Melvyn P. Leffler - Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq

The Bush Administrations invasion of Iraq in 2003 tops any list of strategic failures in the long history of American foreign relations. Conversely, Mel Leffler tops any list of the nations finest scholars of American strategic decision-making. The two come together in this gripping, illuminating, fair-minded, and undoubtedly landmark exploration of how American leaders, at the height of their power and influence yet simultaneously driven by fear, got it all so very, very wrong.

Jeffrey A. Engel, Director, Center for Presidential History

The war in Iraq was a disaster that diminished American power and divided the American people. Leffler explains how a fearful, well-intentioned, but poorly informed president led our country down this damaging road. This book is essential reading for any leader who hopes to avoid disaster, and any citizen who wants to elect better leaders.

Jeremi Suri, author of Civil War by Other Means: Americas Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy

Confronting Saddam Hussein offers a welcome antidote to flip assessments of the Bush administrations decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Mel Lefflers provocative new account shows that the invasion was not a result of cartoonish bumbling or single-minded warmongering, but rather careful debate poisoned by a disastrous mix of fear and hubris.

Nicole Hemmer, Director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency, Vanderbilt University

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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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Melvyn P. Leffler 2023

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CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 9780197610770

eISBN 9780197610794

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197610770.001.0001

For my younger brother, Fred,

who died too young

and whose friendship and love

sustained me in good times and bad

On September 11, 2001, I walked by the White House at about 8:20 a.m. on a beautiful, cloudless, sunny Tuesday morning. I recall the light traffic on the street, the relative tranquility, as I meandered alongside the Treasury Building and turned right on 15th Street to head to the Woodrow Wilson International Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the onset of a new academic year, and I hoped to use my time as a Visiting Scholar to make progress on my book dealing with the Cold War. Shortly after I arrived, I noticed a small group of people standing in a lounge watching television. I had been at the Wilson Center many times, and I had never noticed anyone doing this. I joined them to see what was going on, and watched repeated pictures of a jet flying into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The horrifying, spectacular scene was mesmerizing. Hushed, a group of us stood there together. After listening to commentators speculate about what had happened, I think I walked away, and then returnedI dont really remember. But, then, I watched another jet crash into the second tower, and saw the ensuing chaos as flames engulfed the upper floors and the towers collapsed.

The Wilson Center closed. Rumors circulated that the Reagan Building might be a target of another attack. I do not recall being scared, just shocked. I left around noon to walk to my apartment, about a mile away. The streets were eerily quiet, deserted. I called my daughter who lived a few blocks away. She came over and we spent the evening watching the same scenes again and again on television. We did not talk much. We were too absorbed in our own thoughts. What did it mean? Why did it happen? What next?

The rest of the year remains a blur. I tried to stay focused on my research, but it was not easy. Every day there were rumors of new terrorist attacks. Routines at the Wilson Center were disrupted when letters with anthrax spores circulated in the mail and killed some postal workers. Government buildings, including the Wilson Center, instituted new regimes of security. Book deliveries from the Library of Congress were disrupted, and internet access was restricted. These personal inconveniences were inconsequential, as larger developments unfolded. President George W. Bush launched the Global War on Terror, overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan, declared new threats from an Axis of Evil, and identified Saddam Husseins Iraq as a gathering menace that had to be confronted.

I went to England for the 20022003 academic year to be the Harmsworth Professor of History at the University of Oxford. The big event of the year for a Harmsworth Professor is the so-called inaugural address, then occurring, paradoxically, at the end of the year. I had every intention of crafting my Harmsworth Lecture around the research I was doing on the Cold War. But during the fall of 2002, I was beleaguered by British students and scholars pressing me to explain why the Bush administration was discarding the doctrines of deterrence and containment, and embracing preemptive wars. I did not enjoy the position I was intrying to elucidate, and often forced to defend, the logic of policies I did not fully grasp nor necessarily support.

My best friend, the late philosopher John Arthur, who was also spending the year at Oxford, asked me one day why I was planning to give my Harmsworth Lecture on the Cold War. Nobody, he mused, cared about the Cold War any more. Talk about recent events; put 9/11 in historical perspective, he insisted. John enlisted my wife to join him in the campaign to shift the focus of my lecture. I did, reluctantly. In May 2002, I presented my Harmsworth Lecture on 9/11 and American Foreign Policy. Unintentionally, that talk reshaped the trajectory of my interests over the next twenty years.

Although I returned to the United States and finished my book on the Cold War, I also began to write short articles on the Bush administrations foreign policy. I contested the idea that his policies constituted a radical turn or spectacular aberration. Unilateralism, preemption, military preponderance were not new phenomena, I argued; nor was the quest for a liberal, open international marketplace. I was not seeking to excuse, praise, or criticize the president and his advisers; I was just trying to place their actions and predilections in historical perspective.