Chronicle of a War, 20 Years On
The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable.
A review of Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq by Melvyn P. Leffler, 368 pages, Oxford University Press (February 2023)
When asked after the ouster of Saddam Hussein how history would judge the Iraq war, President George W. Bush replied, “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” For all the alluring modesty of this reply, Bush did not reckon on an eminent and conscientious historian of US foreign policy like Melvyn Leffler. Leffler’s new book, Confronting Saddam Hussein, examines the tangled origins of the war without reproducing the historical revisionism that has long disfigured public understanding of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The purpose of his study is neither to denounce the decision to wage war nor to praise it, but to better apprehend how it came to pass.
The Iraq war began on March 19th, 2003, endorsed by Congress as well as a majority of the American public. Confronting Saddam Hussein arrives on the conflict’s 20th anniversary, at a time when historical amnesia has reconceived it as the work of neoconservative warmongers. Leffler aims to set the record straight. Contrary to the reigning narrative, he reminds us that the Bush administration’s Iraq policy was in keeping with America’s approach toward Saddam Hussein in the preceding decade (Bush was the third consecutive president to use military force against Baghdad). If this was a mistake, the burden of responsibility rests not just with the Bush administration—let alone the “Israel lobby”—but with a broad swath of the governing class and the public at large.
Taking his cue from the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, who insisted that the purpose of history is to show how things actually were, Leffler begins his account with the singular figure of Saddam Hussein. The decision to employ force cannot be understood without taking stock of the dictator’s perverse “role and agency,” and no amount of revisionism can efface his incessant malice, aggression, and volatility.
The regime of absolute control and capricious terror in Baghdad established what the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya called a “republic of fear,” or what the country’s first post-war president, Jalal Talabani, once described as “a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it.” Before the arrival of coalition forces, Iraq was an abattoir of repression at home, and a font of menace and violence abroad. Although the rule of the Ba’ath Party has seldom been omitted from retrospective evaluations of the causes of the war, it has generally been given short shrift. It’s therefore not especially surprising that Saddam Hussein is now widely regarded as a phantom threat, and that the war has come to be perceived as the outcome of a conspiracy.
Leffler remedies this omission by setting out the moral and strategic challenges posed to American power by Iraq’s ancien régime. Perhaps one anecdote will illuminate the character of the modern totalitarian state the Ba’athists modeled on those of Hitler and Stalin. On July 22nd, 1979, just days after he assumed the presidency of Iraq, Saddam Hussein convened an urgent assembly of the Ba’ath Party leadership. One of his lieutenants opened the meeting by announcing a treasonous plot in which the conspirators were said to be present, and an old party rival bearing the signs of torture was produced to identify the 68 supposed collaborators. As the names were haltingly recited and the accused were detained, panic swept the room. Desperate to assure the new leader of their loyalty, some of the remaining delegates broke into hysterical chants of “Long live Saddam!”
A few days later, 22 of the 68 accused were brought to the courtyard of the same building for execution. The penalty would be meted out by the delegates themselves, to whom Hussein personally handed pistols, thereby ensuring their complicity with the new order.
The bloody origins of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship were indicative of the means of his rule. For decades, he would pursue forcible domination of the Middle East, and vast quantities of Iraq’s petroleum revenue were devoted to purchasing the instruments of war and genocide. The ambition to lay his hands on weapons of mass destruction persisted even in the face of daunting obstacles. In 1975, four years before he became president, the Iraqi Ba’athists inked a deal with French prime minister Jacques Chirac to acquire a nuclear reactor. The facility was later destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, but not even this brush with foreign power on Iraqi soil caused a rethink of the country’s nuclear aspirations. As Saddam later confessed to his American interrogators, these aspirations never ceased and were judged a necessary insurance policy for a regime dedicated to expansionism. As Saddam himself later put it, “the boundaries of our aims and ambitions … extend through the whole Arab homeland.”
Leffler details the sadistic aggression that characterized the regime’s external behavior. In 1980, Saddam Hussein ordered an invasion of revolutionary Iran. Despite Henry Kissinger’s remark that it was a pity both sides couldn’t lose, the US lent support to each. By the time it was over, more than a million soldiers and civilians had died for no discernible purpose. Iranian cities and the restless Kurdish minority of northern Iraq had been subjected to chemical attacks ordered by Baghdad, and the notorious Anfal campaign made the Iraqi Ba’ath Party the first regime in history to attack its own civilian population with such weapons. (A quarter-century later, Bashar Assad replicated that barbaric act as he sought to quell the Syrian uprising.)
In July 1990, after brokering a ceasefire with Iran, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed the former Iraqi province of Kuwait, demanding that the petroleum-rich emirate hike oil prices and reimburse Iraq for material losses in the war with Iran. This act of aggression called up a large international coalition to turn back the Iraqi army. In response, Saddam seized foreign hostages inside Iraq, launched SCUD missiles into Israel, raided a border town in Saudi Arabia, and threatened the deploy of his chemical arsenal (again). These provocations were intended to split the coalition marshaled against him, but only succeeded in further justifying its existence.
In short order, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm, a decisive counterthrust that dispatched half a million troops to the Gulf. By January 1991, the US-led coalition was striking Iraqi command-and-control and the presidential palace. After Iraq set Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze, the US expeditionary force, acting on behalf of relevant UN resolutions, routed the Iraqi army in 100 hours.
The Iraqi dictator acquiesced to the terms of the armistice, calling off the invasion, recognizing Kuwaiti sovereignty, and disclosing and eliminating his weapons of mass destruction. He also agreed to allow UN inspectors (UNSCOM) to monitor Iraqi compliance with the arms control system. The Republican Guard, however, had been spared by American airpower, and so the country’s apparatus of domestic terror remained largely intact. Iraq proceeded to crack down on a Shi’ite rebellion in the south and another Kurdish rebellion in the north. In a belated attempt to protect Iraqi civilians, the US, the UK, and (initially) France established no-fly zones without a UN mandate. In the ensuing dozen years, more than 300,000 Anglo-American sorties were made to prevent a repetition of mass slaughter, and these patrols were fired upon almost daily.
Any hopes of a reformed Iraqi regime were swiftly dispelled when an assassination attempt on former president George H.W. Bush was uncovered during a postwar visit to Kuwait. The lunacy of such plots, in addition to the unsleeping quest for WMDs and long-range missiles after 1991, provided irrefutable proof that Saddam Hussein remained bent on war and aggression. A chemical arsenal, he believed, was critical not only to his own survival, but also as a means of deterrence and blackmail. And so, instead of complying with the terms of the armistice to disclose and destroy his illicit arms cache, he preserved what he could—and maintained the capabilities to augment it in the future—on a grand scale.
For years, the UN and IAEA weapons inspectors faced regular obstruction from a concealment committee run by Qusai Hussein, the younger son of the dictator. International inspectors nonetheless managed to confirm the existence of a nuclear program far more advanced than they had known or expected. (Saddam had initiated a crash program in 1990 to acquire a nuclear weapon in less than a year.) These findings elicited modest concessions from Baghdad, but the regime never accounted for numerous prohibited items or ceased to harass and hinder arms inspectors.
This sequence of events prompted Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, which proclaimed that US policy was “to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government.” The vote was 360–38 in the House, unanimous in the Senate, and President Clinton signed the act on October 31st, 1998. Although few choose to recall this support for regime change in Baghdad, it captured the growing impatience of the custodians of American power with the regime of Saddam Hussein.
In December 1998, Iraq expelled the UN weapons inspection team. The inspectors insisted that the regime had not destroyed its bacteriological agents, disclosed all its chemical programs, or renounced its atomic ambitions. Washington and London responded to Iraq’s breach of its commitments by launching a barrage of cruise missile attacks—again without UN authorization—against suspected chemical-weapon sites. By Clinton’s own admission, however, this did not conclusively destroy the illicit weapons program or bring Saddam Hussein to heel. Having survived yet another skirmish with American power, and without intrusive inspectors to contend with, Baghdad sought (with French and Russian collusion) to break free of sanctions and reconstitute its WMD programs.
After September 11th, 2001, the fears about the nexus of dangers presented by Ba’athist Iraq became more acute as the parameters of risk assessment were suddenly altered. It didn’t help matters that Saddam Hussein was the only world leader to praise al Qaeda’s assault on US civil society. The jihadist attacks loomed large in the national mood for years to come, and lowered the threshold of military action against palpable menaces. The sight of thousands of victims on American soil and trillions of dollars in destruction made America’s most convenient enemy look like an intolerable one. Though no evidence (and no official rhetoric) held Saddam Hussein directly responsible for the 9/11 atrocities, he personified the culture of autocracy and radicalism from which it had sprung. Beyond al Qaeda, which would be pulverized in the Hindu Kush, Iraq appeared to be a plausible source of a future attack, including one conducted with unconventional weapons. The prevailing thinking in Washington is summarized by an official cited by Leffler: the American public might forgive “one surprise attack, but not a second.”
Despite conflicting evidence about the condition of Iraq’s arsenal, it now seemed more imprudent than ever to indulge the regime in Baghdad with the benefit of the doubt. Its imperial ambitions were supplemented by the malevolent networks it cultivated, and by outward appearance, it embraced the Islamist cause. In 1991, the words Allahu Akbar (“God Is Great”) had been added to the Iraqi flag, in what was purported to be Saddam Hussein’s own handwriting, and the regime made no secret of the support it provided to theocratic Palestinian terrorist organizations. More alarming still, Iraq offered sanctuary to various jihadist operatives, including Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, and Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda bandit who fled Afghanistan for northern Iraq, where he experimented with biological weapons.
Brian Stewart
The prospect of such a regime acquiring WMDs—and using such weaponry to intimidate its enemies, inevitably constraining the exercise of American power—was deemed unacceptable in the wake of 9/11. Although a lethal arsenal, actual and potential, was the centerpiece of the public case for war, a host of other reasons were officially cited in the authorization of the use of military force. In October 2002, both houses of Congress passed 23 writs mandating war in Iraq—an update of Clinton’s 1998 Iraq Liberation Act.
The failure to uncover WMD stockpiles (beyond chemical-warfare shells and warheads) would become an abiding source of embarrassment to Western intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, Iraq’s covert weapons programs had been latent and the absence of stockpiles was not the same as an absence of intent. As late as 2003, Iraqi envoys met with North Korean officials in Damascus with a view to procuring Rodong missiles (which have a range much greater than what had been prohibited to Iraq by the UN resolutions) from Pyongyang. After the invasion, Iraq’s chief nuclear physicist led US soldiers to his garden where he had buried parts of a nuclear centrifuge on the orders of Qusai Hussein. In short, it would have been highly irresponsible to proceed on the assumption that Iraq ever intended to come clean about its arsenal, let alone that it had renounced its nuclear ambitions.
The architects of the war in Iraq were bitterly aware of the serial depredations of this hostile regime and believed that the limits of diplomacy had already been exceeded. The leading voices of the Democratic party were no exception. Leffler reminds us that Senator Biden, then the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, speculated at length about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power. Before the war, Biden argued in congressional hearings that “Saddam has got to go.” And unlike President Obama’s later pronouncement that Syria’s despot Bashar Assad had to quit, Biden left no doubt in the case of Iraq that this objective would require “US force.”
The persistent criticism of the war as a “unilateral” affair ignores the widespread approval that it garnered abroad. Arab dissidents and Israeli Laborites lent their support to the operation, as did European trade unionists, old-stock British liberals, and former anti-Communist dissidents who understood something about living under tyranny. Here, it’s worth highlighting Tony Blair’s role in rallying antitotalitarian liberals to the cause of liberating Iraq. The British statesman had an abhorrence of political tyranny and genocidal aggression that exemplified a muscular liberal internationalism dormant in the post-Vietnam era.
In the course of an entire chapter devoted to the “special relationship,” however, Leffler misses the opportunity to elaborate the roots of Blair’s distinctive stance. Contrary to the slander that Blair was George W. Bush’s “poodle,” Blair was sounding the alarm about Saddam Hussein while Bush was still a provincial governor of Texas. In April 1999, after helping to put an end to Slobodan Milošević’s “Greater Serbia” fantasy, Blair gave a speech at the Economic Club in Chicago, in which he declared that giving a free hand to delinquent or hostile states would inflict an irreparable defeat on the liberal order. He singled out the Iraqi Ba’ath party by name.
Two years later, Blair responded to the attacks of September 11th, 2001, by claiming that al Qaeda had struck “us” as much as the United States, and resolved to stand at the Americans’ elbow in their determination to confront aggressive dictatorships that might wreak even greater destruction. Blair plainly felt that a matter of principle was involved in the challenge posed by Saddam Hussein. His emphasis on the importance of strategic interest as well as moral duty in the war on terror endeared him to Bush, who admired his political courage. Despite their partisan political differences, Bush and Blair shared an intense fear and loathing of Iraq’s dictator and believed that a confrontation with his regime could no longer be safely postponed.
This shared vision, which animated the American public and sustained US foreign policy for a while after September 11th, faltered when the United States became deeply engaged and dangerously exposed in the Islamic world. The dictatorships and absolute monarchies that surrounded Iraq had little sympathy for the democratic experiment in Iraq, and aided and abetted the reactionary forces that sought to destroy it. In the process, Americans lost faith in democratic development, especially in the Middle East.
The Iraq War progressed through three stages. The initial invasion was a remarkable success, toppling the regime in a matter of weeks. But it was followed by a brutal Ba’athist-Islamist insurgency among the Sunni tribes of western Iraq that sent the country hurtling toward civil war. At the 11th hour, President Bush ordered a “surge” of US military commitment in the teeth of near-universal opposition. This risky decision to reinforce the American position and enlist Iraqi Sunnis in the fight for Iraq thwarted al Qaeda’s plan to carve out a takfiri caliphate.
The question of why the war went awry in its middle phase detains Leffler, as it should detain anyone keen to avoid repeating the errors of the past. The early troubles stemmed not from the war itself but from the botched execution of the peace. Believing that Iraq would be easily pacified, Bush and his cabinet harbored unwarranted optimism about establishing order and free institutions in the post-Saddam era, and deployed insufficient troops to guard the Iraqi citizenry from malicious foreign agents as well as themselves. The culpable failings of the occupation were rooted in this contradiction between means and ends—a “light footprint” military strategy paired with a grand socio-political reformation envisaged by civilian leaders.
Leffler attributes the worst blunders of the war and the reconstruction effort to the military brass and their civilian masters. “The American military establishment not only had planned miserably for the postwar phase of operations,” he writes, but also exacerbated its poor planning with rash unit rotations and troop cuts. The resulting security vacuum in postbellum Iraq handed the initiative to the forces of terror determined to challenge the new order. Years into that battle, the Bush team was still unable to grasp the magnitude of the enterprise and hadn’t even decided if they were “liberators or occupiers, if they were staying briefly, or not.”
Battle plans rarely survive the first shock of attack, but this conceptual ambiguity prevented a coherent response to a burgeoning insurgency. Efforts at de-Ba’athification may have been popular inside Iraq, but as Leffler points out, they also “undermined efforts to preserve order, restore services, and reconstruct the infrastructure.” Given the totalitarian character of the deposed regime, it was surely necessary to purge elite members of the Ba’ath Party and lay the foundation for public trust and representative institutions. The problem was that the blacklist of Ba’athists (printed on a deck of playing cards) was too short, while the graylist of career bureaucrats who simply joined the party for a salary was much too long.
Brian Stewart
On May 23rd, 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority issued Order #2 to disband the Iraqi army. Ambassador Bremer, who led the CPA, recognized the danger of implementing this measure without providing its numerous employees with compensation and pensions. Despite an absence of employee rosters, the decision was taken anyway, depriving the CPA of the services of trained personnel and alienating many former officers. Another problem identified by Bremer at the time was that as soon as Baghdad fell, the Iraqi army—largely a ragtag conscript force—disbanded itself. At which point, responsibility for security fell to coalition forces, which faltered in policing Iraq until years of unremitting mayhem brought the country to the brink of disaster.
Confronting Saddam Hussein renders a justifiably harsh verdict against Donald Rumsfeld, the hapless defense secretary who was content to go to war with the army we had but not one that was fit for purpose. It was Rumsfeld’s insistence “on ramping down troop numbers after combat” that deprived US forces of the means commensurate with the mission’s ends. Leffler’s plodding restatement of this failure to translate post-invasion plans into operational orders for soldiers in the field, and of Rumsfeld’s smirking insouciance about its calamitous results, now reads, if anything, more strongly than it did at the time. And since the responsibility for a smooth coordination of the execution of plans rested in the Oval Office, Bush’s refusal to demand Rumsfeld’s resignation early on remains the most damning and inexplicable of his errors.
The unintended consequence of destroying Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny without securing the institutions of free government was to release forces of barbarism straight out of Heart of Darkness. But whatever may be said of this Rousseauian failure of imagination on the part of the American government, it scarcely undermined the casus belli. In fact, the vicious forces empowered by Saddam Hussein that swarmed into the power vacuum after his fall were part of the case for war to begin with. The evisceration of Iraqi civil society and the increasingly Islamist character of Ba’athist rule prefigured the descent into mayhem after he was swept from power. Had his reign been permitted to continue, the most plausible scenario would have been the eventual implosion of the regime under its own weight, turning a rogue state into a failed state.
Leffler doesn’t spend much time considering this counterfactual, which leads him to fault the Bush administration (and the rest of the governing class) not only for glaring incompetence but also for failing to “master our fears, discipline our power, and curb our hubris.” He indicts the war’s architects for allowing “awe of American power” to trump “judgment about the risks of employing it.” Advocates of a more humble foreign policy are always ready to explain the risks of using power, and seldom address the risks of not doing so. In the case of Saddam Hussein, this is a colossal mistake. It is perfectly possible to argue that the manifold blunders involved in the policy of ushering Iraq into a new era pale in comparison to the failure of refusing to confront its insane regime for so long.
Brian Stewart
To put the matter another way: Whatever the costs of the US military engagement in Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s nightmarish tyranny was never going to be anything approaching a compliant partner in the international order. In all likelihood, it was going to enlarge its own power at the expense of every decent movement and state in its orbit until it was removed by force or collapsed into mayhem. By 2003, invading forces encountered a country already in an advanced state of disarray. Even more than other autocracies that abound in the Arab world, Ba’athist Iraq had kept society under a lid of oppression, stultifying the social, political, and economic development of the country. In due course, its implosion—whether by internal revolt or fratricide between the despot’s sons—would have unleashed a hideous orgy of violence. Absent the helping hand of international security forces, post-Saddam Iraq would have made the bloodletting of the Lebanese civil war look tame by comparison.
The experiment in participatory politics in postwar Iraq has been a messy and sometimes nasty arena of sectarian rivalry and confessional jostling. But the spectacle of incipient democratic rule in the Middle East has been a heartening development nonetheless. The Ba’athist-Bin Ladenist forces arrayed against the new Iraq were eventually routed, but not before inflicting grievous wounds, both in Iraq and on the American psyche. The costs and failures of the war stimulated a remarkable coincidence of view between cynical conservatives and soft-headed progressives across the West that remains largely intact to this day. The public lost faith in the traditional mission of US foreign policy to shore up the international system. Despite America’s robust material support for Ukraine, it’s clear that the cause of American activism has not quite recovered from the war in Iraq.
Some two decades after the Iraq War was launched, its hold on America’s imagination has not slipped. But if it’s to be a determining influence over Americans’ view of the world and their role in it, a more sober consideration of its lessons is needed. Greater accuracy in our hindsight will sharpen our foresight. It therefore remains a relevant question whether the world would be better off were Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons still in power in Baghdad. Years after the demise of the Arab awakening, the case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable.
Against President Bush’s claim about the tardy judgment of history, it isn’t too early to see that Saddam Hussein and his dictatorship were long overdue for removal. Reviving the elevated sense of national interest and global responsibility that motivated that intervention will be the charge of those, in and out of Washington, who hope to learn anything from history.
