Twenty years after the United States launched its invasion of Iraq, the question, Why Did Us Attack Iraq, remains intensely debated and analyzed. Numerous explanations have emerged, initially dominated by political scientists and journalists. However, historians have increasingly contributed to the scholarship, offering deeper historical context and nuanced interpretations. The Iraq War stands as a pivotal foreign policy decision of the 21st century, making the extensive scrutiny and analysis entirely understandable.
This article delves into the ongoing debate surrounding the origins of the Iraq War, tracing its development over the past two decades. It aims to provide a balanced overview of the competing viewpoints, clearly outlining different interpretations, highlighting areas of disagreement, and acknowledging the influence of political perspectives and ideologies on academic analysis. We will explore how varying viewpoints on the war have arisen from the diverse perspectives, methodologies, and objectives that scholars bring to this complex historical event.
While a single article cannot comprehensively cover every aspect of Iraq War scholarship, this essay will concentrate on three crucial questions that are central to understanding the war’s origins and continue to divide experts. First, was the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq primarily motivated by security concerns or the pursuit of global dominance? Second, was the “coercive diplomacy” employed by the Bush administration in late 2002 and early 2003 a genuine effort to avert war, or was it a strategy to legitimize a pre-determined decision for military action? Third, to what extent did neoconservative ideology influence the decision to initiate the Iraq War?
The central point of contention in academic discussions about the Iraq War is the dichotomy between security and hegemony. Explanations rooted in security, as exemplified by Melvyn Leffler’s work, suggest that the Bush administration’s primary goal was to safeguard the United States from future terrorist attacks in the altered security landscape following 9/11. In this context, threats like Iraq were reassessed and deemed critical. In contrast, scholars emphasizing hegemony, such as Ahsan Butt, argue that the Bush administration utilized 9/11 and the perceived threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as justifications for a war driven by a desire for regional and global hegemony. This fundamental divide shapes the understanding of other critical aspects of the war’s origins, including the nature of the Bush administration’s coercive diplomacy and the impact of neoconservative figures.
Historiographical analysis requires understanding why the scholarly discourse has evolved in its current form and suggesting future directions. Interpreting history, particularly recent history, is inherently challenging, especially given the limited access scholars have to primary source materials. Consequently, much of the debate revolves around the analysis, critique, and contextualization of a relatively small set of available sources. Furthermore, political and policy debates have significantly influenced, and at times complicated, the scholarly discourse.
Methodologically, the security-focused perspective often accepts policymakers’ stated motivations, both at the time and in retrospect, as genuine unless compelling contradictory evidence emerges. This school emphasizes the post-9/11 environment as the crucial context for understanding the war, a period where national security was paramount and Iraq was widely perceived as a significant threat.
Conversely, the hegemony school argues that a security-centric view fails to adequately explain key aspects of the war. They contend that policymakers’ testimonies should be treated with skepticism due to potential incentives to conceal ideological or miscalculated motivations. Instead, these scholars situate the Iraq War decision within broader historical trends, highlighting 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, arguing these views are more relevant than immediate security concerns.
Given the recency and contentiousness of the Iraq War, discussions about its origins extend beyond academic circles, influencing contemporary political and policy debates, particularly regarding lessons for U.S. foreign policy in an era of great-power competition. Scholars aligned with the security school often view the Iraq War as an understandable error, given the traumatic post-9/11 context and the widespread belief in Iraq’s WMD programs. They typically do not advocate for significant changes in U.S. foreign policy post-Iraq. Conversely, the hegemony school argues that the war stemmed from a detrimental bipartisan pursuit of global primacy, warning of similar disasters if this grand strategy persists.
It is important to note that this article does not aim to defend the security-hegemony dichotomy or favor either side. Instead, it seeks to clarify its parameters, evolution, and implications. While some may argue that categorizing scholarship into these two broad camps oversimplifies a complex and nuanced field, this approach is valuable for providing a clear overview, especially for those new to the subject. It helps identify the fundamental questions that continue to define and drive the field, questions that future research on the Iraq War must address.
This essay does not provide an exhaustive survey of all Iraq War scholarship, nor does it offer its own historical or theoretical explanation for the war’s causes. Such undertakings would require far more extensive analysis. Therefore, certain important topics, such as the Baathist regime’s perspectives and decisions, the history of weapons inspections before 2002-2003, pre-war planning shortcomings, and the international diplomacy leading up to the war, receive less attention. While crucial for a complete understanding of the war’s origins, these areas have not been the primary focus of scholarly disagreement, which this essay aims to explore.
Security vs. Hegemony: The Core Divide
Did the United States invade Iraq primarily to eliminate a perceived 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 ambitions for American dominance?
While a nuanced answer might suggest a combination of both, or argue against a false dichotomy, the division between security and hegemony remains a significant and real one among scholars. This divide reflects fundamental differences in interpretation, contextualization, and even political perspectives. Scholars themselves often identify security-based or hegemony-based factors as the most critical drivers. Security-focused interpretations emphasize that in the post-9/11 context, security imperatives overshadowed hegemonic aspirations. Hegemony-focused interpretations, while not dismissing security concerns entirely, argue that worries about Iraqi WMDs and terrorist links were used to justify pre-existing hegemonic goals. Each school of thought frames the war within different contexts, with the security school highlighting the post-9/11 moment and the hegemony school emphasizing the preceding decades and the development of the war’s architects’ worldviews.
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. objectives and ideologies, these scholars posit that the Bush administration’s pursuit of security in the aftermath of 9/11 was the primary catalyst for the decision to invade Iraq. Leffler 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 similarly asserts that “[t]he fundamental cause of the invasion was the perception of unacceptable threat from Saddam [Hussein] triggered by the combination of pre-existing beliefs about his regime and the impact of terrorist attacks.” Bozo concludes that “the choice for war clearly arose first and foremost from a logic of national security.”
President George W. Bush delivering a speech to the nation, articulating the reasons for potential military intervention in Iraq.
Security school arguments underscore the transformative impact of 9/11 on U.S. national security thinking as crucial for understanding the Iraq War. Leffler and Jervis contend that while some in the Bush administration favored regime change even before 9/11, Iraq was not a central focus in the administration’s first nine months, nor were significant steps taken towards removing Saddam Hussein. Bush initially opposed nation-building and advocated for strategic restraint.
However, scholars within the security school consistently maintain that the perceived security threat posed by WMDs, terrorism, and a rogue state was not merely a pretext, but the genuine driving force behind the war.
The 9/11 attacks fundamentally reshaped U.S. foreign policy, setting the stage for the Iraq War. The Bush administration experienced intense anger, fear, and vulnerability after 9/11, prompting a reevaluation of existing security threats. Leffler argues that for the Bush team, “the risk calculus had changed dramatically after 9/11.” They believed they could no longer tolerate states pursuing WMDs, threatening neighbors or the U.S., and supporting terrorism.
So, why Iraq specifically? The Bush administration viewed Iraq as the “nexus” of these threats. As Bush himself stated, Iraq met these criteria more comprehensively than any other nation: “state sponsors of terror … sworn enemies of America … hostile governments that threatened their neighbors … regimes that pursued WMD [weapons of mass destruction].” While officials may have made critical errors and exaggerations regarding Iraq’s WMDs and terrorist ties, they genuinely believed these threats were real and growing. Furthermore, at the time, many analysts, even in countries opposing the war, did not accurately assess that Saddam had ceased meaningful WMD production. Saddam’s obstruction of inspectors for nearly a decade also contributed to the reasonable assumption that he intended to resume WMD production.
Given the perceived risk of “the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud,” as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice famously stated, the U.S. felt it could not afford to wait for the Iraqi threat to fully materialize. This led to the declaration of a right to launch preventive wars to eliminate such threats. This perceived right was central to the Bush Doctrine, which, according to the security school, was less a grand strategy for hegemony and more an adaptation of established ideas about using force in the face of new dangers.
For the security school, the Iraq War was not primarily driven by grand designs of expanding U.S. hegemony or promoting liberal values. While U.S. military dominance and the unipolar international system made regime change feasible, these factors were not the primary motivations. Leffler asserts that “missionary fervor or idealistic impulses” played a minor role in the Bush administration’s decisions. Tunc argues that hegemony is an illogical motive for the Iraq War, as removing a relatively minor adversary would not significantly alter the global balance of power.
Idealistic ambitions and the global power imbalance had existed for years before 9/11. The attacks were the critical new element that prompted a reassessment of national security, ultimately leading to the invasion. Leffler summarizes the core, security-focused causes: “They were seeking to safeguard the country from another attack, save American lives, avoid the opprobrium that would come from another assault, and preserve the country’s ability to exercise its power in the future on behalf of its interests.”
Scholars in the security school often take a more understanding view of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. Leffler emphasizes the emotional trauma of 9/11, including top officials’ visits to Ground Zero and interactions with first responders and bereaved families. He argues that context is crucial for interpretation: “Critics forget how ominous the al Qaeda threat seemed and how evil and manipulative Hussein really was.” He maintains that the Bush team aimed to “do the right thing” and protect the nation from what they believed was an imminent danger. Importantly, security school scholars believe that the perceived threat of WMDs, terrorism, and a rogue state was the genuine motivation for the war, not merely a pretext. As Jervis argues, considering the consensus about Iraqi WMDs and the post-9/11 imperative to rethink security threats, “There is little reason to doubt that Bush and his colleagues sincerely believed that Saddam had active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programs.”
The security school’s perspective aligns significantly with Bush administration officials’ memoirs, which also emphasize security motivations for the war. These memoirs highlight the emotional impact of the post-9/11 period, where the administration felt responsible for failing to prevent 9/11 and feared another attack. “I could not have forgiven myself had there been another attack,” recalls Rice. Bush writes that “before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage.” However, “through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed.” Protecting the nation from further terrorist attacks became the paramount priority, and threats like Iraq could no longer be tolerated. Official memoirs emphasize that the administration did not desire war with Iraq and sought alternatives, but ultimately, national security concerns necessitated removing this threat.
This alignment is understandable given scholars like Leffler’s reliance on interviews with administration insiders. However, it also raises concerns that the security school might be uncritically accepting policymakers’ accounts of events. Bush officials have a vested interest in portraying themselves as open to peaceful solutions and not driven by idealistic crusades. As we will see, the hegemony school adopts a more critical stance on this issue.
The Hegemony School
Scholars associated with the hegemony school include Ahsan 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-based explanations fundamentally incomplete. Their central argument is that the primary motivation for the invasion was to maintain and expand U.S. hegemony. However, the hegemony school is divided on whether the U.S. sought realist or liberal forms of hegemony.
On the realist hegemony side, Butt argues that the war stemmed from the “desire to maintain the United States’ global standing and hierarchic order,” with security acting more as a justification for domestic consumption than a genuine causal factor. 9/11, he argues, threatened U.S. hegemony, leading the U.S. to choose a “performative war” to re-establish “generalized deterrence,” or the perception of unchallengeable power and the willingness to use it that underpins hegemony. He quotes Rumsfeld’s statement on 9/11, “[w]e need to bomb something else [other than Afghanistan] to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks.” Butt contends that available intelligence did not indicate Iraq was an imminent threat. However, Iraq was a convenient target for demonstrating U.S. power, being militarily weak, diplomatically isolated, lacking WMDs, and unpopular with the U.S. public.
Stephen Wertheim concurs, arguing that “the decision to invade Iraq stemmed from the pursuit of global primacy,” aiming to “dissuade other countries from rising and challenging American dominance.” Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney similarly state, “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 also 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.”
Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, alongside Dick Cheney, former Vice President, both central figures in the Bush administration.
Scholars in the realist-hegemony camp interpret the Iraq War as a strategy to uphold realist priorities, such as maintaining unipolarity and U.S. freedom of action globally.
Scholars in the realist-hegemony camp view the Iraq War as a means to maintain realist priorities like unipolarity and U.S. freedom of action in the world. The Bush administration leveraged 9/11 and the alleged Iraqi WMD threat as a “pretext,” “opportunity,” or “rationale” to advance this agenda, believing it would neutralize the terrorist threat and other challenges to U.S. power. Democratization was a secondary motive, used to justify a war fundamentally driven by power considerations.
Walt, Porter, and Bacevich agree that the U.S. aimed to demonstrate power and preserve hegemony by invading Iraq, but they argue the Bush administration specifically sought to solidify liberal hegemony. Under this grand strategy, the U.S. aimed to spread liberal democracy and capitalism, seen not only as inherently good but also as tools for maintaining global dominance. The Cold War had constrained 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 presumed U.S. right to intervene globally, either to protect human rights or suppress challenges to American power.
According to this perspective, 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, asserting a unilateral right to change regimes in rival states through preventive war, encapsulated in the Bush Doctrine. While security school scholars see this doctrine as a response to a new category of threat, the hegemony school views it as a blueprint for maintaining U.S. primacy, asserting the unilateral American right to eliminate potential threats like Iraq and prevent the rise of peer competitors. Some scholars also point to protecting Israel and advancing U.S. oil interests as additional hegemonic motives, though these remain more contentious explanations.
For Walt, Porter, and others, the Iraq War arose from the pursuit of liberal hegemony, a revisionist grand strategy aimed at spreading democracy and other liberal values, overthrowing tyrants, and thereby establishing a more peaceful and cooperative world order. Following this vision, the U.S. sought not only to remove a threat but to transform Middle Eastern politics by establishing democracy in Iraq. They cite considerable evidence that democracy promotion was a significant motive for the war, especially for Bush, rather than merely a justification for a power-driven war. The 2002 National Security Strategy, for example, reflected this universalistic idealism, declaring, “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom — and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”
This war aligned with the long-held liberal belief among many U.S. policymakers that autocracies inherently threaten long-term peace, prosperity, and security, and only a democratic international order can guarantee these. As Bush argued in a February 2003 speech, “The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder.” Liberal idealism, as Michael MacDonald argues, also convinced the Bush administration that regime change in Iraq would be straightforward, as Iraqis would naturally embrace democracy after the Baathists were removed.
Mearsheimer labels the Iraq War “probably the best example of this kind of liberal interventionism” that dominated post-Cold War U.S. thinking. Bacevich argues that the WMD threat was a “cover story” and the war’s 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 differing worldviews among top Bush administration decision-makers. Rumsfeld and Cheney leaned towards a more realist paradigm, prioritizing power reassertion over 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 regarding 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 U.S. had been pursuing some form of primacy 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 threat than a convenient target for solidifying hegemony.
In terms of contextualization, the pre-9/11 era is more significant for the hegemony school than the security school, as the former emphasizes continuities in U.S. foreign policy extending back to the Cold War. These scholars highlight that key architects of the war like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz had openly advocated for U.S. hegemony in the decades before 9/11. Many cite the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, drafted by Zalmay Khalilzad and Abram Shulsky under Wolfowitz’s supervision, then serving under Cheney. This document endorsed a hegemonic grand strategy to maintain indefinite global military dominance and “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and numerous other future Bush administration officials also signed open letters in the late 1990s calling for regime change in Iraq and a primacist grand strategy.
Following 9/11, these hegemonists immediately linked the Baathist regime to terrorism despite limited evidence, promoted questionable intelligence, exaggerated the Iraqi threat, and downplayed the risks of invasion. For the hegemony school, this indicates that the administration “wanted war,” as Record argues, and that subsequent claims of reluctant entry into war are self-serving myths.
Some Bush administration officials have contradicted the official security-focused explanation and acknowledged the significance of broader ideological or hegemonic designs. CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir that top administration officials seemed uninterested in the specifics of Iraq’s WMD programs, interpreting this as a decision to invade Iraq using WMDs as a pretext. He argued, “The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. In my view, I doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face put on it.” He pointed to “larger geostrategic calculations, ideology,” and “democratic transformation” as 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 explore the national security urgency of the post-9/11 period 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 emerged in the 1990s, predisposing the U.S. foreign policy establishment to favor Saddam’s removal and view containment as a failing policy. Broad agreement on U.S. hegemony fueled this consensus, making the Iraq War seem logical to many U.S. elites. However, 9/11 was a crucial factor that significantly reduced America’s tolerance for threats like Iraq, while providing U.S. leaders more latitude to pursue risky strategies.
One way to synthesize these schools is to assign different causal roles: the hegemony school explains “Why Iraq?” and the security school addresses “Why now?” Hegemony school analysts often question: If WMD proliferation was the real concern, why not focus on countries with more advanced programs like North Korea? If terrorism was the primary worry, why not target more active state sponsors like Iran?
After all, as Pillar and others argue, the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence process, not in a genuine effort to accurately assess Iraq’s WMD capabilities, but to gather — if not fabricate — evidence to support the case for regime change.
These inconsistencies regarding “Why Iraq?” highlight a key weakness in security-based explanations: Iraq, which became the central front in the War on Terror, was neither the most powerful “rogue state” nor involved in 9/11. Instead, within the hegemonic framework, Iraq was more of an opportunity than a threat, and its alleged WMD programs were more a pretext than a genuine motive. As former CIA intelligence analyst Paul Pillar bluntly states, concern about WMDs “was not the principal or even a major reason the Bush administration went to war.” It was “at most a subsidiary motivator of the policy.” Pillar and others argue that the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence process not to genuinely assess Iraq’s WMD capabilities, but to gather or inflate evidence to justify regime change.
However, the hegemony school struggles to answer the “Why now?” question. If the bipartisan pursuit of hegemony and liberal idealism are constant features of U.S. foreign policy, why did the Iraq War not 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 addresses a fundamental point: a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is virtually unimaginable without 9/11.
An interesting point of agreement between both schools is that the end of the Cold War was a crucial precondition for the Iraq War. The idea of the U.S. invading a mid-sized country—formerly a Soviet satellite—to change its regime during the Cold War seems improbable. The hegemony school particularly emphasizes the role of unipolarity, which they believe fostered hegemonic ambitions, both realist and liberal, in the U.S. imagination. This raises the question of whether the return of multipolarity will deter future U.S. attempts at direct regime change.
The relationship between the 1990-1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War is an under-explored area. Scholars like Samuel 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 persisted throughout the 1990s, fostering a strong desire within the U.S. political establishment to “finish the job,” even before 9/11. There was no war with Iran or North Korea in the 1990s, nor an Iran or North Korea Liberation Act. However, there was the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, declaring regime change as official U.S. policy toward Iraq. Relatively few studies systematically trace U.S.-Iraqi relations during this period, although Helfont’s recent book significantly addresses this gap by examining 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 complete reconciliation difficult. It is challenging to simultaneously view a war as both predetermined and contingent—and to see the Bush administration as both obsessed with regime change and open to various disarmament methods. Moreover, primary source evidence supports both major interpretations.
The contrasting viewpoints of the security and hegemony schools also impact the overall interpretation of the war. Was it an understandable tragedy or an avoidable and unforgivable blunder? In terms of periodization, was the war primarily a response to 9/11, or do its roots extend decades into 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 previous trends, goals, and ideas?
What Was “Coercive Diplomacy” All About?
The position scholars take in the security-hegemony debate influences their understanding of other key questions about the war’s origins. This essay now examines two additional issues that have divided scholars, starting with the purpose of Bush’s “coercive diplomacy” strategy in late 2002 and early 2003.
In fall 2002, under pressure from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush decided to pursue a “diplomatic track” on Iraq. On September 12, at the United Nations, he demanded Iraq readmit weapons inspectors or face potential overthrow. He also sought Congressional authorization for military force against Iraq. Simultaneously, the buildup of U.S. troops in the region provided a credible threat of force to support this final diplomatic push. Rice describes this strategy as “coercive diplomacy.”
But what was the true aim of coercive diplomacy? Was it a genuine attempt to peacefully disarm Iraq? Or was it a tactic to gain legitimacy and garner allied and domestic political support for a pre-decided policy of regime change? This debate is crucial for determining when the Bush administration made the decision for war and to what extent it was inflexibly committed to regime change, regardless of circumstances. While the security-hegemony debate is important but somewhat deterministic, the coercive diplomacy debate introduces questions of contingency and potential alternative paths.
Leffler argues that in early 2002, Bush was “not yet ready to choose between containment and regime change,” remaining undecided into fall 2002. Bush was uncertain whether disarmament could be achieved without regime change. Coercive diplomacy was a final attempt to find out. In adopting this strategy, he accepted the possibility that war might be avoided and Saddam could remain in power. He also temporarily rejected the advice of more hawkish advisors like Cheney and Rumsfeld who considered UN involvement counterproductive. As Leffler writes, Bush “decided to see if he could accomplish his key objectives … without war.” In this account, Bush did not decide to invade until January 2003, after Iraqi authorities failed to fully comply with renewed weapons inspections.
Other scholars, particularly in the security school, concur with Leffler’s view of coercive diplomacy. Frank Harvey argues that coercive diplomacy aimed “to re-invigorate a failing containment policy by reinforcing multilateral, U.N. inspections that demanded full and complete compliance.” Debs and Nuno Monteiro also agree that in supporting new inspections, the Bush administration genuinely sought to test Iraqi cooperation and avoid war.
These analyses emphasize the contingent nature of Bush’s approach to Iraq. While some Bush officials strongly advocated for regime change, Bush proceeded deliberately, giving peaceful disarmament methods a final chance. He did so because his priority was disarmament by any means, not regime change for other reasons.
Again, 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 effort to avoid war, but Saddam’s non-compliance with inspections forced Bush to choose war in early 2003. Rice similarly claimed, “We invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”
For scholars like Leffler, the situation remained fluid and contingent until just months before the invasion. For scholars like Mazarr, the war was virtually inevitable once the Bush administration set its sights on Iraq in early 2002.
Michael Mazarr and others challenge Leffler’s account of coercive diplomacy, placing the decision to invade much earlier than early 2003. Mazarr writes that “between September 11 and December 2001 … the Bush administration — while nowhere near what would be defined as the formal ‘decision’ to go to war — had irrevocably committed itself to the downfall of Saddam Hussein.” 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 minimal debate within his administration about the fundamental soundness of invading Iraq, 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 Bush administration quickly concluded inspections had failed in early 2003 and solidified the decision to invade in January.
My own research supports Mazarr’s view and further argues that the idea of Bush seeking to restore containment through coercive diplomacy is illogical. Bush had already argued earlier in 2002 that containment was insufficient to address the “nexus” threat. Moreover, most advisors and the policy establishment already viewed containment as obsolete. Finally, the Bush administration was deeply skeptical of inspections’ effectiveness and set such high standards for success that failure was almost predetermined.
Scholars in the hegemony school generally agree with Mazarr’s analysis of coercive diplomacy. They argue that the Bush administration was not interested in peaceful resolution because it sought an opportunity to assert U.S. power. They see coercive diplomacy as a facade to legitimize a pre-planned war. Butt, for instance, argues Iraq could not have avoided war, as the U.S. was determined to crush a rival to re-establish generalized deterrence. John Prados argues Bush decided on war in early spring 2002, and Richard Haass places the decision in July 2002, both before coercive diplomacy began.
Similar to the security-hegemony divide, the debate about coercive diplomacy is difficult to resolve. For scholars like Leffler, the situation remained fluid and contingent until shortly before the invasion. For scholars like Mazarr, war was 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 U.S. demands and complying with inspections constituted a de facto decision for war, even if not a formally finalized one. If anything, coercive diplomacy may be an under-examined aspect of the Iraq War, overlooked by analyses that attribute the war’s origins solely to security or hegemony. This can lead to overly deterministic explanations that minimize contingency.
Analyzing the State Department’s role in the lead-up to war could offer a way forward. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage supported the war but were not fervent advocates, and many skeptics of the war held senior positions in the State Department. When more sources become available, it will be insightful to see if Powell or others raised critical questions about the fundamental decision to go to war or urged Bush to pursue coercive diplomacy more thoroughly. This could reveal whether genuine uncertainty and openness to non-violent solutions existed within the administration, as Leffler suggests, or if the U.S. was on an irreversible path to war before fall 2002, as Mazarr argues.
However, we should be cautious about assuming new documentary evidence will fully resolve these disagreements. The British Iraq Inquiry, published in 2016, released a wealth of primary sources and interviews on British policymaking on Iraq from 2001 to 2009. Numerous scholars have utilized this material, but interpretive disagreements persist because they analyze this evidence through different lenses. For example, Leffler argues that Blair’s correspondence with Bush after 9/11 shows neither leader was rushing to war with Iraq, but rather establishing a general timeframe for pressuring Iraq to disarm. This supports his broader argument that the Bush administration was not fixated on war, explored other disarmament methods, and only decided on war after exhausting other options.
Butt, conversely, argues that these same sources demonstrate that “war was decided upon very soon after — probably even on-9/11.” Blair, after all, told Bush on October 11, 2001, “I have no doubt we need to deal with Saddam” and “we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date.” For Butt, this source shows Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in Iraq and reasserting U.S. hegemony in the Middle East almost immediately after 9/11. Blair merely cautioned Bush against rushing into war without building a coalition. Porter, in his book on Britain’s war in Iraq, also draws heavily on the Iraq Inquiry and reaches a similar conclusion. He contends that the Blair government was as ideologically committed to strategic primacy and spreading liberal democracy as Bush. It never seriously considered alternatives, but “worried predominantly about how to create conditions that would legitimize a British military campaign, that would generate enough support.”
The discrepancies among scholars using the same documents highlight the importance of the interpretive frameworks analysts bring to their sources. Consequently, new sources may not necessarily lead to convergence between different interpretive camps.
How Important Were the Neocons?
The final major question explored 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 isn’t perfect, the security school tends to downplay neoconservatives, while the hegemony school usually emphasizes their central importance.
Neoconservatives represent a loosely defined intellectual movement that has evolved significantly 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. 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’ role in initiating the Iraq War has been contentious. Early commentary often simplistically portrayed a “cabal” of neoconservatives as hijacking U.S. foreign policy and leading the nation into a disastrous war. For example, then-Senator Joe Biden, who voted to authorize the Iraq War but later regretted it, stated in July 2003, “They seem to have captured the heart and mind of the President, and they’re controlling the foreign policy agenda.” Frank Harvey convincingly argues that these narratives are not only simplistic but also provide cover for the many political groups who supported what became an unpopular war.
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 peripheral and, in fact, lost most internal debates on Iraq before the invasion. Leffler and Mazarr contend that while neoconservatives were present in the Bush administration, neither Bush nor the top decision-making echelon were neoconservatives. Leffler minimizes the role of neoconservatism or any ideology in the administration’s decision-making, focusing instead on security motivations.
Daalder and Lindsay argue that Bush and most top advisors were “assertive nationalists,” or “traditional hard-line conservatives willing to use American military power to defeat threats to U.S. security but reluctant as a general rule to use American primacy to remake the world in its image.” Jane Cramer and Edward Duggan contend that Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, the three most critical decision-makers, were not neoconservatives but “primacists” and consistent hard-liners who had never shown concern for democratization or human rights throughout their careers. In his history of Bush’s war cabinet, journalist James Mann argues that Bush primarily relied on the “Vulcans”—like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Armitage, and Dov Zakheim—for foreign policy guidance, few of whom were neoconservatives. Rather, these Vulcans “were focused above all on American military power” and maintaining U.S. primacy, especially after the Vietnam War.
These authors agree that neoconservatives like Wolfowitz may have pushed for regime change, but their presence was not essential for the war to occur. Mazarr also downplays the role of neoconservatives—but not ideology in general. He argues that “many aspects of the neocons’ foreign policy assumptions reflected the prevailing conventional wisdom in the U.S. national security community,” including primacy, exceptionalism, and the universality of democracy.
Some scholars in the realist hegemony school concur with this analysis. Butt dismisses the role of neoconservatives, arguing they provided an ideological veneer for a war fundamentally about power. Interestingly, some neoconservatives themselves minimize their role. Kagan, for instance, argues that security concerns drove decision-making and the war “can be understood without reference to a neoconservative doctrine.”
Paul Wolfowitz, a prominent neoconservative figure who held a high-ranking position in the Bush administration.
Many scholars, particularly in the liberal hegemony school, argue that neoconservatives played a vital role in causing the Iraq War. For them, neoconservatism helps explain 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 within the administration and in public discourse. They helped set the post-9/11 agenda, focusing on Iraq, at a time when figures like Rice and Powell seemed skeptical. They advanced 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 focuses on the role of neoconservatives in constructing a liberal hegemonic war. Pillar argues that “[t]he chief purpose of forcibly removing Saddam flowed from the central objectives of neoconservatism,” primarily “the proposition that the United States should use its power and influence to spread its freedom-oriented values.” Walt and Mearsheimer agree: “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 this band was actually quite large: over 20 neoconservatives held senior positions in the Bush administration, forming an activist core pushing for war with Iraq.
Vaisse adds that in 2003, Cheney ordered 30 copies of the neoconservative Weekly Standard to the White House weekly. He observes that while Bush campaigned as a restraint-minded realist, he and Rice adopted a neoconservative worldview after 9/11, frequently speaking of a U.S. obligation to overthrow tyrants and spread liberal values. Other analysts highlight how neoconservatives spearheaded the promotion of damning, though questionable, information about Saddam’s WMD programs and links to al-Qaeda to garner support for the war.
Journalistic accounts of the Iraq War also tend to emphasize the role of neoconservative networks and personalities in paving the way to war. They effectively demonstrate the close personal ties between neoconservative intellectuals and Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi with top Bush administration officials. While they may not always present systematic arguments about the war, they clearly show 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 invasion or a justification developed to sell the war? Is removing neoconservatives the key to restoring balance and restraint to U.S. foreign policy after Iraq, or is more profound change necessary? Are neoconservatives simply a modern manifestation of America’s exceptionalist identity and missionary impulses dating back centuries, or are they a distinct and contemporary ideological movement? These are crucial 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 protracted and costly nature of the Iraq War has profoundly shaped discussions about its lessons for U.S. foreign policy. However, the competing interpretations of the war’s origins are equally relevant to these debates. Most scholars in both the security and hegemony schools agree that Iraq was a mistake, if not worse. Yet, they disagree about its implications for U.S. foreign policy.
Security-centric explanations of the war tend to offer a less critical portrayal of the Bush administration and the foreign policy establishment. Hal Brands and Peter Feaver describe an “empathy defense,” arguing that “greater sensitivity to constraints, alternatives, and context can lead to a more favorable view of decisions taken in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.” In this view, Bush faced an unprecedented security threat after 9/11 and launched a flawed war marred by intelligence, planning, and execution errors.
However, these errors do not necessitate a radical rethinking of the U.S.’s global leadership role. Many conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberal internationalists have concluded that the lesson of Iraq is not to abandon an active global posture, but 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.” They contend that America’s defense of the liberal international order has been overwhelmingly beneficial for U.S. interests, as well as global democracy, prosperity, and peace. The U.S. can continue this role while avoiding obvious errors like the Iraq invasion. Nor does this war necessitate dismantling the foreign policy establishment.
Still, this article suggests that even as the United States refocuses toward great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain hotly contested and highly consequential for America’s global role.
U.S. leaders appear to share this view of the lessons of Iraq, including those like President Barack Obama, who initially opposed the war. Obama, President Donald Trump, and Biden have all criticized the Iraq War and shown skepticism towards nation-building interventions. Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy, for example, states, “We are also realistic and understand that the American way of life cannot be imposed on others.” Nonetheless, their national security strategies all affirm the indispensability of engaged U.S. leadership and military primacy. For these scholars and leaders, the lesson of Iraq might be summarized as “Don’t do stupid shit,” as Obama once quipped. Instead, the country should continue as the linchpin of the liberal world order.
Unsurprisingly, these figures 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 endorsed or reviewed Leffler’s book, which offers minimal critique of U.S. grand strategy. Bolton, a neoconservative architect of the war, praises Leffler for recognizing that “Bush was not eager for war … his advisors did not lead him by the nose … they were not obsessed with linking Saddam to 9/11,” and “their objectives did not include spreading democracy at the tip of a bayonet.” Brands, who has called the Iraq War a “debacle” and “tragedy,” nevertheless calls Leffler’s book “the most serious scholarly study of the war’s origins” for similar reasons as Bolton.
Scholars in the hegemony school strongly disagree about the Iraq War’s lessons. They argue the war signals the failure of an overly ambitious and hyper-interventionist grand strategy of primacy. Primacy, as Wertheim argues, requires the U.S. to maintain global military presence and prevent the rise of great-power rivals, while fostering messianic exceptionalism. He concludes that “the invasion of Iraq emerged from this logic,” and if the U.S. fails to fundamentally reassess its global role, it will stumble into more unnecessary conflicts.
For these critics, the Iraq War also revealed 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 led to unnecessary wars, immense human and financial costs, balancing behavior from rivals, and the erosion of U.S. leadership domestically and internationally. Using the Iraq War and other missteps as leverage, they aim to challenge the limited and stagnant discourse within the policy establishment and steer U.S. grand strategy towards “realism and restraint,” in Walt’s words, while prioritizing resources for domestic democracy and prosperity.
In summary, differing interpretations of the war’s origins are intertwined with debates about its lessons. It is appropriate for scholars to debate how this war should inform the future of U.S. foreign policy. However, participants in this debate risk filtering history through ideological lenses and using it to support pre-existing arguments. Still, this article suggests that even as the United States refocuses toward great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain hotly contested and highly consequential for America’s global role. This is particularly true as the generation that fought in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars assumes leadership positions in the military and politics. Their interpretations of that conflict will significantly 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 causes of the Iraq War can be effectively organized into security and hegemony schools. While these categories simplify a broad range of analysis, they provide a useful overview of the field two decades after the war began. Currently, the hegemony school likely has more adherents among war scholars, though the war’s architects tend to favor the security school.
The security-hegemony debate is not merely “academic.” It represents a distinct interpretive divide that influences how scholars approach their sources and leads to contrasting answers to critical 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 seek syntheses of these perspectives. Historians are particularly well-suited for this task, as they prioritize holistic, narrative, and multi-variable analysis, rather than the emphasis on parsimony and generalizability typical of political scientists.
One way to move beyond the security-hegemony binary may be to adopt new methodological approaches to the Iraq War. The security-hegemony divide largely operates within traditional approaches to studying war. Hahn describes these methods as focusing on “the exercise of power, the conduct of diplomacy, the practice of international politics, the interest in domestic politics and public opinion, and the application of military strength by U.S. government officials who calculated the national interests and formulated policies designed to achieve those interests.”
Many of these scholars have not consistently integrated cultural factors with the study of foreign policy or the causes of war.
New approaches could revitalize this seemingly entrenched dichotomy. 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 smaller powers influenced the superpower rivalry. Some scholars have already advanced more global accounts of the Iraq War by examining Iraqi sources, the UN’s role, and the regional politics of the conflict. Until more sources become available on Bush administration decision-making, this may be a more productive avenue than further entrenchment in the security-hegemony divide.
Additionally, a cultural turn could be beneficial for Iraq War scholarship. The cultural turn in diplomatic history brought greater attention to how cultural factors like race, gender, religion, language, and memory shape policy and strategy. Discussions of interests and ideas took a backseat to construction, imagination, narratives, symbols, and meaning in elite and popular culture. The transnational turn further highlighted the role of non-state actors as significant forces in the global arena. Scholars in this vein showed how a broader range of actors challenged the nation-state, formed networks, and exchanged ideas across borders, placing national politics in a global context.
There has indeed been insightful work in history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies on 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 military force to domestic audiences. Edward Said, Zachary Lockman, and others argue the Iraq War should be understood within the context of Orientalist beliefs about supposedly backward, dangerous Arabs and Muslims requiring Western discipline.
Unfortunately, this work has often been separated from mainstream scholarship on the Iraq War’s causes. Many of these scholars have not consistently integrated cultural factors with the study of foreign policy or the causes of war. More traditional scholars, in turn, often overlook culture, race, gender, religion, and other factors. Students of the Iraq War and all post-9/11 foreign policy should bridge these gaps by exploring how culture interacts with and shapes policy, perceptions of rivals, and decision-makers’ understanding of themselves and America’s global role. Significant potential exists for this kind 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.
