The Iraq Debacle Twenty Years Later

Attacking Iraq would not have been justified even if all of the Bush administration claims had been true.

Robert Zoellick reviews Melvyn Leffler’s history of the start of the Iraq war, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. He concludes with this remark:

Today’s Washington zeitgeist wants to force a showdown with China. Leffler’s history suggests the need to ask lots of questions and to consider options carefully.

Many accounts of the Iraq war dwell on the Bush administration’s shoddy or non-existent preparations and their failure to think through all the possible consequences of what they were proposing to do. It seems that Leffler’s history does the same. That is an important part of the history, but it can miss the larger lesson from this debacle: criminal aggression is never acceptable, no matter what the pretext for it may be.

No doubt the Bush administration was profoundly incompetent and irresponsible in their many failures to prepare for the aftermath and to consider alternatives to war, but the main flaw in their policy was their willingness to commit illegal aggression against another country. Iraq’s government did not possess the weapons programs that the Bush administration claimed that it had, but attacking Iraq would not have been justified even if all of the Bush administration claims had been true.