Historians have always faced the problem of deciding how much to trust their sources, given that their sources often lie, mislead, sugarcoat, deflect, and rationalize. In the foreign policy realm, this problem intensifies because there are only a few people “in the room where it happened” who can provide insights into the motives, mindsets, and emotions of elite decision-makers. And it is even more acute for histories of the recent past for which there are not robust archival sources against which historians can check leaders’ claims.
Melvyn Leffler’s new book on the roots of the 2003 Iraq War demonstrates the pitfalls of excessive trust in one’s sources, especially memoirs by and interviews with top policymakers. Leffler deploys an impressive bounty of evidence in this book, including a roster of interviewees that features Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Clarke, Scooter Libby, and Michael Gerson. However, he places too much trust in their portrayal of events, motivations, and decisions, failing to adequately critique their self-depictions.
Leffler argues that the Iraq War was motivated by a combination of fear, power, and hubris. He holds that September 11 was a necessary precondition of the war, spending significant time illustrating the emotional reaction of top U.S. officials. Bush and his deputies felt intense outrage, fear, and sadness, as well as a deep sense of responsibility for stopping another mass casualty event. National security threats had to be re-evaluated, which led the administration to focus on states like Iraq that sought weapons of mass destruction and had ties to terrorism, a threat that Bush officials believed could not be managed with containment or deterrence.
Confidence in the ability of U.S. military power to easily destroy threats like Iraq further motivated the decision to invade. The seeming ease of the campaign to topple the Taliban only intensified this feeling of momentum and potency. Finally, Leffler stresses the hubris of top policymakers, which motivated them to believe that the United States could bring down Saddam, quickly install a representative government, and go home. In this context, he shows how a combination of Bush’s poor management and Rumsfeld’s mania for control infected the postwar planning process, creating conflicting objectives and poor understandings of the challenges of occupation.
This book provides a welcome counter to accounts of the Iraq War that stress nefarious oil interests, neoconservative cabals, or outright lies by the administration. Leffler rightfully places Bush at the center of decision-making, although he is far from the first analyst to do so. The book is thorough but concise, and benefits from being attuned to the Iraqi side of the conflict.
Ultimately, though, Leffler’s faith in his sources leads to three major errors of interpretation: First, he never connects the administration’s hubris with the role of specific ideologies in fueling the decision to invade. Second, he fails to place the war’s origins in a wider historical context, especially the experiences of the 1990s. Third, he accepts the questionable claim that top Bush officials gave “coercive diplomacy” a real chance to work before invading.