In Confronting Saddam Hussein Melvyn Leffler Sets the Record Straight on the Iraq War
Book Review
If there is one book you should read about the Iraq War then look no further than Melvyn Leffler’s Confronting Saddam Hussein.
I couldn’t put it down. I read one chapter every morning at the break of dawn til I was done. Since you can’t find any history of the conflict that is not more of an anti-Bush polemic soaked with inflammatory invective, Leffler’s measured assessment of what drove the Bush administration to war with the Hussein regime is a much needed corrective to what was getting to be a hopeless affair in partisan revisionism or, not to be ironic, adventurism.
In the age of Trump, and the Democratic party already subject to the vicissitudes and hypocrisy of American isolationism, this history sets the record straight. And it should shore up public opinion against the pervasive pessimism of America’s views on its own efforts at global engagement.
In the introduction before you stick him with overdetermined accusations of partisanship, Leffler is careful to articulate that his book is no apology for the Bush administration. Nor a justification for the Iraq War. For the record he states his opinion is that the Iraq War was a “tragedy.” However it is not a tragedy for the reasons people suspect. It wasn’t that the people were lied to and a bunch of Americans died on a scale not seen since Vietnam to “export democracy” to the Middle East and remake the world in our own image.
No, from Leffler’s perspective the real tragedy was actually that the Bush administration was telling the truth about what it believed were WMD’s in Iraq, which especially after 9/11, no one felt they could afford to be complacent about. Remember, it was complacency in the foreign policy establishment that precipitated 9/11. When one considers that Saddam Hussein, who after a career of challenging American primacy in the Middle East, was the only one of America’s enemies to publicly praise the World Trade Center attack, did at one time possess WMD’s which he also did not hesitate to use on multiple occasions, in the Iran-Iraq War and to ethnically cleanse the Iraqi Kurdish minority as a stepping-stone in his totalitarian statecraft, and 3. gave shelter to Al Qaeda leaders who it was an established fact, were seeking to obtain WMD’s— one could understand why Bush was disinclined to take chances with Saddam Hussein.
When Bush and his advisers declared a global war on terror, dwelled on terrorist networks and they sponsors, and launched their assault on Afghanistan, their overriding goal was to prevent another attack on American citizens, the United States, and its allies. They stated this again and again in their policy memoranda, in their memoirs and in their interviews. “Keep the terrorists from striking again,” was Bush’s number one goal. “Preventing the next attack,” Cheney emphasized, should be “our top priority.” “Our principal motivation” said Rumsfeld should be self-defense, “not vengeance, retaliation or punishment.” They agreed that defense meant going on the offensive: destroying the terrorists and persuading or intimidating the states that provided safe haven or assistance to change course. In a memorandum to the president Rumsfeld stated the goal simply and starkly, “we are after terrorists and the regimes that support them.” Wolfowitz stated it publicly, “We have got to root out the terrorist networks. And we have got to end the sport that they get from a number of states.”
These officials believed that weakness invited aggression. They embraced the paradox: the United States had become the most powerful nation in the world yet it had also become more vulnerable to terrorists, rogue states, and asymmetric threats. State Department reports on global terrorism catalogued the number of terrorist attacks each year: 304 in 1997, 274 in 1998, 395 in 1999, 426 in 2000, and 348 in 2001. Twenty-five Americans died in 1996, six in 1997, twelve in 1998, five in 1995, and twenty-three in 2000. In 2001, there were 219 attacks against US facilities and citizens. The portentous nature of the attacks also mounted: the New York World Trade Center in 1993, US and coalition troops stationed at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in Yemen’s Aden Harbor in 2000. If previously hesitant, Bush and his advisors now felt that they had to reshape the global security environment that permitted terrorist networks to fester and flourish. The terrorists, Bush believed, “interpreted our lack of a serious response as a sign of weakness and an invitation to attempt more brazen attacks.” His aims were clear: thwart attacks from any terrorist group with global reach, not just al Qaeda, and either topple the regimes or reshape the behavior of any state that provided assistance or training to these terrorist groups."
But far from blundering into Baghdad out of sheer panic, it was months and months of deliberating that led up finally to the invasion of Iraq. Leffler explains that in addition to those factors above, the UN sanctions regime— imposed after the Iran-Iraq War to punish Saddam’s use of chemical weapons—was fast eroding. Without UN member states voting to renew them, notably France and Germany, Bush felt compelled to use military coercion to pressure the revanchist Arab autocrat to be up front with the IAEA about his WMDs’ capabilities and destroy whatever he possessed and whatever remained of his WMD infrastructure. Though because the sanctions were coming off regardless, Saddam called Bush’s bluff and famously refused to cooperate with America’s threats.
Hussein continued to treat the UN restrictions with disdain. Talks held between Iraqi and UN officials went nowhere And Hans Blix, executive chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) said the documents submitted by the Iraqi government contained scant data that would resolve outstanding disputes.
Instead the Iraqi dictator continued to mix manipulation with contempt. Iraqi scientists continued to design missile systems “with the assumption that sanctioned material would be readily available.” Hussein used his oil revenues to leverage support from France, China, and Russia to end UN sanctions. At the same time he invested his growing financial reserves in strengthening Iraq’s military industrial complex and acquiring dual-use items that might be used for chemical and biological weapons. Hussein also accelerated or sustained Iraqi support for terrorist activity in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, including the targeting of American aid workers. Although US intelligence analysts knew that he was financing the activists of several Palestinian terrorist groups, they were not aware of his growing support for Hamas’s activities, in return for which, according to captured Iraqi documents, Hamas seemed “willing to do Saddam’s bidding.” Some US officials like Wolfowitz suspected that Hussein was making common cause with Islamic radicals, but they did not really know that it was indeed happening,. What they did know was that the dictator’s atrocious behavior showed no signs of abating. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Commission on Human Rights, as well as State Department, continued to report on his all pervasive repression and oppression,” his arbitrary executions, his expulsion of Kurds and Turkmen from their homes in Kirkuk, Tuz and Khormatu, his murder of Shi’a clerics, and his affinity for torture, like cutting out the tongues of regime clerics and raping the wives and daughters of men suspected of disloyalty.
Meanwhile American military forces had waited on Iraq’s borders for months. Either Bush would have to use them or he would have to order a withdrawal. However, as Leffer points out, then America’s credibility was on the line (and Biden’s cut-and-run betrayal of Afghanistan that led to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine months later should remind us how important credibility truly is). If Bush pulled out forces, then a madman and a thug, with all his visions ultimately of a pan-Arab empire in the Middle East united under his iron fist, basically would have given America the finger. Then besides Hussein resuming his WMD programs, which he surely would have, what message would that have sent to other expansionist tyrants and rogue states—and specifically how about bin Laden and Al Qaeda?—about America’s willingness to make good on its threats?
Americans, Hussein calculated, would accept an outcome short of regime change. They would attack for three or four days, recalled one of his artillery officers, and then it would be over. Hussein thought he would win the game of chicken with the Americans.
He was wrong. Bush despised his defiance. The president knew he was being tested. By March US troops were poised to take action. Summer was coming. Their readiness would decline Arab partners in the region were growing impatient, communicating their uncertainty about US resolve. Cheney believed strongly that American credibility was at risk. Rumsfeld felt the the same way: failure to confront Iraq would send a message to other nations that neither America nor any other nation was willing to stand in the way of their support for terrorism and pursuit of WMD.” Bush had to face reality: coercive diplomacy was failing: if we were to tell Saddam he had another chance—after declaring this was his last chance—we would shatter our credibility and embolden him.” The president had a fateful choice, Hadley explained, “use it or lose it,” and he commented “do you basically walk away and allow Saddam Hussein to make us look like paper tigers,” or do you enforce the resolutions that he had been violating for a dozen years?
As Leffler’s tragic portrait shows, whether the invasion of Iraq was the right decision or not, Bush felt that he did not have a choice. Now some people blame “neocons” and Dick Cheney for the decision to invade Iraq. Leffler shows that it was largely Bush himself who made the decision though. And the only one affiliated with neoconservatism was Paul Wolfowitz, and he played an admittedly minor role in the decision to topple the regime— and for the record, neoconservatism is not an ideology of unrestrained interventionism.
And Leffler shows much of what went wrong in the aftermath of the invasion was Donald Rumsfeld’s fault, who terribly underestimated the amount of troops needed to secure the country, and who didn’t seem to understand why it would be necessary to build a new state to replace Hussein’s regime.
That being said, while no, the Bush administration did not lie about WMD’s in Iraq, it is true that they listened exclusively to the intelligence that gave them the worst case scenario. But the blame for that should be mitigated by the administration’s failure to ignore the flashing red lights from the CIA that culminated with the 9/11 attack. If as Leffler says “hubris” was part of the calculus for Iraq, then the administration was correcting for what they rightly believed was their complacency about Al Qaeda. Particularly Condoleeza Rice knew all about Al Qaeda, but she failed to respond to the intelligence reports, though to be fair her office was besieged with all manner of warnings from radiological weapons to bioweapons threats after 9/11.
I wouldn’t go so far as share Meffler’s view that the war was a tragedy, meaning a terrible error. Rather my view is one of qualified admiration in my conviction that Bush made the right decision that, under the circumstances, he could not but make. Whether Saddam Hussein had WMDs or not, it was the right to decision to topple his regime, because the long term threat he posed to the region was undeniable, and as the world’s number one sponsor of terror, his threat was existential. As every genuine analyst would tell you, after the UN sanctions expired Saddam’s plans were to restart his WMD programs, which ranged from chemical and biological to nuclear weapons unimpeded by Western nations if not emboldened by the lack of an American response.
He would have used his WMDs to inoculate himself against Israel and Iran while bidding to evict America from the Gulf, perhaps sell WMDs to al Qaeda, and because he was such a cutthroat pragmatist split the Middle East between bin Laden and himself. Moreover it would set off regional nuclear proliferation like hell at the minimum. A showdown with Saddam Hussein was thus an inevitability that the Anglo-American world could not afford either to ignore or lose.
I can admit that it could have been done a lot better. It was a mistake to disband the Iraqi military. It was a mistake not to seize the opportunity to contain Iran. But so to speak, the only thing we really got wrong in Iraq was that we didn’t send in double as many troops as we did to flatten the country and properly rebuild it from the ground up.
Anyway twenty years on, Iraq is a lot better now than it was under Saddam. This is a fact that even people who are the most opposed to the Iraq War have to admit. Civilians don’t live in terror. Iraqis have a chance to live their own lives. The government is very corrupt. But whatever setbacks Iraq faces from its unstable government no thanks to Iran’s militias, has to do with America’s far too dour assessment of its ambitions for the region in the wake of overthrowing the Hussein menace.
The tragedy for me is what our ill-founded regret shows about our own deep-seated aversion to using our power. If you look at how Bush’s antecedents like Obama sat on his hands while Assad gased 200,000 people to death and forced the Iran nuclear deal down Israel’s throat and utterly failed to deter Putin from annexing Ukraine, and how Biden follows his example with his cut-and-run betrayal of Afghanistan to the Taliban, mirroring Obama’s disastrous withdrwawl from Iraq that led to the rise of Islamic State, and Biden whose continuted appeasement of Iran now has the Houthis controlling translational shipping through the Red Sea, obviously the consequences are worse because America does too little. Not too much.
And if today's Republican Party is even more pessimistic about America’s role in the Middle East and the world than the Democratic Party, such that the Republican frontrunner for the 2024 nomination would invite Russia to attack a NATO ally, that is only a measure of how successive Democratic administrations absolutely botched foreign policy. Whatever Trump says and despite his plans to surrender Afghanistan just as Biden ended up doing, Trump still assassinated Soleimani, the central architect of Iran’s “ring of fire” proxies that surround Israel (no thanks to Obama), he pulled out of the nuclear deal that by starving the Iranian economy ignited a protest movement that rocked the status quo. And most importantly of all, the Trump administration built the Abraham Accords that would contain Iran and give Israel free rein to demolish the Iranian nuclear program whenever the Jewish State felt threatened. Trump’s attitude to allies is disgraceful and categorically reprehensible, but the record shows that it was years of Democratic nonintervention that laid the groundwork for isolationists who would sooner give up than fumble defending our values in fits and starts as badly as they have.
However you feel about the Iraq War, Leffler is here to tell you there is no excuse to indulge conspiracy theories about Dick Cheney and the “military industrial complex” lying to us, or that it was all “revenge” after 9/11. God knows how indulging this nonsense gives Biden an excuse to bash Israel for its “collective punishment” of Palestinians and to urge Netanyahu not to invade without an “exit strategy,” and also all but forecloses American will to prevent Iran from going nuclear at the risk of a wider regional war.
Confronting Saddam Hussein is only 252 pages, and it’s paced like a thriller, whether you’re an amateur foreign policy scholar like myself or merely a casually interested observer, you will find it very illuminating and sobering. It’s on Amazon for $21.92
— Jay