militarized patriotism: why the u.s. marketplace of ideas failed before the iraq war
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Militarized Patriotism: Why the U.S.Marketplace of Ideas Failed Before theIraq WarJane Kellett CramerPublished online: 31 Aug 2007.
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Militarized Patriotism
Why the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas Failed Beforethe Iraq War
JANE KELLETT CRAMER
The marketplace of ideas within a mature democracy such as
the United States is supposed to fairly reliably vet foreign policies
through open, wide-ranging debate. It is widely recognized that
the U.S. marketplace of ideas failed during the 2002-03 debate over
going to war in Iraq. Examinations of this market failure have em-
phasized executive powers and public fear after 9/11 as the main
reasons threat inflation succeeded; I show neither explains this case.
The majority opposition was silenced throughout early 2002 and
ultimately defeated in a struggle over the Iraq War Resolution by
pressures to be patriotic. I contend that this silencing patriotism
should not be considered ordinary patriotism for a democracy as
it is anti-democratic. I discuss how two critical norms of behavior
which silence debate of national security policies and cause defer-
ence to the executive branch on war powers became established as
part of the militarized political culture that took root in the United
States during the Cold War. Thus these norms, enforced by what
I term to be militarized patriotism left over from the Cold War, si-
lenced debate over Iraq and led to the failure of the marketplace of
ideas.
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weaponsof mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use againstour friends, against our allies, and against us.”1 With these words Vice Presi-dent Dick Cheney launched the Bush administration’s campaign to “sell” theinvasion of Iraq on 26 August 2002. Claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass
Jane Kellett Cramer is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at theUniversity of Oregon.
I wish to thank Robert Art, Ron Krebs, John Mueller, Sue Peterson, Lars Skalnes, TrevorThrall and the editors and anonymous reviewers of Security Studies for their helpful comments.
1 Vice President Dick Cheney, “Address to Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention,” 26August 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html.
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destruction (WMD) were consistently combined with suggestions that a sub-stantial link existed between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and even between Iraq andthe 9/11 attack,2 even though U.S. intelligence services had investigated anddiscredited this alleged link in early 2002. On 8 September 2002, for example,Cheney repeated the claim on Meet the Press that 9/11 hijacker MohammedAtta “did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places himin Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before theattacks on the World Trade Center.”3
It is now obvious that the administration inflated the Iraqi threat as itworked to mobilize public support for an invasion of Iraq.4Although therehas been much debate about a supposed intelligence failure playing a rolein leading Congress and the public to conclude that Iraq possessed immi-nently threatening WMD, intelligence failure was not the problem. It has beenestablished that “the information needed to debunk nearly all [the adminis-tration’s claims] was available both inside and outside the U.S. governmentbefore the war.”5This case of successful threat inflation undercuts sharplythe notion that mature democracies have well-functioning “marketplaces ofideas” that allow policies to be vetted before they are implemented.6A majordebate has developed concerning why the U.S. “marketplace of ideas” failedso profoundly in this period. I argue that the failure of the marketplace ofideas can best be understood by recognizing the powerful silencing effect of
2 Most often, the administration only carefully implied a possible relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, see Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner, “Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection inthe Bush Administration’s Rhetoric,” Perspectives in Politics 3, no. 3 (2005): 525–37.
3 Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler, “Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked by Cheney,” Washington Post, 29 September2003, A01.
4 The best evidence of deliberate threat inflation is the so-called “Downing Street Memo.” This Britishmemorandum reveals that Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British intelligence agency MI6, reportedto top British officials in July 2002 that the Bush administration was determined to invade Iraq and that:“the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” See the memo and extensive discussionin Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History
(New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), quotation at 89.5 Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling
of the Iraq War,” International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 6. Demonstrating that there wassufficient information to refute the administration’s case at the time, see Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t At-tack Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2002, A12. Criticizing the press for not pursuing andbetter revealing critical and knowable information at the time, see John R. MacArthur, “The LiesWe Bought: The Unchallenged ‘Evidence’ for War,” Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2003,http://archives.cjr.org/year/03/3/macarthur.asp . For more on what was knowable at the time, see MichaelMassing, “Now They Tell Us,” The New York Review of Books 51, no. 3, 26 February 2004, 43–49.
6 The claim that mature democracies have relatively well-developed “marketplace[s] of ideas” is fromJack Snyder and Karen Ballentine, “Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas,” International Security
21, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 5–40. Also see Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International
Ambition (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991) for more discussion of U.S. threat inflation and therelative ability of the United States to correct “myths” through open deliberations. Note that Snyder doesnot argue democracies will necessarily prevent foreign policy errors in advance; he mainly argues thatthey will correct egregious errors over time. However, he does argue that they are less prone to errors ingeneral.
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norms of behavior that delineate what is considered “patriotic” behavior inthe United States. Two important norms emerged during the Cold War as thepolitical culture within the United States became increasingly militarized—to support “strong” national security policies, and second, to defer to theexecutive branch on war powers in times of perceived crisis. These normspreclude genuine democratic deliberation of foreign policy alternatives in themarketplace of ideas. Adherence to these norms created the market failurein the run-up to the Iraq War. This argument, focused on norms, stands insharp contrast with other leading explanations that point to the institutionalpower of the executive branch or public fear after the terrorist attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001 as the critical factors leading to the success of threatinflation.7
Scholars, politicians, and pundits have noticed that patriotism played arole in silencing political opposition and sharply prejudiced the media duringthe run-up to the Iraq War.8Others argue that the silencing effect of patrio-tism was simply the unavoidable effect of “ordinary patriotism” and that itmay have silenced some opposition but was not the central obstacle to theefficient functioning of the marketplace of ideas.9 I contend that the normsenforced by patriotism—i.e., what behavior is considered patriotic—werenot “ordinary” norms of patriotism for a democracy,10but were relatively re-cent anti-democratic norms generated by the militarized political culture thatemerged during the Cold War.11Moreover, I show that the strong silencing
7 My argument pointing to domestic norms that led the United States to unilateral intervention appearsto at least somewhat contradict Martha Finnemore’s argument about emergent global norms pressuringstates to only intervene “multilaterally with authorization from an international organization.” I agreethat global norms push in the direction of multilateralism, and in the United States, public opinion andelite opinion strongly preferred multilateralism as I discuss below. In this case, the domestic norms ofmilitarized patriotism in the United States only narrowly trumped the global norms when the norms cameinto conflict, as explained below. See Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs
about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3, passim.8 For a discussion emphasizing the detrimental effects of oppressive policy-specific patriotism silenc-
ing dissent, see for example, George McGovern, “Patriotism is Nonpartisan: Challenging a Mistaken WarCan Take More Courage than Fighting One,” Nation, 24 March 2005 , 30–31; and Paul Krugman, “TheTreason Card,” New York Times, 7 July 2006, A17.
9 Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure,” 36.10 Defined briefly, patriotism is “love and devotion to one’s country.” In a democracy, free and
open debate is respected and valued, thus anyone expressing a differing opinion should not be branded“unpatriotic” for their views. Hence, norms of patriotism that silence free and open debate should not beconsidered ordinary in a democracy. The foreign policy views that this article shows to be off-limits werenot considered unpatriotic prior to the Cold War, thus what is considered ordinary patriotism has changed.The foreign policy views that are now off-limits were strongly preferred by the Founding Fathers. Hencethe norms of patriotism today are militarized and anti-democratic.
11 A political culture argument is often appropriate when state behavior cannot be readily ex-plained by the state’s external environment. It is difficult to explain the decision to invade Iraq as arational response to the United States’ security environment. The argument in many ways parallels JohnDuffield’s political culture argument, which was designed to explain why Germany remained antimilitaris-tic and focused on multilateral solutions to international problems in the post-Cold War period. Structural
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effect of “militarized patriotism” was the main reason for the failure of themarketplace of ideas.12 Politicians and the media had sufficient informationto counter the administration but did not engage in debate for fear of be-ing labeled “unpatriotic.” If countervailing institutions are silenced and failto fulfill their role in the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace will notfunction.
Unlike most constructivists who discuss political culture, I do not arguethat the militarized political culture in the United States created a shared worldview where the public and politicians prefer, or can only imagine, highlymilitarized security policies.13 On the contrary, a majority of the public and thepoliticians recognized and preferred a multilateral solution to the Iraq threat,with a strong preference for disarming Iraq through weapons inspectionsrather than a military invasion. However, individual political actors, especiallyprominent politicians of national stature, were constrained in their individualbehavior by cultural norms of behavior. It was imperative for them to avoidbeing labeled unpatriotic, thus they could not espouse policies that could beconstrued as weak on national security or as unsupportive of the executivebranch in a time of crisis. A cultural domestic environment established in anearlier period in response to a different international environment embodieda set of norms that later constrained the behavior of rational political actors.14
explanations would have predicted a shift in Germany’s behavior toward being more militarized and uni-lateral. See John Duffield, “Political Culture and State Behavior: Why Germany Confounds Neorealism,”International Organization 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 765–803; and Thomas U. Berger, “Norms, Identityand National Security in Germany and Japan,” in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Se-
curity: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 317–56. Fora discussion of how cultures are manifested through norms, such as “regulative” norms that determinethe proper role of particular actors in a society, see Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and PeterJ. Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security,” also in Katzenstein, The Culture of
National Security, 54–55.12 “Militarized patriotism” is the causal mechanism through which militarized political culture is
manifested and affects behavior in the marketplace of ideas. On the importance of identifying the causalmechanism to explain behavior, see Albert S. Yee, “The Causal Effects of Ideas on Policies,” International
Organization 50, no. 1 (1996): 69–108.13 For example, in a more typical political culture analysis, John Duffield discusses how culture
predisposes “collectivities toward certain actions and policies rather than others. Some options will simplynot be imagined.” See Duffield, “Political Culture and State Behavior,” 772. I do not claim that actors couldnot imagine other policies or that actors too easily rejected alternative policies as inappropriate becauseof their political culture. In fact, I find the opposite to be true because a majority of leading politicians inthe Iraq case felt policies other than the Bush administration’s invasion plan would be more appropriate.However, leaders were constrained in their behavior by anachronistic militarized norms of behavior.
14 For an argument for such “hybrid” explanations, see Frank Schimmelfennig, The EU, NATO, and the
Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 283–84, esp. 11.Schimmelfennig explains: “Because rational members of a community are concerned about their imageof legitimacy, a community environment has the potential to modify the collective outcome that wouldhave resulted from the constellations of preferences and power and the formal decision-making rulesalone. In other words, in a community environment, norm-based collective outcomes are possible evenamong strategic actors and in the absence of deep socialization, coercive power or egoistic incentives tocomply.” Ibid., 7.
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This argument contrasts with other explanations of the marketplace fail-ure that led to the decision to attack Iraq. Many scholars and observers havestressed the importance of executive power, including executive control overintelligence information, executive authority in foreign policy, and executivepower over agenda setting as the central causes of market failure in this case.15
The primary focus has been on the control of intelligence information, butenough information was available to counter the administration even dur-ing critical periods of debate. Thus, executive control over information wasnot the real issue. Moreover, congressional opponents and even the majorityof the public (according to some measures) were not persuaded by exec-utive authority to support the unilateral invasion. Some scholars emphasizeexecutive agenda-setting power because the administration pressed for theadoption of the Iraq War resolution just before the 2002 midterm elections.However, the administration’s plan to accomplish regime change in Iraq wasknown far in advance of the 2002 election. What begs explanation is the longsilence of the opposition and its deference to the executive branch despiteits preference for opposition to the administration’s case for unilateral regimechange.
Others have emphasized the importance of mass psychology in the wakeof 9/11.16After 9/11, this argument avers, there was such widespread fearamong the U.S. public that most people were psychologically primed to inflatemerely possible threats. Although public fear is often cited as a major reasonwhy the Bush administration could successfully make a case for a preemptiveattack on Iraq, the reality is that the public consistently preferred the UnitedStates work with the United Nations and favored disarming Iraq throughweapons inspections right up until the eve of the war. The administrationhad to work to sell the invasion to the public and majority support wassoft and hesitant well into early 2003. Given these public attitudes that wereknown to Democrats at the time, it is even more puzzling why Democratic
15 See Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure;” Jon Western, “The War Over Iraq: Selling War tothe American Public,” Security Studies 14, no. 1 (January–March 2005): 99–130; and Spencer Ackermanand John B. Judis, “The First Casualty: The Selling of the Iraq War,” New Republic, 30 June 2003, 14–25.
16 This argument about the psychology of public fear appears in many places in different forms.See Ronald R. Krebs, “Correspondence: Selling the Market Short? The Marketplace of Ideas and the IraqWar,” International Security 29, no. 4, (Spring 2005): 196–202. Jack Snyder includes this psychologicalargument as a reason why the public was prepared to believe “imperial myths” after 9/11. See Jack Snyder,“Imperial Temptations,” National Interest (Spring 2003): 39; Diego Gambetta, “Reason and Terror: Has9/11 Made It Hard to Think Straight?” Boston Review 29, no. 2; Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, CharlesTaber, and Gallya Lahav, “Threat, Anxiety, and Support for Antiterrorism Policies,” American Journal
of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005): 593–608; Robert Jervis, “Understanding the Bush Doctrine,”Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 373; Brad Schmidt and Jeffrey Winters, “Anxiety After9/11” Psychology Today (January/February 2002); and Christian Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand (New York:Doubleday, 2006), 411. For more on the psychology of threat perception, see Robert Jervis, Perception
and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); and RobertH. Johnson, Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1994).
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politicians of national stature did not stand up in the fall of 2002 to opposethe administration’s plan for invading Iraq.
A third approach to explaining the marketplace failure focuses on theweakness and complicity of the countervailing institutions—that is, Congressand the media. Why did these institutions fail to counter the executivebranch’s threat inflation? Explanations of the infirmities of these institutionshave, for example, emphasized the “FOX effect” on the media or the “rhetor-ical coercion” of the Democrats. These explanations focus on the immediatesymptoms of marketplace failure these institutions exhibit without recogniz-ing the underlying disease of a militarized political culture and its long-termeffects on the functioning of democracy.17
This article is organized in four sections. The first section presents myargument, including a description of the militarization of U.S. political cultureduring the Cold War and how this led to the collective embrace of two criticalideas that became norms of behavior. These norms are enforced by execu-tive and public pressures to conform to “militarized patriotism.” The secondsection presents the evidence demonstrating the effects of militarized patrio-tism during the run-up to the Iraq War. Most critically, this section shows thata strong majority of Senators preferred to check the power of the executivebranch and not support a unilateral invasion of Iraq—thus these essentialcongressional members were neither misled nor somehow persuaded intosupporting the unilateral invasion. Instead, it is shown through close ex-amination of the political process that the political pressures of militarizedpatriotism trumped the actual preferences of key congress members, leadingto the collapse of bipartisan opposition to the unilateral invasion plan. With
17 I discuss below a number of arguments about the media, such as the well-known “FOX effect,”which contends that the mainstream media was under pressure to be more patriotic in its coveragebecause of competitive pressures from the meteoric rise of the jingoistic FOX news in this period. Mostof the media theories likewise explain various pressures for the media to be patriotic, and most of theseexplanations are compatible with my more fundamental discussion of the militarized nature of Americanpolitical culture rooted in the Cold War. See Adel Iskandar, “‘The Great American Bubble’: FOX NewsChannel, the ‘Mirage’ of Objectivity, and the Isolation of American Public Opinion,” in Lee Artz andYahya R. Kamalipour, eds., Bring ‘Em On: Media and Politics in the Iraq War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman& Littlefield, 2005), 155–74. One argument focused on explaining why the Democrats were essentiallysilent in the run-up to the Iraq War maintains the Bush administration rhetorically fixed the meaning ofSeptember 11 and tapped into a dominant discursive tradition that allowed it to “rhetorically coerce” theDemocrats into silence. My argument is generally complementary to this argument in that I agree that theBush administration successfully used Cold War rhetoric to help evoke the norms of the Cold War, whichin turn created pressures to be “strong” on defense and unify behind the executive branch. However, afocus on the rhetoric alone misses the bigger picture of why some rhetoric has come to be dominant.Without recognizing the shift to a militarized political culture during the Cold War from a less militarizedand more democratic political culture before the Cold War, one misses a true understanding of what iswrong with the marketplace of ideas. On “rhetorical coercion,” see Ronald R. Krebs and Jennifer Lobasz,“Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq,” Security Studies (thisissue).
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the collapse of political opposition to the invasion plan, and the receipt of“blank check” authority to use force, the marketplace of ideas became irrele-vant to the administration’s final decision to invade. The third section brieflyexamines how the leading alternative explanations of executive power andpublic psychology after 9/11 fail to account for the success of threat inflationduring the run-up to the Iraq War. The final section of this article exploresthe theoretical implications of the argument.
THE COLD WAR AND THE NORMS OF MILITARIZED PATRIOTISM
During, and especially after, World War II, the U.S. political culture was trans-formed from relatively isolationist and anti-militarist to wholly international-ist and highly militarized.18Rapid militarization of the United States happenedearly in the Cold War with the creation of a large permanent standing army, avast network of overseas bases, and the blossoming of what has been calledthe “national security state.”19The most dramatic period of militarization oc-curred in the early 1950s when the defense budget jumped from $13.7 billionin 1950 to $52.8 billion in 1953.20 This militarization happened because theUnited States came to fear a large threat from the Soviet Union and com-munism, and this collective fear led to what has been called the “Cold Warconsensus.” The creation of the Cold War consensus led to the transformationto a militarized political culture during the Cold War, and this new politicalculture included the collective embrace of two ideas critical for the mar-ketplace of ideas: the widespread endorsement of strong national securitypolicies to the total exclusion of other options and broad support of defer-ence to the president on matters of war powers, especially during periods ofperceived crisis.
For almost two decades at the beginning of the Cold War, the periodof the Cold War consensus, the U.S. public was highly unified in its em-brace of very strong national security policies; this was the time when a
18 This transformation has been widely observed by historians. Specifically discussing the changesafter World War II as a radical departure with past peacetime practices and how the old political culture ofisolationism, antimilitarism, and antistatism was transformed, see Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S.
Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945—1954 (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998) esp. chap. 1, “The National Security Discourse: Ideology, Political Culture, and State Making,”1–23; Also on this transformation to a highly militarized state, see Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War:
The United States Since the 1930’s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).19 On the blossoming of the national-security state after World War II, see Hogan, A Cross of Iron;
and Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston:Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977).
20 These figures are for outlays in current dollars. Office of Management and Budget, “Budget Base-lines, Historical Data, and Alternatives for the Future,”1993.
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unified political culture is easiest to discern.21When the United States foughtin Vietnam, the Cold War consensus significantly eroded. Many Americansbegan to question the size and necessity of the massive military, and they be-gan to question many other U.S. foreign policies. During the 1970s there waseven widespread agreement that the United States had perhaps gone too farin its militarization and that overkill existed, and therefore the United Statescould safely and securely pursue arms control.22However, while there weredisagreements about national security policy in terms of whether the UnitedStates needed to keep building its forces up or if it could limit its forcesto some degree, there remained intact a widespread consensus in favor ofstrong national security policies.
No politicians of national stature ever advocated significant reductionsin military spending or any other major lessening of militarization throughoutthe Cold War or after. Advocates of isolationism or any position supportingmerely national defense rather than a strong global military presence werenot to be found.23 This was a profound change from the more than 150 yearsof U.S. history before World War II when many citizens and leaders openlyand forcefully advocated for un-militarized, even isolationist, foreign policies.In 1979, after a decade of some questioning, widespread popular support forstrong national security policies returned in full force at a time of perceivedincreased threat. Militarization returned with a vengeance in the 1980s, whenthe United States—with its highest peacetime military budgets of the ColdWar—spent over $2.2 trillion in eight years on the military. Militarizationcontinued at Cold War levels even after the end of the Cold War and thedisappearance of the Soviet threat.
21 Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National
Security Policy, 1949–51 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Sometimes all important politicalactors and most of the public in a country share the same political orientation—a “consensus.” Whensuch general agreement exists across the political spectrum, it is valid to discuss a single political culture.However, when a country is deeply divided and there is no strong consensus, then subcultures need tobe analyzed. I argue that even though cultural divisions arise in other issue areas, a strong consensuswas maintained throughout the Cold War in support of strong national security policies and increasedexecutive war powers. On analyzing cultures and subcultures, see Elizabeth Kier, “Culture and MilitaryDoctrine: France between the Wars,” International Security 19, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 69.
22 On “overkill,” see David Alan Rosenberg, “Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and AmericanStrategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7 (Spring 1983): 3–71. It should be noted that a consensusto pursue arms control was not a consensus to pursue significant arms reductions.
23 The exception to this rule, perhaps proving this rule, is Pat Buchanan, who has been a dedicatedisolationist in foreign policy. Buchanan has many other non-mainstream policies in addition to isolationismthat likely account for most of his modest national support. Buchanan began his political career workingclosely with Richard Nixon in the 1960s and early 1970s. Buchanan later ran for President in 1992, 1996,and 2000. Buchanan was widely criticized for being racist, anti-Semitic, and more. Nixon later repeatedlydefended Buchanan, saying he’s “a decent, patriotic American” with “some strong views,” such as his“isolationist” foreign policy, with which Nixon disagreed. However, Nixon said, Buchanan “should beheard.” Richard Nixon, “1992 Interview—Part 2, Bush’s Foreign Policy,” CNN, 23 April 1994; and RichardNixon, Larry King Live Transcript no. 1102 (R-#469), CNN, 23 April 1994.
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The Cold War embrace of strong national security policies was matchedby public and apparent congressional willingness to support increased pres-idential war powers. The Cold War was an era of nuclear threats, and manybelieved national security interests could no longer allow for a slow, deliber-ative, and open debate of U.S. military interests and decisions for war. With thepossibility that devastating weapons could attack the United States quickly,it was assumed that a president who had the prerogative to act quickly ormake independent credible threats was necessary for national security.
U.S. presidents have used force abroad over 300 different times through-out U.S. history, whereas Congress has officially declared war only 5 times.24
Thus one could argue that the War Powers Clause of the Constitutiongranting Congress full powers and responsibility to declare war has neverheld sway.25However, historians maintain that from the founding of the Re-public through the nineteenth century and until the Cold War, presidentsgenerally sought congressional authorization or approval prior to usingforce.26
This political practice was essentially overturned with the Korean War,when President Truman sought no formal declaration of war or prior ap-proval before committing troops. Instead the Truman administration noted:“that the President’s power to send the Armed Forces outside the coun-try is not dependent on congressional authority has been repeatedly em-phasized by numerous writers.”27Moreover, Truman maintained he had theconstitutional authority as commander in chief to use the military forcesfor a “police action.” These arguments were accepted and even defendedby some members of Congress. Ryan Hendrickson writes: “With such aprecedent in place and repeatedly reaffirmed by presidential leadershipin military affairs during the cold war, it seems that a norm of pres-idential leadership is now an accepted part of the U.S. foreign policyprocess.”28
After the Vietnam War, Congress attempted to reassert its power overwar powers by passing the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon’sveto in 1973. However, the War Powers Resolution has been widely criti-cized for actually ceding war powers to the president that the Constitutiondoes not allow: It permits the president to commit troops for up to ninetydays without congressional authorization, whereas under the Constitution
24 Ryan C. Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars: The Constitution, Congress, and War Powers (Nashville,TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 1.
25 The War Powers clause is Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the U.S. Constitution. It vests in Congressthe exclusive power to declare war.
26 On the nineteenth century, see Abraham D. Sofaer, War, Foreign Affairs, and Constitutional Power
(Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1976); and Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University Pressof Kansas, 1995).
27 “Authority of the President to Repel the Attack in Korea,” Department of State Bulletin (31 July1950), 173, cited in Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars, 3.
28 Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars, 3.
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the president can only use force to “repel sudden attacks.”29 Other critics ofthe War Powers Resolution argued it was an unnecessary effort to establishpowers that Congress already had. In the end, most observers have arguedthat the War Powers Resolution failed because Congress has been unwill-ing to exercise its power and subsequent presidents have been unwilling toabide by it.30
In sum, the political culture in the United States significantly changedduring the Cold War, and two militarized ideas came to be collectively em-braced. First, Americans came to support only strong national security poli-cies. This collective belief came to be a “norm of behavior” for politiciansof national stature, where no politicians with ambitions to run for nationaloffice could afford to be seen as weak on national security. Second, duringthe Cold War, Americans decided to accept and support expanded presi-dential powers, including allowing the president to arrogate nearly unilateralwar powers to the executive branch. Thus it became a norm of behavior forcongressional leaders to most often unify behind the president, especially ifany pretext of imminent threat or urgent need was proffered.31 Both of theseshifts occurred in response to the potentially imminent threat posed by theSoviet Union, but over time they became nearly unquestioned norms thatlong outlasted the Soviet threat.
29 Louis Fisher and David Gray Adler, “The War Powers Resolution: Time to Say Goodbye,” Political
Science Quarterly 113, no. 1 (1998): 1–20; For example, both President Ronald Reagan’s invasion ofGrenada in 1983 and President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989 took place within the90-day time frame, thus large military engagements are not subject to congressional oversight under theWar Powers Resolution.
30 Arguing the War Powers Resolution has failed, see Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars, 19, passim;Robert A. Katzman, “War Powers: Toward a New Accommodation,” in Thomas E. Mann, ed., A Question
of Balance: The President, the Congress, and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC.: Brookings Institution,1990). Some scholars disagree and argue the resolution significantly altered presidential behavior. SeeDavid P. Auerswald and Peter F. Cowhey, “Ballotbox Diplomacy: The War Powers Resolution and theUse of Force,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1997). Other scholars argue theWar Powers Resolution was part of a significant transformation of the foreign policy making process afterVietnam, where the executive in the 1980s “could no longer unilaterally determine foreign policy.” For thisargument, see Susan Peterson and Christopher Wenk, “Domestic Institutional Change and Foreign Policy:Comparing U.S. Intervention in Guatemala and Nicaragua,” Security Studies 11, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 76.Although there is no doubt the foreign policy process changed in significant ways in the post-Vietnamera, in terms of war powers, little really changed. The president’s powers did appear significantly curbedin the case of Nicaragua, where the executive branch had its way in getting support for the contras someof the time, but also met with significant congressional resistance. However, during the same period,President Reagan unilaterally committed military advisors to El Salvador, sent troops to Lebanon, invadedGrenada, and launched air strikes on Libya, all with either perfunctory notification of Congress (no actualconsultation) or disingenuous arguments that the troops did not face hostile conditions.
31 Often it was argued that politics needed “to stop at the water’s edge,” thus a unified foreignpolicy behind the executive branch was necessary. For a discussion of the continuing existence of thispervasive attitude in 1999, long after the Cold War ended and before the run-up to the Iraq War, includinghow this attitude stifles healthy debate of foreign policy, see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “Why PoliticsShould Not Stop at the Water’s Edge,” Weekly Standard, 15 November 1999, http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/dailyreport/archive/2856921.html.
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After the Cold War ended and the threat from the Soviet Union evapo-rated, many observers expected the United States to become less militarizedand possibly for Congress to reassert its war powers.32People expected alarge “peace dividend” and a return to democratic normalcy. However, noend of militarization materialized and no significant lessening of presidentialleadership in war powers came about.
No politicians of national stature significantly questioned the UnitedStates’ strong national security policies at the end of the Cold War eventhough the massive size and scope of the United States’ military establish-ment in the absence of a peer-competitor was historically without prece-dent. In 2002, U.S. defense spending was twenty-five times greater than “thecombined defense budgets of the seven ‘rogue states’ then comprising theroster of U.S. enemies.”33In addition, after the demise of the Soviet Union, theDefense Department extensively expanded its already immense network ofoverseas bases to 725, with many new bases in what had been the Sovietsphere of influence in Eurasia.34 It is clear the United States remained highlymilitarized after the Cold War, and the norm of behavior that no politicianof national stature could afford to be viewed as weak on national securityremained intact.
Moreover, no significant congressional challenge of executive authorityin war powers was ever mounted after the Cold War, despite the dramati-cally changed threat environment. In fact, after the Cold War there has beena significantly increased U.S. willingness to use force, but no marked increaseof congressional participation in decision making. During the forty-year ColdWar, although the United States liberally used clandestine force, it only en-gaged in six separate large-scale military actions. Since the end of the ColdWar, beginning with Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989, the UnitedStates has engaged in nine large-scale military operations, along with manyother smaller actions such as cruise missile attacks and frequent bombingsin Iraq throughout the 1990s, and each use of force included vast congres-sional deference and little meaningful congressional participation in decisionmaking.35This continued norm of congressional deference was perhaps moststriking in the case of President Clinton’s use of force in 1995 shortly after
32 One of the best studies of how American culture profoundly changed through a process of re-lentless militarization in response to perceived threats and vulnerabilities was published in 1995, and thisstudy concluded on a tentative hopeful note with the last chapter entitled “A Farewell to Militarization?”See Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War. Expecting a return to congressional assertion of War Powersafter the Cold War, but examining the six case studies of uses of force by President Clinton and findinghe did not comply with the War Powers Resolution, see Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars.
33 Emphasis in original. Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Se-
duced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17.34 Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 22–24. Many of the 725 bases the Defense Department lists are
small, but 60 to 100 are of considerable size. In a world of fewer than 200 states, the United States hassignificant bases in over a third of the countries of the world.
35 Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 19.
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sweeping Republican victories in the House and Senate. Republicans tookcontrol of Congress for the first time in forty years in 1994. They had vowedin their Contract with America that they would not allow U.S. troops to beplaced under UN command and they would restore national security by notallowing Clinton to use U.S. forces in conflicts where there was no clear na-tional interest. Much of their campaign rhetoric specifically precluded U.S.involvement in Bosnia. Yet, in the end, the Republican Congress under NewtGingrich’s leadership deferred to Clinton because of “the desire to appearnot as obstructionists, but as patriotic. . . . ”36The norm of executive branchcontrol of war powers was not challenged.
Thus, it is these two norms of behavior that account for congressionalsilence and the executive branch victory in the run-up to the Iraq War. Itwas too politically risky for members of Congress to be viewed as not beingstrong on national security or unpatriotic by not deferring to the executivebranch on war powers in a time of alleged crisis. In short, skeptics weresilenced and Congress could not conduct a genuine debate on the most im-portant national security question—whether or not to go to war. If Congressis paralyzed and cannot democratically deliberate then the entire market-place of ideas fails, and the executive branch wins no matter the merits ofits case. Although the struggle between Congress and the executive branchis the central battleground for the marketplace of ideas, the media can havean independent influence on Congress and on the debate overall, and it islikely the media is affected by the same pressures to be patriotic.
MILITARIZED PATRIOTISM STIFLED DEBATE
On most issues, Democrats have been unified in their opposition to the Bushadministration. Some analysts have argued the Iraq War issue was differentand Democrats did not oppose the Bush administration because many wereconvinced that attacking Iraq was the best policy. For those Democrats op-posed, it is argued, it made no sense to speak up because the administrationwas going to prevail, and there would be no political gain by standing inopposition.37This line of reasoning finds there was no real debate in the
36 Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars, 98, with a full case study of the war powers issues over Bosniain chap. 4, 68–98. Also finding presidential dominance in war powers after the Cold War, see Gary R.Hess, “Presidents and the Congressional War Resolutions of 1991 and 2002,” Political Science Quarterly
121, no. 1 (2006): 93–118.37 Some Democrats did speak out in loud opposition, such as Sen. Robert Byrd and Rep. Dennis
Kucinich, among some others, but there were not many Democrats interested in taking on this issuein debate. These few oppositional voices were not the leaders in Congress or the prominent Democratswho are considered likely viable presidential candidates—candidates of national stature. Thus these voiceswere not listened to, and real debate would have taken place if Democratic leaders or likely presidentialfront-runners had taken up the issue as one to make a stand in opposition to the administration. Onereason the Democrats who did speak out were not heard was because the media was also under pressure
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marketplace of ideas because a majority in the Congress, including most Re-publicans and a significant number of Democrats were persuaded by theadministration that attacking Iraq was necessary.
In this section, I present extensive evidence strongly indicating that mostDemocrats, as well as many Republicans, were not convinced by the admin-istration. Instead, a large majority of Congress believed the administration’scase concerning a WMD threat from Iraq was weak and unproven, they didnot agree that the United States should attack Iraq unilaterally, they stronglypreferred disarming Iraq through weapons inspections, they opposed regimechange without real proof there was a “grave” threat, and they feared the costsand consequences of invading Iraq. In fact, because so few in Congress wereactually convinced regime change in Iraq was a good idea, in late August2002, many administration leaders and Democrats thought the Bush admin-istration would not get support from Congress to attack Iraq unilaterally.Even in late September, after the Iraq War resolution had been presented bythe administration and discussed extensively, congressional support was stillmuch in question.
However, in a political maneuver at the end of September, with nosignificant new intelligence presented, the executive branch prevailed. Thereis strong evidence that most Democrats and many Republicans deferred tothe executive branch not on the merits of the case, but because they did notwant to appear weak on defense or unpatriotic. In the end, the marketplaceof ideas failed in 2002 because of the dual norms of militarized patriotism—congressional leaders, especially those who were presidential hopefuls andneeded to be of national stature, understood they needed to be strong onnational defense and to defer to the executive branch in times of perceivedcrisis in order to survive politically.
That there was virtually no debate at all about invading Iraq in the firstseven months of 2002 provides strong evidence Democrats feared being la-beled unpatriotic. In January, President Bush had labeled Iraq as part of the“axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech and presented his argumentsagainst Saddam Hussein. In the succeeding months he repeatedly asserted hisintention of removing Saddam Hussein from power,38 and his administrationbegan visibly to prepare extensively for a “possible” invasion of Iraq. ManyU.S. allies overseas stood up in opposition to a possible invasion, yet mostDemocrats did not even ask questions. One commentator asked, in March2002, “Where is the debate?” and argued: “It isn’t treason for a party out of
to be patriotic as discussed below. This reality made it more difficult for any politicians to speak outbecause they were unlikely to get “fair” representation by the “patriotic press.” Of course, Rep. Kucinichdid run for the presidency, so some might argue he is a politician of “national stature;” however, hefrequently remarked that his candidacy was simply intended to get some issues on the agenda, and hewas aware he was not a major contender.
38 Stating President Bush had for months made his intentions clear, see Michael E. O’Hanlon andPhilip H. Gordon, “Is Fighting Iraq Worth the Risks?” New York Times, 25 July 2002, A17.
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power in wartime to talk about these matters. If anything, it’s the Democrats’patriotic responsibility not just to hold up their end of the national dialogueover the war’s means and ends, but to say where they want to take thecountry in peace. . . . ”39 Another commentator observed: “Democrats [have]been tiptoeing around [the Iraq war issue] like teen-agers sneaking in aftercurfew ....” and argued “The Democrats’ silence coupled with the Republi-cans’ enthusiasm put the nation in the difficult position of being taken into aquestionable war without any questions being asked.”40 Likewise, an edito-rial remarked that the beating of war drums in Washington, D.C., had “beenmet by a cowed silence from most Democrats.”41
Leading Democrats all stated they agreed that it would be better if Sad-dam Hussein was out of power, but most hedged about whether it wasnecessary or advisable to use force against Iraq. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-
CT) notably came out in full support of using force. If others agreed, it likelywould have been to their advantage to speak up. House Minority LeaderDick Gephardt (D-MO) also tentatively favored military action if all other ef-
forts failed, but in August was a firm believer there should be a nationaldialogue with evidence presented to Congress before any large-scale inva-sion.42 Other leading Democrats, such as former Vice President Al Gore,Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), and Senators John Edwards (D-
NC), John Kerry (D-MA), and Hillary Clinton (D-NY), repeatedly tried to sidestepthe issue altogether. As Edwards said: “It is overly simplistic to say are we infavor of a war or against a war. Saddam is dangerous, and he needs to begone. But there are many things that need to be done before any decision ismade or action taken.”43 It was widely perceived that Democrats were cau-tious because they believed they could only lose politically if they tried todebate the Iraq issue.44 According to Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who cameout in strong opposition to invading Iraq: “There’s a certain amount of fear[among Democrats], let’s face it. The nature of politics is caution. People are
39 Frank Rich, “The Wimps of War,” New York Times, 30 March 2002, A15. Rich describes theDemocrats as “sheepish” and avoiding debate, noticing there was only “sporadic tough talk. . . fromthe clownish Mr. McAuliffe or the cranky Senate octogenarians Robert Byrd and Ernest Hollings.”
40 James O. Goldsborough, “Democrats Finally Awaken Over Iraq,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 30September 2002, B7. Explaining how the Democrats ducked the war issue in 2002 and continued to doso into 2006, see Ari Berman, “The Democrats: Still Ducking,” Nation 282, no. 12 (27 March 2006): 21–22.
41 “Bush Can’t Circumvent Congress to Initiate War,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 23 August 2002,19A.
42 James Dao, “Call in Congress For Full Airing of Iraq Policy,” New York Times, 18 July 2002, A1.43 Steven Thomma and Ron Hutchinson, “Democrats Cautious on Attack on Iraq,”Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette, 22 August 2002, A8. Thomma and Hutchinson report, “Democrats fear being labeled unpatriotic.They do not want to force a debate now that would divert attention from domestic issues that they thinkboost their chances in November’s elections.”
44 As one typical report stated in August: “Iraq is emerging as the wild-card issue in the 2002 election,with Democrats nervously watching a growing debate. . . fearful that it could shift attention away fromeconomic issues that now dominate the agenda.” Dan Balz, “Democrats Worry About Iraq as Issue; Debateon War Seen as Diversion From Economy,” Washington Post, 19 August 2002, A01.
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just watching and wondering what’s going on here.”45Democrats had openlyfavored the invasion of Afghanistan, thus their silence in the first half of 2002indicated they at least were not sure invading Iraq was a good idea—Whydid they not raise questions? Why were they fearful?
In mid-April, prominent outside observers recognized the strikingcongressional reticence to debate a possible war in Iraq. An ongoingBrookings/Harvard Forum convened a panel of eminent “Congress-watchers”to discuss: Where was Congress? Was it perhaps premature for a serious con-gressional debate? Was Congress intimidated by the White House? All fourpanelists agreed that in the wake of 9/11, Congress had been in essentialagreement with the White House about the invasion of Afghanistan basedon the merits of the case, but each predicted there would soon be muchmore debate over Iraq. One stated: “[Earlier] Congress did support the pres-ident on the merits of these things and as issues become less black andwhite and more complicated, I think you’ll certainly see more congressionalinvolvement.” Likewise, another remarked:
I think in times of war there is a natural tendency for everybody to rallytogether and to support the chief executive and that inhibits this kind ofquestioning that you want to erupt. I think you will have a debate overIraq. I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more of it up to now,but I think it’s going to happen.46
Thus, these observers believed the time of rallying behind the presidentafter 9/11 was fading (as was indicated in public opinion polls). They didnot think Congress simply agreed about Iraq, and they had expected moredebate already in the spring of 2002.
Democratic silence continued well into the summer of 2002 even aspublic support for invading Iraq—despite scarce voiced opposition—fell tojust over 50 percent. There was over 60 percent support among the public formultilateralism (discussed below). The silence was finally broken by strongquestioning (although not strong opposition) by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE)
and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), the leaders of the Senate Foreign RelationsCommittee, who decided in early August to begin hearings about U.S. policytoward Iraq. The questions posed by the senators strongly implied they werenot convinced invading Iraq was urgent or even necessary:
45 Thomma and Hutchinson, “Democrats Cautious on Attack on Iraq,” A8.46 These quotations from Tom Donilon, assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Clinton
administration and Mort Kondracke, commentator on FOX-TV and executive editor of Roll Call, a newspaperthat covers Capitol Hill, respectively. Transcript of forum in Stephen Hess and Marvin Kalb, eds., The Media
and the War on Terrorism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), chap. 15, “Congress,” 237–49, esp. 249.
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First, what threat does Iraq pose to our security? How immediate isthe danger? . . . Second, what are the possible responses to the Iraqithreat? . . . Third, when Saddam Hussein is gone, what would be our re-sponsibilities?47
These hearings were revealing in that many felt they learned how weakthe administration’s case actually was, but the hearings were also criticizedby some Democrats for not including voices who “believe war in Iraq isneither desirable nor inevitable.”48
In August 2002 prominent Republicans and former military officerslaunched a credible challenge to the executive branch. Brent Scowcroft, re-tired Air Force general and former national security adviser to Presidents Fordand George H.W. Bush, led the opposition arguing there was “scant evidence”to tie Saddam Hussein to terrorism. Scowcroft also reasoned that SaddamHussein, whom he believed then devoted enormous efforts to equipping hisforces with WMD, would not make common cause with terrorists because hewas a “power-hungry survivor” who would know that this would open him toa devastating response from the United States.49 Scowcroft was joined in hischarge to stop the administration from unilaterally invading Iraq by two secre-taries of state from the George H.W. Bush administration, James W. Baker IIIand Lawrence S. Eagleburger. Others joining the opposition included RichardC. Holbrooke and numerous Republican politicians, including House MajorityLeader Dick Armey (R-TX) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), a likely Republicanpresidential hopeful. It was widely reported that State Department officials,including Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, were opposed to the invasionand were working behind the scenes.
Other respected military professionals also openly opposed an invasionof Iraq and made their voices heard during this critical period of debate.They included Gen. Wesley Clarke, the head of the U.S. NATO force in theKosovo War, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, head of U.S. forces in the 1991 GulfWar, and Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had then just recently served as Bush’stop envoy to the Middle East. All warned strongly against a war with Iraq.Other military professionals were also calling for more debate, such as Re-tired Army Lt. Col. Ralf Zimmerman, who wrote in the Army Times that itwas time for the U.S. public to think through this issue and “have an openpublic debate over war vs. containment as the proper option when dealingwith Iraq.”50Even with all of these credible allies and public support for an
47 Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Richard G. Lugar, “Debating Iraq,” New York Times, 31 July 2002, A19.48 This quote is from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who held several Capitol Hill briefings trying to highlight
the unheard opposition to U.S. military action against Iraq. From Elizabeth Auster, “Kucinich Focuses OnWhy Not To Attack,” Plain Dealer, 21 August 2002, A3.
49 Scowcroft first appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and then followed up with an op-ed, “Don’tAttack Saddam.”
50 Quoted in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: PenguinPress, 2006), 48.
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invasion dropping, no leading Democrats from Congress decided to take astrong stand in opposition. Were they all convinced on the merits of thecase?
By the end of August 2002, after many Republican and military voicescame out in opposition, some Democrats were arguing that the presidentneeded Congress’s approval before invading Iraq. A number of Democratsmade it clear that they were not convinced an attack was necessary andwere not ready to give the president authority under the War Powers Act.“Based on what the administration has shared with Congress, I’d say theadministration is far short of being able to count on Congress’s support forany action,” said Rep. Rick Larsen (D-WA).51 It was reported in Washington, D.C.,that White House lawyers were arguing the president did not need a votein Congress because the 1991 resolution approved in Congress was still ineffect. Some administration officials were also arguing authorization underthe War Powers Resolution was not necessary at all, and it was reportedadministration leaders feared a resolution would likely include restrictionson military action.52In response to the challenge from Republicans and someDemocrats, the Bush administration ultimately decided to change tactics.Instead of insisting it could go ahead unilaterally, it decided to take the issueto the United Nations. It then would frame the issue so that Congress wasasked to rally behind the president to help pressure the United Nations toact but should not tie the president’s hands if the United Nations failed toact.
A majority of Democrats and many Republicans were not convincedeven at the time they approved the resolution that a unilateral invasion wasnecessary or right. In September 2002, the administration launched a cam-paign to press its case to the United Nations, Congress, and the public. It heldspecial briefings and emphasized evidence that, they argued, made a strongcase against Iraq, including the evidence of aluminum tubes for centrifuges,unmanned aerial vehicles that could possibly carry WMD, and new evidenceof “associations” and “relationships” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Manyleaders were unconvinced. Dick Armey said later: “It wasn’t very convincing.If I’d gotten the same briefing from President Clinton or Al Gore, I proba-bly would have said, ‘Ah, bullshit.’ But you don’t do that with your ownpeople.”53
At the same time, Democratic Party leaders held their own brief-ings for House Democrats. These briefings were led by men and womenwho shaped national security strategy for Bill Clinton, including KennethPollack, Dennis Ross, and Madeleine Albright. They all argued Saddam
51 David Postman, “Washington Congressional Democrats Say They’re Wary of Attack on Iraq,” Seattle
Times, 28 August 2002, A12.52 Postman, “Washington Congressional Democrats,” A12.53 Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 124. For other accounts from Congress members who found the briefings
unconvincing, see ibid., 123–27.
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Hussein was dangerous and military force was the only permanent solu-tion, although they included caveats about the need for a broad interna-tional coalition and sufficient postwar planning. Many Democrats wouldlater argue it was these briefings that changed their minds, but there isevidence to suggest this information and advice did not actually con-vince the majority (at least in the Senate) that there was a grave threat—or to support a unilateral invasion. Only after Democrats voted for theblank check resolution did they rationalize that these briefings convincedthem.
The administration introduced its preferred language for the Iraq WarResolution on 19 September and was still negotiating the language at theend of September. Even by the end of the month—after all the briefings—the president’s war resolution was not a sure thing. Joe Biden and twoRepublicans, Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel, were gaining support foran alternative proposal that would drastically narrow the president’s au-thority. The senators all served on the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-tee and they had heard extensive testimony from the intelligence serviceson the alleged Iraqi threat.54They were not convinced the administrationhad sufficient evidence and they wanted to draw the resolution narrowly.The Biden-Lugar-Hagel Resolution was crafted to allow Bush to attack Iraqonly for the purpose of destroying Iraq’s WMD (not regime change), andonly after seeking UN approval. If the United Nations said no, their pro-posal required the president to come back to Congress and demonstratethat the Iraqi threat was so grave that only military action could eliminateit.
The resolution reportedly had the backing of at least sixty to seventysenators, including as many as twenty-five Republicans. According to Biden,the resolution was being encouraged by Powell and Armitage at the State De-partment. The widespread support for this resolution demonstrates that therewere substantial bipartisan doubts about a grave threat requiring unilateralmilitary action.
The White House was worried about the Biden proposal. Bush was re-portedly furious and told Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), “I don’t want a resolution such
54 Most noteworthy was the testimony from the CIA chief and director of all intelligence, GeorgeTenet, who admitted that there was no “technically collected” evidence—no physical proof—on Iraq’sWMD programs. Thus the intelligence services were basing every claim of current programs on defectorstatements. This clearly took some senators and staffers by surprise because they knew human intelligencealone was a shaky proposition. Moreover, the main piece of evidence the administration had presentedat this point for an Iraqi nuclear program was intercepted aluminum tubes that were allegedly for nuclearcentrifuges. However, the senators had heard from the State Department and the Energy Department(which had the strongest technical expertise to judge the aluminum tubes) that the tubes were not likelymeant for a nuclear program. Thus the senators knew the administration’s case was not strong. OneSenate science advisor recalled that after watching the administration’s presentation of its evidence, hesaid in private, “They’re going to war and there’s not a damn piece of evidence to substantiate it.” SeeIsikoff and Corn, Hubris, 117–19.
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as this to tie my hands,” and he ordered Lott: “Derail the Biden legislationand make sure its language never sees the light of day.”55 In the end, Lott didnot need to derail the resolution. The White House had been negotiating thelanguage of its preferred resolution with leaders from both the House andSenate. The Democrats were a minority in the House, and although DickGephardt had been pushing for small changes to the resolution, he couldnot get much. The White House had Republican support in the House anddecided to call deliberations to a close and introduce the legislation in theHouse—most likely to preempt the Biden Resolution in the Senate. Accord-ing to Gephardt, “At some point, the White House said, ‘This is as good asit gets,’ and I became convinced we couldn’t get more. You had to makea decision whether you were for giving the president the authority or not.Everything else was window dressing.”56
On 2 October the White House held a Rose Garden press conferenceannouncing that it had finalized the draft Iraq War Resolution to be introducedin the House. The press conference was particularly notable because DickGephardt agreed to appear with the president in support of the resolution.Tom Daschle had taken part in the negotiations but had refused to appear inthe Rose Garden and endorse the broad language of the proposed resolution.Gephardt’s appearance in the Rose Garden caught both Daschle and Bidenoff guard.57 Daschle abruptly canceled his morning press briefing. A stunnedBiden remarked to reporters,
I believe from my discussions with the Republicans who support this [theBiden resolution] that there are up to twenty-four, twenty-five Republicanmembers who would much prefer to see this [resolution] narrowed alongthe lines that we have suggested. I believe there are as many as a dozenwho, prior to this sort of being potentially, you know, match point alreadyoccurred here [referring to Gephardt’s Rose Garden appearance], whowere prepared to vote for this.58
Gephardt’s support of the president’s resolution effectively killed Biden’sproposal. Thereafter, the Republicans responded to Biden’s requests for sup-port by stating that they could not afford to “be to the left of Dick Gephardt.”59
55 This account in Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 127.56 Ibid., 127.57 Catching the surprise and disappointment of this moment, see the PBS news video and transcript,
A Newshour with Jim Lehrer, “Kwame Holman reports on the House resolution authorizing military ac-tion against Iraq,” 2 October 2002, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle east/july-dec02/bkgdiraq10–2.html.
58 Joseph Biden, transcript, A Newshour with Jim Lehrer, “Kwame Holman Reports on the HouseResolution Authorizing Military Action Against Iraq,” 2 October 2002.
59 Much of the following account of the Biden proposal, especially the discussion of Dick Gephardt’srole, is based on Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 127–28. These authors apparently interviewed members ofCongress familiar with Gephardt’s and Biden’s roles.
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Why would many Republican senators and almost all Democratic sen-ators, who believed they should support a narrow resolution precluding aunilateral invasion without more proof of a grave threat, change their mindsjust because one Congressman decided to support the blank check reso-lution? Republicans felt they could not be seen as weaker on national se-curity than a leading Democrat. Moreover, they could not be seen as lessloyal to the commander-in-chief. With the collapse of Republican support,all Democrats who faced tight races in the 2002 midterm elections (exceptSen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN))—and presidential hopefuls from both parties (in-cluding Senators Hagel and Biden)—decided they also needed to be strongon national security and support the commander-in-chief.
Why did Dick Gephardt decide to support Bush and even appear in theRose Garden before any debate of the resolution had taken place in Congress?Most observers were as surprised as Daschle and Biden and considered hisappearance in the Rose Garden out of character and even a betrayal ofsorts to his party. According to Gephardt, his thinking was shaped by theformer Clinton national security aides who argued that Iraq would have tobe confronted. Indeed, Gephardt made an impassioned speech about howIraq posed a serious threat. However, there is also strong evidence he wasnot actually convinced a unilateral invasion was a good idea and was insteadconforming to the norm to be strong on national defense. First, he repeatedlyrevealed that he had deep reservations and regrets at the time and felt hewas in a difficult political position. He later recalled saying: “I’m sorry he’sthe president. I didn’t vote for him. But we’re in a tight spot.”60 He contendedthat Democrats had no choice but to go along with Bush on Iraq and theyhad to try to keep Iraq from becoming the defining issue in the upcomingelections.61
Second, others noted that Gephardt was in a particularly tight spot be-cause he was determined to run for the presidency in 2004 and, like otherleading Democrats, he had voted against the 1991 Gulf War. Other membersof Congress reasoned Gephardt felt that if he cast a similar vote now, hecould expect the Republicans to tag him as soft and too hesitant to use mili-tary force. Instead, if he came out strong on national security, this could be tohis definite advantage and set him apart from other Democratic contendersfor the presidency. His political advisers urged him to appear on the lawn.
60 Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 128.61 It should be noted that Democrats did have a choice here because bipartisan opposition to the
administration’s resolution would have given political cover to the Democrats, where no one could taganyone else as unpatriotic because support was so widespread including many prudent hawks and militaryprofessionals. Thus the Biden-Lugar-Hagel proposal was a missed opportunity that would have given theDemocrats the ability to neutralize the war issue during the election season by being full participantsrather than rubber stampers. Gephardt’s claim, therefore, that there was no real option for Democratsappears self-serving; it appears he jumped at the chance to have a “McCain Moment” of looking extratough on national security in the Rose Garden, rather than working for the benefit of the Democraticparty and the country.
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Gephardt was not alone on the lawn with the president. Bush had sup-port at that point from many known hawks on this issue, such as SenatorsJoseph Lieberman, John McCain (R-AZ), and John Warner (R-VA), and Re-publican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), all of whom were inthe Rose Garden. However, it was notable that Republican House MajorityLeader Dick Armey was not there. The absence of both Armey and Daschle(see above) was known to be because they hoped to leave open the possi-bility of real debate over the resolution. Thus the presence of Gephardt wasstriking to all. Daschle, like Gephardt, was also a presidential hopeful andwould likely have benefited politically by being seen as “standing tough” onnational security. Daschle’s colleagues recognized it took political courageto not appear on the lawn standing strong on national security and praisedhim for his courage and leadership on the Senate floor during the debate ofthe resolution.62
Senate members preferred not to allow the President to unilaterally at-tack Iraq. After the collapse of the bipartisan support for the Biden Res-olution, everyone knew the passage of the president’s resolution was asure thing. Everyone on Capitol Hill began predicting the resolution wouldpass easily after the Rose Garden incident, so the debate was anticli-mactic. The media hardly covered the House debate with only one re-porter in the press gallery when it began. At the most intense points inboth the House and the Senate debates fewer than 10 percent of eachbody’s members attended. One seasoned observer remarked: “Usually, whenthere are few people around, it means they don’t like what’s happen-ing but don’t feel they can do anything about it.”63Overall the Senate de-cided to go to war in Iraq after only six days of debate. This brief debatestands in stark contrast to the twenty-one days spent debating the Elemen-tary and Secondary Education Act, the twenty-three days on the energybill, the nineteen days on the trade bill, and eighteen days on the farmbill.64
It is remarkable how perfunctory the discussion was, given that sen-ators received the crucial National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq on 1October 2002, a mere three days before the debate.65Congress had requestedin September that the CIA produce an NIE on Iraq. The fact that membersof Congress needed to request an NIE should have set off alarm bells: Suchrequests were normally unnecessary because the CIA routinely produces NIEs
62 Sen. Byrd, “Authorization of the Use of United States Forces Against Iraq,” on 10 October 2002,Congressional Record S10242.
63 This quote and the preceding observations about the debate are in Ricks, Fiasco, 61.64 Byrd, Losing America, 175.65 Note that Dick Gephardt made up his mind without consulting this new NIE on Iraq, further
indicating he made up his mind based on political pressures rather than reasonably full consideration ofthe merits of the case.
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about possible major threats.66 When the intelligence estimate on Iraq’s WMD
capabilities finally arrived in Congress on 1 October 2002, some congressionalaides were anxious to review it, but no more than a half dozen members ofCongress ever went to the secure room to examine the document. Senateaide Peter Zimmerman, the scientific adviser to the Senate Foreign RelationsCommittee, later explained why:
We had an election coming up. The Democrats were afraid of being seenas soft on Saddam or on terrorism. The whole notion was, “Let’s get thewar out of the way as fast as possible and turn back to the domesticagenda.”67
Although Zimmerman’s perception that the vote had already been de-cided before the debate was on target and that it was decided because leadersdid not want to appear soft was also correct, the additional implication that itwas decided by normal electoral pressures of wanting to merely change theissue is not exactly correct. Congress, despite electoral pressures, came closeto standing together in opposition to the executive branch. It was the acutepressures on Gephardt—that was also perceived to be acute for all politi-cians of national stature—that led to the wholesale change of many votesthat nearly were cast in opposition despite the election season.
Finally, most Democrats and even many Republicans made speechesthat revealed they understood the weakness of the intelligence and that theythought attacking unilaterally was unwise.68For example, Daschle made itclear to all there were major controversies over the intelligence that wasbeing reported in the media when he said on 10 October 2002:
A report in yesterday’s Washington Post suggests “an increasing numberof intelligence officials, including former and current intelligence agencyemployees, are concerned the agency is tailoring its public stance to fitthe administration’s views.”69
66 There were many apparent reasons Congress members should have been skeptical of the ad-ministration’s case—and I argue they were skeptical, just not expressing their skepticism loudly. Anotherreason they should have been skeptical, undoubtedly known to at least members of the Senate ArmedServices Committee, was the fact that that committee had heard testimony from the head of the DefenseIntelligence Agency (DIA) on 19 March 2002 that Iraq was not even on the list of the five most pressing“near-term concerns” and that Iraq had only “residual” WMD capabilities. During the testimony the DIA chiefmade no mention of a nuclear program or any possible ties to al-Qaeda. See Isikoff and Corn, Hubris,26–27.
67 Quoted in Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 133–38.68 Sen. Clinton warned strongly against a unilateral invasion multiple times and ultimately said: “I
take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a United Nations resolution and seek to avoidwar, if possible [through weapons inspections].” Sen. Clinton, on 10 October 2002, Congressional Record
S10289.69 Sen. Biden, on 10 October 2002, Congressional Record S10241. Sen. Biden stated: “. . . Iraq’s il-
legal weapons of mass destruction program do not—do not—pose an imminent threat to our nationalsecurity . . . ” Congressional Record—Senate, 10 October 2002, S10290.
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Daschle, among others, also pointed out that there was no debate aboutthe real costs and consequences of the possible war they were authorizing,nor was there any discussion of the new, and in his view, dangerous policyof preemption they were adopting if they went forward with attacking Iraq.Daschle made these points by asking tough questions of the resolution—questions so tough it sounded like he really would not support the resolution.In the end, he defended his right to ask tough questions in these words:
Some people think it is wrong to ask questions or raise concerns when thePresident says our national security is at risk. They believe it is an act ofdisloyalty. I disagree. In America, asking questions is an act of patriotism.For those of us who have been entrusted by our fellow citizens to serve inthis Senate, asking questions is more than a privilege, it is a constitutionalresponsibility.70
Daschle expressed in this statement strong awareness of the pressure toconform with the norms of militarized patriotism. The next day, on 11 Octo-ber 2002, Daschle voted with seventy-seven other senators for the Iraq WarResolution.
The Media and Militarized Patriotism
The central forum for meaningfully vetting foreign policy in the U.S. market-place of ideas is the debate between the executive branch and Congress. IfCongress refuses to fully engage in debate or simply authorizes the executivebranch to make foreign policy unilaterally, policy will not be meaningfullydeliberated. However, theorists of the marketplace of ideas have recognizedthat the media plays an important, often independent, role in the market-place of ideas. The media can investigate issues and inform the politicians.The media also provides a forum for politicians to be heard. Thus, an es-sential ingredient of a mature democracy is that it enjoys the benefits of aself-regulated marketplace of ideas where a free press strives to attract diverseaudiences, invites expressions of various viewpoints, and seeks to presentnews stories that objectively present evidence.71 In short, the media in a mar-ketplace of ideas play an important role in communicating the information
70 Sen. Daschle, on 10 October 2002, Congressional Record S10242.71 This description of what needs to happen for a “marketplace of ideas” to function properly is from
Snyder and Ballentine, “Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas,” 39. Note that it is understood thatstriving to uncover “objective truth” is perhaps the most important goal—this is the goal of a “watchdog”press that safeguards democracy. This is the opposite of a “lapdog” press that faithfully reports what it hasbeen told by authorities. Being a diligent watchdog is a high standard for the press, which some arguecan only strive to be “fair and balanced.” Fair and balanced is much better than reporting just one side,but ideally the press needs to go further and work to help its audience by asking the tough questions to“weed out” false arguments and get at truth.
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needed to make sound decisions. The press did not play this fundamentalrole in the prewar debate.72
It has been argued that because the Democrats failed to provide op-position, the media had no opposition to report, and that this explains thefailure of the media in the marketplace. Like politicians, however, the mediawas also under pressure to be patriotic, to be deferential to the executivebranch, and to support strong national security policies. Space limitationspreclude a full explication of the pressures on the media or the media’s im-pact on politicians. Nevertheless, evidence is included below in support ofthe argument that the media was under multiple pressures to conform withmilitarized patriotism and that this likely exerted strong pressure on possibledissenters who would have known they would not be fairly and fully cov-ered by the media. At least three factors pressure members of the press toengage in patriotic reporting.
First, individual journalists often want to be patriotic. In the immediateaftermath of 9/11, a leading media personality illustrated the pressures ofmilitarized patriotism. On 22 September 2001, Dan Rather, who was for yearsthe anchor of CBS Evening News, was asked if he thought journalists mightbe reluctant to question the administration out of fear of backlash from thepublic. Rather explained it was not about backlash for him:
I want to fulfill my role as a decent human member of the communityand a decent and patriotic American. And therefore, I am willing to givethe government, the president and the military the benefit of any doubthere in the beginning. I’m going to fulfill my role as a journalist, and thatis ask the questions, when necessary ask the tough questions. But I haveno excuse for, particularly when there is a national crisis such as this,as saying—you know, the president says do your job, whatever you areand whomever you are, Mr. and Mrs. America. I’m going to do my jobas a journalist, but at the same time I will give them the benefit of thedoubt, whenever possible in this kind of crisis, emergency situation. Notbecause I am concerned about any backlash. I’m not. But because I wantto be a patriotic American without apology.73
Second, reporters fear backlash from the public if they fail to be patriotic.Months later, on 5 May 2002, in an interview on BBC Newsnight, Rather hada different view of the situation and candidly discussed what he viewed as
72 Massing, “Now They Tell Us”; Michael Massing, “Unfit to Print?” New York Review of Books 51, no.3 (24 June 2004): 43–49; Michael Massing, “The Press: The Enemy Within,” New York Review of Books
52, no. 20 (15 December 2005): 36–44; and MacArthur, “The Lies We Bought.” All of these examinationsof the media recognize the information was available and reported briefly on the back pages of leadingnewspapers, or more forcefully by less prominent newspapers. The information was there, the story wasunderstood, but it did not receive prominent sustained front page attention as it deserved or as it did inthe European presses.
73 Robert Jensen, “The Problem with Patriotism: Steps toward the Redemption of American Journalismand Democracy,” in Artz and Kamalipour, eds., Bring ‘Em On, 69.
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extreme pressures on the media to be patriotic. He said patriotism leadsa journalist to say, “I know the right questions, but you know what, thisis not exactly the right time to ask them.”74 Moreover, he compared theproblems U.S. journalists faced regarding patriotism with the practice of“necklacing”:
It is an obscene comparison. You know I’m not sure I like it. But youknow there was a time in South Africa that people would put flamingtires around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fearis that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of a lack ofpatriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalistsfrom asking the tough questions. . . . And again, I am humbled to say, Ido not except myself from this criticism.75
Third, there are powerful economic reasons why the press might notserve its proper role as a watchdog. Patriotic reporting before the Iraq Warwas regarded by media consultants as good for selling more papers or gainingmore viewers. The influential television-news consulting firm Frank N. MagidAssociates warned its clients before the Iraq War that “covering war protestsmay be harmful to a station’s bottom line.” Moreover, the firm found that warprotests were the topic that tested the lowest among 6,400 viewers acrossthe nation, with only 14 percent of respondents saying that television newswas not paying enough attention to “anti-war demonstrations and peaceactivities.”76
Examples of the public demand for patriotic reporting abound, as ev-idenced in particular by the meteoric rise in popularity of the FOX Newschannel in this period, leading to what has been called the FOX effect: com-petitive pressures to put a patriotic spin on the news.77 Perhaps the moststriking example of American patriotic reporting in 2002 is from CNN. CNN
executives decided six months before the war to run two separate newsbroadcasts—one for the United States and a different one for the rest of theworld. The U.S. broadcast featured Paula Zahn, who “looked and talked likea cheerleader for U.S. forces,” and Wolf Blitzer, who “politely interviewedWashington’s high and mighty, seldom asking a pointed question.”78In
74 Ibid., 71.75 Ibid., 71.76 Paul Farhi, “For Broadcast Media, Patriotism Pays; Consultants Tell Radio, TV Clients That Protest
Coverage Drives Off Viewers,” Washington Post, 28 March 2003, C01.77 In 2002, FOX, with a strong patriotic spin on the news, increased its viewers by 300 percent to
an average of 3.3 million viewers a day. The big losers were the mainstream television networks, whosenightly news programs lost 2 million viewers (10 percent of their viewers). The mainstream media wasstill much more popular overall, but many observers argued that all networks were under competitivepressures to be more patriotic. Steve Schifferes, “Who Won the Media War?” BBC News Online, 18 April2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/2959833.stm.
78 See Massing, “The Unseen War,” 17.
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contrast, CNN’s international coverage featured “tough-minded” and “sharpand inquisitive” reporters who gave a far more “serious and informed” ver-sion of the news than did the U.S. version. Most telling is the fact that eventhough Britain was fully allied with the United States and sent significantforces to Iraq, the BBC and other British news services were still far morehard-hitting than any U.S. reporting.79
There is considerable evidence to support the argument that the pres-sures of patriotism pushed journalists, both individually and through theirmedia organizations, to do patriotic reporting. It is likely that the patriotismof the press conformed to the norms of militarized patriotism because, asnoted above, this is the dominant form of patriotism in the United Statessince the Cold War. Democrats and other skeptics failed to strongly critiquethe administration’s case for war so the media had few critiques about whichto report. At the same time, the media had access to the information neededto critique the case for war, and many non-mainstream media outlets, as wellas the European press, appreciated and reported the evidence against theadministration’s case. However, the mainstream media did not play the roleof watchdog because of the pressures to be patriotic, and in turn, did notprovide a fair forum for skeptics of the administration’s case, further silencingthe skeptics.
With no significant opposition from Democrats or other critics in themainstream media, executive powers appear vast, but in reality the oppo-sition was defeated by militarized patriotism and not by executive powers.In the next section, I examine the leading alternative argument—that execu-tive power explains the success of the threat inflation. I also investigate thepopular explanation that public psychology after 9/11 helps to explain thesuccess of the threat inflation.
ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS: EXECUTIVE POWER AND PUBLICPSYCHOLOGY AFTER 9/11
Powerful arguments have been made that excessive executive power wasthe cause of the executive branch’s successful threat inflation. These ac-counts emphasize executive control over intelligence information, executiveauthority in foreign policy, and executive agenda setting power.80These ar-guments ultimately rest on the claim that the executive branch has inherent
79 In Massing, “The Unseen War,” he compares the BBC and others with U.S. coverage in detail.80 Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure”; Western, “The War over Iraq,” 106-12; and Ackerman
and Judis, “The First Casualty.” For emphasizing the power of the executive to cause threat inflationthrough “oversell,” see Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1969). In Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro,The Rational Public: Fifty
Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. 282–84, they make the argument that the main reason the U.S. public is sometimes irrational is that elites controland manipulate information.
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institutional strength that makes it dominant in the marketplace of ideas andthat the countervailing institutions are inherently too weak to be countedon to reliably contain concerted threat inflation by the executive branch.It cannot be denied that the executive branch triumphed in this case, butI have made the case above that the countervailing institutions failed tofulfill their role in the marketplace of ideas because they were silencedby norms of militarized patriotism, not because they are institutionally tooweak.
In other words, the executive branch institutional power appears vast,but in reality the countervailing institutions had the power to behave dif-ferently. As I point out above, Congress came extremely close to behavingdifferently when they almost managed to block a unilateral invasion withstrong bipartisan support for the Biden amendment. Congress evidently be-haved as it did because it was coerced, not because it was convinced orpersuaded to go along. In the following section, I address the leading argu-ments about executive power, and I show how appearances are deceiving—arguments about executive power actually blur important distinctions con-cerning control of information, authority in foreign policy, and agendasetting.
First, executive power arguments have blurred the most important pointover executive control of intelligence information. For example, Chaim Kauf-mann argues that there was enough information available to refute admin-istration claims, yet contends that administration control of information wascritical. He squares this circle by indicating that the administration’s abilityto selectively release information at important points in time allowed theadministration to maintain the appearance of having substantial private in-telligence when in fact it did not have such important information.81This iscertainly what appeared to happen and helps explain why the public or evensome less well-informed officials were probably persuaded by the adminis-tration. However, Kaufmann never fully analyzes whether the oppositionactually had enough information to refute key executive branch claims atkey points in time. Kaufmann states:
If the public and opposition politicians understood the weakness of theevidence of Hussein’s determination to attack the United States, links to9/11 or al-Qa’ida, or nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs,
81 Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure,” 37–38. Kaufmann also blurs the distinction I amtrying to make by repeatedly saying the political opposition was either “persuaded or intimidated.” Seeibid., 31. However, his overall claim that executive power to frame the issue was most important restson the assumption that persuasion was what led to executive branch victory. Moreover, he argues thatthe countervailing institutions are likely inherently too weak to counter the administration. See ibid.,43–45. Although I agree the countervailing institutions are today too weak, it is not because they lackedinformation or were persuaded, it is because they were conforming to militarized norms.
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the administration probably could not have made a persuasive case forwar.82
Thus, the most important question is: Did the executive branch substantiallycontrol more intelligence information than Congress so that it was able totrick Congress into supporting its inflated threat claims? In other words, didthe executive branch perpetrate a “hoax” on Congress?83
It is widely believed the administration perpetrated a successful hoax ofsome sort. The many statements by members of Congress that they voted forthe Iraq War Resolution under false pretenses has greatly contributed to theappearance that the executive branch had private information that allowedit to mislead Congress and the public. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) impliedthis was the heart of the problem on 19 October 2005:
I am not going to rehash the false premises that have brought us towhere we are today in Iraq. I will say that I find it very unhelpful forthe administration to continue to suggest that the terrorist attacks thatoccurred on our soil on September 11, 2001 were in any way linked toSaddam Hussein. We know, and they know, that this is untrue. Therewas no linkage to Saddam Hussein.84
However, Dodd almost certainly knew in October 2002 before the vote onthe Iraq War resolution that there was no significant intelligence that linkedSaddam and 9/11.85
Numerous other prominent members of Congress have also argued thatthe executive branch misled them. Sen. Kerry has repeatedly made this claim.He told a Democratic rally in June 2006, “We were misled. We were given ev-idence that was not true. . . . ”86 Likewise, Sen. Hillary Clinton also frequently
82 Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure,” 31.83 The characterization of this episode as a “hoax” comes from Colin Powell’s former chief of
staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, who described Powell’s speech before the UN on 5 February 2003: “I par-ticipated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Se-curity Council.” See Lawrence Wilkerson, interview with David Brancaccio, PBS NOW, 3 February 2006,http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/wilkerson.html.
84 Opening statement by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. PolicyToward Iraq, http://dodd.senate.gov/index.php?q=node/3133.
85 Also making this argument officially is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) who, in response to therepeated insistence by the White House that the Congress had access to the “same intelligence” on Iraq,requested an investigation by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS). The CRS provided areport on “Congress as a Consumer of Intelligence Information” which found: “The president and a smallnumber of presidentially designated cabinet-level officials, including the vice president—in contrast tomembers of Congress—have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitiveintelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods.” Althoughthis memorandum supports the notion that members of Congress could have been “tricked,” the questionis whether or not the Congress had enough information to counter the central claims of the White House,even if they did not have all of the information.
86 Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Starting Gate: Foreign Policy Divides the Democrats,” New Yorker, 15January 2007, 35.
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makes this claim. She has repeatedly said, “I’m not going to believe this pres-ident again,” and “Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, therewouldn’t have been a vote, and I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way.”87
These claims are often carefully worded because although it is true the ad-ministration made repeated false claims and provided misleading evidence,Congress, at the same time, had access to intelligence information that re-vealed the weakness of the case. Thus, despite claims that the administrationsuccessfully misled Congress, it is clear that Congress had sufficient informa-tion to refute administration claims but chose not to expose that information.Instead, Congress deferred to the executive branch.
Three types of evidence, in addition to the discussion of the Biden Res-olution (above), reveal that the opposition had the necessary information atthe time, understood and appreciated that evidence, and chose not to utilizethe information. First, central pieces of the administration’s case were knownto be unsubstantiated or false. For example, the executive branch allegedlypersuaded many that the nuclear threat from Iraq was great enough thata unilateral invasion was justified to eliminate this threat. Kaufmann states,“Many of the 77 senators and 296 representatives who voted in October 2002to authorize the president to use force against Iraq gave the nuclear threatas the main or one of the main reasons for their votes.”88At an earlier pointin his analysis, however, Kaufman argues:
Although Hussein may still have been interested in acquiring nuclearweapons, evidence available both inside and outside the U.S. governmentthroughout the mid-1990’s as well as the first two years of the Bushadministration showed beyond a reasonable doubt that by 2002 Iraq hadnot had an active nuclear weapons program for more than a decade.89
Even the CIA had stated that Iraq was not likely to have a nuclear weapon forfive to ten years and only then if sanctions failed in the meantime. Thus whilemany Congress members cited the nuclear threat as justifying their vote forauthorizing a unilateral invasion, for many this justification is not credible.The nuclear threat was well-known to be both distant and possibly non-existent, thus supporters who adamantly contended that a unilateral invasionwould not be wise, and there were many, this justification is highly dubious.
87 These standard talking points of Clinton’s are from NBC’s Today Show in December 2006, as citedin Alex Koppelman and Jonathan Vanian, “What Hillary Should Have Known,” Salon.com, 26 February2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/26/clinton aumf/print.html. Clinton is not alone inher awkward ambiguous position of repeatedly carefully stating “if I knew then what we know now.”Many congress members take this position. In one poll of Senators which asks about their votes for theIraq War Resolution in hindsight, 34 Senators said they would not have voted for it, saying: “if I knewthen what we know now” about WMD. See Jake Tapper, “Senate Regrets the Vote to Enter Iraq,” ABC
News, 5 January 2007, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?id=2771519&page=1.88 Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure,” 31.89 Ibid., 21.
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Moreover, Kaufmann points out that the important claim the Bush ad-ministration made before the vote in October was that Iraq had been caughttrying to import high-quality aluminum tubes. Yet Kaufmann notes that thisreport was discredited by internal sources even before it was made public.Thus even by his account, the Democrats, especially those on the IntelligenceCommittee, should have been aware of the weakness of this much-flauntedevidence.90It is also now clear many more in Congress had the intelligenceinformation that discredited this supposedly key piece of evidence, be-cause the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had heard compelling dissent-ing testimony in September 2002.91Thus it is clear that leading Democratschose not to actively expose the aluminum tubes ruse, even though theycould have before Congress voted for the Iraq War resolution in October2002.
Next, Democrats knew there were no substantial ties between Iraq andal-Qaeda. Perhaps most significantly, it was well-known that Cheney’s re-peated claim mentioned above about a meeting between the 9/11 hijackerAtta and an Iraqi intelligence agent had been discredited in early 2002 by U.S.
intelligence agencies—Why did Democrats choose not to refute this claimloudly and thereby discredit the administration thoroughly? Sen. Robert Byrd(D-WV) tried to convince Democrats in private to make this case, arguingthat “surely opposition to attacking Iraq, absent a strong connection to 9/11,worked for Democrats.” But Byrd noted:
With an election staring at one-third of the Senate, some Democrats wouldfind it politically easier to give the president what he wanted. So simple toexplain—terror threat, patriotism, support a popular president. Some sen-ators were almost terrified at the prospect of being labeled “unpatriotic”—just what Bush wanted.92
The Democrats failed throughout 2002 to make even the obvious argumentsagainst the administration’s case even though a large amount of credibleinformation was available to them.
Second, in addition to evidence that sufficient information to refute theadministration’s case was available at the time of the debate, there are also nu-merous statements made during the brief debate that pointed out Democratsunderstood the many major problems with the case. For example, Bidenstated on 10 October 2002, one day before voting for the resolution:
Is [Iraq] an imminent threat now? No. Is al-Qaeda involved now? No. Isall this talk about the likelihood of cooperation with terrorist groups a
90 Ibid., 25.91 Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 117–19.92 Byrd, Losing America, 163.
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real imminent threat? No. I don’t believe any of that now, but I do knowwe are going to have to address it. So the question is, do we address itnow or do we wait a year or two or three?93
Statements like this, showing the Democrats were not actually persuadedby the administration’s case, are plentiful in the congressional testimony.However, they are mixed in and diluted with a great deal of testimony tryingto justify giving the president the authority to possibly attack unilaterally. Asa result, no strong opposition by leading politicians was made, even thoughtheir testimony reveals they were not persuaded.
Third, evidence Congress members were misled would be if they wereaggressively investigating the alleged hoax today or making strong argumentsthey were deceived. Proving they were deceived would be the best argumentpresidential hopefuls could make for explaining their vote—if it was true.Instead, presidential candidates carefully choose their words and avoid fullyexplaining their vote. In one begrudging, but candid, interview on the topic,Sen. Edwards admitted: “I’ve just heard people say, I can’t even tell you who,I’ve just heard people say, ‘Well, you know, George Bush . . . misled us.’ Youknow, it’s just—I was there, it’s not what happened.”94 Hillary Clinton, indiscussing if she thought she’d been lied to, stated,
I have to tell you, I think they believed, as I believed, that there was, at thevery least, residual weapons of mass destruction, and whether the Iraqisever intended to let the inspectors go forward was being answered yearby year. There was a lot of evidence that this was not their intention.95
Clinton’s argument is not a strong one for making the case that she had beenlied to and makes her vote for the blank check resolution nearly inexplicable.
A second explanation of executive power argues that the executivebranch, due to its authority in foreign policy, was able to overstate the threatIraq posed and persuade others.96This explanation de-emphasizes control ofinformation and argues instead that the administration is more widely be-lieved by the public because no other institutions have equal credibility.While there is no doubt the executive branch has greatest authority on for-eign policy with the public generally, in this case it needs to be determinedwho the executive branch successfully persuaded based on its authority ver-sus who was not persuaded but deferential to the executive branch because
93 Sen. Biden, on 10 October 2002, Congressional Record S10249. Biden also states: “. . . this is oneof the confusing aspects of this debate. I find myself supporting this resolution but worried this resolutionwill get us in to real trouble” and “This is not a blank check for the use of force against Iraq for anyreason. It is an authorization for the use of force, if necessary, to compel Iraq to disarm, as it promisedafter the Gulf War .... But this resolution does not make Saddam’s removal its explicit goal.”
94 Goldberg, “The Starting Gate,” 35.95 Ibid., 36.96 Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure,” 41–43.
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of norms of militarized patriotism. Kaufmann argues executive authority wasimportant for issue manipulation, and issue manipulation convinced the pub-lic and elites of the need to invade Iraq. The evidence presented abovedemonstrates that elites were not generally persuaded, especially the evi-dence that the majority of the Senate preferred to support the Biden res-olution before Gephardt appeared on the Rose Garden lawn. This strongsupport for the Biden resolution demonstrates that members could have op-posed the executive branch, so executive authority did not trump the pos-sibility of congressional opposition —Congress could have intervened, andmany members even thought they were going to successfully oppose thepresident. Further, executive authority did not actually persuade a majorityof the public either, even though there was no real opposition to the exec-utive branch by leading politicians, as discussed below. Instead, the publicpatriotically rallied behind the executive branch as it rushed to war, butthe majority was not convinced a unilateral invasion was the right thing todo.
A third argument that executive power was decisive emphasizes execu-tive agenda-setting power. Indeed, the Downing Street Memo reveals that theexecutive branch, as was widely guessed at the time, scheduled the introduc-tion of the Iraq War issue for just prior to the 2002 midterm elections—whenit was widely perceived the administration would have its greatest lever-age.97The introduction was also strategically timed to coincide with the firstanniversary of 9/11, thus it has been argued that this power over when tointroduce the issue was a big advantage for the executive branch. How-ever, the main reason the administration could begin debate at this pointwas because Democrats had avoided debate for the previous eight months.The only reason the administration enjoyed such strong leverage in the issuearea was because of the norms of militarized patriotism. If the Democratshad been free to engage in debate without the concern of being labeledunpatriotic, there would have been no major agenda-setting advantage forthe executive branch, and the issue would have been determined throughopen deliberation about the merits of the case.
A fourth explanation for the failure of the marketplace is that public psy-chology after 9/11 created an atmosphere that allowed the Bush administra-tion to easily—and successfully—inflate the threat. This argument maintainsthat after 9/11 there was such widespread fear among the U.S. public thatmost people were psychologically primed to easily inflate threats and wereready to lash out at merely possible threats.98This view has been buttressed
97 The Downing Street Memo reveals the British Defense Secretary reporting on the Bush adminis-tration’s plans on 23 July 2002: “No decisions had been taken, but . . . the most likely timing in US mindsfor military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before US congressionalelections.” See Danner, The Secret Way to War, 90.
98 For many arguments that public fear helped threat inflation, see references in footnote 16 above.
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by the observation that some public opinion polls shortly after 9/11 showedthat the public broadly supported (74 percent) removing Saddam Husseinfrom power.99However, although public fear is often cited as a major reasonfor the easy success of the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq,the public never strongly embraced the idea of urgently and unilaterally in-vading Iraq. Public fear does not explain the apparent success of the Bushadministration’s threat inflation.100Ultimately the public patriotically backedthe administration, but not because a majority believed the administration’scase.
The public consistently preferred working with the United Nations andfavored patience and disarming Iraq through weapons inspections. In June2002, only 20 percent of the U.S. public believed “we should invade Iraqeven if we have to go it alone,” whereas 65 percent said the United States“should only invade Iraq with UN approval and the support of its allies.”101
This poll demonstrates that public fear after 9/11 did not lead the public towidely believe an invasion of Iraq was urgent or even necessary. Furtherrefuting the public psychology hypothesis is the fact that even after the Bushadministration had championed the need for an invasion for months, the U.S.
public in February 2003 was still opposed to the administration’s unilateralplans, with only 31 percent of the public agreeing that “Iraq presents sucha clear danger to U.S. interests that the United States needs to act now.” Atthat time, 64 percent agreed that “the U.S. needs to wait for approval of theUnited Nations before taking action against Iraq,” and 62 percent said that“the United States should wait and give the United Nations inspectors moretime.”102These polls demonstrate that public fear after 9/11 did not translate
99USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, 26–27 November 2001, USATODAY.com, http://www.usatoday.com/
news/sept11/2001/11/28/poll-results.htm. However, numerous polls at this time with open-ended ques-tions found that the public spontaneously and overwhelmingly blamed Osama bin Laden, and only blamedSaddam Hussein in forced-choice questions. See Scott L. Althaus and Devon M. Largio, “When OsamaBecame Saddam: Origins and Consequences of the Change in America’s Public Enemy #1,” PS, October2004, 797–99. The Bush administration saw these 2001 polls in support of military action to removeSaddam Hussein, but feared public support might not be sustained or actually transfer from a hypothet-ical question to an actual military deployment—especially without real evidence of a direct connectionbetween Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Western, “The War over Iraq,” 102–104.
100 A. Trevor Thrall, “A Bear in the Woods? Threat Framing and the Marketplace of Values,” Security
Studies (this issue). Thrall amply shows that the public was not persuaded to unilaterally invade Iraq—the threat did not actually inflate among the public because of manipulated facts. However, Thrall leavesunexplained why the marketplace of ideas failed to restrain the executive branch, essentially arguing it willalways be divided based on values and facts will be irrelevant. My argument contends the facts mattereda great deal. Congress members across parties with different values heartily supported the invasion ofAfghanistan based on the merits of the case, but most clearly preferred to avoid a unilateral invasion ofIraq. They resisted endorsing an invasion of Iraq because they feared it was reckless, and they almostarranged bipartisan opposition to prevent a unilateral invasion. In the end, they were cornered by strongpressures to be patriotic rather than intransigently divided based on values.
101 Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” Political
Science Quarterly 118, no. 4 (2003–2004): 569.102 Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis, “Misperceptions,” 570.
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into public demand for an invasion of Iraq. The public only reluctantly cameto support a unilateral invasion.
At the time of the invasion, polls showed the Bush administration en-joyed 66 percent approval for the military action in March 2003. However,only 44 percent of the public said they supported the war because it wasthe “right thing to do,” whereas 21 percent said they supported the presi-dent but they were not sure it was the right thing to do.103In other words,the administration garnered support for its unilateral invasion largely throughthe patriotic rally-around-the-flag effect as the war began and not throughactually convincing a post-9/11 fearful public that the invasion was the rightthing to do.
MILITARIZED NORMS AND THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
The theory of the democratic marketplace of ideas is based on the notionthat open debate and discussion can ultimately influence policy outcomesin a democracy. I have argued that the militarized political culture createdin the United States during the Cold War forged two norms of behaviorthat drastically curtailed open debate in the marketplace of ideas duringthe run-up to the Iraq War. These norms pressured politicians of nationalstature to appear strong on national security and to unify behind the executivebranch during this period of perceived crisis lest they risked being tarred asunpatriotic. Although it can often be impossible to know why politiciansvoted as they did, there is strong evidence that a vast majority in the Senatepreferred to vote to curtail the executive branch’s plans for unilateral regimechange, but many Republican and Democratic votes suddenly changed basedon political calculations when the bipartisan effort to drastically narrow theIraq War resolution collapsed on 2 October 2002.
The circumstantial evidence that many in Congress actually opposed theexecutive branch’s plans for unilateral regime change is extensive. First, ifmany members of Congress agreed with the executive branch, they mostlikely would have come out in support of an invasion of Iraq early in 2002.Strong supporters of the invasion plan, such as Sen. Lieberman, expressedtheir support early. In addition, most members of Congress did not hesitateto express their support of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 based on themerits of the case. However, throughout 2002 there was a noticeable lack ofsupport and lack of debate of the administration’s plans for regime change inIraq. At the same time, there were many strong reservations about invadingIraq expressed by experts and politicians who did not have their politicalcareers at stake, whereas politicians of national stature or politicians facing
103USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll, 17 March 2003.
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tight midterm election races in the fall of 2002 were viewed as being cautiouson the issue and afraid of being labeled unpatriotic.
In August and September 2002, there was a brief meaningful debateover Iraq policy. This was the short period during which Congress had anopportunity to influence the executive branch’s plans to invade Iraq. Al-though it appeared to many observers that the executive branch managed tocontrol enough information to actually persuade a majority in Congress thatit was necessary to unilaterally invade Iraq even if the United Nations didnot go along, I have shown that there was strong majority support for theBiden-Lugar-Hagel alternative resolution, despite the executive’s manipula-tion of intelligence and intense public relations efforts. In other words, mostmembers of the Senate were not persuaded unilateral regime change wasnecessary or wise. After the bipartisan effort to stop unilateral regime changecollapsed, debate over the Iraq War Resolution was anticlimactic and brief,with Congress members not even bothering to consult the newly minted na-tional intelligence estimate. Many Senate speeches in support of the Iraq WarResolution reveal senators did not believe the threat was imminent or urgent,and most senators strongly urged the president to not invade unilaterally andto seek disarmament through weapons inspections, but they authorized theblank check resolution nonetheless.
Norms determined the outcome of this foreign policy debate—notthe merits of the administration’s case. Executive control over intelligenceinformation—widely perceived to be the critical factor for the success ofthreat inflation in this period—helped to eventually sway the public, but didnot determine the vote in the Senate. Much attention has been paid to thedebate in the marketplace of ideas after the Congress passed the Iraq WarResolution on 11 October 2002. It is clear this subsequent debate, includ-ing Powell’s famous speech before the United Nations, was irrelevant to thepolicy outcome. With the blank check authorization from Congress in hand,the administration proceeded to stone-wall the weapons inspectors, buildup troops in the Gulf, and launch a unilateral invasion without UN authoriza-tion.104 The invasion was launched even though Saddam Hussein was fullycooperating with weapons inspectors, who declared in early March 2003 be-fore the invasion they had found nothing even after investigating all of theevidence provided by the United States.
Public fear after 9/11 did not drive politicians to invade Iraq. In fact,the public strongly preferred to seek Iraq’s disarmament through weaponsinspections and to invade only with allies and UN authorization. Althoughpoliticians understood these public preferences, they also perceived that thepublic expected them to behave patriotically. This seemed to mean that
104 On the administration’s stone-walling of weapons inspectors, feigning cooperation with the UN,and misrepresenting their actions to the public, see Ackerman and Judis, “The First Casualty,” 23–25.
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politicians believed they could safely stand together and curtail the presi-dent’s powers—as they almost did with the Biden Resolution—but without astrong bipartisan consensus, individual politicians felt they needed to protectthemselves from being labeled unpatriotic. Thus no politicians of nationalstature staked out a strong position in opposition to the administration, andall quickly fell in behind the administration when bipartisan opposition col-lapsed. The norm to be patriotic trumped politicians’ rational judgment onthe merits of the case.
This argument about norms determining the functioning of a democ-racy is not dissimilar from other writings about the democratic peace thatrecognize that some liberal democracies are fully liberal and thereby morepeaceful, and others are illiberal and thereby not likely to be as inclinedtoward cooperation or resort to force only as a “last resort.”105 My argumentabout this case points out that a militarized democracy is not likely to bea peaceful liberal democracy. Hence the problem for the marketplace ofideas is not one of inherent legal institutional strength of the executive, orirrational public fears, but one of the emergence of a militarized political cul-ture. Congress, in this case, had access to sufficient intelligence informationto understand the security situation sufficiently. Congress also had the legalauthority to determine the Iraq policy. Congress failed to act because of mil-itarized norms that stifled democratic deliberation and demanded deferenceto the executive branch.
105 John Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 15–17. Owenwrites: “Majority rule begs the question of what the majority wants.” (emphasis in original) If the demosis liberal, it will uphold the laws and behave liberally. For my argument, if the demos is militarized, weshould hardly expect it to behave liberally.
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