Don't Let the Architects of the Iraq War Off the Hook

Leffler is happy to accept self-serving accounts from the people responsible for the war, and that necessarily slants his account in their favor.

Joseph Stieb reviews Melvyn Leffler’s history of the invasion of Iraq:

Melvyn Leffler’s new book on the roots of the 2003 Iraq War demonstrates the pitfalls of excessive trust in one’s sources, especially memoirs by and interviews with top policymakers. Leffler deploys an impressive bounty of evidence in this book, including a roster of interviewees that features Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Clarke, Scooter Libby, and Michael Gerson. However, he places too much trust in their portrayal of events, motivations, and decisions, failing to adequately critique their self-depictions.

When writing a history, there is always a danger of taking sources at face value, but it is something that should be avoided as much as possible. Judging from Stieb’s review, Leffler is happy to accept self-serving accounts from the people responsible for the war, and that necessarily slants his account in their favor. This is part of what I feared after reading a previous review of the book. It is appropriate to take into account what policymakers have said about why they did what they did, but that is only the beginning of the inquiry. Their claims have to be checked against the other available evidence, and those claims have to be interrogated and dissected instead of swallowed whole.