Image from article, with caption: President George W. Bush with Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers in 2003. CreditCreditJeff Mitchell/Reuters
Book Review by Andrew Bacevich, The New York Times, April 19, 2019; see also
Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy
by Michael J. Mazarr
The operative word in the title of “Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy” is the last one: tragedy. Drawing on extensive interviews with unnamed “senior officials” as well as recently declassified documents, Michael J. Mazarr attributes the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 to good intentions gone awry. Here is an example of “America’s worthy global ambitions” that went “terribly wrong.”
Yet the evidence Mazarr himself assembles refutes that conclusion. Chalking up the debacle of Iraq to “the messianic tradition in American foreign policy,” as he does, simply won’t wash. It’s akin to writing off a vehicular homicide because the driver happens to be a known alcoholic.
The Iraq war was not a tragedy. It was more like a crime, compounded by the stupefying incompetence of those who embarked upon a patently illegal preventive war out of a sense of panic induced by the events of 9/11. An impulse to lash out overwhelmed any inclination to deliberate, with decisions made in a “hothouse atmosphere of fear and vulnerability.” Those to whom President George W. Bush turned for advice had become essentially unhinged. Iraq presented an inviting opportunity to vent their wrath.
The handful of officials who shaped policy after 9/11, writes Mazarr, a political scientist currently with RAND, were “not evil or pernicious human beings.” Instead, Mazarr credits them with acting in response to a “moralistic sense of doing the right thing.” Viewed from that perspective, “the Iraq war decision was grounded in sacred values,” even if the evil and pernicious consequences of that decision continue to mount.
So Mazarr bats away what he calls “erroneous mythologies” attributing the war to a neoconservative conspiracy or describing it as a plot to protect Israel or seize Arab oil. He finds these explanations unworthy. The invasion of Iraq, he insists, stemmed from “America’s essential sense of itself” as “fundamentally messianic or missionary in character.”
As an account of the war’s origins, “Leap of Faith” offers few genuine revelations. It clarifies, confirms and fills in details. So, Mazarr tells us, within 24 hours of 9/11, even before Bush had unveiled the phrase “global war on terrorism,” a decision to overthrow Saddam “had been essentially sealed in cognitive amber.” All that remained was to work out the details while conjuring up a moral rationale that would conceal the absence of a strategic one. The dearth of hard evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or confirming the existence of an Iraqi program for developing weapons of mass destruction was beside the point. The administration declared Saddam a threat; nothing more was required.
Mazarr affirms that an actual decision for war was never really made but merely assumed. “There was no single meeting,” he writes, “no formal options paper, no significant debate about the consequences.” None were required.
Recently, critics have lambasted President Trump for making decisions to pull out troops from Afghanistan and Syria without properly consulting the national security establishment. There’s been no process, the charge goes. During the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, in contrast, there was process galore, an endless stream of studies, briefings and planning sessions. It’s just that none of it mattered. Bush and his chief lieutenants were dead set on a course of action and nothing was going to prevent them from plunging ahead. Process was a charade.
Mazarr describes the result as “policy implementation on autopilot,” with doubters and dissenters frozen out or simply ignored. At echelons below the top level, he writes, “loyalty-enforcing groupthink” abounded. Military officers given to asking annoying questions “were particularly muzzled.” With the exception of a single four-star general who went off script by suggesting publicly that occupying Iraq might pose a stiff challenge, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff learned to keep their mouths shut.
Making matters worse was the dysfunction that prevailed at the top level. President Bush, Mazarr says, “believed in belief itself,” a tendency that obviated the need to challenge assumptions or solicit second opinions. Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, created his own foreign policy shop, which pursued its own agenda. Secretary of State Colin Powell lagged two steps behind his colleagues, never quite grasping that he had been marginalized. “To demonstrate his superiority, to dominate, to overawe,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld blustered, accrued authority and protected his turf. Yet when it came to making tough decisions, he ducked and deferred. Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz, another important figure, was “moved more by grand ideas than by the bothersome trivia of execution.” Condoleezza Rice [JB see], the national security adviser, was herself given to what some of her associates called “magical thinking,” and never gained the respect of Cheney or Rumsfeld. All in all, according to Mazarr, a “truly astonishing degree of wishful thinking” permeated the upper echelons of government. It was like the court of Czar Nicholas II in 1917.
So while United States military commanders focused on the problem of getting to Baghdad, the question of what was to happen next became an orphan, ignored and unwanted. Rumsfeld in particular nursed the fantasy that the United States could “be liberator and hegemon at the same time” — freeing Iraqis from oppression, and then quickly converting Iraq itself into a compliant ally that would do Washington’s bidding, all with minimal muss and fuss. As a result, the disorder triggered by Saddam’s overthrow and the combined civil war and insurgency that ensued caught the war’s architects completely by surprise. For the next several years, American soldiers and Iraqi civilians were to pay a heavy price for what can only be described as malpractice on a Trumpian scale.
To explain all of this in terms of a misplaced messianic impulse — the self-described indispensable nation having a bad run of luck — may play well in Washington, where serious introspection is rarely welcome. Yet, ultimately, such an explanation amounts to little more than a dodge. After all, altruism rarely if ever provides an adequate explanation for the actions of a great power. Exempting the United States from that proposition, as Mazarr does, entails its own spectacular leap of faith.
The United States invaded Iraq not in response to a “vigorous missionary impulse,” but to avoid reckoning with this fact: Decades of wrongheaded policies in the Middle East had culminated on 9/11 in a cataclysmic episode of blowback.
National security policies conceived from the 1940s through the 1990s, reinforced after the Cold War by false assumptions of military supremacy, had produced the inverse of security. In the formulation of those policies, America’s missionary obligations had figured as the faintest afterthought, if at all. Sadly, Mazarr’s well-intentioned book is likely to provide yet another excuse to postpone reckoning with that failure.
Andrew J. Bacevich is the author, most recently, of “The American Century at Twilight.”
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