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GET THE LATEST NEWS & UPDATESThe 2003 invasion of Iraq can teach us important lessons about the U.S. and Middle East relations. (U.S. Army / Flickr)

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It Wasn’t About Oil, and It Wasn’t About the Free Market: Why We Invaded Iraq - In These Times http://inthesetimes.com/article/17626/what_the_Iraq_war_teaches_us

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The road to Iraq waspaved withneoconservativeintentions. Otherfactions of the U.S.foreign policyestablishment wereeventually broughtaround to supportingthe war, but theneocons were itsarchitects and chiefproponents.

Free Market: Why We Invaded IraqMuhammad Idrees Ahmad’s new book not only interrogates the motivationsbehind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but also reveals a cautionary tale for thepresent.BY DANNY POSTEL

I was reluctant to review Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's The Road to Iraq: TheMaking of a Neoconservative War. With all the dramatic developments in theMiddle East today—the ISIS crisis, the siege of Kobanê, the deepeningnightmare in Syria, the escalating repression in Egypt, the fate of Tunisia’sdemocratic transition, the sectarianization of regional conflicts driven by theSaudi-Iranian rivalry—delving back into the 2003 invasion of Iraq seemedrather less than urgent. It’s hard enough just to keep up with the eventsunfolding day-to-day in the region. Reading—let alone reviewing—a detailedstudy of the internal processes that led to the United States toppling SaddamHussein over a decade ago seemed remote, if not indeed a distraction.

But I’m glad I set these reservations aside and took the assignment. Thisforcefully argued and meticulously researched (with no fewer than 1,152footnotes, many of which are full-blown paragraphs) book turns out to beenormously relevant to the present moment, on at least three fronts:

ISIS emerged from the ashes of al Qaeda in Iraq, which formed in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion andoccupation of Iraq. Without the 2003 invasion, there would be no ISIS as we know it—and the region’s politicallandscape would look very different.

The US Senate report on CIA torture has brought back into focus the rogues gallery of the Bush-Cheneyadministration—the same cast of characters who engineered the 2003 Iraq invasion. This book shines a heat lamp onthat dark chapter and many of its protagonists.

There is talk of a neoconservative comeback in Washington. This thoroughly discredited but zombie-like group are

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PRICE! ZIPnow angling for the ear of Hillary Clinton, who might be the next US president. Ahmad’s book provides a marvelouslyilluminating anatomy of the neocons, which has lessons that apply directly to this movement’s potentially ominous nextchapter.

The central question Ahmad attempts to answer is: Why did the 2003 Iraq War happen? In one of the book’s mostvaluable sections, felicitously titled “Black Gold and Red Herrings,” he goes through several prevalentexplanations/theories and takes them apart one by one:

Oil. “If Iraq was invaded for oil,” Ahmad writes, “then the US was remarkably negligent in securing the prize.” Iraqawarded its first major post-invasion oil concessions in 2009, and the big winners? Norway, France, China and Russia.Of the 11 contracts signed only one went to a US company (Exxon Mobil). The only sector in which US firmsprevailed was oil services—but “in that sector the US has always enjoyed a virtual monopoly, invasions or no,” Ahmadnotes.

It’s true that Bush and Cheney had worked in the energy industry, but US oil companies did not push for theinvasion—in fact they lobbied to lift the sanctions on Iraq, which blocked potential profits. The oil industry has longfavored agreements with governments, Ahmad notes; belligerence, in contrast, “has only jeopardized investments andbrought uncertainty to future projects.” Did US oil companies try to cash in on the opportunity presented by thetoppling of Saddam Hussein? By all means, but this is not to be confused, Ahmad argues, with why the invasionhappened. Gulf energy resources have long been a vital US interest, he notes, but on “no other occasion has the UShad to occupy a country to secure them.”

Free markets. Naomi Klein has done the most to popularize this notion with her widely-read 2007 book The ShockDoctrine, seeing Iraq as a paradigmatic case of disaster capitalism—of predatory market forces exploiting a societyconvulsed by shock and awe. But “beyond short-term gains for a few businesses,” Ahmad writes, “the war proved adisaster for the world capitalist system.” The world will be paying for the Iraq war for a bloody long time, as JosephStiglitz and Linda Blimes have demonstrated in The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the IraqConflict. (They later revised that estimate upwards.)

Market fanaticism of the Milton Friedman variety, Ahmad acknowledges, “was certainly ascendant in the aftermathof the invasion, but there is no evidence that it played any part in the deliberations over war” (emphasis mine). Heshows, moreover, that Klein conflates neoconservatism and neoliberalism—two distinct doctrines. His excellentdiscussion of the differences between them provides a salient corrective to the widespread confusion about this,especially on the Left.

Global hegemony. The idea that the war was waged to expand US global dominance is belied, for Ahmad, by twofacts: that it had “remarkably few supporters among the traditional advocates of American primacy” and that the


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results have been a geostrategic catastrophe for the United States on myriad levels. The first point might seem counter-intuitive, but as someone who wrote extensively about the Iraq debate in US foreign policy circles, I can confirm thatAhmad is exactly right about this. Attacking Iraq was a minority position in US officialdom. Against it were the realistsof the sort who dominated the administration of Bush’s father and were pillars in the foreign policy teams of Reagan,Carter, Ford and Nixon: think national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, secretary ofstate James Baker and the late senior diplomatic adviser Lawrence Eagleburger. All of them opposed the war. Asdid Colin Powell. This has been largely obscured by the secretary of state’s infamous presentation to the UN on the eveof the invasion, one replete with lies and distortions. Not only Powell but virtually the entire state department, andindeed a significant swath of the military and intelligence establishments, opposed going to war.

Who, then, were the war party—and how did this minority faction get their way? The road to Iraq was paved withneoconservative intentions. Other factions of the US foreign policy establishment were eventually brought around tosupporting the war, but the neocons were its architects and chief proponents. New York Times columnist ThomasFriedman, himself a supporter of the invasion, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in April 2003: “I could give you thenames of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington]) who, ifyou had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.”

The neocons were obsessed for decades with toppling Saddam’s regime. Ahmad provides a thorough and instructivegenealogy of the neoconservative movement, mapping both its intellectual coordinates and its “long march through theinstitutions” of the national security apparatus: from its roots in ex-Trotskyism, to the office of US Senator Henry“Scoop” Jackson, a hardline Cold Warrior, ascending into the Reagan administration and the Pentagon, and a labyrinthof magazines, think tanks and ad hoc committees. There is nothing conspiratorial about Ahmad’s analysis: he sees theneocons as a network of individuals (or what the anthropologist Janine Wedel calls a “flex-net”) with a particularideological agenda, using the levers of the state and the media in pursuit of that agenda, in close coordination with oneanother. In this figure from the book he maps what he calls “the neoconservative core”:


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The neoconservative core and Ahmed Chalabi. Richard Perle lies at the core of this unusually dense network with a direct,one-to-one relationship with every other member of the network. Albert Wohlstetter is the outlier mainly because he belongsto a previous generation. He is included because he played the crucial role in inserting apex neocons into government.

The neocons were the Iraq war’s sine qua non, but other stars had to align for the opportunity to present itself: theterrorist attacks of 9/11 were a godsend. The moment was ripe, and the neocons were abundantly prepared to exploit it.They “succeeded in using the shock and disorientation of the attacks to place Iraq…on the agenda and helpedmanufacture the case for invading it,” Ahmad writes. Indeed, such was their preoccupation with Iraq that many of themurged going to Baghdad immediately after 9/11, never mind Afghanistan. Deputy defense secretary PaulWolfowitz argued this case a mere four days after the terrorist attacks, at the first gathering of Bush’s national security


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team post-9/11, held at Camp David. Not even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, supported Wolfowitz’s position—atleast not at that point. (The “flipping” of Rumsfeld and Cheney—their metamorphosis from traditional conservatives, or“aggressive nationalists,” into two of the war’s key champions—was pivotal in the decision to go to war. Ahmad offers adiscerning if ultimately inconclusive discussion of this opaque piece of the historical puzzle.)

But why exactly was toppling Saddam an idée fixe in the neocon mind? And how did this minority faction ultimatelyprevail over its rivals within the administration? Much of the book is devoted to answering these two critical questions.Ahmad’s discussion of the latter—his chapters on “Setting the Agenda” and “Selling the War”—are well crafted but coverfamiliar ground. There are several other books that tell that story, and Ahmad relies on them extensively in his ownaccount. But his discussion of the former—the explanation he advances for what motivated the neoconservative crusadeagainst Saddam Hussein—is this book’s real contribution.

The war was “conceived in Washington, but its inspiration came from Tel Aviv,” he writes, echoing the political scientistsJohn Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of the influential (and controversial) book The Israel Lobby and US ForeignPolicy (which began as an essay in the London Review of Books). Mearsheimer and Walt, the two preeminent realist scholarsin international relations theory, maintain that both Israeli leaders and the Israel lobby in the US urged the Bushadministration to invade Iraq—a course of action, they contend, that was not in the geostrategic interests of the US but thatIsrael saw in its interests. Ahmad concurs with them. “Not all imperial projects are about economic predation: some simplyaim to destroy political enemies”, he argues—correctly, in my view. But in taking out Saddam Hussein the US destroyed oneof Israel’s political enemies. In so doing, Mearsheimer and Walt argue, it undermined American national interests.


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The Institutional infrastructure of the Israel lobby.

Ahmad demonstrates in painstaking detail how the neocons in the Bush administration—especially in the Pentagon(Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—think “Feith-based intelligence”) and the office of the vice president (Lewis “Scooter” Libby)—aggressively advanced the (Israeli) case for the invasion. “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or theAmericans on any given day,” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw remarked. Joe Klein, a centrist columnistfor Time magazine (and himself Jewish) wrote that the neocons pushed for the invasion “to make the world safe for Israel.”

As Ahmad notes, however, the neocons operate on the basis “of what they think are Israel’s best interests” (his emphasis):whether the war, which has significantly strengthened Iran, was actually in Israel’s interests, is highly contestable. ManyIsraelis opposed the war. But as former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan contends, neoconservatism “is about enabling


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the most irredentist elements in Israel.” The neocons are more accurately seen as Likud-centric than Israel-centric.

Against the widely-held view that Israel does America’s bidding, Ahmad shows how Israelpolitik is at odds with both USgeostrategic interests and those of global capital. Big Oil, the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce havelocked horns with the Israel lobby on multiple occasions over sanctions on Syria, Iran, Libya and other states—measures thatthe lobby pushed hard but the corporations opposed fiercely.

“US support for Israel, when considered not in abstract but concrete detail, cannot be adequately explained as a result ofAmerican imperial interests,” the late anti-Zionist and leftist writer Israel Shahak observed. “Strategically, Israel is obviously ahuge burden for the U.S.,” notes Sullivan. This view is becoming increasingly clear to many observers and indeed to more andmore in the US foreign policy establishment.

I find Ahmad’s arguments about the motivations behind the Iraq war—and his critiques of the dominant alternativeexplanations—broadly convincing. But I wish he had engaged directly with some of the criticisms of the Mearsheimer-Waltargument. I share his view that most of those criticisms are unconvincing and that the Israel lobby thesis generally stands up toscrutiny—but his defense of that thesis would have emerged stronger had he dealt with some of the more serious criticismsleveled at it. He doesn’t even mention, much less engage, the criticisms that Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, or JosephMassad, for example, have advanced against Mearsheimer and Walt.

Like Ahmad, I think those criticisms are wrongheaded. They take issue with Mearsheimer and Walt at the level of theirideological framework, or the conceptual arc of their argument. They argue—to make a long story short—that Mearsheimerand Walt let the US off the hook, in effect, and are insufficiently anti-imperialist. But the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis is anempirical matter—the question isn’t what one thinks of their worldview in general (a worldview Ahmad and I both find deeplyflawed, by the way) but whether their argument about why the US invaded Iraq in 2003 is correct or not. I agree with Ahmadthat the evidence is on the side of Mearsheimer and Walt rather than their critics. But it would have made Ahmad’s defense oftheir (and his) case more compelling had he aired those arguments.

Finally, I want to pick a bone with Ahmad’s discussion of liberals and humanitarian interventionists. In a section polemicallytitled ‘From humanitarian intervention to shock and awe’, he takes them to task for forging a “neoconservative-liberal alliance”in support of the 2003 invasion. The liberal interventionists helped shape “the climate of debate,” he asserts, by “easing theinhibitions of some about the use of force.” There are two problems with this section.

First, he wildly overstates the extent of support for the Iraq war among liberals. In fact, the majority of liberal intellectuals andcommentators opposed the invasion—but Ahmad fails to mention that any of them did. It’s true that several high-profileliberals signed on—infamously among them, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, George Packer, David Remnick and PeterBeinart. (Ahmad includes several others in this group who are/were decidedly not liberal: Jean Bethe Elshtain was explicitlyanti-liberal; Kenneth Pollack is a creature of the CIA and the National Security Council; Christopher Hitchens was a Trotskyist


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who morphed into a “neo-neo-con,” in the apt phrase of Ian Williams, and was decidedly hostile to liberalism.)

The pro-war liberals were disproportionately prominent. But in fact their support for the war was a minority position amongliberal interventionists. In his important book The Left at War, Michael Bérubé lists just some of the liberal intellectuals andwriters who opposed the Iraq war: Ian Buruma, Martha Nussbaum, Jürgen Habermas, Timothy Garton Ash, Richard Rorty,Stephen Holmes, Tzvetan Todorov, Mary Kaldor, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ronald Dworkin, Saskia Sassen, Mark Danner,Samantha Power, Amartya Sen, Seyla Benhabib, Charles Taylor, David Held, Ian Williams, Kenneth Roth, David Corn, theeditors of The Nation, Boston Review, openDemocracy, The American Prospect, and the New York Review of Books. (And this isonly a very partial list.)

Ahmad takes the liberal writers Michael Tomasky and Todd Gitlin to task for “denounc[ing] anti-war voices”—but bothTomasky and Gitlin opposed the Iraq war. They had criticized opponents of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, not the 2003invasion of Iraq. Ahmad approvingly quotes Tony Judt’s brilliant London Review of Books jeremiad “Bush’s UsefulIdiots” (September 21, 2006), in which the late historian upbraided the liberal intellectuals who supported the war. Ihave written in praise of the piece myself. It was Judt at his best.

But Ahmad neglects to mention that Judt himself was a liberal who strongly supported the humanitarian interventions inBosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. Like most of us who supported those interventions, Judt strongly opposed the Iraqwar—which, as Ahmad demonstrates, was anything but a humanitarian intervention. To their eternal shame, some humanitarianinterventionists supported the Iraq war—but they were in the minority within the humanitarian interventionist camp. Judtbelonged to the very camp that Ahmad criticizes for, in his view, providing intellectual cover for the Iraq war. In fact, Judt wassquarely in the majority among liberal interventionists in opposing the Iraq war. Indeed, liberals and humanitarianinterventionists articulated some of the most forceful arguments against invading Iraq.

It isn’t just that Ahmad gets the intellectual history wrong in this admittedly brief section of his otherwise outstanding book. Themuch more serious issue is that the arguments he advances against the principle of humanitarian intervention flirt with the verylogic deployed, for example, by the targets of Ahmad’s sharpest criticisms in his more recent writings on Syria: those on the Leftwho steadfastly oppose any form of intervention in Syria on the grounds of defending the “sovereignty” of the murderous Assadregime. Ahmad finds those arguments as specious and pernicious as I do. And, to be sure, he concedes in passing that there are“crises where predatory states use the cover of sovereignty to tyrannize vulnerable populations.”

But he doesn’t think through the larger implications involved here. This is not the place to open a philosophical debate onhumanitarian intervention. But I’ll close by posing a question to Ahmad: has the Syrian conflict, and the ideological fault linesthat have formed around it, occasioned any rethinking on his part of the debates about intervention going back to the 1990s?

These criticisms aside, let me reiterate the enormous significance and relevance of The Road to Iraq. It is a work of tremendousintellectual diligence and moral seriousness. We are all indebted to Ahmad for undertaking this major contribution to the debate


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on one of the central events of this century, whose aftershocks continue to unfold daily, to disastrous effect. With the neoconspoised to make a comeback, this book serves as a cautionary tale of bracing urgency. It is a must-read guide to the history of thepresent.

This article first appeared at The Drouth.

DANNY POSTELDanny Postel is Associate Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and co-hosts its series of video interviews with leading

scholars. He is the author of Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran's

Future and The Syria Dilemma, which was named one of the best books of 2013 in The Progressive. He is a co-editor of PULSE and blogs for Truthout, Critical

Inquiry and the Huffington Post. He was a member of Chicago's No War on Iran coalition, communications coordinator for Interfaith Worker Justice, and

communications specialist for Stand Up! Chicago, a coalition of labor unions and grassroots community organizations.

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4 Comments In These Times Login!1

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ViralOutrage • a year ago

I can't argue the strength of the Israel lobby but I find it rather strange that the tail would wag the dog soefficiently and vigorously. And for what reason? Israel asking the US to invade Iraq would be like someonecalling the cops over some noise complaint coming from the neighbors.... Yeah, they're drunk and listeningto some pretty loud punk rock music...can you please show up here in full riot gear and tear gas the heckout this whole neighborhood, giving them the time to retaliate with Molotov cocktails and give them arallying cry they need for a week long protest on police brutality, please?

Why the war happened: Kick that hornet's nest, and the exterminator will have all the job security he needs,reasoned the neocons. Problem is, they underestimated the amount of hornets as well as their sting. Theywill indeed be having many an adventure in the sand for years and years to come, but I don't think any ofthem have any idea on how to make this a controlled fire instead of the raging conflagration we have now.That's why most of the rogues gallery of the noecons have shut their pieholes and retired.

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Alain Robert • a year ago> ViralOutrage

As long as the hornets are busy fighting each others, Israël is secure.

• Reply •

Rod Dalton • a year ago

The neocons and Cheney, it seems to me there was no single person more instrumental and responsible forbringing about the Iraq War than Vice President Dick Cheney.9

zabada • a year ago

America biggest mistake is,America mess up with iraqis sunnis ,who make up 90% out of nearly 2 billionmuslims all over the world.As sunni Muslim i m goimg to tell how we regard America was.America regardedas a an oppressor by the world .America planted 9 11 to expand it political hegemony on Arab world.Half ofpeople in the world know this and increasing day by day.America support israel badly,even it is oppose bymany ,even in some Christian Western world.Dethrone Saddam and favor politic to Syiah .regarded byMuslim sunnis as a crime to sunnis.America is not acknowledge that msulims regarded Syiah is

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