Why Did America Invade Iraq?

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0:00:07.7 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Michael J. Mazarr, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, he is the author of 2019’s ‘Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy.’ Welcome to Free Thoughts, Mike.

0:00:22.0 Michael Mazarr: Great to be here, thanks for having me.

0:00:26.0 Trevor Burrus: Since your book tells us a story of a sort, it seems sensible to start at the beginning, which would be maybe the early ’90s, or possibly the late ’80s, and the America foreign policy relationship and America’s relationship to Saddam Hussein in those years.

0:00:43.5 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, sure. Well, what happened eventually in 2003 with the US intervention in Iraq has deep roots, as you’re saying, and the United States in the ’80s and then into the ’90s was confronted with this dual problem, which leads ultimately to a policy they call dual containment of two regimes they didn’t like very much, that they thought was a threat, [chuckle] Iran and Iraq. Obviously by 1990, late ’90, early ’91, Saddam is showing himself as a particular threat with his invasion of Kuwait. But the US administration as at the time, grappled with the issue, and under the first Bush administration, there was a little bit of a sense that maybe they could kinda get closer to Saddam, make him more of a US friend as a counter-​balance to Iran.

0:01:34.2 Michael Mazarr: And frankly, that… Despite the fact that I think there’s a lot of belief out there that the United States cosied up to Saddam, and… That really didn’t go that far pretty quickly after James Baker and some others were looking into it. Human rights issues and other things just sort of came up and US intel assessments at the time that Saddam remained a threat of aggression to the region, pretty quickly put significant limits on it. But it was interesting in the sense that Saddam, always after that, felt like a jilted lover, a little bit. Like the United States should have been his best friend, and didn’t they realize that Iraq was their natural ally in the region, and he and Iraq were destined to rule over the Arab world and the United States could support that. So it left some frustrations in his mind, but the US toyed with that idea, but it didn’t actually go very far.

0:02:28.1 Trevor Burrus: It’s one of the more fascinating quotes you have in the book, is being asked… Dick Cheney being asked during the first Gulf war, why didn’t we go in? Why did we stop at the Kuwait border and not go in and remove Saddam Hussein? And what did he say about that?

0:02:46.1 Michael Mazarr: Well, he has… So this was in a PBS documentary where he was interviewed and they said part of the criticism at the time from the right was that they should have gone to Baghdad, and he laid out in a long… And it’s quoted in the book, a whole paragraph-​long answer, basically saying, if we tried to do that, the whole world would have turned against us, there would have been an uprising in Iraq, it would have been very expensive, we would have gotten stuck there. All the things that happened in 2003, and all the reasons why people talked about before the invasion, of why it could be a bad idea, he laid out. And I’m sure that his answer would be, “Well, my view changed because of 9/11, and I didn’t feel like we could leave Saddam in power anymore.” But the quote makes clear that he was well aware of the risks of this potential invasion, and he did very little, if anything, as vice president to try to make sure that the United States mitigated those risks, took them seriously later on, so that is a pretty striking quote.

0:03:56.2 Trevor Burrus: And it’s not just 9/11, of course, we’ll get to 9/11 as being such a huge event in so many different ways. But the relationship between the US and Saddam is not good in the ’90s, to say the least, and even by the Clinton administration, that’s something you point out very effectively in the book, which to be honest, is something we spend… My colleagues at CATO in the Foreign Policy Department spend a lot of time wondering why there’s such unanimous agreement so much on the sides of both the Democrats and Republicans about the way the American foreign policy should be executed. And by the Clinton administration, it seemed like there weren’t that many fans of Saddam Hussein in the Clinton administration either.

0:04:39.4 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, right. Although at the time, nobody was advocating for a US invasion, so that is a very significant difference. The United States can decide that a regime is dangerous and work in the direction of change. That raises the whole separate problem of covert regime change, and the dangers of that and the fact that the United States has overused that tool as well. But yeah, by the late ’90s, it wasn’t unanimous, but there was a significant subset of officials at the senior and mid-​level in the Clinton administration who had decided that, partly influenced by the intelligence that was going around even then, that Saddam was seeking weapons of mass destruction, which at one time he had been. And other reports, I mean the fact that he had tried to put an operation in place to kill George Bush Sr, and these other kind of things. They just decided, US policy in the Middle East can’t be secure if Saddam is in power. But that’s kind of as far as they got, and they began to talk about ways of approaching that, the strategy documents that came out of that discussion have still not been declassified, but from my interviews with people, it’s a lot of stuff well assured of a US invasion.

0:05:52.8 Michael Mazarr: So I think… But that does… Like you’re saying, that establishes some of the reason why after 9/11, when the national shock of that happens, you do have a bunch of hawkish Democrats saying, “Well, yeah, maybe we do need to go get him finally,” because they had been psychologically prepared for that by these prior discussions.

0:06:12.8 Trevor Burrus: So Bush gets elected in 2000, and one of the reasons you wrote your book, I think, is to at least go after some of the common ideas about what this war was about, which is, one of them is retribution. You tried to kill my father or we didn’t finish up the first time, and so I’m gonna finish off what my father… And not just my father, many of the same exact people were in the administration who had been in the first Bush administration. Another one, of course, is the war for oil, is another classic narrative. And I would say a third one is basically some sort of power grab, international power grab based on a knowing lie would be… Like a knowing lie about weapons of mass destruction and connections to Al-​Qaeda, I think those are probably the three most common ideas. And you really go to excellent lengths and extraordinary lengths to show that, in many ways, it’s worse than this. If it was that simple, if it were that simple, just like, Oh, these people lied, and so next time we won’t have… Or they were old oil executives, so we wouldn’t have to worry about that again if we don’t ever elect another old oil executive. But it’s actually worse than that. It’s messianic, and they really believe this. But on Election Day 2000, was that on his plate for George W. Bush? Was Iraq and just the general kind of going and finishing the job, was that in his things he wanted to do in his administration?

0:07:37.5 Michael Mazarr: Yeah. I’ve found nothing to suggest that it was, at least not as some kind of an urgent goal or an idea in his head. Clearly, Iraq came up in… And I’ve talked to a bunch of the folks that worked in the so-​called Vulcans, the group of Republican foreign policy folks who were advising him during the campaign. And unanimously, what they say is, “Sure, Iraq came up.” And their view was the same as the view of the folks in the end of the Clinton administration, which is, “We gotta do something about this guy.” But what we had to do wasn’t at all clear. And then that becomes the basis for the fact that in the first few months of the Bush administration, before 9/11, there’s a lot of just going around in circles about Iraq policy with a couple of people kinda saying, “Hey, let’s find some… Do sort of a Bay of Pigs kinda thing and find some Iraqi exiles that we can give some money to.” But nobody was talking about invasion, and there wasn’t any urgency to it. And everything that… All the people that I spoke with and everything I found suggests that George W. Bush’s real priorities were domestic, that… Things like immigration reform, education reform, social security reform, good garden variety Republican kind of domestic policies were where he wanted to make his mark.

0:09:02.0 Michael Mazarr: And he had this kind of instinctive sense of toughness in foreign policy, but really not shaped by any extensive experience or worldview on foreign policy. And there are a couple of these news reports that say that he met with some Iraqi-​American groups during the campaign and said, “You just wait. I’ll take him out.” Politicians say stuff like that in front of every interest group they meet with, to make ‘em think that they’re their person. So, no, I found no evidence that there was a pre-​cooked agenda to do whatever it took, including military intervention to take Saddam out at the beginning of the administration.

0:09:45.8 Trevor Burrus: But interestingly, Saddam was on the minds of American foreign policy establishment, and then 9/11 happens. And how soon after 9/11 are they discussing Iraq as a possibility?

0:09:58.8 Michael Mazarr: Well, the same day. The same day. Some of the most famous revelations or de-​classified materials are the notes of one of Rumsfeld’s top aides from about 2 o’clock that afternoon where they’re talking about… And one of the infamous phrases there is something like “SH for Saddam Hussein, roll up things related and not,” or something like that. So that they were already talking about this broader campaign. And I think that’s one thing that’s lost about Iraq sometimes, is that Iraq is really the kind of close cousin or related agenda item to the Global War on Terror in general. So, this initial decision, which people don’t really talk about, it’s almost taken for granted that, “Okay, after 9/11, the right answer is to go big, to have a global war on all kinds of… ” And there was, of course, debate about it at the time, but not all that much. And once you’ve made that decision, then when you look at some of the declassified documents, you do a bunch of interviews, and Iraq was one of a number of agenda items. When they were laying out the GWOT strategy, they had a number of countries on their target list, Iran being another. And they were, at least within the policy process, they are pretty open about the fact that, “We wanna knock over a bunch of these regimes that are ‘friendly to terrorism,’ ” which kinda means anti-​American.

0:11:32.9 Michael Mazarr: Now, they never got to those, of course. Thankfully, they stopped after Iraq. But that notion of… And that is something that on 9/11 and within the first two or three days, is just universally accepted in a massive piece of groupthink by the administration that the answer to this is not to just go after the perpetrators in Afghanistan, which would have been a perfectly reasonable strategy. The answer is to go global in some enormous outburst of American power. And then Iraq becomes the first thing… It’s almost like Saddam Hussein had the bad luck of being the most hated of those… The countries on that list, and a country where the military campaign looked doable, so… But theoretically, they could have gone after somebody else first. So it’s really part and parcel of the larger global strategy that comes out of 9/11.

0:12:34.3 Trevor Burrus: What was sort of uniquely American about this? ‘Cause you used the word messianic a lot, the missionary impulse, which I think, having lived through the time, also was uniquely of the time post the fall of the Soviet Union, that we had the right, the ability and the obligation to do this stuff. The other countries… There’s a lot in the book that says, as you said, like, “If this happened in another country, it would have been the sensible response of that country to just go get the people who did it, and then stop there. But that’s not how America does things, especially at that time in world history.”

0:13:07.8 Michael Mazarr: Well, right, right. And as we’re seeing, it’s not necessarily how Russia does things either. Their reaction to the Ukraine problem has a lot of the same hallmarks. And it’s, in some ways, grounded in kind of a similar national identity and self-​image and form of messianism that they believe they have the right to control things in their neighborhood, but yeah, it’s this… And it’s obviously a self-​image that takes route, I think as early in some ways, as World War II, and then the aftermath kind of percolates along during the Cold War, and then as you say, it really explodes into a new kind of form after the Cold War, where there was no one there to check our power. And it’s this notion that the answer to something like this is, as you say, we have the right and in some ways, we have the obligation to reshape the world in ways that we see fit, because we’re the good guys and that’s our job. And if you’re talking about delivering food aid to starving people, that’s a great impulse. When you’re talking about knocking over governments and waging wars, it’s incredibly dangerous, and this is one of the things I think we’re still grappling with today, and the foreign policy spectrum. I don’t consider myself a restrainer or a retrencher, so I have differences of views, but I strongly agree.

0:14:35.4 Michael Mazarr: And I think there’s, certainly after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is this kind of new consensus that we gotta redefine that messianic impulse. There’s elements of goodness in it, but it has to be focused and limited and constrained and applied in the right way for the right kind of goals with the right tools. And I think the debate on that, really as much as there’s been a lot of argument about ending forever wars and stuff, that debate is still really only starting about what shape that takes.

0:15:15.5 Trevor Burrus: I think Iraq and Afghanistan… And this was a little bit true of Vietnam, but that narrative was a little different in the years after, but the other thing is the ability. A very big over-​estimation of how kick-​ass our military is and that it can do anything it possibly wants if it puts its mind to it. I think that we were knocked down some pegs with Iraq and Afghanistan, and that’s not exactly how it is.

0:15:39.2 Michael Mazarr: Well, that’s right. And depending on the kind of missions that you’re talking about, they’re absolutely kick-​ass in terms of taking down the Iraqi military. And this is a failing of the uniform military to a degree at the time, because if you’d ask them, “Okay, are you guys gonna be kick-​ass, staying for 10 years and governing this country?” They’d say, “That’s not what we do.” And talk about another quote before… As is typical during presidential campaigns, it’s typical for either the candidate or their top foreign policy advisor to write an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that lays out their views. Well, Condi Rice did one before the 2000 election, and there is a startling paragraph in there where she says, “These Democrats have been using our military like social workers, sending them all over the world to manage towns and determine who’s at fault when somebody runs over somebody’s dog. But we can’t… The military is just to fight and win wars.” And yet they turn around and make exactly the same mistake.” So there was a recognition that US military power… That the uni-​polarity of military power did not extend to counterinsurgency, running countries, nation-​building, state-​building.

0:16:55.5 Michael Mazarr: And then, so what you get is, guys like Rumsfeld seemingly assuming, we’ll just barge in, throw somebody in the presidential palace and then get the heck out and hope for the best, because I don’t wanna… And then even Rumsfeld in February 2003, he gives this speech called, Against Nation Building, one month before they go into Iraq, basically saying, we should not be doing exactly what we are about to start doing. But in his mind, he was hoping we’d get out quick. Of course, there’s no way to do that when you invade and topple a government. And nobody held him accountable to that, and folks like… I have to say, Condi Rice, there’s a certain amount of accountability there, that in a lot of ways, you can see places where she tried to push at consensus and ask hard questions, but ultimately as the national security advisor, I think it was her job to go to the president and say, “This business of what we’re gonna do with a country after we get there, no one has a damned clue, really. And until we do, I don’t recommend you do this,” and that never happened.

0:18:01.5 Trevor Burrus: Let’s get a little bit into that sort of famous dramatis personae, rogues gallery, maybe by some people’s idea. And Rumsfeld is the first one. He’s an interesting guy, very combative, had obviously a very long career at all levels of power in DC, but also super manipulative, extremely scheming, and his relationship with other people in the administration was not exactly great. Correct?

0:18:32.0 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, no, absolutely. Particularly Colin Powell, even Condi Rice, one of the things that comes out that… I sort of had noticed, but it took reading Condi Rice’s memoir to really see how much kind of knee-​jerk misogyny is also involved in Rumsfeld and Cheney’s approach to her.

0:18:51.8 Trevor Burrus: Not surprised, I’m not at all surprised.

0:18:54.9 Michael Mazarr: They come from a generation… Different generation, it’s not… But in so many different ways, yes, he simply did not think of himself as a team player, he thought from his distant experience, of course, you could go back and find these quotes on the White House tapes of Nixon talking about him when he was working under the Nixon administration saying he’s a nasty little SOB, but he was gonna use him for his purposes. But even he knew he was kind of a political schemer, and he’s one of these kinds of folks who thinks… He was proud to be a bare-​knuckles, no prisoners taken bureaucratic operator, ’cause he thinks that’s the way government works. And to some degree it is, but it also works in other ways and it can work much more effectively when the major participants in the administration don’t view it that way. If there’s one person that was the most maligned influence on this outcome, it was certainly Rumsfeld.

0:19:56.5 Trevor Burrus: And interestingly he’s often up there on the rogues’ gallery, but so is Dick Cheney, and they’re often put above Bush, interestingly, ’cause of this idea about Bush.

0:20:05.8 Michael Mazarr: No, I would do that, I would do that.

0:20:07.2 Trevor Burrus: But yeah, but actually, Dick Cheney is the master planner manipulator here. And the thing that I never encountered until reading your book was actually how much Dick Cheney had kind of changed in his long career in Washington to being sort of extremely pessimistic about democracy and just the desire to just get things done by the time he’s in the vice presidency.

0:20:30.2 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, and it’s hard to know, like there’s a little bit of a difference of opinion among people that know him, some who say he changed dramatically, some who say he didn’t. I think you just phrased the change very well, actually. I think that in some of his basic political views, people thought of him as a moderate for a long time, ’cause he speaks slowly and he doesn’t always say what he thinks, and he was actually more kind of a radical conservative, but I think you’re right, that over time, similar to Rumsfeld, he came to believe that in government, if you wanna get something done, you just have to shut everybody out and get it done. And that some of the most infamous examples are some of the Presidential Orders he had signed on detainees and on climate change, where literally Colin Powell would discover him leaving the White House with a signed piece of paper that hadn’t been coordinated with anybody, and that’s… What struck me reading that is, you go around giving all these fire-​breathing speeches about the superiority of democracy and how evil dictatorship is, and we’re gonna spread democracy to Iraq, and then the way you operate is entirely dictatorial, there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy there, but yeah, that was certainly his style by that time.

0:21:45.1 Trevor Burrus: And then Bush, misunderstood oddly, I think possibly due to Trump, dislike of Trump, and so enjoying a little bit of a renaissance in a way, in terms of how he’s characterized, how would you kind of characterize his attitude at the time?

0:22:01.8 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, I don’t… He’s such a fascinating and conflicting individual, because there’s no question that he was incurious, he didn’t spend a lot of time getting to the details of things. It’s interesting, all these people, as you were talking about with Rumsfeld and Cheney and their view of governing, people’s view of governing and leadership in these roles has a big effect. And Bush had really bought into this, pick good people and give them a mission and get out of their way kind of mode of leadership, which is true to a degree, except you still have to make sure there’s checks and balances in the process. And he was way too instinctive and knee-​jerk in his reactions way too easily, and he had gotten this idea that, adding on to the general messianic view of the United States, that he specifically had been chosen by God to lead the country, I think that can be exaggerated and kinda how weird it made him, but he had this idea that, “My instinct must be shaped by God if I was chosen by God to be here.” So now, on the other hand, I believe that he is a much…

0:23:14.2 Michael Mazarr: He’s a basically… From everything I found, the people I talked to that worked with him, the evidence I found, I have a sense that he really is essentially well-​intentioned for whatever that is worth, that he really believed, came to believe that this could be a force for good, this invasion of Iraq and promotion of democracy, that it was… And it sort of comes from this idea that the way to respond to 9/11, yes, there’s a very hard-​nosed, kill them all aspect to it, which comes out in some actual quotes of his, but there’s also an aspect that we have to offer people hope and a better future, which is not really the way that Rumsfeld and Cheney would see it, but it was the way Bush saw it, and so he just, he needed much stronger… A number of people told me he’s sort of a well-​intentioned guy who really needed better staff support, from a Chief of Staff, a National Security Advisor, may be a different Secretary of Defense, who really would say, “Alright Mr. President, we get your instinct, but here’s what you gotta make sure… Here’s what we all have to make sure of before we do this.”

0:24:29.0 Michael Mazarr: And so it was kind of this worst of all worlds, of a president that didn’t give the details, a couple of senior officials in Cheney and Rumsfeld who were just determined to make this happen, and really unconcerned about the details themselves for a different reason, and then other officials, like his Chief of Staff and Condi Rice who didn’t barge in and kinda stop it. But one of the things in Bush’s legacy that people forget is, today, as we see… It’s still relatively low level, but some of the rising anti-​Chinese sentiment growing with the US-​China rivalry, Bush was the loudest voice coming out after 9/11 saying, “This is not a war against Islam, American Muslims are a wonderful part of our country, we should embrace them, that we should work with them to solve this problem.” And I think that made an enormous difference. And a different president, like one we’ve had relatively recently, would not have done that and could have caused enormous damage, both to the Muslim-​American community and also to America’s reputation abroad. So you get these little hints of the essentially good person that George Bush is in some ways, but married to these other aspects that he didn’t fully do his job as president in making this happen.

0:25:54.1 Trevor Burrus: Afghanistan happens. We have… There’s a lot of support and goodwill for that mission, and then by early 2002, that’s the thing you point out very well in the book, is there’s sort of an informal and a formal decision-​making track happening here, where in some real sense, the decision had been made to go into Iraq, and in some ways that surprised different staffers at different levels of government, but there was a conversation happening, and then all of a sudden, you kinda describe it as, it’s like it emerged from the ether, then it’s just like, there wasn’t a meeting, there wasn’t a thing where they just said, “This is gonna happen one day or… ” It just said, “One day, in the next couple of years, this is going to happen,” became just the unofficial agreed-​upon mantra.

0:26:37.1 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, among some key people, that decision in their minds was really settled by November, December 2001. So within a month or two of 9/11. George Bush has said publicly, when asked when was the decision made, he said, “Well, March 2003, that’s when I gave the order. So that’s when I made the decision, like a year and a half later.” But yeah, so he in…

0:26:58.3 Michael Mazarr: In November, he goes to Rumsfeld and says, “Look, we gotta start… ” I mean, put it this way, September 14, 15, that meeting at Camp David just after 911, the official defense department memo for that meeting said, “We’re gonna do Iraq and Afghanistan as a package, and we may even do Iraq first.” So, within days of 9/11, you have very official statements. Now, they backed off of that. Bush clearly said, “I’m not ready for that yet.” But within a few weeks of that, he’s going back to Rumsfeld saying, “Yeah, really get those war plans worked up again.” So, from that moment, I think in Rumsfeld and Cheney’s mind and the mind of Paul Wolfowitz and others, the decision… They feel like a decision has essentially been made and they’re working to implement it. Meanwhile, other folks, especially at State and the intelligence community are just kind of going along their way, and as you say, there’s not a series of meetings where, “Okay, we’re gonna decide next week if we’re gonna invade Iraq.” So, they don’t…

0:28:00.0 Michael Mazarr: And so you get that famous episode in June, I think of 2002, when the head of state policy planning, Richard Haass goes to Condi Rice and says, “I’m here now let’s talk about invading Iraq, we better have a real debate about that if we’re gonna do this.” And she says, “No, it’s done. It’s… The decision has been made.” So, by spring, summer of 2002, the National Security Advisor believes the decision has been made, and then late in 2002, Bush actually goes to her and to Colin Powell and maybe to others, but two that we know of and says, “So, I’m kind of thinking, we gotta do this, you onboard with that?” So, it’s all these little bits and pieces that yeah accumulate to a decision without people ever, sitting down and saying, “Here’s a proposal, here’s the options, what are the costs and risks?”

0:28:52.8 Trevor Burrus: And then after that moment, that time you have very motivated reasoning where kind of everyone’s on board with, that he has to go, and so then it’s just a question of figuring out why to tell the world, and that kind of culminates in Colin Powell’s speech at the UN with all this information. But that they did not… Two things, the WMDs and his contacts with Al Qaeda, which we now know was incredibly bad intelligence, but they were so motivated in their reasoning that they just didn’t really care to look twice at it, and on top of that, they even said, even if he doesn’t have WMDs, it’s still worth taking him out.

0:29:35.5 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, that’s one of the really striking comments you get at the time, and then some of the interviews I did, and without naming, ’cause my interviews were anonymous, but in public comments in their books, people like Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and others, will say like, “Well, kind of WMDs was the reason, but we just… Like you said, we decided to take him out. So, what interesting is, even at the time, the intelligence community knew that the contacts with terrorism argument was BS, and they very explicitly said that and push back on it. So, when we talk about the bad intelligence, it was really limited to the WMDs, and the contacts with terrorism stuff came from these kind of amateur intelligence analysts who’d been writing books about the global spider web of conspiratorial terrorism and autocratic regimes coming to end the American way of life and the intelligence community was very clear that that was just not true, and then on the WMD side, the problem is this is kind of a bipartisan and a long-​standing problem, and I’ve talked to folks from… State Department folks who are not at all sympathetic to the war, who nonetheless said, “Mike, you gotta realize, everybody believed that,” at some level, it was just taken for granted.

0:30:55.1 Michael Mazarr: But then what’s interesting… And as I pointed out in the book, every time they really laid out the whole case in front of someone, and this is something about George Bush, people think he’s stupid, he’s very bright. And that’s where Tenet’s infamous comment about, “It’s a slam dunk,” came from because just as Condi Rice had reacted earlier when they laid out the case, Bush looked at the intel and said, “Wait a minute, this is all you got? I thought this was obvious, but I’m not seeing any smoking guns here.” And Tenet said, “Don’t worry Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk.” Another senior official badly serving him, because if your president expresses doubt in the intelligence, the answer ought to be, “You know Mr. President, that’s a good question. We’re gonna go back and really relook this.” And there were a couple… Well, we know from stuff has been declassified, just a couple of cases, one by the J2, which is the intelligence arm of the Joint Staff, where analysts really raised hard questions and said, “When you look at what we actually know for sure it’s very little about the WMD piece.” But yeah, the policymakers were being told by the intelligence community, “This is real, this is true.”

0:32:13.5 Michael Mazarr: So, to some extent… And I would actually say you were talking about motivated reasoning, to me, the motivated reasoning applies even more to the aftermath piece, to the, “How can we… What are we gonna do with this country when we own it?” Because that was a complete vacuum, apart from some random assertions by some people in DOD, and everybody that touched that issue came away saying, “This is gonna be a disaster.” But the folks in charge just plowed forward.

0:32:43.9 Trevor Burrus: Some of the more interesting parts of the book are when you have comments from Saddam, things that we know that Saddam believed, where Saddam was at this time in terms of, as we discussed before. He thought, “Why isn’t America my friend more?” But one of the ones that’s pretty fascinating and interestingly bilateral is that Saddam knew he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and he was pretty convinced that the Americans had to know this, because he overestimated America’s intelligence community, and we have some crack military, and of course, we know everything and we’re spying on everyone, so he thought we were gas-​lighting him essentially, correctly that we had something else going on here.

0:33:27.0 Michael Mazarr: We were bluffing and we’d back off because we must know this. Yeah, absolutely. And just like he said…

0:33:32.4 Trevor Burrus: And he had intentionally dismantled the whole thing in the mid ’90s, correct?

0:33:37.0 Michael Mazarr: He had sort of, yes, dismantled it with the instructions to keep a lot of the people employed and handy and… It was his intent, and even folks who are agnostic about the war like the Darfur Commission folks and people that have looked into this say he did have the intent of eventually resuscitating that program, now that is not a reason to go to war, there’s a lot of other ways to control it, but yeah, he had decided, I gotta get out from under these sanctions if I want my economy to be the global hegemon that is appropriate to my regime, and so, yeah, he got rid of some of it, hid some of it, and then didn’t fully get out from under sanctions anyway, and so got pissed off, but by the war, he had not yet really recommitted himself, and so when Cheney is going around talking about his one year away from a nuclear weapon and stuff, that was… I mean, that was well beyond what the intelligence said and was, if not an outright lie, it was a massive misstatement of what the intelligence supported.

0:34:47.6 Trevor Burrus: The other interesting fact in this town out before I got to DC, this all happened before I got here, but I do remember that it wasn’t just the White House and all of their allies, it was kind of the entire media ecosystem that started beating the drums of war together and the think tanks, Cato. We like to be proud of the fact that we were the only major think tank to really resist this war as well as the first Gulf War, but everyone kinda got on board and you have these other strange connections, you have Christopher Hitchens, I think, having dinner with Paul Wolfowitz like once a week, and so Christopher Hitchens makes this massive switch. I know Andrew Sullivan always publishes this stuff about what he was wrong about, and he has an entire section of all of his blogging and he was completely wrong about it, so the drums of war started beating really heavily kind of across all institutions.

0:35:40.3 Michael Mazarr: You’re absolutely right. And of course, Cato has the advantage, and it’s against every war, so if the war goes wrong, it’ll be on the right side, but no, it is… And frankly, when I got to the end of this book, I really wanted to tell the story of the policy-​making process and the decision, but there is a separate story, which I don’t think has been told yet of the large… Like you’re saying, a larger ecosystem, Congress as well, but Congress and the media, basically, media broadly defined, right, columnists and to some extent sort of thought leaders, Christopher Hitchens types, and you had some of the infamous cases like the New York Times WME reporting, but most of the New York Times, The Post, the editorial pages ended up being in favour of the war, obviously, you’re gonna have Wall Street Journal line up. In Congress, the vote was much less close than in 1990, than to evict Saddam out of a country he’d already invaded and threatened the region’s oil supplies. 9/11, of course, accounts for a lot of that but… And there’s no conspiracy theory to be told here about people that are so different and in such different places in the political spectrum and…

0:36:54.0 Michael Mazarr: You know what I mean? I think it’s just a very worrisome case study of how a nation can get to a moment caused by a national trauma in which they’re just kind of in the mood to break some things, I guess. I mean, partly. And then combined with this Messianic sense, this idea that… Which lives on today. One of the things that’s disturbed me about some of the commentary about the Ukraine war, is it is exactly… Some of it is exactly the same moralistic sensibility that… You know, I support aid to Ukraine, I believe the invasion was completely unjustified, NATO enlargement had a role but did not justify this, it’s Putin’s aggression, we should… Sanctions were a good idea. All of that. But to turn it into a kind of normative campaign that the United States has to pound the table and cannot rest until it has righted all wrongs is a very dangerous thing to do. And that is, I think, the dark underside of this American Messianic sensibility, which has done a lot of good in the world but can’t seem to keep itself from going to excess.

0:38:12.3 Trevor Burrus: We haven’t talked about Colin Powell too much, and there’s been accounts about when he goes to the UN and reads this speech, which is, I think quite effective from a PR standpoint, but did he believe that speech? Was he on board in the same way? And he was chosen specifically, I think, to give that speech due to his reputation for being a straight shooter, right, and is a good public speaker and stuff. But did he eventually kinda feel used if he didn’t…

0:38:45.0 Michael Mazarr: He definitely felt used, in part because he knew… The initial draft he got was full of a lot of garbage. And I believe it came from Scooter Libby, but it was filled with all kinds of stuff that these people in DOD, this Office of Special Plans, and folks in the Vice President’s office who had been cherry-​picking intelligence jammed it full of every raw intelligence thing they could find. And so Powell had to go to spend some time himself and then leave his staff with folks from the intelligence community to go through this thing line by line and weed out all the garbage. And, of course, they didn’t weed it all out because they didn’t know some of it was wrong. But he definitely felt used later. On the other hand… So folks that were close to him that I interviewed said he never really had a problem with taking Saddam out. That there wasn’t kind of a moral objection to the idea of invading and removing Saddam. Which is a little surprising to me given his Vietnam experience and his sort of detailed awareness of the military challenges that would come in the aftermath.

0:39:51.7 Michael Mazarr: And there are folks that worked with him on a daily basis, very common basis, who say at some point he saw the writing on the wall, he was so pissed off at Cheney and Rumsfeld, and he had lost faith, to a degree I guess, in Bush, and they never had a great relationship from the start, that he just kinda said, “Alright, to hell with it. They’ve decided on it. You know. It’s gonna be their problem to solve, and I can’t stop it.” And so he does request this famous meeting in August of 2002, which Condi Rice helps to set up, where he asked to make sure that Bush had thought through all the problems. But the tone of the meeting was, “Mr. President, you’re aware that there are these potential risks, right?” And Bush says, “Yeah.” And he says, “Okay, just wanted to make sure.” [chuckle] And then later on Bush says, “Are you with me?” And he says, “Yes.”

0:40:46.3 Michael Mazarr: So, part of the issue with… And, of course, it’s very dangerous to psychologize people at a distance, or even close up, but at the end of the day Colin Powell’s a soldier, and he does not… In almost an inverse to Rumsfeld’s view, he does not believe that his role is to seize control of the bureaucracy and make happen whatever he wants to have happen. He believes in loyally serving the process and his leadership, which is an admirable trait. But in this case, it’s almost like they needed a counterpart troublemaker to Rumsfeld, to screw up the process… To be willing to say first of all, “I’m gonna spend a couple of weeks getting a bunch of people in my office to determine if we know what the hell we’re doing when we get there.”

0:41:30.7 Michael Mazarr: “When I find out we don’t, I’m gonna stop this from happening until we do.” That is something that in theory he could have done, but it would have put his career right on the line, but beyond that I think he would have perceived it as disloyalty. Because it’s not his decision to make. It’s the President’s decision to make. So another person that it’s… I think he has escaped some of the blame that he should share a bit because he didn’t do some of these things. On the other hand, it was never really… He was never one of the ones pushing to go into Iraq, but he ends up in kind of this unsatisfying middle ground that… And, as you say, in that particular speech being kind of used for his public reputation.

0:42:22.8 Trevor Burrus: You’ve alluded to it, and you don’t get into it a ton in the book ’cause it’s really about the decision to go to war, which is already depressing enough, especially as that’s how you tell it, but I’m always impressed when a book can take my already low expectations of government competence and make it even lower.

[chuckle]

0:42:41.9 Trevor Burrus: Because I had been like, Well, you know, they went in there with a bad plan for after the invasion. They had a bad plan. But it’s actually worse than that. There was no plan. And to some extent, Rumsfeld, I think, is at fault for that because he tried to make sure there wasn’t one, ’cause as you said his idea was like, “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, we’ll be gone in 90 days and we’ll just let… And then Iraq will take over and rule itself.” So he didn’t want there to be a plan. And so you have all these different conflicting people with different ideas, which ends up just being complete dysfunction on the ground.

0:43:14.0 Michael Mazarr: Yeah, 100%. And the idea that Rumsfeld actively did not want there to be a plan, I think the evidence is overwhelming, but there isn’t a smoking gun to prove that, ’cause he just doesn’t say much and put much down on paper, apart from his million little pointless snowflakes. But yeah, and to this day Wolfowitz and Feith will say, “We had a plan. We had this thing called The Interim Iraqi Authority.” And that’s just not true, in the sense of any… Now, when the US military actually plans to go and do something at length, even if it’s provision of humanitarian aid or the initial phases of peace enforcement and nation-​building, it can do a fine job. It’s just that… Another personality here we haven’t talked about is Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander. And so here’s the guy who’s on the uniform side of this, and resists his own command’s efforts to plan for what they call phase four, and tells them, “No, no, no, look, I’ve been told by the political people that’s their job. State’s gonna roll in… ”

0:44:21.1 Michael Mazarr: Nobody believed that. There was no one who thought State was in a position to do that. Years later, you get talk about a civilian surge and the State Department still doesn’t have the capacity to do it. So he was another person who just sort of closed his eyes and said, “I’ve been told a plan for this, I’m doing it, and anything outside that is outside my lane.” Which I think is a complete dereliction of responsibility. But, look, I don’t wanna undermine anybody’s faith in government as a rule. Government can do amazing things when there’s a clear goal, somebody clear in charge, you know, a variety of these conditions, none of which were met in this case. And when you go to war and put the lives of your service members and the people in the country you’re invading at risk, that is an absolute moral failing.

0:45:14.1 Trevor Burrus: One of the things that shocks me, many wars that we have gotten involved with, but especially Iraq I think, is that there seemed to be, because of some of the group think impulses, messianic stuff, to almost have been no desire to really research the country itself and figure out, “Well, how is this country split up? What are the different ethnicities? What are the different historical alliances? How is Saddam currently ruling the place?” There just seems to be no interest. I always try and say, if you just wanted to invade Ohio, and you say, Alright, let’s say we invade Ohio, we woulda set up a government in Columbus but you had to be aware that the southern Ohioans are much more like Southerners, the northern ones are much more like Michigan, or they might hate me for that. And you have rustbelt people. There’s all these different cultures and different stuff that you couldn’t just be like, “Well, it’s just that simple. You just invade Ohio, put a government in Columbus, and there you go.”

0:46:05.7 Trevor Burrus: It would obviously never work that way. And they get there and they’re like, Wow, Saddam held the country together as a series, I think the phrase is, of tiny kleptocracies that were reporting to him in different ways, and there was no trying to figure out who was gonna pick up the trash, who was gonna do the basic functions of governments. It seemed like no one had even thought about it. So suddenly these 20-​year-​old sergeants are doing local government functions, and it’s just… It’s sort of stunning. How long does that go on? I know the book is not entirely about that, but is there a point when suddenly they’re just like, “Well no, we have to stay, and this is not gonna… This is not gonna be quick.”

0:46:42.8 Michael Mazarr: Well, that happens gradually. Just quickly, I would say your point about not understanding the countries we’re dealing with is 100% right and is one of the classic American failings, in part because, as you say, we’ve got this sense that we’re the good guys riding in, so… And sort of a rationalistic enlightenment view of, We’ll show up and make everything better and we don’t need to know that much. And you gave one analogy… Something that struck me during this process was that one of the most instructive shows about counter-​insurgency, I think, is the show Justified. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Justified. But this place in… This particular… Harlan County, right, where this guy, this marshall comes back, railing to enforce the law. And he’s from the area, his dad’s there, he knows all the people, he dug coal with the criminals. And this incredibly intense set of relationships and histories and everything, and then you see these FBI people come from time to time who don’t know what the heck’s going on, and they can’t begin… And you think, okay, even within the United States, when people from outside a specific county come in and try to manage the situation, they don’t know what the heck is going on, they can’t master…

0:48:04.1 Michael Mazarr: To me it’s like a perfect analogy for figuring out tribal dynamics in Iraq or Afghanistan. But to answer your question, yes, it becomes clear within a couple of months, in some ways, because, as you were saying, Rumsfeld had this idea that we’re gonna move out pretty quickly, and so they had a fairly… They already had on paper a process of withdrawing a lot of the troops that were there, and that had begun within a few weeks after… A couple of weeks after getting there. And there was a point at which, and I don’t remember the exact date, where they had to sort of put an end to that because it was becoming clear that… If you remember, there was a period, March, April, May of 2003, when things were still relatively quiet, in part because the Iraqis were kinda looking around, saying… And one of the Iraqis… And I didn’t get a chance to do a ton of interviews with Iraqis, but a couple of dozen. And one of the former government officials I talked to said, “Yeah, we figured this was gonna be just like 1945 Japan. You guys are gonna come in and turn us into this wonderful advanced society at peace with itself.”

0:49:14.1 Michael Mazarr: And they waited a few months and then realized the Americans didn’t have any clue what was going on. And were potentially trying to shove some people into power, like Ahmed Chalabi that had no power in the country. And were beginning to restrict the rights of some Iraqis in different ways. And then looting begins, the Americans don’t control that. So it’s a couple of months of quiet, some troops starting to withdraw, then some of the violence starts to pick up in the spring and into the summer of 2003. And I think it’s between about May and August, September, October, that… And more at the beginning of that process, like at the beginning of May, you have the arrival of Jerry Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority taking over from ORHA, and… Paul Bremer, I’m sorry. And he arrives with a very different notion too, so that’s another critical kind of threshold. Because he got there, thinking, “Yeah, we’re not gonna be able to leave immediately ’cause it would be chaos. And if the President wants democracy in Iraq, we’re gonna have to dig in and stay for a while as an occupying authority.” So in some ways, I guess I would say the beginning of May with the arrival of Bremer, is, from a policy standpoint, the critical threshold to, We’re gonna stay.

0:50:39.3 Michael Mazarr: In the military, it kinda then kinda becomes more apparent over time. But to our earlier point about disconnection, Bremer… There were still… Khalilzad and some other folks were still scheduled to fly into Iraq to hold various meetings to get Iraqis in charge of a new government so we could leave. At the same time Bremer’s getting there, Rumsfeld is shocked by Bremer’s decision that we’re not leaving. So there’s no coordination of that, that’s just complete chaos.

0:51:12.6 Trevor Burrus: It’s obviously a huge tragedy, probably something like 250,000 Iraqis were killed in the war, I think is the number that’s usually discussed, and thousands of American soldiers. And the aftermath here is… The lessons… We don’t seem to… I don’t think Americans… And this is like a little crass, but we don’t tend to care that much about hundred thousands of dead non-​Americans as maybe we should.

0:51:40.7 Michael Mazarr: Yeah. Sadly, yeah.

0:51:42.8 Trevor Burrus: And so we have this tragic thing that we now have some amount, I think, of collective guilt for, and we understand it was a mistake. But you kinda mentioned earlier the kind of lessons that we would take from this, you would hope, to… Is it something that is unique enough that it would only occur in a post-​9/​11 kind of environment? Where something like that has to happen to make something like this happen, that maybe we don’t need to be so worried about it happening again?

0:52:14.8 Michael Mazarr: Well, if we’re talking about an unprovoked invasion like that, unprovoked in an immediate sense, yeah, I think you’d probably need some kind of provocation, but there’s always provocations. That’s part of the problem, is whether… I mean, Pearl Harbor was a different thing. But the Cuban Revolution wasn’t launching attacks on the United States but was perceived as a provocation and a threat, which then led to the Bay of Pigs and then discussions in the Cuban missile crisis of coming very close to invading that country. So the challenge is to be able to manage provocations, you know what I mean? And in that sense, I do think there is a very different view of that kind of stuff today than there was then. The general foreign policy… If somebody were to propose… Particularly, and if you look later, like a Libya-​style operation, which the defenders of that will now say, “Well, we never intended regime change, that… ” Well, come on, once you’re protecting people in a country, this is where it’s gonna go. That was obvious at the time. So I think that there’s a lot more wariness, clearly in American politics.

0:53:29.9 Michael Mazarr: When you look at the number of Republicans that just voted against a non-​binding resolution supporting the NATO Alliance, and what this… The prior president said about US alliances, we are in a different place. But the challenge I think is gonna be, how do you manage general challenges of US foreign policy, threats, risks and then the provocations that happen? Short of aggression. In North Korea, they’ve been doing a lot of stuff that… Look, back in the Clinton administration, they came very close to thinking about a military attack on North Korean nuclear facilities. Now that’s out of the question ’cause they have too much and their retaliatory capabilities are too big, at least against South Korea and Japan. But nobody’s talking about military action against Korea, not seriously. The Iran thing worries me, because the opponents of the JCPOA don’t seem to have… It’s almost like invading Iraq. It’s like, We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna get rid of the treaty, have something better. What’s better? I don’t know, but it’s gotta be better than that. Well, eventually the only way to stop it is with military action, and I think we’re gonna be able to avoid that. In Ukraine, I think the administration has done a very good job of managing the pressures and doing enough to kind of support the victim of aggression while making very clear that we’re not gonna get involved in this fight.

0:54:47.8 Michael Mazarr: So that to me is the challenge going forward. In terms of an Iraq-​style thing of, We’re gonna go topple that government and put a new government in place, my sense is that for a long time it would have to be a pretty extreme situation to justify something like that. I hope and think we’ve kind of learned our lesson. But part of our history shows, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, how close we came there, Libya, a bunch of the covert actions we’ve done, you can get yourself involved in a scrape in a lot of different ways. It doesn’t just take loading up the troops and going off to do a self-​determined invasion. So it’s gonna be just a continuing process of managing this instinct America has to go forth into the world and just solve problems.

[music]

0:55:54.4 Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us at Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.