Did the Bush Administration mean well?

ABSTRACT

This review engages with Melvyn Leffler’s new book on the origins of the (second) Iraq war. It focusses particularly upon his argument that the Bush administration, and especially the president himself, genuinely regarded Iraq as a serious threat and initiated the war in 2003 for understandable reasons of national security. The review acknowledges that Leffler makes a strong case that Bush himself was motivated by such concerns, but goes on to argue that Leffler underplays the role of White House officials and beltway journalists and lobbyists who seemed clearly to have other motivations.

KEYWORDS:

• George W. Bush
• Iraq war
• Melvyn Leffler

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein (Oxford University Press 2023), xiv.

² Ibid., 183.

³ On this see Kaufmann, ‘Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War’, International Security 29 (Summer 2004).

⁴ I am grateful to Patrick Porter for pointing this out.

⁵ Though PNAC dissolved long ago, this letter remains on the archive.org website. See Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism (archive.org).

⁶ See Yglesias, ‘AIPAC and Iraq’, The Atlantic, 3 October 2007, and Judt, ‘Bush’s Useful Idiots’, London Review of Books, 21 September 2006. As Eli Clifton has discovered, using the archive.org website, both the FDD and AIPAC have erased evidence of their war cheerleading from their websites. See AIPAC, FDD websites erase all evidence of their Iraq War cheerleading – Responsible Statecraft.

⁷ On Blair’s fateful decision to side with the US, see Porter, Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (Oxford University Press 2018). This book, widely seen as the definitive study of the British role, is not cited by Leffler.

⁸ See the NPR’s transcript of Obama’s 2 October 2002 speech at Transcript: Obama’s Speech Against The Iraq War : NPR.

⁹ See the famous New York Times advertisement, signed (and paid for) by leading American IR scholars: ‘War in Iraq is Not in America’s National Interest’, 26 September 2002; and also the debate in The Onion: ‘This War Will Destabilize the Entire Mideast Region and Trigger a Shockwave of Anti-Americanism’ vs ‘No it Won’t’, 26 March 2003.

¹⁰ See Kull, Ramsey, and Lewis, ‘Misperceptions, Media, and the Iraq War’, Political Science Quarterly 118 (Winter 2003/04).

¹¹ Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press 2020).

¹² On this point see Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018).

¹³ See in particular his trenchant essay, ‘New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Configurations’, in Michael Hogan (ed.), America in the World: the Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge University Press 1995).

¹⁴ For a full discussion, see Walt, chapter five.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Campbell Craig

Campbell Craig is professor of international politics at Cardiff University. He is the author of several books and many articles on US foreign policy, nuclear politics, and international relations theory.