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FLUX ISSUE 50 AUTUMN 2014
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£5.95 COVER ARTIST: CIARA PHILLIPS
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The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad Edinburgh University Press ÂŁ19.99
Reviewed by Danny Postel
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Oil. ‘If Iraq was invaded for oil,’ Ahmad writes, ‘then the US was remarkably negligent in securing the prize’. Iraq awarded its first major post-invasion oil concessions in 2009, and the big winners? Norway, France, China and Russia. Of the 11 contracts signed only one went to a US company (Exxon Mobil). The only sector in which US firms prevailed was oil services—but ‘in that sector the US has always enjoyed a virtual monopoly, invasions or no’, Ahmad notes. It’s true that Bush and Cheney had worked in the energy industry, but US oil companies did not push for the invasion—in fact they lobbied to lift the sanctions on Iraq, which blocked potential profits. The oil industry has long favored agreements with governments, Ahmad notes; belligerence, in But I’m glad I set these reservations aside and contrast, ‘has only jeopardized investments and took the assignment. This forcefully argued and brought uncertainty to future projects’. Did US meticulously researched (with no fewer than oil companies try to cash in on the opportunity 1,152 footnotes, many of which are full-blown presented by the toppling of Saddam Hussein? paragraphs) book turns out to be enormously By all means, but this is not to be confused, relevant to the present moment, on at least three Ahmad argues, with why the invasion happened. fronts: Gulf energy resources have long been a vital US • ISIS emerged from the ashes of al Qaeda in Iraq, interest, he notes, but on ‘no other occasion has which formed in the immediate aftermath of the US had to occupy a country to secure them’. the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. With Free markets. Naomi Klein has done the most out the 2003 invasion, there would be no ISIS to popularize this notion with her widely-read as we know it—and the region’s political land 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, seeing Iraq as scape would look very different. a paradigmatic case of disaster capitalism— • The US Senate report on CIA torture has of predatory market forces exploiting a society brought back into focus the rogues gallery of convulsed by shock and awe. But ‘[b]eyond shortthe Bush-Cheney administration—the same term gains for a few businesses’, Ahmad writes, cast of characters who engineered the 2003 ‘the war proved a disaster for the world capitalist Iraq invasion. This book shines a heat lamp on system’. The world will be paying for the Iraq that dark chapter and many of its protagonists. war for a bloody long time, as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes have demonstrated in The Three • There is talk of a neoconservative comeback Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq in Washington. This thoroughly discredited Conflict. (They later revised that estimate but zombie-like group are now angling for the upwards.) Market fanaticism of the Milton ear of Hillary Clinton, who might be the next Friedman variety, Ahmad acknowledges, US president. Ahmad’s book provides a ‘was certainly ascendant in the aftermath of the marvelously illuminating anatomy of the invasion, but there is no evidence that it played neocons, which has lessons that apply directly any part in the deliberations over war’ (emphasis to this movement’s potentially ominous mine). He shows, moreover, that Klein conflates next chapter. neoconservatism and neoliberalism—two The central question Ahmad attempts to answer distinct doctrines. His excellent discussion of is: Why did the 2003 Iraq War happen? In one of the differences between them provides a salient the book’s most valuable sections, felicitously corrective to the widespread confusion about titled ‘Black Gold and Red Herrings’, he goes this, especially on the Left. through several prevalent explanations/theories and takes them apart one by one: I was reluctant to review this book. With all the dramatic developments in the Middle East today—the ISIS crisis, the siege of Kobanê, the deepening nightmare in Syria, the escalating repression in Egypt, the fate of Tunisia’s democratic transition, the sectarianization of regional conflicts driven by the Saudi-Iranian rivalry—delving back into the 2003 invasion of Iraq seemed rather less than urgent. It’s hard enough just to keep up with the events unfolding day-to-day in the region. Reading—let alone reviewing—a detailed study of the internal processes that led to the United States toppling Saddam Hussein over a decade ago seemed remote, if not indeed a distraction.
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Global hegemony. 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 Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, secretaries of state James Baker and Henry Kissinger, and the late diplomatic adviser Lawrence Eagleburger.
Figure 1 The neoconservative core and Ahmed Chalabi. Richard Perle lies at the core of this unusually dense network with a direct, one-to-one relationship with every other member of the network. Albert Wohlstetter is the outlier mainly because he belongs to a previous generation. He is included because he played the crucial role in inserting apex neocons into government.
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All of them opposed the war. As did Colin Powell. This has been largely obscured by the secretary of state’s infamous 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’.
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The neocons were obsessed for decades with toppling Saddam’s regime. Ahmad provides a thorough and instructive genealogy of the neoconservative movement, mapping both its intellectual coordinates and its ‘long march through the institutions’ of the national security apparatus: from its roots in ex-Trotskyism, to the office of US Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a hardline Cold Warrior, ascending into the Reagan administration and the Pentagon, and a labyrinth of magazines, think tanks and ad hoc committees. There is nothing conspiratorial about Ahmad’s analysis: he sees the neocons as a network of individuals (or what the anthropologist Janine Wedel calls a ‘flex-net’) with a particular ideological agenda, using the levers of the state and the media in pursuit of that agenda, in close coordination with one another. In this figure from the book he maps what he calls ‘the neoconservative core’:
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a course of action, they contend, that was not in The neocons were the Iraq war’s sine qua non, but other stars had to align for the opportunity to the geostrategic interests of the US but that Israel saw in its interests. Ahmad concurs with them. present itself: the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a godsend. The moment was ripe, and the neocons ‘Not all imperial projects are about economic predation: some simply aim to destroy political were abundantly prepared to exploit it. They enemies’, he argues—correctly, in my view. But ‘succeeded in using the shock and disorientation in taking out Saddam Hussein the US destroyed of the attacks to place Iraq…on the agenda and one of Israel’s political enemies. In so doing, helped manufacture the case for invading Mearsheimer and Walt argue, it undermined it’, Ahmad writes. Indeed, such was their preoccupation with Iraq that many of them urged American national interests. going to Baghdad immediately after 9/11, never Ahmad demonstrates in painstaking detail how mind Afghanistan. Deputy defence secretary the neocons in the Bush administration— Paul Wolfowitz argued this case a mere four days especially in the Pentagon (Wolfowitz and after the terrorist attacks, at the first gathering Douglas Feith—think ‘Feith’-based intelligence) of Bush’s national security team post-9/11, held and the office of the vice president (Lewis at Camp David. Not even Donald Rumsfeld, the ‘Scooter’ Libby)—aggressively advanced the defence secretary, supported Wolfowitz’s (Israeli) case for the invasion. ‘It’s a toss-up position—at least not at that point. (The ‘flipping’ whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the of Rumsfeld and Cheney—their metamorphosis Americans on any given day’, British Foreign from traditional conservatives, or ‘aggressive Secretary Jack Straw remarked. Joe Klein, a nationalists’, into two of the war’s key champions centrist columnist for Time magazine (and —was pivotal in the decision to go to war. Ahmad himself Jewish) wrote that the neocons pushed offers a discerning if ultimately inconclusive for the invasion ‘to make the world safe for Israel’. discussion of this opaque piece of the historical As Ahmad notes, however, the neocons operate puzzle.) on the basis ‘of what they think are Israel’s best interests’ (his emphasis): whether the war, which But why exactly was toppling Saddam an idée has significantly strengthened Iran, was actually fixe in the neocon mind? And how did this in Israel’s interests, is highly contestable. Many minority faction ultimately prevail over its rivals Israelis opposed the war. But as former New within the administration? Much of the book Republic editor Andrew Sullivan contends, is devoted to answering these two critical neoconservatism ‘is about enabling the most questions. Ahmad’s discussion of the latter—his chapters on ‘Setting the Agenda’ and ‘Selling the irredentist elements in Israel’. The neocons are War’—are well crafted but cover familiar ground. more accurately seen as Likud-centric than Israel-centric. There are several other books that tell that story, and Ahmad relies on them extensively in his own Against the widely-held view that Israel does account. But his discussion of the former—the America’s bidding, Ahmad shows how explanation he advances for what motivated the Israelpolitik is at odds with both US geostrategic neoconservative crusade against Saddam interests and those of global capital. Big Oil, the Hussein—is this book’s real contribution. Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce have locked horns with the Israel The war was ‘conceived in Washington, but lobby on multiple occasions over sanctions on its inspiration came from Tel Aviv’, he writes, echoing the political scientists John Mearsheimer Syria, Iran, Libya and other states—measures that the lobby pushed hard but the corporations and Stephen Walt, authors of the influential opposed fiercely. ‘US support for Israel, when (and controversial) book The Israel Lobby and considered not in abstract but concrete detail, US Foreign Policy (which began as an essay in cannot be adequately explained as a result of the London Review of Books). Mearsheimer and American imperial interests’, the late antiWalt, the two preeminent realist scholars in international relations theory, maintain that both Zionist and leftist writer Israel Shahak observed. ‘Strategically, Israel is obviously a huge burden for Israeli leaders and the Israel lobby in the the US’, notes Sullivan. This view is becoming US urged the Bush administration to invade increasingly clear to many observers and indeed Iraq— 24
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to more and more in the US foreign policy establishment. I find Ahmad’s arguments about the motivations behind the Iraq war—and his critiques of the dominant alternative explanations—broadly convincing. But I wish he had engaged directly with some of the criticisms of the Mearsheimer-Walt argument. I share his view that most of those criticisms are unconvincing and that the Israel lobby thesis generally stands up to scrutiny—but his defence of that thesis would have emerged stronger had he dealt with some of the more serious criticisms leveled at their argument. He doesn’t even mention, much less engage, the criticisms that Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, or Joseph Massad, for example, have advanced against Mearsheimer and Walt. Like Ahmad, I think those criticisms are wrongheaded. They take issue with Mearsheimer and Walt at the level of their ideological framework, or the conceptual arc of their argument. They argue—to make a long story short—that Mearsheimer and Walt let the US off the hook, in effect, and are insufficiently anti-imperialist. But the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis is an empirical matter—the question isn’t what one thinks of their worldview in general (a worldview Ahmad and I both find deeply flawed, by the way) but whether their argument about why the US invaded Iraq in 2003 is correct or not. I agree with Ahmad that the evidence is on the side of Mearsheimer and Walt rather than their critics. But it would have made Ahmad’s defence of their (and his) case more compelling had he aired those arguments.
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several high-profile liberals signed on— infamously among them, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, George Packer, David Remnick and Peter Beinart. (Ahmad includes several others in this group who are/were decidedly not liberal: Jean Bethe Elshtain was explicitly anti-liberal; Kenneth Pollack is a creature of the CIA and the National Security Council; Christopher Hitchens was a Trotskyist who morphed into a ‘neo-neo-conservative’, in the apt phrase of Ian Williams, and was decidedly hostile to liberalism.) The pro-war liberals were disproportionately prominent. But in fact their support for the war was a minority position among liberal interventionists. In his important book The Left at War, Michael Bérubé lists just some of the liberal intellectuals and writers who opposed the Iraq war: Ian Buruma, Martha Nussbaum, Jürgen Habermas, Timothy Garton Ash, Richard Rorty, Stephen Holmes, Tzvetan Todorov, Mary Kaldor, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ronald Dworkin, Saskia Sassen, Mark Danner, Samantha Power, Amartya Sen, Seyla Benhabib, Charles Taylor, David Held, Ian Williams, Kenneth Roth, David Corn, the editors of The Nation, Boston Review, openDemocracy, The American Prospect, and the New York Review of Books. (And this is only a very partial list.)
Ahmad takes the liberal writers Michael Tomasky and Todd Gitlin to task for ‘denounc[ing] anti-war voices’—but both Tomasky and Gitlin opposed the Iraq war. They had criticized opponents of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, not the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ahmad approvingly quotes Tony Judt’s brilliant London Review of Books jeremiad ‘Bush’s Useful Idiots’ (21 September Finally, I want to pick a bone with Ahmad’s 2006), in which the late historian upbraided the discussion of liberals and humanitarian liberal intellectuals who supported the war. interventionists. In a section polemically titled I have written in praise of the piece myself. It was ‘From humanitarian intervention to shock Judt at his best. But Ahmad neglects to mention and awe’, he takes them to task for forging a that Judt himself was a liberal who strongly ‘neoconservative-liberal alliance’ in support of supported the humanitarian interventions in 2003 invasion. The liberal interventionists helped Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. Like most of us shape ‘the climate of debate’, he asserts, by who supported those interventions, Judt strongly ‘easing the inhibitions of some about the use of opposed the Iraq war—which, as Ahmad demonforce’. There are two problems with this section. strates, was anything but a humanitarian interFirst, he wildly overstates the extent of vention. To their eternal shame, some humanitarsupport for the Iraq war among liberals. In ian interventionists supported the Iraq war—but fact, the majority of liberal intellectuals and they were in the minority within the humanitarcommentators opposed the invasion—but Ahmad ian interventionist camp. Judt belonged to the fails to mention that any of them did. It’s true that very camp that Ahmad criticizes for, in his view, 25
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providing intellectual cover for the Iraq war. In fact, Judt was squarely in the majority among liberal interventionists in opposing the Iraq war. Indeed, liberals and humanitarian interventionists articulated some of the most forceful arguments against invading Iraq. It isn’t just that Ahmad gets the intellectual history wrong in this admittedly brief section of his otherwise outstanding book. The much more serious issue is that the arguments he advances against the principle of humanitarian intervention flirt with the very logic deployed, for example, by the targets of Ahmad’s sharpest criticisms in his more recent writings on Syria: those on the Left who steadfastly oppose any form of intervention in Syria on the grounds of defending the ‘sovereignty’ of the murderous Assad regime. Ahmad finds those arguments as specious and pernicious as I do. And, to be sure, he concedes in passing that there are ‘crises where predatory states use the cover of sovereignty to tyrannise vulnerable populations’. But he doesn’t think through the larger implications involved here. This is not the place to open a philosophical debate on humanitarian intervention. But I’ll close by posing a question to Ahmad: has the Syrian conflict, and the ideological fault lines that have formed around it, occasioned any rethinking on his part of the debates about intervention going back to the 1990s? These criticisms aside, let me reiterate the enormous significance and relevance of The Road to Iraq. It is a work of tremendous intellectual diligence and moral seriousness. We are all indebted to Ahmad for undertaking this major contribution to the debate on one of the central events of this century, whose aftershocks continue to unfold daily, to disastrous effect. With the neocons poised to make a comeback, this book serves as a cautionary tale of bracing urgency. It is a must-read guide to the history of the present.
Danny Postel is Associate Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of Reading ‘Legitimation Crisis’ in Tehran and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future and The Syria Dilemma.
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