultaneously obsessed with regime change and open to various disarmament methods. Primary sources support both major interpretations, further complicating resolution.
The security and hegemony schools’ contrasting viewpoints also shape the overall interpretation of the war. Was it an understandable tragedy or an avoidable and unforgivable error? In terms of periodization, was the war primarily a response to 9/11, or were its roots deeper in U.S. foreign policy history? Finally, did the Iraq War, especially the Bush Doctrine, represent a radical shift in U.S. diplomatic history or a continuation of prior trends, goals, and ideas?
What Was “Coercive Diplomacy” All About?
The chosen side in the security-hegemony debate influences how scholars interpret other key aspects of the war’s origins, including the purpose of Bush’s “coercive diplomacy” in late 2002 and early 2003.
In fall 2002, under pressure from UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush adopted a “diplomatic track” on Iraq. On September 12 at the UN, he demanded Iraq readmit weapons inspectors or face overthrow. He also sought congressional authorization for force. Simultaneously, U.S. troop buildup in the region added credibility to the threat of force behind this diplomatic effort. Rice describes this strategy as “coercive diplomacy.”
Was coercive diplomacy a genuine attempt at peaceful disarmament, or a tactic to gain legitimacy and political support for a pre-decided regime change policy? This debate determines when the Bush administration decided on war and whether it was irrevocably committed to regime change regardless of circumstances. Unlike the somewhat deterministic security-hegemony debate, the coercive diplomacy debate involves questions of contingency and potential alternatives.
Leffler argues that in early 2002, Bush was “not yet ready to choose between containment and regime change” and remained undecided until fall 2002. Bush was uncertain if disarmament was possible without regime change. Coercive diplomacy was a final attempt to determine this. In adopting this strategy, he accepted the possibility of avoiding war and Saddam remaining in power. He also temporarily dismissed hawkish advice from Cheney and Rumsfeld against UN involvement. Leffler writes Bush “decided to see if he could accomplish his key objectives … without war.” According to this view, Bush decided to invade in January 2003, after Iraq failed to fully comply with weapons inspections.
Other scholars, especially in the security school, agree with Leffler’s interpretation of coercive diplomacy. Frank Harvey argues it 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 believe the Bush administration genuinely sought to test Iraqi cooperation and avoid war through new inspections.
These analyses emphasize the contingency of Bush’s approach. While some Bush officials strongly favored regime change, Bush proceeded cautiously and gave peaceful disarmament a final chance, prioritizing disarmament over regime change for its own sake.
This account aligns with U.S. leaders’ descriptions of their actions. Bush states in his memoir, “My first choice was to use diplomacy” on Iraq. Coercive diplomacy was a sincere attempt to avoid war, but Saddam’s non-compliance forced Bush to choose war in early 2003. Rice similarly claimed, “We invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”
Alt Text: Secretary of State Colin Powell presents evidence to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, arguing for the urgency of action against Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction programs.
Michael Mazarr and others challenge Leffler’s account, placing 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 on diplomacy, but even Powell never questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. There was minimal debate within the administration about the fundamental soundness of invading, suggesting the decision was made before coercive diplomacy 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 administration quickly deemed inspections a failure in early 2003 and finalized the invasion decision in January.
Stieb’s research supports Mazarr, adding that the idea of Bush seeking to restore containment via coercive diplomacy is illogical. Bush had already argued earlier in 2002 that containment was inadequate for the “nexus” threat. Moreover, most advisors and the policy establishment considered containment obsolete. Finally, the Bush administration was deeply skeptical of inspections’ effectiveness and set unrealistically high success criteria, virtually predetermining failure.
Hegemony school scholars generally concur with Mazarr’s analysis of coercive diplomacy. They believe the Bush administration was not interested in peaceful resolution, seeking an opportunity to assert U.S. power. They view coercive diplomacy as a facade to legitimize a predetermined war. Butt argues Iraq could not have avoided war, as the U.S. had decided to crush a rival to re-establish generalized deterrence. John Prados argues Bush decided on war in early spring 2002, and Richard Haass places it in July 2002—all before coercive diplomacy began.
Like the security-hegemony divide, the coercive diplomacy debate resists easy resolution. Leffler views the situation as fluid until months before the invasion, while Mazarr sees the war as virtually inevitable once the Bush administration targeted Iraq in early 2002. A possible synthesis is that the administration’s deep pessimism about Saddam yielding to threats and complying with inspections constituted a de facto decision for war, if not a formal one. Coercive diplomacy might be an under-examined aspect, often overshadowed by security or hegemony explanations, leading to overly deterministic accounts that minimize contingency.
More analysis of the State Department’s role might offer insights. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage supported the war but were not fervent advocates, and many skeptics populated senior State Department roles. Future research, as more sources become available, could explore whether Powell or others questioned the fundamental decision to invade or pushed for a more thorough pursuit of coercive diplomacy. This might clarify whether genuine uncertainty and openness to non-violent solutions existed, as Leffler suggests, or if the U.S. was on an irreversible path to war before fall 2002, as Mazarr argues.
However, new documentary evidence may not fully resolve these disagreements. The UK Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot Report), published in 2016, released extensive primary sources and interviews on British Iraq policy from 2001 to 2009. While scholars have utilized this material, interpretive differences persist due to varying analytical frameworks. For example, Leffler argues Blair’s post-9/11 correspondence with Bush shows neither leader was rushing to war but establishing a general timeline for pressuring Iraq to disarm, supporting his view that the Bush administration was not fixated on war, explored other disarmament means, and only decided on war after exhausting alternatives.
Conversely, Butt argues these same sources show “war was decided upon very soon after — probably even on-9/11.” Blair told Bush on October 11, 2001, “I have no doubt we need to deal with Saddam” and “we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date.” Butt interprets this as Bush and Blair agreeing on regime change and reasserting U.S. hegemony in the Middle East almost immediately after 9/11, with Blair merely advising caution against rushing to war without building a coalition. Porter, drawing on the Iraq Inquiry, reaches a similar conclusion, arguing the Blair government was as ideologically committed to strategic primacy and liberal democracy promotion as Bush and primarily focused on legitimizing a British military campaign.
These discrepancies using the same documents highlight the impact of analysts’ interpretive frameworks. New sources alone will not necessarily bridge interpretive divides.
How Important Were the Neocons?
The final key question regarding the Iraq War’s origins is the role of neoconservatives. Were they the intellectual architects of the war, or were they peripheral to the decision to invade? While the alignment is not perfect, the security school tends to downplay neoconservatives, while the hegemony school usually emphasizes their central importance.
Neoconservatism is an evolving intellectual movement originating in the 1960s. Vaisse defines third-wave neoconservatism as a nationalistic movement peaking in the 1990s and early 2000s, advocating U.S. primacy, “national greatness,” and democracy promotion, with a unilateralist approach. Numerous 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, the extent of neoconservatives’ influence on the Iraq War decision is debated. Early commentary often simplistically portrayed a neoconservative “cabal” hijacking U.S. foreign policy and leading the nation into a disastrous war. Senator Joe Biden, who voted for the war but later regretted it, stated in 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 such narratives are simplistic and obscure the broader political support for the war that later became unpopular.
Harvey, Leffler, and others argue neoconservatives were either irrelevant or of secondary importance in causing the Iraq War. Harvey takes an extreme stance, claiming they were entirely peripheral and lost most internal debates on Iraq before the invasion. Leffler and Mazarr argue that while neoconservatives were present, neither Bush nor top decision-makers were neoconservatives. Leffler minimizes the role of neoconservatism or any ideology in administration decision-making, focusing instead on security motives.
Daalder and Lindsay describe Bush and most top advisors as “assertive nationalists” or “traditional hard-line conservatives willing to use American military power to defeat threats to U.S. security but reluctant as a general rule to use American primacy to remake the world in its image.” Jane Cramer and Edward Duggan contend that Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney—the key decision-makers—were not neoconservatives but “primacists” and consistent hard-liners with no prior concern for democratization or human rights. Journalist James Mann, in his history of Bush’s war cabinet, argues Bush primarily relied on “Vulcans” like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Armitage, and Dov Zakheim for foreign policy guidance, few of whom were neoconservatives. These Vulcans “were focused above all on American military power” and maintaining U.S. primacy, especially after Vietnam.
These authors agree that neoconservatives like Wolfowitz might have advocated for regime change, but their presence was not essential for the war. Mazarr also downplays neoconservatives’ role but not ideology in general, arguing 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 realist hegemony school scholars agree. Butt dismisses neoconservatives’ role, seeing them as providing ideological justification for a war driven by power. Ironically, some neoconservatives minimize their own roles. Kagan, for instance, argues security concerns drove decisions and the war “can be understood without reference to a neoconservative doctrine.”
Many scholars, especially in the liberal hegemony school, argue neoconservatives played a crucial role in causing the Iraq War. For them, neoconservatism helps explain why, post-9/11, the U.S. invaded a country that had not attacked it.
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 prioritize Iraq on the post-9/11 agenda when figures like Rice and Powell were more skeptical. They promoted various arguments for war: the nexus threat, Saddam’s brutality, protecting U.S. interests, advancing democracy, transforming the Middle East, asserting U.S. power, and improving Israeli-Palestinian relations. Flibbert concludes that without these ideas, invading Iraq would not have made sense, making neoconservative actions essential to explaining the war.
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 neoconservatives’ role in constructing a liberal hegemonic war. Pillar argues, “[t]he chief purpose of forcibly removing Saddam flowed from the central objectives of neoconservatism,” 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 substantial: over 20 neoconservatives held senior Bush administration positions, forming an activist core pushing for war with Iraq.
Vaisse notes that in 2003, Cheney ordered 30 copies of the neoconservative Weekly Standard weekly to the White House. He argues that while Bush campaigned as a restraint-minded realist, he and Rice adopted a neoconservative worldview post-9/11, frequently speaking of a U.S. duty to topple tyrants and spread liberal values. Other analysts show how neoconservatives spearheaded the promotion of damning, albeit questionable, information about Saddam’s WMD programs and al-Qaeda links to sell the war.
Journalistic accounts of the Iraq War also highlight the role of neoconservative networks and figures in paving the way to war, demonstrating close personal connections between neoconservative intellectuals and Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi with top Bush officials. While often lacking systematic arguments, they indicate significant neoconservative influence within the administration and foreign policy establishment at the time.
The neoconservative question is relevant to broader issues about the Iraq War and recent U.S. foreign policy. Was ideology a primary motivator or a post-hoc justification? Is removing neoconservatives sufficient to restore balance and restraint to U.S. foreign policy, or is deeper change needed? Are neoconservatives a modern manifestation of America’s exceptionalist identity and missionary impulses or a distinct modern ideological movement? These are vital questions for situating the Iraq War within the larger history of ideas and intellectuals in U.S. diplomatic history.
Iraq War Scholarship and U.S. Foreign Policy
The Iraq War’s protracted and costly nature has shaped discussions about its lessons for U.S. foreign policy. Competing interpretations of the war’s origins also inform these debates. Most scholars across both security and hegemony schools agree the Iraq War was a mistake, if not worse, but disagree on its implications for U.S. foreign policy.
Security-centric explanations tend towards a less critical view of the Bush administration and the foreign policy establishment. Hal Brands and Peter Feaver describe an “empathy defense,” arguing “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 post-9/11 threat and launched a flawed war with intelligence, planning, and execution errors.
However, these errors do not necessitate a radical rethinking of U.S. global leadership. Many conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberal internationalists conclude the lesson of Iraq is not to abandon an active global role but to avoid ambitious nation-building and democratization projects. Brands argues “the Iraq hangover” should not make U.S. leaders “strategically sluggish just as the dangers posed by great power rivals were growing.” They contend America’s defense of the liberal international order has been largely beneficial for U.S. interests, global democracy, prosperity, and peace. The U.S. can continue this role while avoiding mistakes like the Iraq invasion. Nor does this war necessitate overturning the foreign policy establishment.
U.S. leaders, including those who initially opposed the war like Barack Obama, seem to agree with this lesson. Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all criticized the Iraq War and shown skepticism towards nation-building interventions. Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy 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 necessity of engaged U.S. leadership and military primacy. For these scholars and leaders, the lesson of Iraq might be “Don’t do stupid shit,” as Obama quipped, while continuing as the anchor of the liberal world order.
Unsurprisingly, these figures favor Leffler’s security-focused narrative. Brands, Kagan, John Bolton, and Eric Edelman, Cheney’s deputy national security advisor, favorably reviewed Leffler’s book, which offers little critique of U.S. grand strategy. Bolton, a neoconservative war architect, praises Leffler for recognizing “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 called the Iraq War a “debacle” and “tragedy,” still calls Leffler’s book “the most serious scholarly study of the war’s origins” for similar reasons as Bolton.
Hegemony school scholars strongly disagree about the Iraq War’s lessons. They argue the war reveals the failure of an overly ambitious and hyper-interventionist grand strategy of primacy. Wertheim argues primacy requires maintaining U.S. forces globally and preventing great-power challengers, fueling messianic exceptionalism. He concludes “the invasion of Iraq emerged from this logic,” and without a fundamental rethinking of its global role, the U.S. will repeat similar unnecessary conflicts.
For these critics, the Iraq War also exposed the narrow-mindedness and conformism of the bipartisan policy establishment and its seeming addiction to an expansive global mission. This establishment, they argue, remains committed to a hegemonic role that has resulted in unnecessary wars, immense human and financial costs, counterbalancing by rivals, and diminished U.S. leadership credibility. Using the Iraq War and other errors as leverage, they aim to challenge the constrained policy establishment discourse and shift U.S. grand strategy towards “realism and restraint,” in Walt’s words, while prioritizing domestic democracy and prosperity.
In conclusion, competing interpretations of the war’s origins are intertwined with debates about its lessons. Scholarly contestation about how this war should inform U.S. foreign policy is appropriate. However, partisans risk filtering history through ideological lenses to win arguments.
Still, this article suggests that even as the United States refocuses toward great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain hotly contested and highly consequential for America’s global role.
Even as the U.S. reorients towards great-power competition, the Iraq War’s meanings and lessons remain intensely debated and highly significant for America’s global role. This is particularly true as the generation who fought in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ascends to leadership in the military and politics. Their interpretations of this conflict will profoundly shape their thinking and actions, much like competing viewpoints on the Vietnam War influenced a previous generation.
Cultural and Global Turns for the Iraq War
This paper’s central argument is that scholarship on the Iraq War’s causes can be effectively organized into security and hegemony schools. While simplifying diverse analyses, these categories provide a broad overview of the field two decades after the war began. Currently, the hegemony school appears to have more adherents among war scholars, while the war’s architects tend towards the security school.
The security-hegemony debate is not merely “academic”; it represents a genuine interpretive divide that shapes scholars’ approaches to sources and leads to divergent answers on key questions. This divide also influences ongoing U.S. foreign policy debates, with each school suggesting different lessons from the war. The polarization of this debate, while real, is not ideal. Scholars should continue efforts to synthesize these perspectives. Historians are particularly well-suited for this task, prioritizing holistic, narrative, and multi-variable analysis over the parsimony and generalizability often favored by political scientists.
One way to move beyond the security-hegemony binary is to adopt new methodological approaches to the Iraq War. This divide largely operates within traditional war studies methodologies, 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,” as Hahn describes.
New approaches could revitalize this seemingly entrenched binary. The global turn in Cold War historiography, for instance, moved beyond orthodox and revisionist accounts of the Cold War’s origins. The focus shifted to how the Cold War reshaped global history and intersected with decolonization, and how smaller powers influenced the superpower conflict. Some scholars have already advanced more global perspectives on the Iraq War by examining Iraqi sources, the UN’s role, and regional politics of the conflict. Until more sources on Bush administration decision-making become available, this may be a more productive direction than further entrenchment in the security-hegemony divide.
Additionally, a cultural turn could benefit Iraq War scholarship. The cultural turn in diplomatic history emphasized how cultural factors like race, gender, religion, language, and memory shape policy and strategy. Focus shifted from ideas and interests to construction, imagination, narratives, symbols, and meaning in elite and popular culture. The transnational turn further highlighted nonstate actors as significant global forces, showing how a broader range of actors challenged nation-states, formed networks, and exchanged ideas across borders, contextualizing national politics globally.
Interesting work in history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies has explored culture’s role in the Iraq War and the “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 force to domestic audiences. Edward Said, Zachary Lockman, and others argue the Iraq War should be understood in the context of Orientalist beliefs about supposedly backward, dangerous Arabs and Muslims needing Western rule.
Unfortunately, this work has often been siloed from mainstream Iraq War scholarship.
Many of these scholars have not consistently integrated cultural factors with the study of foreign policy or the causes of war.
Many cultural scholars have not consistently integrated cultural factors into foreign policy or war causation studies. Conversely, traditional scholars often overlook culture, race, gender, religion, and related factors. Students of the Iraq War and post-9/11 foreign policy should bridge this gap by examining how culture interacts with and shapes policy, perceptions of rivals, and decision-makers’ understanding of themselves and America’s global role. 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.
