Review Confronting Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq

Leffler, Melvyn, Confronting Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq, New York: Oxford University Press, 2023

 

At the very end of Melvyn Leffler’s book he wrote that “It is important to get the story right in order to grapple earnestly with the dilemmas of statecraft.” He failed to accomplish that in his Confronting Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. Leffler ended up agreeing with the White House that Iraq was a threat to the United States, that President Bush only wanted Iraq to change course using diplomacy, and Bush did not decide upon war until he publicly said so in March 2003. In the process the author completely missed how the debate over Iraq had changed during the 1990s from containment to regime change and war. The main cause of Leffler’s failure was his reliance upon Bush administration officials who were still trying to justify the war.

 

Leffler’s main goal was to determine why and when the U.S. decided to overthrow Saddam. His explanation recited what the Bush administration said. That was Saddam was an evil man who killed his own people, possessed WMD and could give them to terrorists that would attack the United States. The author then went through all the major events from 9/11 to 2003 and repeatedly said that Bush did not want war. It wasn’t until March 2003 when he told Saddam had to leave office or war would start that he finally made his decision. What Leffler thought was his major contribution to the literature turned out to be justifying the invasion by saying that the U.S. had a legitimate cause to take on Iraq. The reason why he agreed with the White House was because he relied extensively upon former members of the administration who believed they did the right thing and never reflected upon their decisions such as former Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

 

Using White House officials so heavily also meant that the book never explained why the Bush administration automatically thought about Iraq on 9/11. Leffler really just focuses upon the terrorist attacks in 2001 as the start of his story which completely overlooked what happened in the 1990s as the U.S. political class moved from containment to regime change on Iraq. The first Bush and the Clinton administrations believed that Saddam could be checked by sanctions that would keep Iraq weak, U.N. inspections which would destroy his WMD and two no fly zones that kept a steady watch over half his nation. By the end of the 1990s that consensus had disappeared as inspectors were kicked out in 1998 and the internal Iraqi opposition was destroyed leaving no hope that anything would improve. The status quo would mean keeping Saddam in power and that was unacceptable to a growing number of both Republican and Democratic voices. The alternative was regime change to remove Saddam from power. Bush believed in that and almost everyone in his foreign policy cabinet had taken part in these debates over the last decade. When 9/11 happened they all fell back on what they had been talking about since the 1990s which was Iraq. It was also more comfortable for them to deal with nation states rather than an amorphous terrorist group like Al Qaeda.

 

The fact that Lefller wasn’t aware of the discussion about Iraq before 9/11 also meant he didn’t know what regime change was about. He writes again and again that Bush and others wanted regime change in Iraq but that didn’t mean war when in fact it did. Instead he argued that the U.S. was trying coercive diplomacy to get Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back in, destroy its WMD and ultimately change its behavior by not supporting terrorists and to stop repressing its people. In the process Leffler mistakes a means for an end. No one in the Bush White House for instance including the president believed that Iraq was going to disarm or that the inspectors would work. It was simply a tactic to build support for the war. The book therefore ignored Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz all saying that Iraq would never cooperate with the United Nations and give up its WMD. Even worse was the idea that threatening Iraq would somehow get Saddam to stop being a dictator. It was extremely naive for Leffler to believe this was the president’s policy.

 

Overall Confronting Iraq is a maddening book. You start off thinking that Leffler might provide some new insights into the Iraq War but he ends up just giving the Bush administration’s argument and following its timeline of events. Just as important he doesn’t explain why Iraq was the center of the White House’s attention because he starts with 9/11 and overlooks the 1990s. He doesn’t even get the strategy to justify the war right. It makes for a very frustrating read.

 

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