The Neocon Experiment In Iraq Twenty Years Later

An excerpt from, “The Iraq Invasion 20 Years Later: It Was Indeed a Big Lie that Launched the Catastrophic War” By David Corn, Mother Jones, March 20, 2023:

The war was a catastrophe falsely pitched to the American people. Whether or not their intentions were honorable, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and their comrades adopted dishonorable means to gin up popular support for the invasion of Iraq. Two decades later, it remains much easier for many to acknowledge the war was a miscalculation than a lie. Yet it was both. It was promoted by Bush and his minions with a reckless disregard for the truth and with hype that was fueled by falsehoods and designed to generate fear instead of serious and reasoned public discussion. Bush and Cheney sold it wrong and they got it wrong. Without all the misrepresentations, unfounded assertions, and exaggerations would this calamitous war have occurred? Perhaps. We will never know. But it should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies. 

An excerpt from, “Focus on Iraq: Restoring A Shattered Mosaic” (PDF) By Hume Horan, Foreign Service Journal, March 2004, Pg. 36 – 37:

Even partial success by a future Iraqi government, moreover, could be of very great consequence for the region and the world. Iraq’s new leaders may have learned something from the harsh schooling of the past half-century. These leaders, furthermore, and especially the Shiite laymen on the Governing Council, and their spiritual mentors in Najaf, are more intellectually open to the modern world than are their Arab Sunni counterparts almost anywhere else. Neither the Shiite leaders nor the Kurds are contaminated by that distemper toward the West that is so common among active Muslim religious elements in Riyadh, Cairo, London, Paris, and almost everywhere else. No Crusaders filled Hilleh’s mass graves. In my conversations, the topic of Israel almost never arose; Palestinians were dismissed as toadies of Saddam. Fellow Arabists will understand the impact such an omission of the Arab world’s favorite “compulsory figures” had on me.

Nor do I see any prospect of Iraq lurching toward some sort of Khomeini-like theocracy.  The Iranian experiment is discredited among most Iraqi Shiites, and those who for nine years fought against Iran under Saddam won’t change sides now. Accordingly, one can hope that even a halfway stable and moderately democratic Iraq will eventually establish cooperative relations with a more democratic Iran. And then to hope further, might those two states, together with Israel and Turkey, shift for the better the strategic, military and intellectual climate of the Middle East, and help other Arabs and Muslims to rejoin not the Western, but the modern world?

An excerpt from, “Israelpolitik, the Neocons and the Long Shadow of the Iraq War—A Review of Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s book ‘The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War” By Danny Postel, Critical Inquiry, February 3, 2015:

The idea that the war was waged to expand US global dominance is belied, for Ahmad, by two facts: that it had ‘remarkably few supporters among the traditional advocates of American primacy’ and that the results have been a geostrategic catastrophe for the United States on myriad levels. The first point might seem counter-intuitive, but as someone who wrote extensively about the Iraq debate in US foreign policy circles, I can confirm that Ahmad is exactly right about this. Attacking Iraq was a minority position in US officialdom. Against it were the realists of the sort who dominated the administration of Bush’s father and were pillars in the foreign policy teams of Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon: think national security advisers Brent Scowcroftand Zbigniew Brzezinski, secretary of state James Baker and the late senior diplomatic adviser Lawrence Eagleburger. All of them opposed the war. As didColin Powell. This has been largely obscured by the secretary of state’sinfamous presentation to the UN on the eve of the invasion, one replete with lies and distortions. Not only Powell but virtually the entire state department, and indeed a significant swath of the military and intelligence establishments, opposed going to war.

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

. . .There are several other books that tell that story, and Ahmad relies on them extensively in his own account. But his discussion of the former—the explanation he advances for what motivated the neoconservative crusade against Saddam Hussein—is this book’s real contribution.

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

An excerpt from, “Neoconservativism in a Nutshell” By Jim Lobe, LobeLog, March 24, 2016:

In my view and that of other veteran observers, such as Jacob Heilbrunn, the defense of Israel has been a central pillar of the neoconservative worldview from the outset. The fact that neoconservatism began as—and remains—a largely Jewish movement is one very relevant reason. But, like the U.S. itself, Israel is also seen as morally exceptional due in major part to the fact that its birth as an independent state was made possible by the terrible legacy of the Holocaust and the guilt it provoked, particularly in the West. Moreover, its depiction in the media since 1967 as both a staunch U.S. ally and a lonely outpost of democracy and Western civilization besieged by hostile, if not barbaric, neighbors has contributed to this notion of moral superiority. Of course, its most recent wars, its treatment of Palestinians, and the steadily rightward drift of its governments have made this image increasingly hard to sustain, not only in the West, but within the Jewish community here as well.

Although strong defenders of Israel, neoconservatives are not necessarily “Israel-Firsters.” They believe that both the U.S. and Israel are morally exceptional. That means that neither one should necessarily be bound by international norms or institutions, like the UN Security Council, that would constrain their ability to defend themselves or pre-empt threats as they see fit. It means that both should maintain overwhelming military power vis-à-vis any possible challengers. In the neoconservative view, the interests and values of the two countries are largely congruent, if not identical. As Bill Bennett once put it, “America’s fate and Israel’s fate are one and the same.”

But that doesn’t mean that neocons defer to whatever Israeli government is in power, as AIPAC tends to do. They have often had quite different priorities. Through the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, to name a few groups, neocons very much led the public campaign for invading Iraq from virtually the moment the Twin Towers collapsed. But I don’t think Ariel Sharon—who considered Iran the greater threat—was all that enthusiastic about the idea. Similarly, many neocons were quite unhappy with Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza and with his successors’ decisions to end wars against Hezbollah and Hamas over the past decade without achieving decisive military victories. Unlike AIPAC, neocons almost always think they know better.

This has changed somewhat since Netanyahu took power in 2009 and especially since the 2013 elections, which resulted in the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Bibi has had a very close relationship with key neocons since the 1980s when he was based here as a diplomat in the U.S. and neoconservatives got their first real taste of power under Reagan. Their worldviews are very similar. Still, there have been differences. Although most neocons have been calling for regime change in Syria through covert or direct U.S. military action, Bibi has wanted the civil war there to go on and on for as long as possible. And although neocons, who have long viewed Moscow as a dangerous adversary, have urged a harder line against Russia over Crimea and Ukraine, Bibi has maintained a discreet silence and enjoys a business-like, if not cordial, relationship with Putin.

So, Manicheanism, moral exceptionalism, a benevolent Pax Americana backed up by huge military budgets, Israel’s security—these are all central to the neoconservative worldview.

It’s often said that neocons are Wilsonians devoted to the spread of democracy and liberal values. I think this is way overplayed. I agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski who has sometimes observed that when neoconservatives talk about democratization, they usually mean destabilization.