STEPPING BACK IN TIME
How the United States got into this mess is the subject of Confronting Saddam Hussein. No one is better suited to answer the question than Leffler, a widely admired diplomatic historian. His landmark study of the early Cold War, A Preponderance of Power, is a model of how to criticize policymakers’ errors while recognizing their achievements and comprehending the excruciating pressures they felt. Good history demands empathy—seeing the world through the eyes of one’s subjects even when one disagrees with them—and Leffler’s work is suffused with it.
Confronting Saddam Hussein is the most serious scholarly study of the war’s origins, relying on interviews with key policymakers and the limited archival material that has been declassified. Leffler aims to understand, not condemn. His thesis is that the Iraq war was a tragedy, but one that cannot be explained by conspiracy theories or allegations of bad faith.
As Leffler demonstrates, before 9/11, U.S. officials believed the problem posed by an unrepentant, malign Iraq was getting worse, but they showed little urgency in addressing it. After 9/11, long-standing concerns about Saddam’s weapons programs, his ties to terrorists, and his penchant for aggression intersected with newer fears that failing to deal with festering problems, particularly those combining weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, could have catastrophic consequences. Amid palpable insecurity, Bush brought matters to a head, first by threatening war in a bid to make Saddam verifiably disarm, and then—after concluding this coercive diplomacy had failed—by invading. “Fear, power, and hubris,” Leffler writes, produced the Iraq war: fear that Washington could no longer ignore simmering dangers, the power that an unrivaled United States could use to deal with such dangers decisively, the hubris that led Bush to think the undertaking could be accomplished quickly and cheaply.
Leffler’s book is no whitewash. The bureaucratic dysfunction that impeded searching debate before the invasion and competent execution thereafter is on display. So is the failure to scrutinize sketchy intelligence and flawed assumptions. The sense of purpose that motivated Bush after 9/11, combined with his visceral antipathy to Saddam—who was, after all, one of the great malefactors of the modern age—brought moral clarity, as well as strategic myopia. Bush and his close ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “detested Saddam Hussein,” and “their view of his defiance, treachery, and barbarity” powerfully shaped their policies, Leffler notes. But none of this criticism is news in 2023, so Leffler’s real contribution is in exploding pernicious myths about the conflict’s origins.