Blunder Britains War in Iraq by Patrick Porter

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/7/2018, SPi
BLUNDER
Blunder
Britain’s War in Iraq
PATRICK PORTER
1
3
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For Jane, Mum, Dad, Em, Pat, Gus, and Molly

Con Amore
Acknowledgements
For the writing of this book, I am in the debt of many people.

My great thanks to Dominic Byatt at Oxford University Press for taking this
project on, for his care and good cheer.
While writing, close friends help keep the flame burning. Thanks to my old
friend Robert Saunders, for his friendly ear, incisive advice, and encouraging
word even while he was writing a history of his own. Gratitude also to David
Blagden, comrade and colleague, for the laughter, thought, and conversation.
Ever since we first met, Huw Bennett has been a sharp interlocutor on Iraq,
and much else besides. Mark Meredith’s part was more of a cameo, but his
dark humour beguiled the weary hours.
The book bears the footprints of many others: Roger Hutton; Marc
Mulholland and Victoria Lill; Paul Newton; Kori Schake; Tarak Barkawi and
Jennifer Luff; Emma Ashford; Chris Preble; Lawrence Freedman; John Bew;
Ned Lebow; Jonathan Golub; Martin Robson; Sergio Catignani; Jason Reifler;
Hew Strachan; Michael Clarke; Malcolm Chalmers; Andrea Berger; Anna and
Nico von der Golz; Adrian Gregory; Nick Stargardt; Rob Dover; Nigel Biggar;
Ryan Grauer; David Edelstein; Toby Dodge; Colin Gray; Christopher Layne;
Barry Posen; Josh Shifrinson; Stephen Walt; John Mearsheimer; Matthew
Kroenig; Andrew Monaghan; Jacques Hymans; James Ellison and Paul Dom-
jan. For the chance to work with strategic minds and practitioners, I am also
grateful to the Joint Command and Staff College and the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter.
My thanks to John Gay and the staff at the National Interest for publishing
earlier pieces on which this draws; to the Oxford Strategic Studies Group and
the Royal United Services Institute for inviting me to rehearse the argument;
to Mick Cox, John Ikenberry, and Dan Deudney for debating the matter at the
International Studies Association Conference; and to my students, who had
less choice in the matter.
My family are the bedrock for everything: Brian and Muriel Porter, Emily,
Pat, Gus, and Molly. For my wife Jane, gratitude is beyond telling.
Lastly, to those who suffered in this campaign, and in all tragic expeditions.
Patrick Porter
Oxford
25 April, 2018 (Anzac Day)
Preface
LEST WE FORG ET
This book explains a decision for war. Britain’s participation in the invasion of
Iraq in the spring of 2003 was a momentous choice. ‘Operation Telic’ was the
country’s first military-strategic failure since the withdrawal from Aden and
South Arabia in 1967,¹ its largest scale combat since Korea in 1950, its most
failed outcome since Suez in 1956, and its most polarizing campaign since the
South African war of 1899. Iraq was a hinge event in British political life in the
first decade of the twenty-first century. It is never far from audits of how
Britain’s public life lost its way. Britain has waged preventive wars before, ‘first
strikes’ to destroy distant perceived threats. Yet these anticipatory campaigns
are distant memories within very different conflicts: the invasion of Iran in
1941 during World War II, to prevent Axis disruption of oil supplies to the
Soviet Union, and the bombardment of the Dano-Norwegian fleet at Copen-
hagen in 1807 to deny it to Napoleon Bonaparte. This smaller war was born of
great ambition. As a move to topple a regime, reconstitute a state, change a
region, influence a superpower and interrupt a hypothetical danger, as a war
intended to be both precautionary and revolutionary, it was a landmark. It is
also part of the present. At the moment of writing, a set of resulting crises
straddling Iraq and its neighbours draws multiple states into collision. The
wars energized by the war have no end in sight. With a large archive of
documents and testimonies now unearthed, we can better ask what happened
and why, and discern its warnings. The battle over the war’s memory con-
tinues. ‘All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second
time in memory.’²
Looking back, a reckoning with the campaign is not easy. People killed,
died, and suffered for it, for disappointing results. To question the war is to
doubt the value of sacrifice. And the very process of learning from history is a
fraught and losing struggle. Our species has tried to educate itself through
history, yet has failed often to prevent similar disasters. From the confusion of
historical analogies, error can flow. Again and again, the mythologized memory
¹ Unless stated otherwise, all primary documents cited are drawn from the ‘Chilcot’ Iraq
Inquiry. As Geraint Hughes observes, ‘Iraqnophobia: The Dangers of Forgetting Operation Telic’
RUSI Journal 157:6 (2012), pp. 54–60, p. 54.
² Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 4. I am grateful to Dr Natalie Sambhi for alerting me to this
reference.
x Preface
of Nazi Germany and Munich has moved modern policymakers to identify
adversaries as Adolf Hitler, to cast themselves as Winston Churchill, and to
assume decisive quick victory. Major powers retain a propensity for self-
inflicted wounds. They inflate threats and choose wars that are more costly
and difficult than they realize. We have been here before. Studies of the United
States’ conflict in Vietnam (1961–75) did not arrest George W. Bush’s drive
for war in 2003. Five years before Iraq, Fredrik Logevall wrote a magisterial
account of Lyndon Johnson’s fateful decision for major escalation in Vietnam
in 1965. He feared that ‘something very much like it could happen again’ if
permissive conditions arose, that ‘soldiers will again be asked to kill and be
killed, and their compatriots will again determine, afterward, that there was no
good reason why.’³ So it went. But we have to try.
In March 2003, Britain joined a coalition led by the United States to invade
Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical Ba’ath regime. Though not
the most powerful state in the coalition, Britain was central to the war’s
articulation and rationale. The invaders overthrew Iraq’s regime in three
weeks. This came after twelve years of frustrated attempts to coerce Baghdad
into verifiable disarmament, to contain it’s ruler’s aggression and shield
the peoples he preyed upon, and to induce the ruler’s downfall. They
struck partly in the name of counter-proliferation, to destroy an arsenal of
WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) that turned out to be non-existent.
They struck partly to disrupt a perceived gathering threat, a potential union of
terrorism, destructive weapons technology, and ‘rogue states’. And as I argue,
these were intensely ideological days. At its core, the war was one of ideas,
large and real. Iraq was one front in the ‘Global War on Terror’, declared
after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to destroy ‘terrorism’ itself by spreading a
liberating alternative. The invasion was supposed to help spread free markets
and democracy. It was supposed to spearhead the emancipation of the Greater
Middle East, to correct the conditions that spawned security threats. It was
meant to accelerate the resolution of the Arab–Israel conflict and the birth of
a Palestinian state. It was supposed to plant a wealthy, democratic, and
compliant state in the heart of the Middle East. And in London, it was
intended to strengthen and confirm British influence over the American
superpower, to tame Washington and tie it into an international system that
it might abandon. ‘Operational Telic’ was a war of many dreams. Warmakers
articulated those dreams with disastrous eloquence.
‘Telic’ draws from the Greek telos, meaning ‘direction’ or ‘purpose’. It is the
unintended consequences, however, that the world must live with. The top-
pling of Saddam bred disorder, and disorder led to bloodletting. It killed and
³ Fedrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in
Vietnam (University of California Press, 1998), pp. 412–13.
Preface xi
maimed hundreds of thousands. It displaced millions who fled the country. It
cost billions of pounds and trillions of US dollars more than was expected. It
precipitated sectarian warfare and the influx of Sunni Islamists. By destroying
a regime that had given up its chemical and biological weapons and aban-
doned its nuclear and ballistic missile programme, the war struck a blow
against the cause of disarmament—not for the last time—by implicitly dem-
onstrating to other hostile states the value of nuclear deterrence. It upended
a rough balance of power in the region, empowering Iran. Iraq was not the
only generating event behind today’s turmoil in the Middle East. But it
helped drive both sectarian strife and a geopolitical cold war between Iran
and Saudi Arabia. As an effort to project and increase power, the war instead
consumed it.
Worse than a crime, the war was a blunder. The blunder led to defeat. In
March 2017, the unveiling of a memorial in Whitehall to the wars in the Gulf
and Afghanistan underscored a tragic failure. One photographer captured a
lonely former Prime Minister Tony Blair sitting Aztec-faced among chattering
royals, officers, and dignitaries. The carefully crafted liturgy mentioned ‘duty’
and ‘service’, but never victory. This has the taste of ashes. If not defeat—and
some find the notion crude—the campaign’s result was at least a barely
acceptable stalemate. In August 2007, with the city of Basra imploding around
Britain’s overstretched forces in southern Iraq, with dwindling domestic
support and demand for the bolstering of embattled positions in Afghanistan,
Britain’s MI6 station chief quietly negotiated a deal with a senior leader of the
Iranian-backed Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) paramilitary force, the ‘Mahdi Army’
that was besieging British bases. The militia agreed to stop targeting the British
military in exchange for the release of detainees from British custody. British
troops were permitted to withdraw from Basra Palace to the refuge of the
airport without the loss of life, a withdrawal the militia graciously policed en
route.⁴ UK ministers framed this pullback as an efficient handover to Iraqi
state security forces and the culmination of an effective operation. But as
Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned the House of Commons after the
Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940, it would be wrong to assign this deliverance
‘the attributes of a victory’.⁵ When an army charged to oversee the creation of
a new state must retreat to safe passage under the cover of night, and only with
the permission of a private force, obtained with bribes, that is humiliation.
Basra’s Shia militia subsequently brought the whip to uncovered women,
intellectuals, and merchants, and a revived black market. These dividends
of Britain’s failed stewardship were only reversed later by a joint Iraqi–US
⁴ Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars (Yale: Yale
University Press, 2017), p. 51.
⁵ Hansard 4 June 1940, vol. 361, cc. 787–98.
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 10/9/2018, SPi
xii Preface
offensive of March 2008, launched with Britain sidelined. Britain’s mission
was supposed to democratize the state, emancipate women, and unite Iraqis
above confession and ethnicity, and affirm the UK’s strategic value to Washington.
The results were perverse. Like other conflicts waged for wildly unrealistic aims
in far peripheries, it exposed the deadliness of good intentions and the limits
of Western power.
This book was conceived in the summer of 2016, a bitter season in British
politics. I worried that Iraq would be part forgotten, and part mis-
remembered. If humans are creatures of memory, they are also tempted to
forget. I feared that upheavals since the Iraq War—like Britain’s withdrawal
from the European Union—would overshadow it. The long and painstaking
inquest, the ‘Chilcot’ Iraq Inquiry, published its report in an hour when the
Brexit fallout was all-consuming. Granted two days of parliamentary discus-
sion over the Inquiry Report, only fifty MPs out of 650 took part in discussion
on day one, falling at times to fifteen or twenty. Some decision-makers
welcomed the diversion. Two foreign ministers who once pressed the case
for military action, Jack Straw and Colin Powell, wished the matter gone. In
leaked correspondence, Straw allegedly wrote that Brexit had a ‘silver lining’,
reducing ‘medium term attention on Chilcot’, which has ‘faded altogether’.⁶
Powell noted gladly that Chilcot barely registered in Washington. Others also
call for a process of forgetting. In making the case for military adventures
today, those who carry the flame of warlike idealism talk of Iraq as a ‘shadow’⁷
that we must escape, or ‘move on’⁸ from, lest its memory arrest Britain’s
inclination towards heroic internationalism and morally charged military
action. To linger over Iraq might induce ‘isolationism’, some warn, as though
a concern for prudent war avoidance is tantamount to cancelling trade, aid, or
alliances.⁹ On 29 March 2006, a group of British writers, journalists, and
scholars issued the ‘Euston Manifesto’, insisting that
the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been
the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the
country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a
life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted—rather
than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.¹⁰
⁶ Christopher Hope, ‘Jack Straw boasted of how the “silver lining” from Brexit meant Chilcot
criticism “faded” away’, The Daily Telegraph, 14 September 2016.
⁷ Fabian Society, Outward to the World: How the Left’s Foreign Policy can Face the Future
(London: Fabian Society, 2015), pp. x, 1; ‘British Foreign Policy must emerge from the shadow
of Iraq, argues Hilary Benn’, The Guardian, 21 December 2015.
⁸ David Batty, ‘David Miliband: Time to Move on From Iraq’, The Guardian, 22 May 2010.
⁹ Joe Cox & Tom Tugendhat, The Cost of Doing Nothing: The Price of Inaction in the face of
Atrocities (London: Policy Exchange, 2017), p. 13.
¹⁰ [my italics] The Euston Manifesto: For a Renewal of Progressive Politics at http://
eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto/, accessed 28 October 2016.
Preface xiii
‘Rubble’, ‘shadow’, ‘move on’—this is the euphemistic language of amnesia. To
encourage the forgetting of Iraq’s memory would not only breach civic duty to
commemorate the dead. It would do a disservice to the living and unborn,
especially given that the war’s consequences are still with us. The Euston group
wished to separate the issues of whether to intervene and the commitment to Iraqi
liberation, but the two questions are inseparably linked. The difficulties of remak-
ing a state after breaking it, and the violence this can unleash, points back to the
original question of whether to break it to begin with. Part of ‘proper concern’ for
any conscientious citizen is precisely to argue over intervention, and argue again.
Whether or not to take up arms is the ultimate political question. It will not leave
alone countries that possess the capability to project power. We therefore must
pick through the ‘rubble’ of the past. The rubble contains fragments of history,
and history is the only guide we have. We are not entitled to ‘closure’.
For the war is still with us. Our choice is whether to confront it, or wish it away.
The war’s notoriety, the gap between promises and reality, sets the terms and
vocabulary of debate through which we contest the use of force: ‘regime change’
and ‘exit strategy’, ‘forty-five minutes’ and ‘mushroom cloud’, ‘shock and awe’
and ‘war of choice’, ‘mission accomplished’ and ‘poodle’. As well as language, the
seductive ideas that powered the invasion outlived the retired decision-makers,
and are still with us. Under later governments, the ideas that drove the venture
inflicted further mischief, from the chaos wrought by intervention in Libya to
Western sponsorship of an Islamist-infected rebellion in Syria, to an escalating
crisis triggered by threats of preventive war against North Korea. Expectations
that the end of the Blair era meant the curtailing of adventures in ‘regime change’
proved naïve. The next government would assist a revolution in Tripoli and a
failed one in Damascus, with results that were not uniformly excellent. As before,
the reigning ideology, of transforming ‘ungoverned space’ through benevolent
force, could return. This makes the inquest urgent.
I also wrote this book from fear that the war’s memory would be reduced,
turned merely into ‘Blair’s war’, or into a tactical exercise about how to wage
ambitious expeditionary wars better, ‘next time’. Indeed, a counter-narrative has
now formed, interpreting the Iraq War as a lesson in the need to be more
determined to project military power, not less. Some find error not primarily
in the war’s launching, but its ending. They pin failure on Western abandonment
and premature withdrawal, treating the state of Iraq as the West’s to lose. On the
other side of the divide, critics fixate too much on one actor, Prime Minister Tony
Blair, and the ‘Blairites’, isolating culpability and exonerating others. This was
Britain’s war, not just Blair’s. It was carried by assumptions widely shared and
which outlive the warmakers, it held a quiet majority of support in the country, it
was endorsed by a free vote in the House of Commons, and by a decisive margin.
The glib catch-cry ‘Not in My Name’ has no place in a responsible democracy.¹¹
¹¹ As Robert Saunders argues, ‘Why Tutu is Wrong’, The Gladstone Diaries, 4 September
2012, http://gladstonediaries.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/why-tutu-is-wrong.html?q=tutu.
xiv Preface
My attempt to interpret Iraq does not spring from personal involvement.
Iraq is as personal as it gets for those who were directly affected. For many
others, it was a puzzling and seemingly faraway event. The state encouraged
citizens to support it but mostly as passive consumers of events. For some of
us, Iraq seemed desperately important, as it would be consequential over
time and space. As a student of international security, Iraq was the defining
political event of my lifetime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Working on
the academic staff at the British Defence Academy, the daily implosion of
Iraq in the autumn of 2006, bombings, kidnappings, and rampant crimin-
ality, was a sobering rebuke to the ambitions of the war party. That people
I knew who were rotating in and out of Iraq lent added pathos to the issue.
Ultimately, Iraq was the decisive point in my own political thinking, towards an
aversion to utopias and a wariness of the implicit danger of militarism in liberal
foreign policy.
Given this background, I cannot pretend to a personal detachment. Even
with arcane subject matter, pure value-free objectivity is impossible. Dispas-
sion is all the more difficult with such a wrenching history. Yet the obstacles to
objectivity do not license historians to tell stories without worrying whether
they are true. Subjectivity should be resisted, not indulged. I attempt to
counterbalance any subjectivity in my account by reconstructing the strongest
possible case for the invasion, both with and without hindsight knowledge. In
order to grasp what drove the decision, I try to perform a double act,
attempting to empathize with those who rolled the iron dice, while retaining
enough distance to exercise a clear-eyed judgement.
This book takes a hammer to the war’s rationale and the dogmatism and
muddled thinking at its heart. At the same time, it is offered as a reproach to
the anti-war movement. Opposition to the war was a broad church. Its ranks
included the honourable and the conscientious. Those at its commanding
heights, though, did not properly confront the dilemmas before them, and
their popular slogan ‘not in my name’ suggested disengagement rather than
engagement with the question. As Brendan O’Neill observed, ‘Protesting
wars today seems to be a way to cleanse one’s private conscience rather than
effecting public change—a case of opting out instead of getting stuck in
and having the hard arguments.’¹² Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, set on the
day of the mass protest, captured the point. As his character Henry Perowne
observes, ‘All this happiness on display is suspect…If they think—and they
could be right—that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic
cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should
be sombre in their view.’ Perowne puts his finger on the war’s central
dilemma: ‘The price of removing Saddam is war, the price of no war is
¹² Brendan O’Neill, ‘What Kind of Anti-War Movement Is This?’, Christian Science Monitor,
13 December 2002.
Preface xv
leaving him in place.’¹³ This book argues for why leaving him in place was
the ‘lesser evil’.
At the hands of some critics, the Iraq War became a canvas onto which they
projected their discontent with the New Labour project and modern life
generally, overstating the sudden rupture that Blair’s war inflicted on a once
green and pleasant land. Peter Oborne, for instance, claims that:
The British people used to trust the British State. This trust is the magnifi-
cent legacy of World War Two, when we united in common sacrifice to
confront fascism. Ever since then, we have regarded our state as ultimately
decent and benign. We have understood that civil servants owed their loyalty
to the state (symbolically expressed as the Monarch) rather than political
parties or sectional interests. It was also understood that there was a secret
state which was unaccountable through normal democratic means. This was
tolerated because we felt that British intelligence officers…were decent,
patriotic people. This trust in the state was shattered by the Iraq War, and
its gruesome aftermath. We have learnt that civil servants, spies, and poli-
ticians could not be trusted to act with integrity and decency and in the
national interest.¹⁴
Oborne’s picture of a once-trusting country losing its faith because of a single
military campaign is strikingly ahistorical. Earlier history contained crises of
confidence over the integrity of the state, from abuses of power in Northern
Ireland to the Brixton and Poll Tax riots to industrial unrest, to long declines
in political participation, to the general crisis-ridden decade of the 1970s.
Oborne’s explanation, that suddenly a gang of bad people took over the
country, and that spies, officials, and elected leaders in 2003 were oblivious
to any concept of the national interest in a sudden fall from their predecessors’
patriotism, is pantomimic. Oborne himself, who admits earlier branding the
Major government of the 1990s as ‘rotten’, reflects a broader tendency to
romanticize the past and villainize the present.¹⁵ This tells us little about why
the Iraq War was actually fought, and what we should learn.
Above all, the book is a self-reproach. My response to the war was fraught
and flawed. Opposed at first, I became a supporter as the violence intensified
in Iraq. I was hopeful about the possibilities given life by the fall of Saddam,
mindful of the fascistic nature of al-Qaeda and the Ba’ath insurgents, and
repelled by the toxic anti-Americanism and ‘anyone but Washington’ spirit so
endemic in sections of the anti-war movement. I believed those in the family
of hawkish idealism, the neoconservatives and liberal hawks, were right on the
¹³ Ian McKewan, Saturday (London: Random House, 2005), pp. 69–70.

¹⁴ Peter Oborne, Not the Chilcot Report (London: Head of Zeus, 2016), pp. 178–9.
¹⁵ Peter Oborne, ‘It’s Time to Give John Major the Credit We So Cruelly Denied Him’, The
Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2012.
xvi Preface
main point, that the West should not have to choose between tyranny and
chaos in the Middle East—indeed, that Western-sponsored tyranny had fed
the Islamist beast and unleashed chaos. The hijackers on 9/11 were not Afghan
but Gulf men, products of oppressive orders—theocratic, or kleptocratic—that
had spawned Wahhabi fanaticism and winked at the Islamist groups who
had unilaterally declared war on us all. Given those roots, 9/11 and its
aftermath warranted an ambitious project to transform the Arab-Islamic
world. I was moved by the eloquence of the hawkish idealists Paul Berman,
Christopher Hitchens, Fouad Ajami, and Norman Geras. This was poor
judgement. It was born of an attraction to the elegance of ideas over their
practical utility, an overestimation of Western power, a disregard for the
wildness of war and its unintended consequences, an ahistorical attachment
to Munich-Churchill-Hitler analogies as the universal guide to security prob-
lems, and a blindness to the historic deadliness of good intentions. Even if a
revision of the West’s relationship with the Middle East is in order, an
ideological crusade to reorder the region at our convenience is no kind of
answer. It should not have taken a disaster to grasp these realities. As we will
see, some in the ‘war party’ maintain that the chance of liberating Iraq and the
region was ‘worth’ the vast human price inflicted. Such claims are too remin-
iscent of Bolshevik ‘eggs and omelettes’ rationalizations, which also failed.
Others argue that victory was at hand, only to be squandered by feckless
defeatists, an argument too reminiscent of Weimar-era alibis for another
disastrous preventive war.
Before we begin the diagnosis, two further points of justification are needed.
In the course of preparing these arguments, a persistent accusation arose that
this is an exercise in ‘hindsight’, and implicitly, that our position of ‘looking
back’ should limit criticism. This is a widespread but defective view of our
relationship with the past. Firstly, given the current lack of time-travel cap-
ability, it is difficult to examine and judge the past from any other vantage
point. Secondly, criticisms of the doctrines that led to war are not purely
hindsight creations. The arguments I make here were anticipated and made at
the time by concerned observers and participants. Most importantly, we are
trying to learn something from the past, to guide decisions to come, always a
difficult exercise. That is an exercise both in empathy and criticism. To
abandon that task is to tell stories with no purpose.
Conversely, there is another common response, regarding the inquest into
Iraq as a waste of time and resources, because the folly of the decision was
‘obvious’. The fact that the Iraq Inquiry, launched in 2009, took seven years to
complete and issue its report, and followed three other inquiries,¹⁶ induces a
¹⁶ See Richard Aldrich, ‘Whitehall and the Iraq War: The UK’s four intelligence enquiries’
Irish Studies on International Affairs 16:1 (2005), pp. 1–16.
Preface xvii
widespread ‘Chilcot fatigue’, the dismissal of the inquest as a waste of time,¹⁷
and the desire to reduce Iraq into a sad story that needs consigning to history.
That attitude certainly is born of a hindsight distortion. If the imprudence of
the Iraq War seems strategically and morally obvious today, it didn’t seem so
to many at the time. More than most crises, the Iraq War presented a choice of
agonies. To oppose the invasion was effectively to argue for continued man-
agement of the status quo, which was a bloody one. More people favoured
invasion than they care to remember. People remember opposing it, but a
plurality of Britons supported it at the time, albeit mostly in muted form,
according to twenty-one polls carried out by YouGov between March and
December 2003.¹⁸ The Economist that later judged it ‘obvious’ that occupying
Iraq made international terrorism worse, that reported the ‘damning’ conclu-
sion that an adapted strategy of inspections and containment could have
succeeded, is the same journal that in February 2003 called for Saddam to be
disarmed by force if necessary, because alternative strategies had failed.¹⁹
Iraqis too are divided on the issue, and they most bore the brunt of war’s
negative consequences.²⁰ Many resent what happened to the country in the
wake of Saddam’s fall, yet are glad he fell, and the question of America’s
withdrawal divides them on largely sectarian lines.²¹ Evidently, for those
involved, the question is a complex one. Internationally, there was no global
consensus at the time. Opinion was conflicted and fluid. The coalition assem-
bled by the United States, that lent diplomatic and material support, was larger
than the one that fought the Korean War. It had the support of half the
member states of the European Union. Its ranks numbered South Korea,
Poland, Japan, Australia, Italy, Spain, Georgia, and the Czech Republic, and
after the first phase, New Zealand troops, German money, and Canadian
trainers. Mongolian soldiers also came, descendants of Ghenghis Khan the
¹⁷ Deborah Orr, ‘The Chilcot Inquiry is a Waste of Time’, The Guardian, 4 February 2010;
Daniel Larison, ‘Remembering some obvious truths about the Iraq War,’ American Conservative,
6 July 2016; Simon Jenkins, ‘The Chilcot Report merely proves the British love hindsight,’ The
Guardian, 8 July 2016.
¹⁸ Will Dahlgreen, ‘Memories of Iraq: Did we ever support the war?’, YouGov, 3 June 2015, at
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/06/03/remembering-iraq/.
¹⁹ ‘Why War would be justified’, The Economist, 20 February 2003; ‘Stating the Obvious’ The
Economist, 28 September 2006; ‘Iraq’s Grim Lessons’ The Economist, 6 July 2016.
²⁰ The most comprehensive survey on Iraqi opinion, the Zogby Poll of 2011, reflected a
largely negative but still ‘mixed’ picture: 30 per cent of those questioned believed that Iraq was
better off at present than before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, 42 per cent thought it was
worse, 23 per cent thought that Iraq was the same, and 6 per cent were not sure. Iraqi Kurds
largely endorsed the removal of the regime, unsurprisingly. Iraqis are divided on whether there is
now greater political freedom since regime change (33 per cent positive, 48 per cent negative;
16 per cent none); regarding women’s rights, the picture was also conflicted (26 per cent positive,
37 per cent negative, 26 per cent no impact). Zogby Research Services, Iraq: The War, Its
Consequences and the Future (18–20 November, 2011).
²¹ See Mark Kukis, Voices from Iraq: A People’s History 2003–2009 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011).
xviii Preface
sacker of Baghdad, who this time aimed ‘to rebuild Iraq’.²² Even if we accept
the dubious proposition that we can evaluate the wisdom of decisions by
‘counting heads’, there wasn’t overwhelming international opposition that
critics imply. If many thought differently about Iraq then, and warnings
went unheeded, that is a matter of important historical inquiry.
The history of Britain’s Iraq War is still being written. Far from an exhaust-
ive account of the whole episode, this book is about the most fundamental
decision: whether to take part. I explain the decision, critique it, and offer a
broader caution, rooted in realism, against warlike idealism, to guide more
prudent decision-making in future. It is not an account of how the campaign
was rescued. Rather, it asks how Britain got itself into a campaign that needed
rescuing in the first place.
²² James Brooke, ‘The Struggle for Iraq: Allies, Mongolians Return to Baghdad, This time as
Peacekeepers’, The New York Times, 25 September 2003.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Warpath 23
2. Breaking States: The Ideological Roots of Regime Change 72
3. Atlantic Ambitions 132
4. Weighing the Arguments 152
5. Virtue Runs Amok: How Realism Can Help 206
Epilogue: Two Speeches 222
Index 227
HE’S GOT EM. LET’S GET HIM.

The Sun, 25 September 2002
I am more afraid of our own blunders than our enemies’ designs.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War 1.144
Introduction
Bad ideas caused Britain’s war in Iraq, ideas that were dogmatically held.
Many remember Iraq as a misadventure of bad faith and botched manage-
ment, of ‘dodgy dossiers’ and deceit. These are evergreen subjects. But they are
not the paramount issue. Mischiefs and falsehoods can facilitate war. They
were not its driving force. From its inception as a proposal as the shadows
lengthened in 2001 to the invasion fifteen months later, Britain’s Iraq venture
was a war of ideas, real concepts about the pursuit of security in a dangerous
world. Those ideas were occasioned by conditions, a sense of both power and
vulnerability. Visions of world order and democracy, and corollary fears of
rogue states with deadly arsenals, were not retrospective face-saving fictions.
They drove the push for action from the outset. Prime Minister Tony Blair was
the chief protagonist and embodiment of ideas that were widely shared. He
and his counsellors, congregating in his Downing Street ‘den’, regarded Iraq as
the central front in an epochal struggle against a new, apocalyptic barbarism.
Britain’s ‘deciders’ are remembered as deft propagandists, but were idealists at
the core. Their endeavour was underpinned by powerful and doubt-proofed
assumptions, as sincerely assumed as they were rarely examined. The decision
to settle accounts with Iraq after a long stand-off, to topple its regime in
Baghdad, was a genuine effort to forestall a hypothetical but terrifying danger,
the coming together of dictatorship, terrorism, and weapons technology, to
reorder the world with the antidote of liberal democracy. It was also a British
effort to play tutor to the United States. British officials were frightened of the
superpower that was wounded and inflamed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They
aimed to prevent America becoming a runaway train. Blair ran grave political
risks to turn his Atlantic ambition into policy. A journalist who tailed the
prime minister affirmed the intensity of his beliefs and the strain of the hour.
The once-cherubic premier of Cool Britannia was thin faced and dark eyed,
enduring ‘sleepless nights and anxious days’.¹ As the parliamentary vote
loomed, without a legitimizing mandate from the United Nations Security
¹ Peter Stothard, 30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War (London: HarperCollins,
2003), p. 7.
2 Blunder
Council, Blair asked his Cabinet Secretary to ready his resignation papers.
Joining Washington’s war was not an act of geopolitical cynicism. It was more
dangerous, a real ideological crusade. As Blair said privately and publicly, ‘It’s
worse than you think. I actually believe in doing this’.²
I argue that three bad ideas drove the war. These ideas I refer to as ‘warlike
idealism’, as they blended a pessimistic account of the international security
environment, one that demanded bold and decisive action, with an optimistic
account of what well-intentioned force could achieve. All three ideas warrant
interrogation. The first is ‘regime change’, a doctrine as much as a practice,
that states have little choice but to pursue security by breaking and remaking
states, possibly in preventive wars, by fixing the political interior of those states
with the expansion of democratic and capitalist institutions, by reorder-
ing whole regions, and by exterminating rather than containing threats. In
launching this bid to reorder the world, policymakers had internalized revo-
lutionary ambitions that were more radical than they realized. They lost sight
of the possibility that their cure was worse than the disease. Behaving as
insurgents, breaking states and creating new power imbalances, they believed
themselves to be guardians bringing order into chaos. Second, there is the
doctrine of ‘rogue states’, the assumption that defiant ‘outrider’ states are
undeterrable, suicidally aggressive actors that we cannot live with, whose
neutralization and removal is so vital that it warrants risky preventive action,
and who make any strategies of restraint an invitation to aggression. Third,
there is the ‘blood price’ fallacy, that Britain can secure exceptional influence
in Washington by committing significant up-front costs, and with ground
forces in America’s ‘9/11 wars’.
As I argue, the explanation that Britain’s Iraq War came from bad ideas that
were widely held better fits the evidence than alternative explanations. These
alternative explanations argue variously that Britain got into the war by
accident as a result of a diplomatic process that locked it in, or that it was a
war of opportunism masked by rhetoric of democratic liberation, or that it was
a good idea that was poorly executed, that it was the result of American
pressure, or that it was simply ‘Blair’s war’ and that the British people were
his victims. These alternative histories struggle to survive interrogation. From
the many things written about Iraq, we can now assemble a range of compet-
ing explanations, explicit and implicit, and weigh them.
This book is a work of ‘international history’, or the historical study of
international politics. It explains an historical event and its significance for the
future. It focuses on the decision for war, and that decision’s consequences. It
does so methodologically with the inspiration of two minds, the philosopher
² A. Campbell & B. Hagerty, The Alastair Campbell Diaries. Volume 4. The Burden of Power:
Countdown to Iraq (London: Hutchinson, 2012), p. 279; Jackie Ashley & Ewan MacAskill,
‘History will be my judge’, The Guardian, 1 March 2003.
Introduction 3
Karl Popper and the historian Marc Trachtenberg. Trachtenberg argues that
the historian must also be a theorist. If ‘theory’ is a set of assumptions that map
the world, the historian should examine evidence consciously with a prior set
of questions in mind, and then attempt to adjust both until they align and
reconcile.³ Why did Britain join the war, when it had discretion not to, and
was already committed to another one? Why did it believe such a relatively
weak adversary posed such a security problem? Why, given the latitude of
choice, did decision-makers think the matter was obvious and that there was
little real choice in the matter? Why did the decision-makers expect such
decisive and benign results, or alternatively, why did they think the risks were
worth the trouble? Why were they able to succeed in carrying opinion? These
questions arise from assumptions that I will defend. In answering these
questions, I borrow from Popper. Like Trachtenberg, Popper assumes that
theory guides observation, and that observation presupposes theory.⁴ In that
tradition, we approach an issue like the causes of Britain’s war in Iraq as a
contest between competing hypotheses. If ever a conflict attracted divergent
explanations about motive, influence, and causation, it was this one. Import-
ant here is Popper’s social-scientific principle of falsification. We cannot hope
for a complete, to-scale explanation that is positively ‘provable’. We can,
though, get closer to a partial rendering or approximation by identifying
and dismissing ‘disprovable’ hypotheses, weighing competing explanations,
and, by eliminating inadequate accounts, identify the explanation that comes
closest to the evidence we have, in terms of plausibility and consistency. To
test my explanation, I pit against it several competing hypotheses, to demon-
strate how my argument better fits, and predicts, the rationales, behaviour, and
chronology of the time. As one of the first histories written ‘post-Chilcot’, this
is only a first foothold, to prepare the ground for histories to come.
Deploying the large number of primary documents and retrospective testi-
monies of participants, I reconstruct the assumptions underlying decisions,
the policy ‘world’ that participants inhabited 2001–3, a world that later
disappointments have made harder to imagine. I present an account of how
governance over the issue ‘worked’. As this was a war conceived primarily in
Washington, and Britain’s preparations grew from interactions with its senior
ally, this is also unavoidably a transatlantic story.
Britain’s Iraq War has already attracted a large literature. Ever since the
withdrawal of international troops, civilian and military officials as well as the
commentariat have re-fought the Iraq War a second time in memory. It has
drawn in journalistic, academic, and ‘grey’ literature. Much of it is partisan
³ Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 51–140.
⁴ Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959); Conjectures and
Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963).
4 Blunder
and polemical. There is also more dispassionate analysis to be found. Most of
that literature predates the release of the Iraq Inquiry’s report in July 2016.
Valuable studies of Iraq were produced before the Inquiry’s findings were
released, but they examine the campaign as a whole and devote much effort to
other questions.⁵
In particular, fixations on dishonesty and illegality overshadow the debate.
The literature already explores how, and how far, Iraq was a war of false
pretences, feints, omissions and exaggerations, and what it means for inter-
national law.⁶ The Inquiry itself was an honourable undertaking. This book
would be impossible without it. But its critique largely focused on other related
questions: the process of decision-making, intelligence, truth, legality, whether
war was a ‘last resort’, and how Britain handled the aftermath and subsequent
disorder.
Unlike so much of the public discussion, this history of the war is not
centrally about the question of ‘lies’ or legality. The Iraq Inquiry rebuked
Blair’s circle, if not exactly for lying or fabrication. Rather, it found the
government guilty of decision-based and faith-based evidence-making, casting
about for evidence to confirm a prior belief and a settled decision.⁷ ‘Selling’ the
threat compromised the process of assessing it, as did the effort to harmonize
plans with Washington, leading to misplaced certainty and undue weight
being placed on ambiguous evidence. The state prepared policies in private,
⁵ Jack Fairweather’s history is mostly an account of the decisions made in the aftermath of the
invasion, ‘taken by soldiers, diplomats and contractors on the ground’, War of Choice: The
British in Iraq 2003–2009 (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 9; Jonathan Steele examines the causes of
failure with a particular emphasis on the occupation and the impossibility of Iraqis accepting
what looked like a ‘colonial’ project from outsiders, Defeat: Why they Lost Iraq (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2008).
⁶ Eric Herring & Piers Robinson, ‘Report X marks the spot: The British government’s
deceptive dossier on Iraq and WMD’, Political Science Quarterly 129:4 (2014), pp. 551–84;
‘Deception and Britain’s road to war in Iraq’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi
Studies 8:2 (2014), pp. 213–23; D. Miller (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion
in the Attack on Iraq (London: Pluto Press, 2003); S. Kettell, ‘Who’s afraid of Saddam Hussein?
Re-examining the “September dossier” affair’, Contemporary British History 22:3 (2008),
pp. 407–26; Brian Jones, Failing Intelligence: The True Story of How We Were Fooled Into
Going Into War in Iraq (London: Biteback, 2010).
⁷ The Report of the Iraq Inquiry (Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors) Executive
Summary (HC 264), p. 115: ‘The statements prepared for, and used by the UK Government
in public from late 2001 onwards conveyed more certainty than the JIC Assessments about
Iraq’s proscribed activities and the potential they posed’; p. 117: ‘intelligence and assessments
made by the JIC about Iraq’s capabilities and intent continued to be used to prepare briefing
material to support Government statements in a way which conveyed certainty without
acknowledging the limitations of the intelligence’. Sir John has reiterated these findings
since: ‘The judgements about Iraq’s capabilities in that statement, and in the dossier pub-
lished the same day, were presented with a certainty that was not justified’ in ‘Sir John’s
Public Statement’, 6 July 2016 at http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-inquiry/sir-john-chilcots-
public-statement/; see also ‘Iraq Inquiry: Full Transcript of Sir John Chilcot’s BBC Interview’, BBC
News, 6 July 2017.
Introduction 5
to force regime change, that diverged from those publicly articulated, to secure
peaceful disarmament. Its plans was locked and loaded well before weapons
inspectors could complete their job. Can lying in wartime be justified? This is
an important question, but a separate one. Certainly, most of the wars Britain
and the United States remember as honourable were also attended by dishon-
esty and dissembling. Wartime leaders most revered in the Anglosphere—
Churchill, Lincoln, Roosevelt—were dissemblers all, suggesting the issue is less
obvious than we may assume. This issue has attracted a sophisticated litera-
ture.⁸ The question of deceit may help explain how states generate consent. It
tells us little about the recourse to war. Charges of falsehood tell us little about
what drove policymakers to war in the first place. This book is concerned less
with deception than self-deception, the tragic process by which rulers are
gripped by assumptions they fail to scrutinize.
Above all, I focus on the ideological roots of the decision to intervene.
I explore three interlocking doctrines that formed the war’s intellectual foun-
dations: ‘regime change’, ‘breaking states’, and the ‘blood price’ of the Anglo-
American relationship. Iraq, like other wars of this century, was an intellectual
war, both opposed by intellectuals and ‘made by intellectuals, and cheered on
by intellectuals’.⁹ President George W. Bush and Blair erected their beliefs on
specific theoretical foundations about the world, and they sought intellectual
opinion to buttress their doctrines, if not question them. The doctrines war-
makers drew upon had a rich intellectual pedigree, such as the ‘democratic
peace’, ideas that were widely accepted at the time, even if many advocates
distanced themselves once the war ran aground. This book puts ideas, habit-
ually sustained, collectively shared, and often uncritically accepted, back at the
centre of the story. These are enduring habits of mind that led Britain into
disaster, and might again.
EXPLAINING IRAQ: I NTERPRETATIONS SO FAR
As we refight the war in memory, the most important historical question is the
simplest one. Why did Britain take part in the first place? There is already a
medium-sized academic literature addressing the question, offering compet-
ing explanations. Many accounts appeared before the Iraq Inquiry generated
⁸ See John M. Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American
Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 7, 57–8, 125–6; Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral
Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1999); John J. Mearsheimer, Why
Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), pp. 11, 23–4.
⁹ As David Rieff observed, ‘The Road to Hell’, New Republic, 23 March 2011.
6 Blunder
its documentation. They are often speculative, and replete with half-truths.
Five versions can be identified: the ‘poodle’ explanation, attributing Britain’s
participation to its servile client status and alliance pressure; inadvertent
escalation, identifying an accidental momentum created by a disarmament
process that was supposed to avoid a final conflict; ‘Blair’s war’, attributing
Britain’s entry predominantly to the will and agency of the Prime Minister;
and ‘virtue/vice’, arguing that Britain went to war either for secret and
diabolical reasons, or simply in good faith, for the reasons publicly articulated
by the government. Each of these captures elements of the truth, but each also
distorts the record.
The ‘poodle’ charge is a common interpretation. It is often vulgarly
formulated as a product of Blair’s power-worshipping tendencies, or the
eagerness of British security elites to please Washington, as a servile client
state, a critique famously played out in the ‘romcom’ film Love Actually.
According to this theory, Blair invaded Iraq out of alliance pressure, real or
anticipated. Those who draw this interpretation charge Downing Street
with being seduced and strong-armed by its senior ally, with Blair capitu-
lating to the superpower. Rosemary Hollis presents the decision in these
terms, approvingly quoting the memoir of former Foreign Secretary Robin
Cook: ‘the real reason he [Blair] went to war was that he found it easier to
resist the public opinion of Britain than the request of the US President’.¹⁰
Hollis and Cook charge that Blair was ‘programmed to respect power not
rebel against it’. Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoir speculates that Blair was
seduced by the awe of Washington DC.¹¹ Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s polemic
takes the allegation to fever pitch, accusing Blair of behaving in the manner
of a ‘puppet or satellite’, denouncing his ‘servility’ to Washington, going
to Bush’s retreat in Crawford, West Texas because he was ‘summoned’.¹²
Like many anti-Blair philippics, the portrait is incoherent, painting Blair as
a warmongering egotist with ‘great power’ fantasies about Britain’s sta-
ture, yet also a slavish vassal willingly subordinating Britain to a foreign
potentates’ will.
The ‘poodle’ interpretation of a craven Blair, doing as he is told, is an odd
account of the figure who confronted trade union leaders and traditionalists
within his own party over its constitution and voting system, a figure who
had argued publicly for a decisive confrontation with Saddam Hussein years
before Bush became president, and whose persistent pressure on President
¹⁰ Rosemary Hollis, ‘The United Kingdom: Fateful Decision, Divided Nation’, in Rick Fawn
& Raymond Hinnebusch (eds), The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences (London: Lynne
Reiner, 2006), pp. 37–49, p. 39; quoting Robin Cook, Point of Departure (London: Simon &
Schuster 2003), p. 104; see also Roderic Braithwaite, ‘End of the Affair’, Prospect 86 (2003),
pp. 20–3.
¹¹ Christopher Meyer, DC Confidential (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).
¹² Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Yo, Blair! (London: Politico, 2007), pp. 7, 8.
Introduction 7
Bill Clinton during the Kosovo crisis led Clinton to rebuke him for ‘grand-
standing’.¹³ It is also an interpretation at odds with the observable dynamics of
the Anglo-American relationship after 9/11. Blair was not ‘summoned’ to
Bush’s ranch, he was invited with flattering overtures, with signals communi-
cated through Condoleezza Rice that the president wanted Blair’s advice, not
his compliance, advice on assembling a coalition that Blair delivered and Bush
heeded. David Manning, his foreign policy advisor, privately advised Blair that
it was a chance to exert ‘real influence’ on the United States, ‘to push Bush on
the Middle East’.¹⁴ This is not the language of poodles. As we will see in
Chapter 3, British Atlanticists desired from their solidarity with Washington
not subordination and approval but influence, out of a flawed expectation of a
grand strategic pay-off, and a belief that Britain could vicariously reclaim
global leadership via its closeness to the US. The ‘poodle’ charge also misrep-
resents the dynamics between Blair and the US. It was not a case of the dog
owner instructing its pet to come to heel. Bush’s administration was not
naturally multilateralist in its orientation, and did not feel the need to invest
capital in pressuring allies to join the fray. Bush’s administration held a
growing confidence that while allied support and international mandates
were desirable ‘extras’, it could confidently act alone. Indeed, the relationship
is the reverse. Blair took more of the initiative to reach out to the Bush’s
administration in the aftermath of 9/11 and impose himself on events. There is
also a significant recorded detail. In a phone call on the eve of Britain’s
parliamentary vote, a vote that could be fatal to his premiership, Bush repeat-
edly and emphatically assured Blair that Washington would sympathize if he
dropped out of the warfighting coalition. Bush offered Britain an alternative
supporting role through a second wave of peacekeeping. Blair gratefully
declined the offer, advising the President ‘I absolutely believe in this too . . . I’m
there to the very end’.¹⁵ America was not making a forceful request for British
participation, and stated a preference for the survival of an allied government
over its risky participation in Iraq. Rather, Britain’s government insisted on
taking part. Alliance-related pressure would constrain the UK in other
ways, but only later in the causal pathway, through the accelerating dynamics
of mobilization, weather, and timetables. The ‘poodle charge’ flows from
a disbelief that the Prime Minister actually believed in the cause. It relies on
¹³ Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 56–7; Christopher Meyer himself
averred the sincerity and longevity of Blair’s belief in the ‘wickedness’ of Saddam Hussein: Iraq
Inquiry Testimony, 26 November 2009, pp. 41–2.
¹⁴ Letter, David Manning to Blair, ‘Your Trip to the US’, 14 March 2002.
¹⁵ Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 338; Bush confirmed
the conversation in a later interview, Con Coughlin, American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on
Terror (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 368: ‘I told Tony . . . rather than lose your govern-
ment, withdraw from the coalition—because I felt it was very important for him to be the Prime
Minister . . . he told me, I’m staying, even if it costs me my government.’
8 Blunder
a poorly supported demonology about Blair. It fails to distinguish between
allied support and allied servility. And it falls back on a crude account of the
Anglo-American relationship.
A second and flawed explanation is inadvertent escalation. According to
this theory, Britain stumbled into war. The invasion was the product of an
accidental momentum created by a disarmament process that was supposed to
avoid a final conflict. The UK allegedly ‘went to war in a comedy of errors,
locked into a sequence of events that its government had worked so hard to
avoid’,¹⁶ falling prey to a ‘policy momentum, largely driven from Washington,
which became impossible to slow down, still less reverse. The systemic failure
to get off the rails that a prime minister, obsessed with leading from the front,
had laid down is the real Chilcot story behind Tony Blair’s own’.¹⁷ Some
versions of this interpretation then stretch to account for what happened next,
charging that with the initial ‘weapons of mass destruction (WMD)’ and
counterproliferation rationale discredited, the occupiers went on conveniently
to the justifications of democracy promotion and nation-building. This draws
partly on a typical ‘bureaucratic politics’ explanation, where governments
reach decisions for functional reasons and then formulate rationales after
the fact. This explanation is tied also to assumptions about how the Anglo-
American relationship functioned. And it assumes that Blair’s circle overcon-
fidently invested their hopes in a UN mandate and process that would force
Saddam to yield without a shooting war. As we will see, Britain’s multilevel
strategy was staked on a strong early assumption of regime change, probably
involving participation in a war to forcibly overthrow Saddam, preferably
through an attempt to gain UN approval, while publicly legitimizing this
endgame as a disarmament process intended for a peaceful resolution. There
was nothing accidental about Britain’s war in Iraq. Coates and Krieger argue
that Britain had no face-saving way out, denied a mandate but facing a defiant
Saddam and under American pressure, with its unique-world-role ‘arrogance’
and imperialist pretentions. This interpretation need not detain us long. To
attribute empire nostalgia to the Europhile, multiculturalist architects of
New Labour is an odd gambit. And like the ‘poodle’ explanation, it is self-
contradictory, positing a Britain that is both vassal state and great power
fantasist. It is also directly contradicted by the historical record.
A third, flawed explanation is the ‘One Man’s War’ account. This narrative
recalls the project as overwhelmingly Blair’s creation, where a messianic leader
dragged his reluctant country to war. One strand of explanation puts weight
on Blair’s authoritarian ‘personality type’, stretching insights about the agency
of leaders to the point where Iraq becomes a product of Blair’s individual
¹⁶ David A. Coates & Joel Krieger, Blair’s War (Polity: Cambridge, 2004), p. 127.
¹⁷ Michael Clarke, RUSI Briefing Note: ‘Chilcot, The Judgement of History’, 7 July 2016,
https://rusi.org/commentary/chilcot-judgement-history.
Introduction 9
foibles or obsessions,¹⁸ his autocratic tendencies and gifts of persuasion.
A silver-tongued charismatic leader, or a glib falsifier in some versions, almost
single-handedly sold Britain the undertaking. The reduction of Iraq to Blair’s
persona has obvious political appeal. For those who doubt Iraq’s legitimacy,
the claim that it was conducted against strong domestic opposition is a major
theme. For those who regret their support, Blair is a tempting target of blame-
shifting. But if the Blair-focused approach is to be consequential to under-
standing Britain’s decision-making, it implicitly must mount a counterfactual
claim, that a different type of leader would not have taken Britain to war. ‘His
faith in his own star convinced him he was right about Iraq’s supposed
weapons of mass destruction. He then charmed parliament and voters into
war. Nobody forgives being seduced and then deceived, which is why most
Britons now despise Blair’.¹⁹ This begs questions. Why were people so easily
‘charmed’, including Blair’s most committed and bitter opponents outside and
inside his own party, who were not in the habit of being seduced? If Blair did
possess such powers, why did he fail when keenly advocated other causes, such
as Britain joining the euro currency? Blair, it is true, was prone to dogmatic
thinking and assumed a great capacity to control events. His dogmas, though,
were rooted in ideas and historical experiences that lay well beyond his
character. Neither is it obvious that without Blair, Britain would have kept
its distance. Gordon Brown, Blair’s Chancellor and who was the recognized
future leader in the wings, admitted even when Iraq was imploding that he
would have made the same decision, and later reaffirmed that the invasion was
‘the right decision’ for ‘the right reasons’ when appearing before Chilcot.²⁰ We
can’t know definitively what Brown would have done in Blair’s position, but
the refusal of Blair’s greatest rival to repudiate the decision in hindsight, and
even despite the political pay-offs, is significant. To carry the will of Parlia-
ment and assemble a wide domestic coalition, Blair needed more than self-
belief and charm. His case for war needed the active help of other agents who
might withhold support. And it had to resonate with a wider pool of
assumptions.
This was Britain’s war too, not just Blair’s.²¹ In public discussion, the former
prime minister has since become the tribe’s scapegoat, onto whom collective
¹⁸ See Stephen Benedict Dyson, ‘Personality and Foreign Policy: Tony Blair’s Iraq Decisions’,
Foreign Policy Analysis 2:3 (2006), pp. 289–306; reworked in Oliver Daddow & Jamie Gaskarth
(eds), ‘New Labour, Leadership and Foreign Policy Making after 1997’, in British Foreign Policy:
The New Labour Years (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 63–84.
¹⁹ Simon Kuper, ‘The chill behind Macron’s charm’, FT Weekend, 20–1 May 2017, p. 5.
²⁰ Interview cited in Patrick Wintour, ‘Moment Blair and Brown Tied Knot, The Guardian,
30 April 2005; Gordon Brown, Iraq Inquiry Testimony, 5 March 2010, p. 3.
²¹ See by contrast John Kampfner’s title, Blair’s Wars; for heavily Blair-centric and biograph-
ical accounts of the war’s origins, framed as a decision by one leader in defiance of most of the
nation, see Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Rhiannon Vickers, ‘Blowback for Britain? Blair, Bush
and the War in Iraq’, Review of International Studies 33 (2007), pp. 205–21; Jane M. O. Sharp,
10 Blunder
sins are loaded before being driven out of the village. This is not to exculpate
Blair or the weight of his decisions. This book will criticize his judgements in
detail. To Blair’s credit, he asks for understanding not exculpation. Instead, it
is to resist the attempt to isolate the issue to one figure, and the attempt to
avoid painful engagement with the war through the blood sport of Blair-
obsession. Blair fulfils a similar exonerating function in Britain to ‘neoconism’
in the US, where a once-broad coalition of minds who supported the war
claims in hindsight that a narrow cabal of ideologues made America do it.²²
That Blair’s inner circle prepared their case in ways that precluded internal
scrutiny is the beginning of the story, not the end. Blair could drive and
discipline his cabinet but did not, and could not, foist the venture on his
other compatriots in the dead of night. He could not have undertaken it had
the ground been infertile. Paradoxically, Britain’s Iraq decision was both
covert and democratic. The inner circle conceived regime change as their
goal and kept that ambition close to their chest. Yet when the conditions were
fitting, they took it to the country. Iraq became one of the most democratically
contested wars in British history, initiated only after a protracted public debate
and vote in the House of Commons. Even Blair, armed with a well-honed
propaganda machine, could only lead Britain to war because many were
already receptive to the doctrines on which it rested. Powerful institutions
rallied to the cause with impressive ease, from press barons to security service
chiefs to Parliament, as did the military service chiefs whose forewarnings
were low volume and gentle. Public figures, including Iraqis in exile, inde-
pendently joined the coalition of pro-war opinion. Central to the argument
was the press magnate Rupert Murdoch and his 175 newspapers worldwide,
all of whom supported the invasion. Often depicted as a mere cut-throat
businessmen, Murdoch is also an intellectual figure who came to the Iraq
question through long-held ideological commitments.²³ He was, in his own
words, ‘a man of ideas’. Murdoch held and promoted the neoconservative
vision of US heroic greatness, that marries democratic idealism with military
assertiveness, using its hegemonic might to transform nations.²⁴ Long before
Blair took office, Murdoch sponsored the Weekly Standard, America’s fore-
most neoconservative publication whose signature project was the liberation
‘The US-UK “Special Relationship” after Iraq’, in Paul Cornish (ed.) The Conflict in Iraq, 2003
(London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 59–75.
²² On ‘neoconism’, see Frank P. Harvey, Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory,
Logic and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 1–2.
²³ On this dimension of Murdoch, see Frank McKnight, Murdoch’s Politics: How One Man’s
Thirst for Wealth and Power Shapes Our World (London: Pluto Press, 2013), pp. 172–93.
²⁴ On neoconservatism, see Michael C. Williams, ‘Morgenthau Now: Neoconservatism,
National Greatness, and Realism’, in Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in
International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 216–41, 217–27; Jacob
Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Introduction 11
of Iraq, and maintained it at a loss, and his media embraced the ‘Bush
Doctrine’ that realized these ideas. ‘With our newspapers we have indeed
supported Bush’s foreign policy’, he said, ‘And we remain committed that
way.’²⁵ Britain’s ‘Sun King’, like other pro-war newspapers from the Observer
to the Financial Times, were not subject to the government’s whip. Of his own
volition, Murdoch agitated for Blair to strike. In the week before the Com-
mons war vote, he phoned Blair to urge against delay.²⁶ The Iraq War attracted
major figures from the British intelligentsia across the spectrum, from Paul
Johnson, Melanie Phillips, Anne Leslie, Michael Gove, and Max Hastings to
David Aaronovitch, John Lloyd, and Nick Cohen. Among these names were
ex-leftist radicals, who embraced American military power as an instrument of
revolution. Blair’s vision was nourished by collective assumptions that had
built up before the 9/11 terrorist attacks that defined the period, assumptions
about the nature of security, about what war was for, and what statecraft could
achieve.
Those MPs who voted for war in Iraq, at times, have since scrambled for
alibis, as have some of their supporters. They claim they lent their support
only because they believed false intelligence, because they trusted the govern-
ment, or that the blame lies with others for bad planning. Matthew Parris
pleaded, ‘we believed what we were told’.²⁷ Gordon Brown, the then Chancel-
lor, has since claimed that he and his colleagues were ‘misled’ into supporting
the war, and that had he known of one critical intelligence report of September
2002 that was withheld by the US until 2011, he would have doubted the
case.²⁸ The report admitted that there was only a thin evidential base for the
Iraqi WMD programme, and that most analysis was based on analytical
assumptions rather than evidence.
But this hand-washing is bogus. Journalists and politicians are supposed to
scrutinize authority. If they were persuaded by the official intelligence dossier,
they were easily persuaded. In Brown’s case, why should we accept that he
would have weighed the withheld report more heavily than the other seem-
ingly authoritative estimates he was given by the head of the Secret Intelligence
Service, Richard Dearlove and his officials, or the seemingly compelling new
evidence produced in September 2002 from the Iraqi defector, that he also
mentions, about alleged mobile biological weapons production facilities? Even
if the secret report had surfaced in time, why should we assume Brown would
have believed it and rejected the others? No one was in a position to ‘know’
²⁵ Joanna Chung, ‘Unbiased Murdoch Stands By His Views’, Financial Times, 27

October 2004.
²⁶ Alastair Campbell, The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq (London: Random House,
2012), Diary entries Tuesday 11 March 2003, p. 490.
²⁷ Cited in Joy Lo Dico, ‘Big Guns of the Press all quiet on the Iraqi Front’, The Independent,
16 March 2008.
²⁸ Gordon Brown, My Life, Our Times (London: Bodley Head, 2017), pp. 250, 254, 255.
12 Blunder
that the secret, sceptical US report represented indisputable truth, or that it
should outweigh the multiple other reports. Even that report still judged that
Iraq ‘is making significant progress in WMD programs’, and that more precise
knowledge was being obstructed by Iraqi Camouflage, Concealment and
Decoys.²⁹ There was also in existence, in public, alternative credible sources
to suggest doubts over the state of the Iraqi WMD Programme. If Brown had
been open to dissuasion, he could have accessed the serious and informed
doubts that were raised before the invasion, in public, by the head of UN
weapons inspections Hans Blix, (as well as Dr Mohamed El Baradei of the
International Atomic Energy Agency), to the Security Council on 14 February
2003, that ‘so far, UNMOVIC [the United Nations Monitoring, Verification
and Inspection Commission] has not found any such weapons [of mass
destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions’.³⁰ If Brown
had been truly prepared to revise the issue, at the time, on the basis of a weak
intelligence base, he did not need access to a secret US report, especially one
that still estimated that a progressing and covert WMD programme existed.
Recall that one argument of the Blair and Bush governments was that the
likely reason for any lack of final proof was Saddam’s concealment, and that in
a post-9/11 world, given incomplete knowledge, responsible states couldn’t
take the risk. Brown’s own memoir supplies further evidence that early access
to the document would probably not have changed his mind. Brown indicates
he was predisposed to accept that Saddam, with his serial breaches of UN
resolutions and his WMD programme, was a ‘threat to regional and global
order’. He recalls that he had strong domestic political incentives not to
dissent over the war. At the time, he was already on a ‘head-on collision’
with Blair over the euro, NHS, and tuition fees, and so was ‘anxious to avoid a
fourth area of dispute, particularly one that was not my departmental respon-
sibility’. Brown’s alibi is implausible, that one critical missing document would
have overturned a whole set of well-entrenched assumptions about power,
order, and security. What mattered was the predispositions of those who, like
Brown, consumed intelligence products.
Outside the government, politicians and journalists cannot plausibly reduce
the issue to one of betrayed trust. In other policy areas, the tabloids and
opposition MPs who supported the war regularly accused the Prime Minister
of mendacity. They accepted the state’s verdict because, ideologically, they
were predisposed to. And they were not only evaluating the government’s
threat assessment, but were exercising a wider strategic judgement, that
invading was a prudent choice and had a strong chance of succeeding. They
²⁹ Joint Staff, ‘Iraq: Status of WMD Programs’, 9 September 2002.

³⁰ ‘Briefing of the Security Council, 14 February 2003: An update on inspections’ at http://
www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/pages/security_council_briefings.asp.
Introduction 13
chose to support the argument that war would work. This, too, drew on
assumptions that warrant scrutiny.
The ‘Blair’s War’ alibi also places undue emphasis on administrative in-
competence, a shifting of blame to ‘bad planning’ and administrative bungling,
and the assumption that Iraq’s ‘lesson’ is that military force must be aligned to
and optimized around the ‘reconstruction’ of countries after overthrow.³¹ The
‘incompetence dodge’ is a face-saving exercise that glibly suggests the pro-
found political problems inherent to post-Saddam Iraq could have been
administered or engineered away. ‘Managerialist’ accounts of Iraq sidestep
questions of ‘whether’ to fight such wars, and to reduce Iraq’s memory to a
guide in ‘how’ to conduct such wars in future. Managerialists infer that the
failure of Iraq is attributable to bad planning, rather than the idea of regime
change itself. They draw from the campaign insights into nation-building and
how to govern states once their own states have seized their capital. Ultim-
ately, their concern is about failure to intervene, not intervention failure, and
are determined to keep the flame of interventionism intact. They caution that
we must not ‘over-learn’ from Iraq, lest it erodes our spirit of warlike idealism.
They work to limit Iraq’s salience as a precedent. Versions of this storyline, of
invasion being spoilt by maladministration, and the need to remain predis-
posed to frequent intervention, are offered by other participants and obser-
vers, including grandees of British security policy like former Secretary of State
Lord William Hague and former UK ambassador to the UN Sir Jeremy
Greenstock. ‘Yet action to support global order cannot be totally abandoned
because particular campaigns ended badly’, as Greenstock’s straw-man reduc-
tionism has it.³² To the contrary, the geopolitical storms created by those
campaigns suggest that we should maintain global order differently. In finally
admitting that the war in Iraq was a ‘mistake’, Lord Hague presents the error
as a problem of proof (‘We relied too much on evidence that turned out to be
flimsy’)³³ and stresses that there will need to be more intervention in the next
quarter-century even than the last, returning to his most emphatic theme,
based on a misrepresentation of recent history, that the gravest danger is
Western passivity: ‘We have seen in recent years that when the West pulls
back, other actors come in’.³⁴ By the time Hague finishes qualifying the
cautionary lessons of Iraq, the campaign shrinks into an unfortunate ‘one-
off ’ with the underlying agenda of liberal war undisturbed. We can iden-
tify other defects of managerialism that Chapter 2 will address in more
³¹ See, e.g., Andrew Dorman, ‘The United States and the War on Iraq’, in Paul Cornish (ed.)
The Conflict in Iraq, 2003 (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 145–59, p. 155.
³² Jeremy Greenstock, Iraq: The Costs of War (New York: William Heinemann, 2016), p. 424.
³³ William Hague, ‘I admit it, Iraq was a mistake: but that shouldn’t stop us intervening in
Syria’, The Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2015.
³⁴ Reported comment at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference, 2017, Tweet 27 June 2017,
1.26 a.m.
14 Blunder
depth: managerialists underestimate the profound problems of breaking and
remaking states and governing foreign populations. Their arguments tend to
treat host populations not primarily as active political agents with visions
and agendas of their own, but as passive recipients who must be better
administered into stable market democracy. In that sense, managerialists
carry colonial attitudes to those they wish to assist. They wrongly interpret
post-Iraq cases, from Libya to Syria, as instances of Western ‘retreat’ or ‘non-
intervention’. In their fixation with staging military operations in order to
impress third parties of the West’s ‘resolve’, they treat international life as a
narcissistic drama about Western political will, and overstate the prospects of
waging peripheral wars in order to impress other major powers into submis-
sion. And in their vision of permanent armed revolution, they betray the same
attitude as another idealistic and relentless warmaker, Philip II, of whom it was
said that ‘No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its
essential excellence.’³⁵ Those who embraced the cause of ‘regime change’
would hardly deny themselves a share of the credit for the consequences if it
had been a cheap and rapid success. They must accept co-responsibility for
their ‘judgement call’.
A narrow focus on Blair arises also from what we might call the legalist
tradition about the Iraq War. Legalists approach the Iraq War primarily as a
crime, rather than a blunder. They emphasize above all the war’s criminal
unlawfulness. The decision-makers, too, devoted much energy and time to
building their case and legitimizing it at home and abroad.³⁶ Legalist critics
range from polemicists such as Tom Bowyer and Owen Jones, to scholars such
as Glen Rangwala, to former intelligence and weapons experts such as Brian
Jones, to jurist Phillipe Sands.³⁷ They suggest that successful diplomacy relies
upon the legitimacy that only the United Nations can bestow. In this pros-
ecutorial tradition, Blair specifically must answer a charge of high crimes and
suffer impeachment. But in 2003, warmakers also considered themselves
internationalists. They too believed that they were enforcing international
principles, to the extent that they were willing to flout the global community’s
formal rules in order to strengthen its writ. The US and British governments
successfully persuaded others to support the invasion, illegal or otherwise.
³⁵ Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1984),
p. 7.
³⁶ See in particular James Strong, Public Opinion, Legitimacy and Tony Blair’s War in Iraq
(London: Routledge, 2017).
³⁷ Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair, the Tragedy of Power (London: Faber & Faber,
2016); Owen Jones, ‘The War in Iraq was not a blunder or a mistake. It was a Crime’, The
Guardian, 7 July 2016; Glen Rangwala, A Case to Answer: A First Report on the Potential
Impeachment of the Prime Minister for High Crimes and Misdemeanours in Relation to the
Invasion of Iraq (London, Spokesman, 2004); Philippe Sands, Lawless World: Making and
Breaking Global Rules (London: Penguin, 2005).
Introduction 15
A number of liberal democracies supported Washington’s claim that the best
way to uphold world order was to overthrow Saddam Hussein after his serial
affronts to it, and argued that an insistence on unanimity had paralysed the
international community in the past. It was not a case of virtuous interna-
tionalists versus malign rule-breakers. It was a conflict between competing
visions of global order, as one side stressed the unity of the United Nations, the
other its credibility.³⁸ This division had been anticipated in 1999, when NATO
countries and their supporters argued that their unauthorized bombing of
Serbia to oppose genocide and war crimes was illegal but legitimate. So too did
advocates of the Iraq War in 2003. As the hawkish intellectual Robert Kagan
noted, ‘In 2003 France and Germany and other European nations were
demanding that the United States adhere to an international legal standard
that they themselves had ignored, for sound moral and humanitarian reasons,
a mere four years earlier’.³⁹ Iraq stands for a wider question, about competing
visions for what it means to uphold international order. A war’s legality—or
otherwise—can only be determined by a properly constituted court.⁴⁰ Ultim-
ately, the difficulty with legalism is pragmatic. In the absence of an inter-
national system whereby powerful states will actually be tried, or rulers
prosecuted, and in a world where states from time to time believe they must
infringe rules to uphold order, these are questions of judgement that cannot be
resolved in courts.
Finally, there is the ‘virtue/vice’ school of interpretation. This approach
treats the matter as a morality play, from opposing angles, whereby the British
government acted out of simple good faith or bad. One version, centred on
‘vice’, speculates that Britain’s participation was driven by unspeakable ulter-
ior motives covered by deception. Peter Oborne, for instance, insinuates an
anti-Islamic motivation on Blair’s part, referring to his ‘habit of attacking
Muslim countries’.⁴¹ The suggestion that Britain attacked those countries
because they were Islamic would intrigue the Muslim majority populations
of Sierra Leone and Kosovo, on whose behalf the UK intervened before
Iraq. It also sits oddly with Blair’s well-documented admiration for all Abra-
hamic faiths, his government’s oversight of a mass immigration programme
³⁸ This distinction was outlined by Sir George Young, MP, in the debate on 18 March 2003:
‘the debate concerns the credibility of the United Nations on the one hand, and its unity on the
other. The Prime Minister’s view is that unless firm action is taken now, the UN’s credibility will
be fatally undermined. The alternative view is that moving too fast will shatter the unity of the
UN, thus fatally undermining it’.
³⁹ Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: American and Europe in the New World Order
(London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 129.
⁴⁰ Neither is there a clear link between legal authorization and strategic success. Most of the
violence that occurred in post-Saddam Iraq took place after the United Nations Security Council
passed resolution 1546 in June 2004, unanimously authorizing the continuing presence of a
multinational force.
⁴¹ Oborne, Not the Chilcot Report, p. 166.
16 Blunder
including a surge of migration from Muslim majority countries, and his daily
reading of the Qur’an.⁴²
Hostile accounts of Britain’s war in Iraq often share one overriding
quality, an assumption there can be no idealism in a war that was allegedly
dishonest or illegal. Iraq was such a low gambit, they assume, that it must
have been bereft of idealism and dominated by narrow and material Real-
politik. As Piers Robinson charges, ‘to what extent might have western popu-
lations been manipulated into support for a war on terrorism that was as
much about geo-strategic opportunism and aggressive wars, as it was about
tackling Islamic fundamentalist terrorism?’⁴³ Notice the structure of Robin-
son’s question, dividing the ‘geo-strategic’ from the armed struggle against
Islamism. The document he builds this case on, ‘The War Against Terrorism:
The Second Phase’,⁴⁴ shows Blair clearly linking the broader Islamist threat
to seven countries. The idealists who took Britain to Iraq believed that if a
geostrategic opportunity presented itself, it was a chance to attack Islamism’s
foundations, for militant Islamism they believed was one by-product and
symptom of a dysfunctional regional order. Because opponents of the war so
often cannot bring themselves to imagine that the warmakers also held ideals,
they struggle to explain it.
A more widespread version of the ‘bad faith’ tradition alleges that it was
mainly a project to secure Western oil interests, whether by unlocking a rich
source of petroleum for the international market, or by seizing a geostrategic
foothold to secure access, with other stated rationales working as high-minded
‘cover’.⁴⁵ This draws too on the demonology about Blair. More subtle obser-
vers, like Paul Rogers, frame the issue more gingerly, inferring intention from
likely effect:
A cynical analyst might conclude that one function of the war, at least in the short
term and from a US perspective, was to break OPEC, damage the economies of
countries such as Iran and Venezuela and ensure price cuts at gas stations in the
run-up to the 2004 presidential election.⁴⁶
We may doubt whether the US Democrats who voted to authorize the
President’s use of force were eager to maximize Bush’s chances of re-election,
and the oil market plays a strikingly marginal role in the records of US
deliberations that we do have. But it is hard ultimately to falsify such theories.
⁴² Tim Adams, ‘This Much I know: Tony Blair’, The Guardian, 12 June 2011.
⁴³ Piers Robinson, ‘Learning from the Chilcot Report: Propaganda, Deception and the War on
Terror’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 11 (2017), pp. 47–73, 69.
⁴⁴ Memo, Blair to Bush, 4 December 2001.
⁴⁵ Nafeez Ahmed, ‘Iraq invasion was about oil: Maximising Persian Gulf oil flows to avert a
potential global energy crisis motivated Iraq War planners—not WMD or democracy’, The
Guardian, 20 March 2014.
⁴⁶ Paul Rogers, A War Too Far, p. 50.
Introduction 17
The totality of motivations are irrecoverable, and hidden motives by definition
are hard to reconstruct. In Britain’s case, if there were secret alternative
rationalizations, they must have been very secret. As we will see, along with
a process of alleged deception, we can also identify expressions of intense and
consistent beliefs in private communications and in the testimonies of Blair’s
opponents within cabinet, where oil was mostly marginal, second order or
unmentioned, all of which suggests authenticity and genuinely held core
convictions.
The ‘oil’ hypothesis is often formulated simplistically, presenting the Iraq
adventure as a war of plunder. Oil, to be sure, had to form part of the calculus.
Had Iraq not been a potentially wealthy oil-rich state located in a region
regarded by London and Washington as strategically sensitive and adjacent
to other sources of threat, policymakers may not have ranked it so highly on
their hierarchy of interests, and there was a general aspiration that a liberated
Iraq would return to a fully functioning part of the international energy
market. Oil mattered less as a ‘spoil’ of war but more indirectly and generally.
Petro-dollars were a strategically potent resource that policymakers feared a
hostile state like Saddam’s could use to generate threatening capability, such as
nuclear weapons.⁴⁷ If, on the other hand, profitable access to Iraq’s energy
resources was the overriding motive, as opposed to a second-order one,
Western powers had cheaper means short of invading the country. To get
Iraqi oil flowing in greater volumes, and to increase their access, they could
have lifted economic sanctions. For twelve years by enforcing sanctions, they
had conducted a policy despite, not because of, an interest in maximizing
Iraq’s oil output. If a prime concern for the US had been to ‘lock in’ privileges
for their own oil companies, overthrowing the regime was not the easiest way
to do it. They could have privately bargained with the regime in Baghdad, as
did the anti-war statesman, French President Jacques Chirac. Oil is a fungible
commodity on the global market, its price is affected by overall supply and
demand, and does not require seizure of a country to secure access to it.
The picture that emerges from the documentary sources is different. Oil
interests in British decision-making circles, while not overlooked, were an
afterthought. Blair’s circle and the Parliament predominantly willed the
removal of Saddam Hussein for other ambitious, security-related reasons.
Only later did they calculate that in the event of his removal, they should
ensure their companies a share of the spoils. There was, from 31 October 2002,
lobbying by British companies BP, Shell, and BG to the Department of Trade
and Industry for a slice of the contracts in post-Saddam Iraq.⁴⁸ This date that
came after, not before, Blair’s circle had privately settled on its decision to
⁴⁷ See Charles L. Glaser & Rosemary A. Kelanic, ‘Getting out of the Gulf: Oil and US military
strategy’, Foreign Affairs 96:1 (2017), pp. 122–31, 128.
⁴⁸ Minute Christopher Segar to PS/Baroness Symons, 31 October 2002, ‘Iraq Oil’.
18 Blunder
participate in military action, so the causal sequence was the reverse of the
‘plunder’ thesis. Liz Symons, Minister of State for Trade, noted, ‘we have been
making the case publicly that this conflict is about WMD not oil (as many
have unfairly claimed)’.⁴⁹ If anything, British firms expressed concern to her
that the state was not being ruthless enough in pursuing commercial interests
in a post-bellum Iraq, and that with momentum for war building, Britain was
losing out to American and French firms in an emerging market. In the words
of Colin Adams, of the trade association British Consultants and Construction
Bureau, as relayed by Symons to Straw, ‘insufficient action appears to be
happening at the political level to safeguard UK interests when the situation
in Iraq is finally normalised’. British envoys were in the awkward position of
emphasizing that security interests were paramount, but that the state would
still lend support in Washington to British oil companies. Britain pushed the
US to ensure more rigorous international oversight over the management of
Iraqi oil revenues. The British embassy advised UK oil companies that ‘US
motivation as regards Iraq parallels our own: this is a matter of national
security, not oil’,⁵⁰ while also urging Downing Street to take up the matter
with the White House. Britain’s main decision-makers did not think, even in
private, that a grab for Iraq’s oil was the main purpose. A paper from the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office set down as a principal aim of a stable Iraq
selling oil on world markets, but described securing reconstruction contracts
for British companies as a ‘second order objective’.⁵¹ With the campaign
underway, Blair urged Bush to outline a vision of Iraq’s political and economic
future ‘to dispel the myth that we were out to grab Iraq’s oil’.⁵² British policy
settings were not optimized around exploiting opportunities for its oil com-
panies. US rules enabled Washington to favour American companies in
disbursing reconstruction contracts, whereas Britain’s rules from April 2001
denied preferential treatment to British firms. There evidently was concern
within government to ensure a pay-off once war was underway. But an anxiety
to receive incidental material benefits once a decision is taken is not the same
as core prior motive. Nor does it falsify the other aims that Blair’s circle
repeatedly and fulsomely asserted.
The other side of the ‘virtue/vice’ approach is the ‘good faith’ version.⁵³ This
account of Britain’s participation is a sympathetic one, and arises partly out
of discontent with the sometimes hysterical allegations of anti-war critics.
⁴⁹ Memo Liz Symons to Jack Straw, 1 November 2002, ‘Iraq: Commercial Aspects’.
⁵⁰ Christopher Meyer to David Manning, 15 November 2002, ‘Iraqi Oil’.
⁵¹ Mark Sedwill to David Manning, ‘Scenarios for the Future of Iraq after Saddam’,
20 September 2002.
⁵² Nicholas Cannon to Simon McDonald, 31 March 2003, ‘Iraq: Prime Minister’s Conversa-
tion with Bush, 31 March’.
⁵³ Vernon Bogdanor, ‘The Iraq War, 2003’, Lecture, Gresham College, 17 May 2016;
Christoph Bluth, ‘The British road to war: Blair, Bush and the Decision to Invade Iraq’,
Introduction 19
Britain’s war, it argues, was waged in good faith and, without the luxury of
hindsight, in circumstances that were compelling. As well as accepting the
basic honesty of the government’s case, it also accepts Blair’s calculation about
the problem. It supports, or at least sympathizes with, the premise that failing
to strike Iraq would amount to an imprudent failure to act. Britain in March
2003 had no ‘good’ choices, and given the risks implied in restraint, was on
balance wise to take the difficult path of conflict. A later chapter tackles these
apologetic arguments, and the dubious counterfactual claims on which
they rest.
Elements of the above interpretations contain some truths. As we will see,
there was an Anglo-American relationship consideration, though not a ‘poo-
dle’ version; oil was indirectly relevant, not an overriding driver; Blair was a
driving force who needed other conditions in place to succeed; and percep-
tions and presentation of threat mattered in implementing a genuine calcula-
tion about security. The best question is how these elements ranked and
interlocked, and what inferior interpretations leave out.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
In Chapter 1, ‘Warpath’, I argue that Britain’s war in Iraq was enabled and
driven by an interaction of power and ideas, a particular blend of fear and
confidence. A set of ideas about how best to pursue security, ideas enabled by
the capabilities of the US, created the warpath, and those ideas were insulated
and taken for granted. Like Bush, Blair’s circle decided on war because it
hardly occurred not to, or to entertain alternatives. Dogmatic ideas were not
merely the property of the decision-making elite: they could thrive, even in the
glare of parliamentary debate. Decision-makers were ideologically predis-
posed to war, and thus neglected the most important question of whether to
strike. A set of basic assumptions, flowing from a pre-existing and widely held
ideology, and the logic of preventive and coalition war, went unexamined, and
proved decisive. Blair and his inner circle assumed war was inevitable—the
only prudent choice was to force the issue now, on their terms, rather than
later, on Saddam’s. They worried predominantly about how to create condi-
tions that would legitimize a British military campaign, that would generate
enough support, and that would predispose the country against further post-
ponement of the final reckoning. By taking this wandering course, however,
they were moving towards a fixed end. They imposed on their compatriots the
tightening pressures of mobilization, the impatience of their senior ally, and
International Affairs 80:5 (2004), pp. 871–92; John Rentoul, ‘Let’s Have a Serious Debate about
Chilcot, and stop claiming Blair is a war criminal’, Middle East Eye, 5 July 2016.
20 Blunder
the mounting fear of the reputational costs of standing down. Even when the
degraded quality of Iraq’s arsenal and its relative weakness was declared by
inspectors on the eve of war, they calculated that only a complete capitulation
by the regime would do. They reckoned they could no longer live with the
ambiguities and frustrations of the status quo. The ghosts of Suez taught them
that they could only influence the superpower by aligning with it. Ultimately,
Britain followed America to war because recent experience and embedded
ideas taught them a simple truth, that war worked.
Chapter 2 forms the core of my argument. In this chapter, I trace the
ideological roots of ‘regime change’, identifying regime change as an under-
lying form of security-seeking. Though it took the structural fact of American
power and the contingent event of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to make the
assault on Saddam possible, it was also conditioned by the rise in the previous
decade of a set of ideas about liberalism and security. Those ideas bred a
‘common sense’ that presented disputable ideas as obvious: that 9/11 was a
harbinger, not an aberration, warranting high-risk and radical measures; that
designated ‘rogue’ actors are undeterrable aggressors who we cannot live with;
and that given the obvious ‘arc’ of history towards democracy and capitalism,
Western power can be applied to transform whole regions if only West-
erners have the will. I then refute an alternative argument, made by two
liberal-internationalist scholars John Ikenberry and Dan Deudney, that the
intellectual foundations of the Iraq War were primarily realist, and that
the ideological tradition of liberalism had little to do with it. As I demonstrate,
liberals and liberalism were deeply implicated. The forceful reassertion of
American primacy was not an amoral exercise in power maximization. It was
infused with an idealism that has deep historical roots. Moreover, liberalism and
the pursuit of hegemony are not antithetical, as the authors imply. Liberalism
married with the capabilities of a superpower gives America a proclivity for
reckless military adventures. So long as liberalism, untampered by prudential
balance-of-power realism, remains a central engine of American grand strategy,
the US will be prone to further such tragedies.
Chapter 3 turns to the Anglo-American relationship, and the ambition that
by aligning with the United States and paying the ‘blood price’, Britain can win
great influence over its strategic direction. Rather than subordinating itself to
receive material benefits, British decision-makers believed that by aligning
with the US in the War on Terror, they were generating the ability to steer a
superpower that otherwise might run amok and jettison itself from the
international community. The belief that Britain could have this leverage
was encouraged by apparent success in steering the Bush administration
towards the United Nations and its authority as the framework through
which to confront Saddam. However, the experience of preparing and waging
war as junior partner revealed the contradictions within the ‘special relation-
ship’ mindset. Influence, so the theory goes, must derive from acquiescence,
Introduction 21
and continued acquiescence to the outlines of US policy is necessary to retain
influence.⁵⁴ This renders any influence highly circumscribed. Having pledged
support for a policy, that support must continue and Britain can only influ-
ence its execution (and the course of the campaign revealed the limits on
Britain’s ability even to shape that). Otherwise, the ability to influence policy
will be withdrawn and estrangement or even punishment will follow. Past
solidarity creates a path-dependent pressure to tow the line, in order to obtain
an influence that Britain in the most critical hour dare not exercise or test.
Ultimately, the ‘special relationship’ ambition misconceives the complexity of
policymaking in Washington, confusing historical sentiment for geopolitical
leverage.
In Chapter 4, I weigh the arguments, and construct the strongest possible
case in favour of ‘regime change’ both with hindsight, and without. Hawks
pose serious ‘what if ’ questions: what were the alternatives to war? What risks
and costs would US-led allies have borne if they had refrained from invading?
I demonstrate that the defences of the war rest on counterfactual historical
claims that are implausible and, in any case, less grave that what actually
happened, even on ‘worst case’ calculations. The strongest retrospective case
for war still involves fragile gains made at costs so heavy, with such serious
unintended consequences, that decision-makers would have judged them
prohibitive, had they known them in advance. As I will argue, not invading
was a lesser evil than invading. Saddam’s Iraq was a diminished and wretched
force that posed little serious threat, the US-led coalition had successfully
shackled the regime by 2003, weakened its ability to threaten the region, and
had established effective deterrence. But there is no avoiding the implications
of restraint: restraint would have constituted effective toleration for continued
Ba’ath party’s predatory rule, with all the consequences. The West, I argue,
could have coexisted with and contained a weakened Iraq even in a situation
where sanctions were breaking down. There was already evidence, before
March 2003, that Saddam’s regime could be deterred and restrained by clear
Western signalling, there are strong reasons to assume that a ‘rogue state–
terrorism nexus’ had not and would not form in Iraq, and that there was time
and capacity to disrupt any rearmament or threatening behaviour. Between
‘regime change’ and ‘doing nothing’ there was a prudent middle way of
vigilant ‘overwatch’ available to US-led forces.
In Chapter 5, I argue that a return to realism of a prudent and sceptical kind
can help temper the pathologies that led to the Iraq War, on several fronts. It
can counsel governments against excess certainty. In particular, it cautions
against the ‘Gordian Knot’ temptation, the impatient urge to eliminate sources
of insecurity and impose decisive solutions on problems, in particular the
⁵⁴ For a similar critique, see Alex Danchev, ‘Greeks and Romans: Anglo-American Relations
After 9/11’, The RUSI Journal 148:2 (2003), pp. 16–19, 18.
22 Blunder
perennial demand for the downfall of adversary regimes. Realism can inform
policymakers what war can affordably achieve. As well as placing princes on
their guard against predation, it encourages prudent war avoidance. Mindful
that states cannot avoid living with insecurity, uncertainty, and risk, we can
draw upon realist insight to restore deterrence and consequential diplomacy as
the central foundations of security. And with realism, we can guard against the
temptation to view international life as a morality play requiring ideological
crusades, recognizing it instead as a tragedy where good intentions can be
deadly, as a conflicted world where not all good things go together, and where
major powers can be their own worst enemies.
In the Epilogue, I offer two speeches to leave the matter for readers to judge.
First, there is the televised address Blair gave on the eve of war. And there is an
alternative address he could have given, setting out an alternative logic of
restraint. It draws on arguments and warnings made and neglected at the time.
Warpath
The wandering course to a fixed end which is the pattern of the rage of
Achilles . . . ¹
In this first chapter, I reconstruct Britain’s road to war. I explain how various
impulses, pressures, and temptations came together between the terrorist
attacks of the autumn of 2001 and the invasion of spring 2003. I do so with
an eye to the interaction of three levels of explanation and causation, as
taxonomized by the political scientist Kenneth Waltz.² The interlocking causes
worked through the international system, the domestic level and the ‘unit’
level of decision-makers. In divining this war’s causes, as with any war, there is
one central analytical problem. Even if the world is a perpetually insecure
place with a dismal recurrence of conflict, most states most of the time do not
enter armed conflict with most other states, including their main adversaries
and rivals. The ‘constant’ of insecurity does not in itself explain variation. We
must, therefore, not only give an account of threat perception, or why British
decision-makers regarded Saddam Hussein’s regime as threatening. They had
regarded him as threatening for the thirteen years prior to invasion. We must
explain how a long period of enmity and active hostility—that had not
translated into all-out war—then did so. We must identify a process of change,
how low- to medium-level hostility escalated into an actual clash.³ Even if we
accept that Britain had effectively been at war with Iraq by using force and
sanctions to punish breaches of an earlier ceasefire, we must still explain how a
long, grinding siege then transformed into a different and more direct cam-
paign to decapitate the enemy. What impersonal forces and prior choices
delivered the actors to this point? What did they consciously think they were
doing? How did the three leaders and their inner circle get into such a fatal
¹ From Bernard Knox, introduction to The Iliad (trans. Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin,
1990), p. 12.
² Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
³ On the need for explanation for how general ‘structural’ constants like insecurity translate
into actual war, see Jack Levy, ‘The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace’ American Review
of Political Science 1 (1998), pp. 139–65, p. 142.
24 Blunder
dance? In brief, I argue that the 9/11 attacks of 2001 coincided with a period of
growing confidence in the US and Britain that the West could remake inter-
national conditions, and a mounting fear that it could only be secure by doing
so in a dangerously globalizing planet. Britain’s decision-makers genuinely
shared this outlook, and took part out of a confidence that they could guide
and restrain the superpower.
This chapter attempts to explain a single conflict. To that end, I attend to
the particularities and unique circumstances of the context, to offer the most
accurate possible portrayal of the war’s origins and its causal hierarchy. To do
so also requires us to go beyond a close study of the documentary record, and
borrow assumptions from the study of the origins of wars generally, to assist
our analysis with more generic concepts. Iraq, like all individual cases, was
unique in its particular combination of people and circumstances. But its
defining ‘parts’—a preventive war, a coalition war, a war of regime change,
were not sui generis. It bears comparison with other cases where rulers role the
dice. We should therefore go beyond single-case analysis, to help us learn
something from Iraq. This chapter, therefore, enters into a dialogue between
the case of Iraq and general theory, helping them inform one another. A trade-
off of rigour and richness is needed in explaining any conflict. Without rigour,
assumptions go untested. Without richness, the dominance of generic cat-
egories makes us lose sight of complexity, and human agency, and raises
inflated hopes of scientific predictability.
The chapter has three parts. In Part I, we begin in Baghdad. Saddam
Hussein’s choices are a point of entry into a wider problem, the propensity
for dogmatic miscalculation to cause war. In Part II, we move to Washington.
At the international level, the defining reality and permissive cause was one of
unchecked American power and how its wielders made their calculations
in the wake of 9/11. This was a war conceived and designed primarily in
America. As early signals from Washington indicated, it was very likely going
to happen. Britain’s choice was whether and how far to join in. London had
some influence over decisions about how and when to proceed, and over the
declared rationale. Indeed, Blair’s role was to articulate the cause of regime
change most effectively for Americans and the wider world. The reality,
however, was that the American drive to war in Iraq worked as a ‘juggernaut’,
in the words of Blair’s Private Secretary and foreign policy advisor Matthew
Rycroft, that those outside the interagency process could only hope to influ-
ence, push or pull, but rarely stop.⁴ In the circumstances of a wounded and
determined superpower striking out, not even America’s primary ally could
have stopped the war happening. President Bush was moving inexorably
towards forced regime change in Baghdad.
⁴ Matthew Rycroft, Iraq Inquiry Testimony [Henceforth abbreviated ‘IIT’], 10 September

2010, p. 7.
Warpath 25
In Part III, we move to London. London, like Washington, approached the
issue as a preventive war. As I argue, that type of initiative typically flows from
a particular alchemy of fear and confidence. Blair’s inner circle believed in
what it was doing, that it was prudent to align Britain with the effort to
eliminate a gathering threat. It believed Britain and its allies were vulner-
able enough to make Saddam Hussein an unacceptable menace, yet powerful
enough to make him an easy target, and that liberating Iraq was a natural step
on the right side of history. Beyond assessments of Iraq, there was a wider
momentum towards ‘visionary world-ordering’, a growing idea that the opti-
mal response to 9/11 was an ambitious effort to transform the Greater Middle
East, the crucible of a global conflict of ideas.
In Part IV, we examine how the main decision-makers persuaded Britain to
go to war by investing urgency and a sense of imminent peril into the question,
framing a genuine perceived threat as a ‘clear and present’ danger, and steering
the confrontation with Iraq to a point of escalation where relaxing pressure
and refusing invasion was hard to accept, and where urgency was reinforced
by fears of reputational cost. Path dependency (or the constraining effect of
prior decisions on later decisions) also exerted greater force over time. By the
time Parliament debated the question in March 2003, British forces were
mobilized in the Gulf at an unsustainable level, the government had made
open commitments to coercive disarmament, had warned of the penalties of
standing down, and America was unmistakably readying its sword. Climbing
down or moderating was difficult to accept. Blair as the principal agent in the
process had deliberately led Britain down the path to this point.
P A R T I . B A G H D A D’S WA R
Before moving onto the invaders’ calculations, we should consider Iraq’s.⁵

Britain’s war in Iraq took three to tango. The First Armoured Division that it
committed to the fight would not have found itself advancing through south-
ern Iraq to guard America’s flanks in the spring of 2003 if Washington had not
⁵ On Saddam’s miscalculations and the regime’s estimates, see Gregory D. Koblentz, ‘Saddam
versus the Inspectors: the impact of regime security on the verification of Iraq’s WMD disarma-
ment’ Journal of Strategic Studies (2016) published online only at http://www.tandfonline.com/
doi/abs/10.1080/01402390.2016.1224764; Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the
DCI on Iraq’s WMD (the ‘Duelfer Report’): ‘Regime Strategic Intent’ section, pp. 1, 29–32, 47;
David D. Palkki & Mark Stout, The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime,
1978–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kevin Woods, James Lacey &
Williamson Murray, ‘Saddam’s delusions: The View from the Inside’ Foreign Affairs 85:3
(2006), pp. 2–28; Michael R. Gordon & Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: the Inside Story of the
Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Atlantic Books, 2006), esp. pp. 55–75.
26 Blunder
chosen war. And they wouldn’t have met resistance had not Iraq also made
certain choices. For an attack to become armed struggle, the opposing party
must also willingly resist. And resist the adversary did, though not well.
In the twenty-fourth year of his rule, the Fifth President of Iraq had come
to seem permanent. Sycophantic poets hymned Saddam Hussein as part of
nature, ‘the peak of the mountains and the roar of the seas’.⁶ Saddam had long
marinated in power, surviving purges, CIA-backed revolts, wars, defeat in the
Gulf War of 1991 and the economic strangulation of his regime from outside.
And this in a country historically vulnerable to invasion. At a vulnerable
crossroads, Iraq bordered six other states. Its flat, alluvial plains had no natural
barriers. Aggressors had fallen upon it again and again. Endurance in such
lethal conditions can breed fantasy. Saddam became a victim of his own
mythologized longevity, or in the words of one British MP who graced his
court, his ‘indefatigability’. Increasingly detached, the self-styled modern-day
Nebuchadnezzar who had debauched the public sphere with the vulgar archi-
tecture of self-celebration now devoted more time to writing novels, delegating
the job of governing to his lieutenants. He had become insensitive to the shifts
going on around him. Saddam believed he had America’s measure. He had
told his own subordinates that if Iraq rode out the siege that had lasted since
the withdrawal from Kuwait, America would be revealed as incapable of
overthrowing the state. Iraq’s forces, he bragged, had sustained losses in the
battle of the Fao Peninsula in the war against Iran that were equal to America’s
entire losses in the Vietnam War. Saddam distributed to his army the film
Black Hawk Down about the battle of Mogadishu that triggered America’s
retreat from Somalia. As Saddam told it, America’s flight after only eighteen
soldiers were killed—at the hands of ‘pagans’ who had ruined and shamed
them—was symptomatic of the superpower’s reluctance to pay the price of
invasion.
Saddam’s defiance in 2002–3 has long puzzled outsiders. With strident
demands for disarmament at the point of a barrel, and hostile forces gathering
on his border, surely there were compelling reasons to yield. It would never
have been possible to prove the negative of final disarmament. He could,
though, have cooperated more fully with weapons inspectors, admitted them
without restriction, permitted his scientists to be interviewed outside the
country, and ceased all evasion, concealment, or non-compliance. This
would have weakened the Anglo-American rationale for military action.
Cooperation and certification by international inspectors of his disarmament
would have allowed Iraq to export oil again, after the annual loss of tens of
billions of dollars in revenue.
⁶ Cited in Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 181.
Warpath 27
Why, then, didn’t he realize the game was up? Some argue that Saddam
refused to cooperate fully because he wished to practise ‘deterrence by doubt’,
to bluff adversaries into believing he had deadly capabilities in reserve. Thanks
now to captured records of the regime’s inner deliberations, we can trace a
path to war that was less about deterring adversaries and more about securing
the regime from outside penetration. Like Stalin whom he aped, Saddam
Hussein reigned through studied paranoia. He was determined to coup-
proof his rule. Iraq’s previous rulers had been violently deposed, their bodies
dismembered and dishonoured: in July 1958 the regent Abd al-Ilah was
dragged through Baghdad to be hung, only for the architect of the coup,
General Abd al-Karim Qassem, to be shot dead four years later. Abdal
Rahman Arif was luckier, being deposed into exile, while Saddam’s immediate
predecessor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr wisely took his deputy’s advice to retire
for health reasons. This background makes it easier to understand Baghdad’s
reluctance to give unrestricted access to international bodies to comb the
country at will. The regime regarded international inspection bodies, from
UNSCOM (the United Nations Special Commission) to the IAEA (the Inter-
national Atomic Energy Agency), as vehicles of subversion infested by foreign
spies, potentially giving Washington the coordinates of his own location for a
cruise missile strike. Even if there was a danger of the US and UK making good
on their threats, full cooperation with the international community would
expose his security apparatus to foreign infiltration. He must also have been
nervous that unlimited capitulation would invite challenge and revolt. It
would be a capitulation and a death sentence. In the process of surveillance,
verification, and disarmament, the stakes were existential. Saddam therefore
walked a precarious line, cooperating enough to divide and weaken the
coalition enforcing sanctions, and resisting enough to insulate his regime.
Saddam’s apprehension about weapons inspections being tied to a hostile
campaign to topple him were not entirely unfounded. The inspections process
had an abiding difficulty. The superpower demanding inspections and threat-
ening punishment also demanded Saddam’s removal from power. Anglo-
American ultimatums, that Saddam must disarm ‘or else’, were undercut by
their refusal to guarantee he could stay in power if he actually disarmed.
Deterrence works only when the actor on the receiving end can be confident
that choosing to be deterred, and avoiding forbidden behaviour, will make a
difference and help them survive. Throughout the interwar period between
1991 and 2003, there were demands for Saddam’s overthrow or assassination
within the political class and commentariat.⁷ US security services had attempted
to kill Saddam during and after Gulf War One and later in a failed coup
⁷ Thomas L. Friedman, ‘Head Shot’, The New York Times, 6 November 1997; George
Stephanopoulos, ‘Why We Should Kill Saddam’, Newsweek, 1 December 1997, p. 34.
28 Blunder
attempt in June 1996.⁸ Even when the UN issued Resolution 1441 in November
2002 demanding Iraq’s full and final disarmament, a senior US administration
official suggested Saddam would still be tried for war crimes even if he dis-
armed.⁹ Disarmament, therefore, could not be counted on as a path to survival
to reduce his adversaries’ hostility. To the contrary, that the diplomatic cam-
paign for his disarmament was coupled with a continuous death threat created
incentives to ride out the pressure and hold ambitions for rearmament.
Saddam’s response to this dilemma was to manipulate and divide his
coalition of enemies, mindful that France and Russia were more biddable to
eventual reconciliation and a resumption of business. ‘Gaming’ the inter-
national community might have worked before. But in the wake of 9/11, it
was now too cute a ploy. Saddam’s error was his failure to sniff the new
impatience in Washington, or to recognize, in time, that war was almost
definitely coming. Even as the American sheriff rounded up its posse over
2002–3, and publicly insisted that the violations of concealment and partial
obstruction were proof enough of a clear and present danger, Saddam failed
to revise his calculations about America’s fecklessness and casualty aversion.
In a fatal misperception, he estimated as though it was still 10 September
2001, believing until the final hours that America did not have the stomach
for a ground war. His greatest adversaries, he maintained, were local and
internal, his own subjects, as well as Iran and Israel. France and Russia
could be counted on to sabotage America’s bid for a UN mandate and
even to upset its advances once invasion was underway. Saddam never
took seriously the possibility that US-led forces would reach deep into the
country and always prioritized the internal threat of revolution over external
adversaries.
In his preoccupation with the threat of internal uprisings, from hostile
populations or from his officers, he created paramilitary units designed pri-
marily to suppress revolts, at the expense of the conventional forces needed to
defend the country. Saddam could have delayed and frustrated invasion by
scorching the earth of infrastructure, and could have prepared a bloodier,
more formidable strategy of defending cities as fortresses, forcing invaders
into an undesired siege as Western strategists feared he might.¹⁰ Such a
strategy would reduce the stronger invaders’ advantages in stand-off strikes,
⁸ Saïd K. Aburish, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge (London: Bloomsbury, 2000),
p. 136.
⁹ David Singer, ‘US Plans to Pressure Iraq by Encouraging Scientists to Leak Data to
Inspectors’, The New York Times, 9 November 2002.
¹⁰ Michael R. Gordon, ‘Saddam’s Likely Plan: Make a Stand in Baghdad’, The New York
Times, 4 March 2003; Kenneth M. Pollack, ‘The Defence of Baghdad’, Brookings Institute, 4 April
2003; Mike Allen, ‘US Increases Estimated Cost of War in Iraq’, The Washington Post, 26
February 2003.
Warpath 29
firepower, manoeuvre and precision, as one of his generals had unsuccessfully
proposed.¹¹ Yet Saddam deployed his regular and Republican guard forces
outside Baghdad in order to distance them from the seat of power, entrusting
his more lightly armed paramilitary forces with city defence, and left his
professional military with no doctrine of urban combat.¹² The bungler of
Baghdad could have mounted a more attritional urban strategy to delay and
bleed the invaders and force a more protracted battle. Instead, he chose to
maintain defiance, while weakening his ability to hold on by stubbornly
deploying his main forces ‘out in the open’. Baghdad fell three weeks later.
The world’s twelfth largest army was swept aside and the paramilitary units
were gunned down in short order.
As Operation Iraqi Freedom neared, he could have taken up President Bush’s
offer to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours to settle abroad in voluntary exile
and immunity,¹³ an offer backed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and by Britain’s
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy also
offered Saddam an opportunity to abdicate. Bahrain’s King Hamad made an
offer, hours before the expiry of America’s ultimatum for he and his sons to
leave Iraq or face military invasion.¹⁴ Past rulers have sometimes fled and
survived in exile, such as Kaiser Wilhelm II. Of course, survival could never
be guaranteed, and Saddam could have been killed or arrested. That option still
conceivably offered higher odds of success than accepting war and the near-
certain consequence of violent death or flight, pursuit, and then trial and violent
death. In a meaningful sense, Saddam chose war. He at least got to rail
incessantly at his subsequent trial. The ultimate dividend was the gallows. As
the fabled survivor finally perished, a chorus of balaclava-clad executioners
chanted sectarian slogans while filming his death, a fitting emblem of the
time, as vendetta and zero-sum competition tore a whole society apart.
Saddam’s blinkered choices made possible his toppling. And it was not just
he who fell prey to the errors of closed thinking. While the Bush and Blair
governments were hardly the equivalent of Saddam’s abattoir autocracy, all
three centres of decision proved to be insulated, organized around like-
minded cabals. For decisive stretches of time, the two Atlantic democracies
did not operate democratically in their preparations for war. The American
and British leaders did not willingly subject their case to an open ‘marketplace
of ideas’, or even to cabinet-level scrutiny, until late. Instead, they shaped the
¹¹ Paul Martin, ‘Iraqi Defence Chief Argued with Saddam’, The Washington Times, 21
September 2003.
¹² Stephen T. Hosmer, Why the Iraqi Resistance to the Coalition Invasion Was So Weak,
(Monterey: RAND 2007), p. 51; Stephen Biddle, Toppling Saddam: Iraq and American Military
Transformation (Calisle: Pennsylvania, April 2004), pp. 26, 27.
¹³ ‘Straw backs Exile Deal for Saddam’, BBC News, 20 January 2003.
¹⁴ Gerald Butt, ‘Bahrain offers exile as Egypt reviles Saddam’, The Daily Telegraph,
20 March 2003.
30 Blunder
circumstances in the shadows, in order then to persuade wider government
and the public. The words of Colin Powell’s former chief of staff about Bush’s
style could be applied to London: ‘Its insular and secret workings were efficient
and swift—not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a
dictatorship than a democracy’.¹⁵ Democracies can be decidedly undemocratic
in their national security decision-making, even in wars that are fought in
democracy’s name.¹⁶ The fact of secrecy is not in itself reprehensible. Worthy
of regret is not any crime but a blunder, the failure to subject the most basic
decision to robust internal scrutiny. And worthy of regret is the ease with
which their ideas, once presented, succeeded, and for that the blame is wider.
PART II. WASHINGTON’S W AR: CO NF IDE NCE

AND F EAR
As the World Trade Center collapsed and as bodies were being carried out of
the Pentagon, a former colleague of mine asked a well-placed American
official about the contours of Washington’s likely response. The reply: ‘It’s
going to be big. It’s going to be American’. There is visible in American history
whereby the US in response to surprise attack on its soil—in 1814, 1941, and
2001—raises its ambitions, enlarges its sphere of responsibilities, and embarks
on ‘visionary world making’.¹⁷ It did not take long for American-sized ambi-
tions to form. As Britain contemplated the warpath, its principle ally was the
most powerful state that has ever existed. The action-enforcing events that
prompted Britain to make plans and prepare dossiers flowed mostly from
Washington. There were declaratory signals: Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ claim in the
State of the Union speech of January 2002, his West Point speech of June 2002
announcing a shift from containment and deterrence to anticipatory war, the
National Security Strategy. And there were in private communications the
persistent signals of a policy shift and military preparations.
A concurrent rise in fear and confidence turned Washington’s long-
standing enmity with Iraq finally into a direct clash. The overthrow of
¹⁵ Lawrence B. Wilkerson, ‘The White House Cabal’, Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2005.
¹⁶ See Michael C. Desch’s study of Israeli decision-making about conflict in its invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, which ‘was exempted from normal democratic procedures’ or cabinet scrutiny.
Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 100–1.
¹⁷ I borrow the phrase ‘visionary world making’ from Nicholas Kitchen, ‘Systemic Pressures
and Domestic Ideas: A Neoclassical Realist Model of Grand Strategy Formation’, Review of
International Studies 36:1 (2010), pp. 117–43, 141; see the history of American responses
to strategic shock in John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 37.
Warpath 31
Saddam Hussein was already formal policy in Washington, as the commit-
ment to a post-Saddam Iraq was fully codified in the Iraq Liberation Act of
October 1998, a bill passed unanimously in the US Senate spelling out
unambiguously that ‘It should be the policy of the United States to support
efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in
Iraq’.¹⁸ After 9/11, the will quickly grew to realize that policy directly and in
full. Americans, including those in government, were scared. They had suf-
fered the greatest act of urban terror by a non-state group in history. An
anthrax scare one week after the 9/11 attacks compounded fears that a serial
wave of terrorist attacks was underway. By the close of 2001, they were also
emboldened. America had enjoyed unexpected early success in its campaign
in Afghanistan, toppling the theocratic Taliban regime with an agile mix of air
strikes, indigenous allies, special forces, and bribes. And it had achieved this
rapid dominance in what was notoriously a zone of exclusion, the so-called
‘graveyard of empires’.¹⁹ With al-Qaeda and its hosts on the run, the super-
power now exhibited a mix of fear, vengefulness, and self-confidence. Its
declared ambitions were boundless. In the words of President George
W. Bush in the State of the Union address in October 2001, ‘Our war on
terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until
every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated’.²⁰
With the Afghan Taliban scattering, the ‘Bush Doctrine’, with its mix of
democracy promotion, anticipatory war, and belief that bold unilateral action
would attract coalitions, was hammered out in a matrix of insecurity and
confidence from combat success.²¹ Ever since 9/11, those in close contact with
¹⁸ Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, Public Law 105–338, 105th Congress, section 3.
¹⁹ As Bob Woodward relates, among Bush’s advisers there was great apprehensiveness about
Afghanistan, its history of ‘rebuffing outside forces’, and the prospect of mountain fighting,
quagmire, and even overspill into Pakistan: Bush at War (London: Simon & Schuster, 2002, 2003
edn.), pp. 82–3; but success created momentum and optimism: Plan of Attack (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2004), p. 5; on 21 November 2001, the day Bush instructed Rumsfeld to prepare
plans for Iraq, he declared that the Taliban were ‘on the run’, ‘President Shares Thanksgiving
Meal with Troops’, at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/
20011121-3.html. Memoirs by administration officials also recall the emboldening effect of
initial success in Afghanistan: Richard B. Meyers, Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front
Lines of National Security (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), pp. 187–96; Hugh Shelton,
Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2010),
p. 482, discussed further by Melvyn Leffler, ‘The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush
Administration’, Diplomatic History 37:2 (2013), pp. 190–216.
²⁰ President George W. Bush, ‘Address to the Joint Session of the 107th Congress’, 20 September
2001, in Selected Speeches of President George W. Bush, 2001–2008, pp. 65–75, p. 68, at
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_
George_W_Bush.pdf (accessed 30 September 2017).
²¹ See President of the United States, National Security Strategy of the United States of
America (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2002); Robert Jervis, ‘Understand-
ing the Bush Doctrine’, Political Science Quarterly 118:3 (2003), pp. 365–88.
32 Blunder
Bush reported his real and sincere ambition to transform the world. ‘I will
seize the opportunity to achieve big goals’.²²
The collapse of the Soviet Union had removed the last check on America’s
power, or so it seemed. Because of their country’s relative strength and a long-
held set of beliefs about America’s exceptional historical mission, American
elites were able to swagger, and to congratulate themselves for their country’s
singularity and prescience in global affairs. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright had declared that ‘If we have to use force, it is because we are
America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further
than other countries into the future’.²³ In 2002–3, well before China’s rise
seriously gathered pace, neither were there any plausible great power candi-
dates to counterbalance the US. Such an imbalance was the permissive cause of
the war in Iraq.
This was a unipolar war, made possible and therefore tempting by the
uniquely lopsided distribution of material and structural power. Unipolarity
entails the constant impulse to use force and tame the world back into order.
A superpower with global reach, and without major opponents, is unfettered
by the kinds of constraints that most major powers must reckon with. Coupled
with that, Washington was not contemplating a strike on Iraq from a blank
sheet of paper. Elite habits, built up over decades, predisposed policymakers
towards a worldview where American predominance was the only natural and
legitimate aspiration. Unlike at earlier crossroads, after World War I, or even
after World War II when America’s sudden acquisition of global power
prompted a serious debate about its international course, the grand strategy
of ‘primacy’ was entrenched and unquestioned.²⁴ This meant that the emer-
gency set off by 9/11 was interpreted as evidence of a need for more American
power projection, not less.
New conditions made preventive war thinkable. A similar venture, to topple
a lesser regime in a power centre like the Gulf would have been vastly more
risky and less attractive during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was then
Iraq’s main diplomatic ally. A unipolar world power that styles itself the ‘world
leader’ will be tempted to use the muscle that those very conditions allow it to.
America’s preponderant levels of power enabled it to identify far-flung and
remote threats for elimination. Whatever benefits it has wrought, American
²² President George W. Bush, cited in Bob Woodward, Bush at War, p. 339; Bush privately
told his close counsellor Karen Hughes a week after 9/11, ‘We have an opportunity to restructure
the world toward freedom, and we have to get it right’. Frank Bruni, ‘A Nation Challenged:
White House Memo; For President, a Mission and a Role in History’, The New York Times,
22 September 2001.
²³ Statement on NBC Today Show, 19 February 1998.
²⁴ As I argue elsewhere, ‘Why the United States’ Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power,
Habit and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,’ International Security (Forthcoming, Spring
Edition, 42:4, 2018).
Warpath 33
unipolarity is not peaceful. The first two decades of the Pax Americana
after 1989 that made up less than 10 per cent of America’s history generated
25 per cent of the nation’s total time at war. Measured in percentage years that
great powers spend at war and the incidence of war involving great powers, the
period of American unipolarity by an order of magnitude is more bellicose
than the preceding eras of bipolarity and multipolarity, in terms of frequency
if not intensity.²⁵ On the road to Saddam’s fall, America embarked as an
already busy, ambitious and warlike hegemon that was willing to project
power while initially wary of open-ended ground commitments. In response
to 9/11, America’s casualty aversion was lowered, and its muscular idealism
was roused. America’s level of material strength had existed throughout the
‘interwar period’ between the Cold War and 9/11. Now, its rulers had redis-
covered a new appetite for military action, including large-scale ground action,
beyond raiding and ‘missile diplomacy’.
Bush’s newfound vision of transformation through American power, and
promoting peace through the solvent of free elections and free markets, would
be developed in world-historical terms by hawkish intellectuals. Charles
Krauthammer, regarded as America’s most influential commentator especially
on the right,²⁶ defined the Bush Doctrine in world-historical terms. Birthing
pro-Western, peaceable states in Afghanistan and Iraq and their neighbours
‘like the flipping of Germany and Japan in the 1940’s, change the strategic
balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism . . . the undertaking is
enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford to
try’. The ‘monster behind 9/11’ was not bin Laden, but the ‘cauldron of
political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin’ of the Arab-Islamic
world, ‘deflected into murderous anti-Americanism’, a condition to be cor-
rected.²⁷ As Krauthammer realized, the Bush Doctrine was not an aberration
but an extension of US foreign policy traditions and practices. Though
articulated more abrasively with only slight regard for international opinion,
in fundamental ways it held commonalities with the Clinton-era National
Security Strategy of 1999 and Obama’s formal strategic documents, sharing a
commitment to primacy, a willingness for unilateral action, an imperative to
spread democratic institutions and free markets, an emphasis on dealing with
rogue states, and a stress on the links between WMD and terrorism. In the
months succeeding 9/11, as Bush and his senior ministers took dead aim at a
familiar adversary, the high-minded belligerence of the moment was simul-
taneously visceral. On the evening of 9/11, Bush insisted ‘we are going to kick
²⁵ See Nuno Monteiro, ‘Unrest assured: Why Unipolarity is not Peaceful’, International
Security 36:3 (2012), pp. 9–40, 11, 19–20; Bruce Porter, ‘The Warfare State’ American Heritage
45:4 (1994), pp. 56–69, 56.
²⁶ Lionel Barber, The Financial Times, 20 May 2006.
²⁷ Charles Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar
World (2004 Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute), pp. 16–17.
34 Blunder
some ass’.²⁸ ‘Fuck Saddam’, Bush insisted in March 2002, interrupting a
meeting of senators with his National Security Advisor. ‘We’re taking him
out’.²⁹
As well as a unipolar war, this was a preventive war. Preventive war is one
kind of anticipatory war. It is distinct from pre-emptive war, which is a type of
conflict-initiation against what a pre-emptor believes is an imminent attack, to
secure first-move advantages. Secretary of State Daniel Webster 1842 argued
that pre-emption is only justifiable when a state can show a necessity of self-
defence, ‘instant and overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no
moment of deliberation’.³⁰ By contrast, to wage preventive war is to attempt
to forestall a threat that is distant, usually produced by an ‘adverse shift in the
balance of power’, driven by ‘better now than later logic’.³¹ Preventive war is
directed against more hypothetical future threats, and a different time horizon.
For a concrete comparative case, a pre-emptive war would have been an attack
on the Imperial Japanese fleet before it reached Pearl Harbor in 1941, whereas
a preventive war would have involved bombing Japanese factories in 1921 on
the basis that it could be used to threaten US later. Not all deliberately initiated
wars are designed to forestall a direct threat. There are also military activities
initiated for purposes of territorial conquest (like Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait
in 1990), or to interrupt an anticipated atrocity (the Anglo-American-French
bombing of Colonel Gaddafi’s forces as they neared the rebel city of Benghazi
in 2011), without anticipating any direct aggression by the target. Practitioners
of preventive war choose conflict in the short term in exchange for what would
effectively be a ‘worse war’ in the long term, or a worse direct threat, such as
nuclear proliferation by a hostile state.³² In practice, ‘preventers’ mindful of
opinion and claims about legitimacy will work hard to position the target as
the aggressor, and may seek to induce the target to conduct themselves in an
allegedly reckless and provocative way. In 2002–3, the initiators worked hard
to position their target, Iraq, as the true source of the conflict, framing
Saddam’s failure to fully comply and his breaches of UN resolutions as
evidence of his aggressive intent. Preventive war and reserving the right to
²⁸ Jean Edward Smith, Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), p. 225.
²⁹ Michael Elliott & James Carney, ‘First Stop, Iraq’, Time, 31 March, 2003; George Packer,
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroud, 2005), p. 45.
³⁰ Daniel Webster, letters to British Foreign Minister Lord Ashbutton, 6 August 1842, and to
Mr Fox, 24 April 1841, cited in Louis Henkin, Richard Crawford Pugh, Oscar Schachter & Hans
Smit (eds), International Law: Cases and Materials (3rd edn., St Paul, MN: West. Pub. Co. 1980),
pp. 890–1.
³¹ Jack S. Levy, ‘Preventive War and Democratic Politics’, International Studies Quarterly 52
(2008), pp. 1–24, p. 1; see also Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981).
³² On the latter, see Francis J. Gavin & Mira Rapp-Hooper, ‘The Copenhagen Temptation:
Rethinking Prevention and Proliferation in the Age of Deterrence Dominance’, Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association, 2011.
Warpath 35
‘act alone’ if necessary is not an alien practice in US diplomatic history but a
mainstream idea that presidents often entertained and occasionally waged.³³
True to the pattern of preventive wars, heightened and disproportionate fear
and confidence mingled.
Preventive war historically is a gamble.³⁴ It presumes great prescience,
confidently assuming that the initiator can ride all the typical hazards of war
that are in fact hard to forecast. By definition, it ‘removes the evidence that
would convince people of the wisdom of waging war’.³⁵ Preventive wars have
been urged before. When they were adopted and failed they were catastrophic,
such as the Kaiserreich’s preventive strike on the Franco-Russian alliance in
1914. In the US, preventive wars were proposed against Stalin’s Soviet Union
and Mao’s China, and were refused by presidents Truman and Johnson. It is
hard to argue that the results of such attacks would have been preferable to
the successful deterrent relationships that formed with the US in both cases.
Because the initiator (in this case, the US) would oppose a world order where
other great powers also choose preventive wars—China over Taiwan, or India
over Pakistan—it implicitly claims a privilege that the initiator would deny to
other states, it has the cost of damaging one’s moral authority. And by striking
first even before an unavoidable crisis has emerged, it may incentivize irre-
concilable adversaries (or potential adversaries) to prepare deterrent capabil-
ities or even to strike first themselves. The sad history of great powers
overreaching and inflicting self-harm suggests it would be difficult for any
major power to avoid restraint if it possessed this much capability, especially
in circumstances so frightening and exhilarating.³⁶
With the campaign in Afghanistan proceeding, a range of potential targets
loomed in the discussion about ‘Phase II’ of the War on Terror, a phase British
policymakers were made aware of. Iraq had already been raised in Bush’s inner
circle after 9/11, and it emerged as the target of choice for several reasons. The
regime’s historical behaviour, its prior use of chemical weapons, its sponsor-
ship of terrorism, its genocidal campaigns and attacks on neighbours suggest-
ed a present and future threat.³⁷ Iraq’s position at the heart of a strategically
³³ See Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Preventive War and US Foreign Policy’, Security Studies 16:1
(2007), pp. 1–31; Melvyn Leffler, ‘Think Again: Bush’s Foreign Policy’, Foreign Policy 144 (2004),
pp. 22–7.
³⁴ For critiques of preventive war as a means of security, see Richard Betts, ‘Suicide for Fear of
Death?’, Foreign Affairs 82:1 (2003), pp. 34–43; Michael Lind, ‘Preventive Wars: The Antithesis
of Realpolitik’, The National Interest, 26 July 2016.
³⁵ Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 60.
³⁶ On the history of great powers and adjustment failure, see Charles A. Kupchan, The
Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 3–4, 33–105; Karen Rasler
& William R. Thomson, The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490–1990 (University Press of
Kentucky, 2009), p. 146.
³⁷ See Jeffrey Record, Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq (Washington:
Potomac Books, 2010), pp. 85–103. Blair shared this reasoning, that Saddam’s historical behaviour
36 Blunder
valuable and oil-rich region also made it both a promising basis for reinforcing
US hegemony, and a potential springboard for the transformation of the
region. And there was a practical dimension. If Saddam presented a grave
threat, his regime was also disposable, an easier target than North Korea or
Iran. There was too much doubt about earlier proposals that the regime could
be brought down through a US-supported Iraqi ground force, emulating
the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan model. Washington decided to attack
head-on.
While we cannot identify the exact combination of America’s exact motiv-
ations for war, what matters for this analysis is the ‘law of the instrument’, the
objective power realities that made possible the superpower’s ambitions, the
temptation to broaden their use to preventive regime change in Iraq, even
while participants had disparate, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting
rationales.³⁸ The reasons swirled: to eliminate a threat, kick-start a revolution-
ary democratic and pro-American wave, to signal a willingness to use force, to
create an alternative client state to Saudi Arabia, and to remove an enemy of
Israel, American’s only democratic ally in the Middle East. Deputy Secretary of
Defence and hawkish intellectual Paul Wolfowitz recalled there were multiple
rationales within the administration for attacking Iraq, and they made coun-
terproliferation and WMD the central basis because ‘it was the one reason
everyone could agree on’.³⁹ Wolfowitz’ recollection was accurate. Each of these
rationales flowed from the fact of America’s power position and the ambition
to double down on its advantages.
Hours after 9/11, leading officials sensed an opportune moment to strike
out globally and take problems off the board. On the afternoon of 9/11, an
aide recorded Rumsfeld’s reaction, ‘Judge whether good enough to hit
S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]. Go
massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not’.⁴⁰ This went beyond terrorist
groups and rogues. As Bush’s ‘West Point’ address and National Security
Strategy made clear, America’s response to 9/11 was to reaffirm and reinforce
its primacy, to prevent ‘any other state from surpassing, or even equalling, the
power of the United States’. ‘Iraq was—and doubtless was intended to be—a
shot across the bow of America’s potential great power rivals: Don’t even think
and present capability made his regime a threat, in his letter to Bush, ‘The War Against Terrorism:
The Second Phase’, 4 December 2001.
³⁸ For this interpretation, see also Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of
Nation Building (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 19; Stephen Holmes, The
Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), p. 108.
³⁹ Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair, May 2003; Wolfowitz specified that the main four reasons
were WMD, terrorism, the criminal mistreatment of the Iraqi people, and the linkage between
the first two: Jamie McIntyre, ‘Pentagon Challenges Vanity Fair Report’, CNN, 30 May 2003.
⁴⁰ David Martin, ‘Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11’, CBS News, 4 September 2002.
Warpath 37
about messing with the United States’.⁴¹ Thus was America both scared, and
not scared enough. As it prepared to storm Baghdad, the Bush administration
was in a state of exaltation, overinterpreting initial success in Afghanistan
as proof of America’s general transformative might and its destiny. The
campaign proceeded with a hyperbolic and operatic quality, stressing both
unprecedented peril and supreme power.
US officials signalled early to London their intention to spread the conflict
beyond al-Qaeda and international terrorism to Iraq as a designated ‘rogue
state’. They signalled their dissatisfaction with the existing strategy of con-
taining Iraq via inspections, sanctions, and coercion. British officials became
aware in late November and early December 2001 that Bush’s attention was
turning towards Saddam, and that a consensus was hardening for a final
settling of accounts. Bush made vague but threatening comments about the
consequences of Saddam failing to cooperate with weapons inspectors in a
press conference on 26 November 2001.⁴² The British embassy and the Deputy
Prime Minister reported that an ‘overwhelming majority’ of Senators favoured
removing Saddam.⁴³ British Ambassador Christopher Meyer reported that the
long-standing lobby for toppling Saddam was now getting increased reception
with the President.⁴⁴ The prospects of American ‘direct action’ against Iraq
was the subject of discussion in December 2001 between Richard Dearlove, the
head of Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and David Manning, then Blair’s
foreign policy advisor.⁴⁵ And it was President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech on
30 January 2002, and a planned meeting with Bush in April 2002, that
prompted Blair to commission advisory papers on WMD proliferation.⁴⁶
The Cabinet Office’s main advisory document, the ‘Iraq Options Paper’ of
March 2002, indicated that the US had already lost confidence in containment,
distrusted the UN process/inspections, and the momentum flowing from
Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. It shared the US assessment
that toughened containment was unlikely to work and that the sanctions
regime may break down.⁴⁷
It is difficult to pinpoint when precisely Bush settled on removing Saddam
militarily, beyond an approximate time window of April to July 2002. The very
⁴¹ Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy From 1940 to the
Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 135.
⁴² The White House, 26 November 2001, The President Welcomes Aid Workers Rescued from
Afghanistan at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011126-
1.html/.
⁴³ Telegram 1616 Washington to FCO London, 29 November 2001, ‘Deputy Prime Minister’s
Visit to Washington: Afghanistan and Iraq’.
⁴⁴ Telegram 1631 Washington to FCO London, 1 December 2001, ‘The Wider War against
Terrorism: Iraq’.
⁴⁵ Letter, Richard Dearlove’s Private Secretary to David Manning, 3 December 2001.
⁴⁶ See Report of the Iraq Inquiry, 4:1, 166, p. 45.
⁴⁷ Cabinet Office, Overseas and Defence Secretariat, ‘Iraq Options Paper’, March 2002.
38 Blunder
opacity of the process suggests a problem in both capitals, that there was a lack
of rigorous internal review over ‘whether’ to attack, beyond small coteries
around the President and Prime Minister.⁴⁸ Principals and participants in
Washington who could reasonably have expected to be alerted to the process
reported that it happened ‘elsewhere’ and they were informed after the fact. As
one senior administration official told journalist Nicholas Lemann, it was
‘somewhere in the first half of 2002 . . . What I can’t explain to you is exactly
the process . . . That’s a mystery that nobody has yet uncovered’.⁴⁹ Senior
officials agree on this point. Richard Armitage, deputy Secretary of State,
and George Tenet, the head of the CIA, both recall that never, to their know-
ledge, was the question of whether to strike seriously debated internally.⁵⁰
Speechwriter David Frum supports this account:
You might imagine that an administration preparing for a war of choice would be
gripped by self-questioning and hot debate. There was certainly plenty to discuss:
unlike the 1991 Gulf War, there was no immediate crisis demanding a rapid
response; unlike Vietnam, the U.S. entered the war fully aware that it was
commencing a major commitment. Yet that discussion never really happened,
not the way that most people would have imagined anyway. For a long time, war
with Iraq was discussed inside the Bush administration as something that would
be decided at some point in the future; then, somewhere along the way, war with
Iraq was discussed as something that had already been decided long ago in the
past.⁵¹
We do know that Bush first tasked Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld with
drawing up plans in late November 2001.⁵² Tommy Franks, the Commander
of Central Command (CENTCOM) recalls that after 28 December 2001, when
he presented Bush with an outline concept for a campaign, efforts since then
were directed at refining the plan, preparing bases and forces.⁵³ We also know
that by July 2002, the head of policy planning at the State Department was told
by Secretary of State Rice ‘that decision’s been made’.⁵⁴
⁴⁸ For an earlier summary of the decision-making process, see John Prados & Christopher
Ames, ‘The Iraq War—Part II: Was There Even a Decision? U.S. and British Documents Give No
Indication Alternatives Were Seriously Considered’, National Security Archive Electronic Brief-
ing Book No. 328, 1 October 2010, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB328/
index.htm.
⁴⁹ Cited in Nicholas Lemann, ‘How it Came to War’, The New Yorker, 31 March 2003.
⁵⁰ Richard Armitage, ‘An Interview with Richard L. Armitage’, Prism (Journal of the National
Defence University), 1:1, p. 104; George J. Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My
Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 305, 308.
⁵¹ David Frum, ‘The Speechwriter: Inside the Bush Administration during the Iraq War’,
Newsweek, 19 March 2013.
⁵² Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (London: Pocket Books, 2004), p. 1.
⁵³ Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: HarperCollins,
2004), pp. 346–56.
⁵⁴ Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), pp. 4–6.
Warpath 39
Dogmatism was not confined to the Bush circle. The American political
class as a whole was predisposed to accept a final confrontation with Saddam
Hussein without seriously considering alternatives. When the debate was
brought before the US Congress in October 2002, in the form of a ‘blank
check’ bill to authorize the presidential use of force, even the minority of
dissidents framed their opposition mostly around operational and procedural
reservations concerning timing and relative priorities with Afghanistan, not
on ‘the broader wisdom of occupying Iraq and overthrowing its govern-
ment’.⁵⁵ Most of those who did vote to authorize military action exhibited
incuriosity about the evidence. To inspect the CIA’s National Intelligence
Estimate on Iraq’s weapons programme, Congress members had to travel to
a secure location on Capitol Hill, yet only six senators and a handful of House
Members were logged as reading the document.⁵⁶ Preventive war logic was
assumed, without scrutiny.
If a state of this magnitude, governed by an administration that cared
little about wooing allies, had shed many of its fears with early success in
Afghanistan, and was independently determined to strike Iraq, there was little
Britain could realistically do to stop it. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld
gave a glimpse of this reality in the week before military action, suggesting that
if Britain was unable to participate there would be ‘work-arounds’.⁵⁷ Britain’s
path to war, too, was shaped by America’s timetable and momentum. The
question facing the UK would be whether, how, and how much, to join in.
Emma Sky, former Political Advisor to the Commanding General of US
Forces, rightly argued looking back that ‘given the limited influence of the
UK on both the US and the new Iraqi elites, it is not clear that this would have
made much difference to the tragic outcome of events in Iraq’.⁵⁸ If this is true,
Britain could still have decided not to participate, a consequential and morally
serious choice for its own national interest.
The case of Iraq is distinct from America’s most significant premeditated
‘minor’ war, in Vietnam. As Frederik Logevall has shown, American officials
in the eighteen-month period of decision, between August 1963 and February
1965, were not gripped by hubris about the deepening of military commitment
to South Vietnam. They did not take the prospects of their commitment for
⁵⁵ Benjamin H. Friedman & Justin Logan, ‘Why Washington Doesn’t Debate Grand Strategy’,
Strategic Studies Quarterly (2016), pp. 14–45, p. 19; see also Jane Kellet Cramer, ‘Militarized
Patriotism: Why the US Marketplace of Ideas Failed before the Iraq War’, Security Studies 16:3
(2007), pp. 489–524.
⁵⁶ ‘Records: Senators Who OK’d War Didn’t Read Key Report’, CNN, 29 May 2007.
⁵⁷ Donald Rumsfeld, cited in “US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Comments about UK
Involvement in War” The Guardian, 12 March 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/
mar/12/usa.iraq.
⁵⁸ Emma Sky, ‘Chilcot Report: Post-Invasion Planning’, Political Quarterly 87:4 (2016),
pp. 486–7.
40 Blunder
granted. To the contrary, the Johnson administration deliberated extensively
whether to escalate its ground commitment and ‘Americanize’ the war. Even
as the executive worked hard to foreclose options for a diplomatic settlement,
senior American officials who favoured heightening the war remained pes-
simistic about the chances of success.⁵⁹ The contrast with the warpath of 2003
is stark. In a period of, at most, four months, decision-makers rarely assessed
their own underlying optimism. They worried primarily about carrying opin-
ion. It’s time to meet Tony Blair.
PART III. LONDON: BRITISH CALCULATIONS
In explaining Britain’s decision for war, we must address two questions: what
caused the desire to strike Iraq? And how did decision-makers persuade the
country to agree? In their comparative study of the causes of blunders in war,
David Gombert Hans Binnendijk, and Bonny Lin argue that botched wars
share common features that revolve around the mishandling of information:
the ignoring, filtering, or manipulation of information to fit predispositions;
excessive reliance on intuition and experience; unwarranted confidence; a
rigid strategic concept; the neglect of potential contingencies, the underesti-
mation of potential resistance, and the stifling of dissent.⁶⁰
This explanation broadly fits Britain’s war, yet begs a further question.
What causes dogmatism? And how do decision-makers persuade? Even dog-
matic war initiators must still persuade others to agree. In this case, Blair
committed to war early not only because of an authoritarian style of govern-
ance, but because some powerful, pre-existing, and flawed ideas about security
prevailed in wider society, and proved impervious to challenge. Blair and his
circle adroitly steered the crisis over Iraq so that feasible options eventually
narrowed into a choice, whether to join a war that was happening anyway
against an adversary who had seemingly been given every chance for a
peaceful resolution, or back down in ways that would invite first-order threats,
damage the United Nations’ credibility, and incur the risks and shame of
capitulation.
My primary focus lies with Prime Minister Tony Blair and his ‘inner circle’
of informal advisors. Blair was the chief protagonist. As the Iraq Inquiry and
the earlier Butler Inquiry found, he oversaw and decided on the major
decisions of foreign policy through a small group, most apart from cabinet
⁵⁹ Frederik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in
Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. xix.
⁶⁰ David Gombert Hans Binnendijk & Bonny Lin, Blunders, Blinders and Wars: What
America and China can Learn (Santa Monica: RAND, 2014), pp. xvii–xviii.
Warpath 41
and its committee machinery, and often apart from Whitehall mandarins.⁶¹
The earlier Butler inquiry identified the ‘the informality and circumscribed
character’⁶² of Blair’s decision-making style, just as Andrew Turnbull, the head
of the civil service and Cabinet Secretary, observed that in this period, Blair
was ‘less and less interested in hearing contrary opinions’.⁶³ I work on an
assumption already well-substantiated, that the main decision-making centre
lay in Blair’s office, which is where the rationale and strategy were conceived.
This is not the whole story. Decision flowed from Blair’s den, but we must also
explain why it flowed outwards successfully. Within government and beyond,
attention to the arguments against war was more popular after the invasion
went wrong. The drive for regime change enjoyed support or sympathy from
within the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the SIS, the Cabinet Office,
the lion’s share of print media, most of the government, and almost all of
the Conservative opposition. Centres of scepticism within government there
were, in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Ministry of
Defence (MOD) in particular, as well as among a minority of the cabinet.
But even the FCO’s advice was at times borderline naïve, badly underestimat-
ing the dilemmas of invasion and occupation. The undercurrents of doubt at
the MOD were counterbalanced by an anxiety to be included in campaign
preparations and an instinctive Atlanticism that had long been part of British
strategic calculation, as Chapter 3 will demonstrate. As for the cabinet, Iraq
was discussed on multiple occasions, but almost never did it deliberate
whether military action was feasible. Under Blair, the cabinet was largely
emasculated, and complicit in its own emasculation. Discussion of Iraq in
cabinet rarely rose above protestations of loyalty to the Prime Minister.
In his response to the Iraq Inquiry’s report in July 2016, Blair claimed
‘I weighed it carefully’.⁶⁴ In one important way, this is untrue. Blair weighed
carefully, to the point of personal distress, ‘with the heaviest of hearts’, how,
when, under what auspices, and with what diplomatic and military strategy to
remove Saddam. He hardly weighed, though, the most vital question of all,
⁶¹ This group comprised Blair, Alastair Campbell the Director of Communications, Jonathan
Powell the chief of staff, and Sally Morgan, Director of Government Relations. Also intimate
were the ‘diplomatic knights’ in Downing Street, foreign policy advisor Sir David Manning, and
Private Secretary Matthew Rycroft. Campbell identified himself, Powell, Morgan, and Manning
as the principal advisors ‘what you would call his inner circle’, as well as John Scarlett, then Chair
of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Richard Dearlove, head of Secret Intelligence Service.
Alastair Campbell, IIT, 12 January 2010, pp. 6, 8, 10.
⁶² Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report of a Committee of Privy
Counsellors, Chairman: The Rt Hon The Lord Butler of Brockwell HC 898 (London: Stationery
Office, 14 July 2004), p. 148.
⁶³ Cited in Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour (London:
Viking, 2010), p. 114.
⁶⁴ ‘Chilcot Report: Read Tony Blair’s Full Statement in response to the Iraq War Inquiry’, The
Independent, 6 July 2016.
42 Blunder
‘whether’ to commit in the first place. The most striking fact about Blair’s
decision to strike Iraq is that this dog hardly barked. There lacked intensive
internal discussion about this basic issue. The essential belief that success was
likely was implicit in the imbalance of effort. The Blair government invested
itself heavily in the enabling process leading up to the war more than problems
that would flow from it, particularly its intensive diplomatic effort to win over
international opinion and secure a clear United Nations mandate. The later,
public discussion was conducted only once commitments had been made, and
under circumstances that pressured the country not to reverse Britain’s course.
Blair was conscious, at times, of potential difficulties. Tragically, he did not
allow this awareness to disturb his basic optimism, his assumption that the
war was necessary and achievable. Difficulties were considerations to be
mitigated in execution, not reasons to reconsider the decision to act. Let us
now reconstruct Britain’s road to war.
The Road to War
Britain’s road to war was long and crooked. It was a complex interaction of
public justification, military mobilization, alliance politics, and the manage-
ment of domestic opinion. This tapestry of detail can obscure the simpler and
overriding point. While the path was wandering and public rationales shifted,
the calculus of Blair’s inner circle was consistent. If military action could be
successfully framed and sold, it was necessary. Saddam’s Iraq, they believed,
embodied a growing systemic threat. Removing his regime would begin the
positive transformation of the Middle East, and taking part would create
influence over their senior ally. A leaked memorandum from Secretary of
State Colin Powell to President Bush in the lead-up to the Crawford talks in
April 2002 neatly summarized it: ‘On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military
operations be necessary. He is convinced on two points: the threat is real; and
success against Saddam will yield more regional success’.⁶⁵ This is consistent
with the record of Blair’s private deliberations in Downing Street, his personal
notes to Bush, his memoirs, and the public case he advocated in March 2003
on the eve of invasion. To those two parts a third element should be added,
a determination to act as a guiding influence on American power.
In and around the Iraq Inquiry, there has been much discussion of ‘when’
the final decision for war was made. But the decision/no-decision binary does
violence to the way the choice unfolded. Downing Street decided early that it
⁶⁵ Internal memo to Bush ahead of Crawford meeting, ‘Memorandum for the President,
Your Meeting with the United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, April 5–7 2002 at Crawford’,
at https://foia.state.gov/searchapp/DOCUMENTS/April2014/F-2012-33239/DOC_0C05446915/
C05446915.pdf (accessed 25 July 2017).
Warpath 43
wanted to unseat Saddam with force. It was too canny to box itself in entirely,
though, as it engaged in public diplomacy and in a rolling negotiation with the
Bush administration. Instead, they agreed in principle to attack if they polit-
ically could, and if they could align the stars to facilitate it. The consistent
theme of David Manning, who conveyed the Prime Minister’s views in
Washington, was that Downing Street favoured regime change but required
a ‘clever’, carefully managed strategy, one which crafted a coalition and
induced enough defiance by Saddam of international inspections to warrant
action.⁶⁶ A desire to attack Saddam if it could be politically achievable was
fixed from early on, as we will see, even if the final resolution to do so had to
await the resolution of the political struggle at home and abroad. Barring a
major impediment, they would strike.
Tony Blair’s conception of the nature of the security problem formed
quickly over the months between September 2001 and January 2002. If Bush’s
immediate response was that 9/11 was a ‘Pearl Harbor’ equivalent,⁶⁷ Blair’s
immediate private and public response was that ‘mass terrorism’ was the ‘new
evil in our world’, and the world’s democracies must rally to ‘eradicate it’.⁶⁸ He
believed the attacks flowed from a systemic failure, namely an absence of liberal
market democracy, and demanded a systemic cure, a clash of ideologies no less,
matched with ambitious global combat. Testifying before the Inquiry, Blair
clearly articulated a rationale that is also to be found in declassified documents,
namely that in a post-9/11 world, the American-led West had to act decisively,
and with anticipatory action, to defeat ‘religious fanaticism’ and transform the
global security environment.⁶⁹
9/11 was significant not because in itself it increased risks. Rather, it
captured the imagination and exposed risks, or risks as they were perceived,
revealing the potential deadliness of the globalizing world and the need to
reimpose order on it. Blair’s Foreign Secretary wrote to him that although ‘the
threat from Iraq had not increased as a result of 11 September’, America was
losing its ‘tolerance’ for Saddam, ‘the world having witnessed . . . just what evil
people can these days perpetrate’.⁷⁰ Like Bush and his advisors, Blair’s circle
believed the 9/11 attacks revealed an environment of clear and present dan-
gers. The assault on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the failed strike on
⁶⁶ Minute, David Manning to Jonathan Powell, 22 January 2002, ‘Talks with Condi Rice,
21 January: Iraq’. Letter Manning to Simon Mcdonald (Blair’s Principle Private Secretary),
7 December 2001, ‘The War Against Terrorism: The Second Phase’.
⁶⁷ On the evening of 9/11, President Bush wrote in his diary ‘The Pearl Harbor of the twenty-
first century took place today’. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster
2002), p. 33.
⁶⁸ ‘Blair’s Statement in Full’, BBC News, 11 September 2001.
⁶⁹ Tony Blair, IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 49.
⁷⁰ Memo, Jack Straw to Tony Blair, 25 March 2002, at http://downingstreetmemo.com/
strawtext.html.
44 Blunder
the Capitol demonstrated possibilities of even greater destruction. This ‘har-
binger theory’ held that 9/11 was obviously a portent of things to come in
‘a new order of terror’. This was a simple and powerful extrapolation from
events.⁷¹ The 9/11 mass-casualty attack, he assumed, was not an aberration in
a world where most violent threats on a comparable scale can be kept at bay,
but part of a serial wave of catastrophic, first-order threat events that directly
threatened the West’s heartlands.⁷² Though powerful, it was a fallacy. That one
disastrous attack has been mounted indicates such an attack is possible, but
not that it can be easily repeated. The many points at which such attacks can
be disrupted suggests that robust counter-terrorism as an alternative to pre-
ventive wars should not have been dismissed so swiftly as an alternative.
The threat matrix included the possibility of a linkage between rogue
regimes, the most destructive weapons technology, and terrorist networks.
Unless systemic action was taken to dismantle the sources of insecurity,
including preventive war, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and targeted
killing, unthinkable larger versions of 9/11 would come, with nuclear terror-
ism as the apex of possible dangers. Incumbent governments were on notice.
Containing, limiting, or disrupting threats and certainly deterring them was
no longer adequate. Blair gave an internationalist and social democratic twist
to an assumption that was rapidly seizing the commanding heights of debate
in Washington, advanced by American neoconservatives and ‘liberal hawks’,
that a proper response to 9/11 entailed not only wiping out threatening actors,
but altering the Middle East ideologically, correcting its tumult with the
antidote of democracy.⁷³
Predisposed to regard 9/11 as the trigger of a global and fundamental
conflict, Blair in a private note one month after the attack shared Bush’s
drive for ‘extending war aims’, ‘confronting terrorism in all its forms’ and
eventually confronting Iraq as well as intensifying the Middle East Peace
Process (MEPP).⁷⁴ By 4 December 2001 at least, Blair’s focus on Iraq had
hardened. He privately wrote to Bush that Iraq was a threat because of its
WMD, its historic willingness to use it, its capacity to export it, and its linkages
to Palestinian terror groups, but that given reluctance of world and British
opinion, ‘we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time’.⁷⁵ There
was a rationale for ranking Saddam’s Iraq as the principal adversary: past
⁷¹ For an outline and critique, see Robert Diab, The Harbinger Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), pp. 2, 99, 102, 189.
⁷² A distinction observed by John Mueller, ‘Harbinger or Aberration? A 9/11 Provocation’,
The National Interest 69 (2002), pp. 45–50.
⁷³ See Benjamin Miller, ‘Explaining Changes in US Grand Strategy: 9/11, the Rise of Offensive
Liberalism, and the War in Iraq’, Security Studies 19:1 (2010), pp. 26–65, p. 56.
⁷⁴ Letter Blair to Bush, 11 October 2001.
⁷⁵ Private note, Blair to Bush, ‘The War Against Terrorism: The Second Phase’, 4 December 2001.
Warpath 45
performance (he had used chemical weapons before), his known links with
Palestinian terrorists, his role as regional spoiler and keystone rejectionist
Arab regime, undermining peace prospects over Israel–Palestine, his continual
flouting of international accords and inspections, and his history of serial
aggression. Potential targets of this wave of liberation in the ‘Second Phase’ of
the War on Terror, in Washington and London, ranged through Syria, Iran,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and the Philippines.⁷⁶ There was also the
expectation of a benign domino effect, as the overthrow of Saddam would
embolden democratic reformers.
‘Regime change’ could take a number of forms. Earlier on, as the battle for
Afghanistan was playing out, the government entertained scenarios of internal
overthrow assisted by a more limited external campaign, either a general revolt
or higher level coup, without an ‘industrial strength war’.⁷⁷ There was the
possibility that the armed confrontation with Saddam could successfully
buckle his regime without an invasion. ‘Saddam may crack’, Blair would
later speculate to Bush.⁷⁸ The hope that international pressure without an
invasion could create an internal collapse short of war existed into the summer
of 2002, but it was always seen as unlikely.⁷⁹ Short of these possible paths,
determination grew to ensure Saddam’s fall directly. Building the case
remained the inner circle’s main concern, or more specifically, ‘to encapsulate
our casus belli in some defining way’ as he put it to Bush privately on 28 July
2002,⁸⁰ or as David Manning summarized it in September 2002 long before the
process of resolutions and inspection reports was complete, ‘We must look
reluctant to use force, making it clear that we saw the current situation as a
challenge to the credibility of the UN, and to the international community’.⁸¹
To wage a preventive war while looking reluctant, and in order to strengthen
the liberal world order, is the thread that tied together the words and deeds of
the period.
For Blair, 9/11 altered his calculus. Although Saddam’s WMD programme
had not noticeably increased since Operation Desert Fox in December 1998,
the shock of the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York served a
didactic purpose. By revealing the capabilities and potential capabilities of
⁷⁶ Memo, Blair to Bush, 4 December 2001; see also Philip Gordon, ‘Bush’s Middle East
Vision’, Survival 45 (2003), pp. 155–65.
⁷⁷ Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Blair orders invasion force this month’, The Guardian, 8 October
2002; R. Beeston, & T. Baldwin, ‘Washington Hawks under fire for ignoring advice’, The Times,
28 March 2003.
⁷⁸ Private Note, Blair to Bush, 24 January 2003.
⁷⁹ This was discussed at the September 2002 Camp David Meeting: Minute David Manning to
Prime Minister, 8 September 2002, ‘Your Visit to Camp David on 7 September: Conversation
with President Bush’. See also Minute, Manning to Prime Minister, 3 November 2002, ‘Visit to
Washington: Talks with Condi Rice’.
⁸⁰ Private Note, Blair to Bush, ‘Note on Iraq’, 28 July 2002.
⁸¹ David Manning to Blair, 10 September 2002, ‘Iraq: Conversation with Condi Rice’.
46 Blunder
dangerous actors, it ‘taught’ him that the world should no longer tolerate the
risk of Saddam’s survival. Blair has continuously defended his decision on
the basis of the precautionary principle, the logic that the high stakes made
preventive action necessary even if the risk was distant and for the time being,
remote. In particular, the possibility of a WMD transfer to a terrorist group
was intolerable. The JIC, Britain’s interagency committee responsible for intel-
ligence assessment, coordination, and oversight, in November 2001 advised
that the threat of Iraqi WMD terrorism was ‘slight’ unless the regime faced
imminent collapse,⁸² yet for precautionary minds, a low-odds severe scenario
still warrants major preventive action. At the same time, the fact of 9/11 created
a new political opportunity to take measures that were not possible before 9/11.
A year before invasion, in March 2002 Blair wrote privately to his chief of
staff and his foreign policy advisor that the case should be strategically and
morally ‘obvious’. It is worth quoting at length. The note distils the rationale
and the ambition that Blair’s private communications would express over the
following year:
1) In all my papers, I do not have a proper worked-out strategy on how we would
do it . . . I need to be able to provide them with a far more intelligent and detailed
analysis of a game plan . . .
2) The persuasion job on this seems very tough. My own side are worried. Public
opinion is fragile.
International opinion—as I found out at the EU—is pretty sceptical.
Yet from a centre-left perspective, the case should be obvious. Saddam’s regime is
a brutal, oppressive military dictatorship. He kills his opponents, has wrecked the
country’s economy, and is a source of instability and danger in the region . . . a
political philosophy that does care about other nations eg Kosovo, Afghanistan,
Sierra Leone—and is prepared to change the regime on the merits, should be
gung-ho on Saddam.
So why isn’t it? Because people believe we are only doing it to support the US, and
they are only doing it to settle an old score. And the immediate WMD problems
don’t seem obviously worse than 3 years ago.
So we have to re-order our story and message. Increasingly, I think it should be
about the nature of the regime. We do intervene—as per the Chicago speech. We
have no inhibitions, where we reasonably can, about nation-building ie we must
come to our conclusion on Saddam from our own position, not the US position.⁸³
Visible here is Blair the ‘double facing leader’. In one direction, there is the
warlike idealist and nation-builder, confident that war is right and can work,
and diagnosing the problem’s roots in the regime itself, not its arsenal. This
Blair viewed the confrontation with Saddam as an extension of his Chicago
⁸² JIC Assessment, 28 November 2001.

⁸³ Note, Prime Minister Tony Blair to Jonathan Powell, cc’ing David Manning, 17
March 2002.
Warpath 47
doctrine of the international community, but with its limitations relaxed, with
a vision of reordering the world in response to global terror.
In the other direction, there is Blair the propagandist, attuned to the difficul-
ties of persuasion. As Blair knew, despite the endless statements about the
special Anglo-American relationship, the political context in Britain was sig-
nificantly different. The US had suffered the 9/11 attacks on its soil. Britain had
not. Al-Qaeda had slaughtered sixty-seven British people in that attack, but it
had not taken place in Britain, nor was Britain the primary target. In the case of
striking a separate target not directly linked to 9/11, British people were less
likely to accept the urgency of the cause than a terrorized and vengeful Ameri-
can population. British politics demanded more forcefully that the country
strive to adhere to international law, and frame its case within those boundaries,
and support the authority of the UN Security Council, whereas the Bush
administration with its unilateralist tendencies had to be persuaded to approach
the Iraq question through the United Nations. Britain’s government was more
sensitive to demands that any action against Iraq be accompanied by a parallel
effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Moreover, there was a
general, diffuse anti-Americanism that bred suspicion about American motives
and Blair’s Atlanticist solidarity with Washington. Blair calculated that any
strategy to legitimize a decisive campaign against Saddam’s Iraq must be
attuned to these constraints. The use of force would attract support, but only
if the country were satisfied that alternative diplomatic measures had been
exhausted and only if the regime had breached the will of the UN Security
Council, which would eventually be expressed in United Nations Security
Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1441. To make war possible, Blair had to manage
the build-up to conflict within these constraints.
By the summer of 2002, and probably months before, Britain’s calculus
focused on how to legitimize and facilitate military action, not whether a war
would or should happen. This claim is disputed by Alastair Campbell, who
maintains that Britain’s desired end-state throughout was disarmament
through the United Nations.⁸⁴ Blair too had assured the House of Commons
in September 2002 while presenting the ‘September Dossier’ that ‘our purpose
is disarmament. No-one wants military conflict. The whole purpose of putting
this before the UN is to demonstrate the united determination of the inter-
national community to resolve this in the way it should have been resolved
years ago: through a proper process of disarmament under the UN’.⁸⁵
These claims are misleading. They are at odds with the private notes from
Blair that we have already seen. Because of a scheduled meeting at President
Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in April, Blair’s circle was motivated to
clarify and firm up its position. In February 2002, a ‘Phase 2 War Meeting’
⁸⁴ Alastair Campbell, IIT, 12 January 2010, p. 23.

⁸⁵ Hansard 6:390, ‘Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction’, 24 September 2002, column 6.
48 Blunder
decided that military action against Saddam’s Iraq was a ‘public persuasion’
issue, implying a preference already reached, and an in-principle commitment
to helping overthrow the regime.⁸⁶ British Ambassador Meyer recalled being
instructed by David Manning in March 2002 to cease advocating an alterna-
tive containment strategy, and shift the basis of talks to advising the US to
adopt an internationalist, UN-sanctioned path to regime change.⁸⁷ Meyer’s
recollection is consistent with what Manning conveyed to National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice on 14 March 2002, in his own words reporting back
to Blair, ‘you would not budge from your support for regime change but you
had to manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion that was very
different than anything in the States’.⁸⁸ Between the March 2002 cabinet
Iraq ‘options paper’ and Crawford, Blair asserted that the central problem
was the nature of Saddam’s regime, ‘in part because of WMD but more
broadly because of the threat to the region and the world’.⁸⁹ In the same
month, Blair met with Vice President Cheney, and the pre-meeting FCO
briefing advised that Blair should signal ‘In complete agreement on objective.
World a better place without Saddam in power. Need to ratchet up the
pressure on Iraq’,⁹⁰ while Blair indicated a ‘clever strategy’ was needed, as it
would be ‘highly desirable to get rid of Saddam’.⁹¹ A note from Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw ahead of Crawford, on 25 March 2002, indicates that
the government was working towards framing and selling a ‘regime change’
strategy. Warning of the potential post-invasion difficulties, Straw advised also
that the core of the strategy for military action against Saddam would have to
draw on the international rule of law.⁹² Along similar lines, on 8 May 2002
Straw communicated to his counterpart Colin Powell that Blair had always
taken the view ‘that if in the end President Bush decided on military action, the
UK had a duty to support him’.⁹³ So by the spring, the UK’s private position
⁸⁶ Chilcot cited a report of the meeting, Report of the Iraq Inquiry 3.2, para. 67, p. 398; see also
‘Blair and Bush to plot war on Iraq’, The Guardian, 24 February 2002; Campbell also refers to the
meeting in his diaries: The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq (London, Random House, 2012),
Tuesday 19 February 2002, p. 170.
⁸⁷ Christopher Meyer, IIT, 26 November 2009, pp. 41–2.
⁸⁸ Private Note, David Manning to Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell, 14 March 2002, from
National Security Archive, at http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB328/II-Doc05.pdf.
⁸⁹ Alastair Campbell, Diaries: The Burden of Power (London: Random House, 2012), 2 April
2002, p. 198.
⁹⁰ Note FCO, ‘Visit of US Vice President Dick Cheney 11 March: Iraq’, attached to Letter,
Simon McDonald to Matthew Rycroft, 8 March 2002, ‘US Vice President’s Call on the Prime
Minister, 11 March’.
⁹¹ David Manning to Simon McDonald, 11 March 2002, ‘Conversation between the Prime
Minister and Vice President Cheney, 11 March 2002’. Cited in Report of the Iraq Inquiry, 3.2,
358, p. 450.
⁹² Declassified Letter, Straw to Blair, 25 March 2002: ‘Full Text of Jack Straw’s Letter to Tony
Blair’ The Daily Telegraph, 18 January 2010, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/
7012529/Full-text-of-Jack-Straws-letter-to-Tony-Blair.html. Accessed 30 September 2017.
⁹³ Minute Straw to PUS [FCO] 9 May 2002, ‘Powell/Straw Tete-a-Tete’ 8 May 2002.
Warpath 49
had shifted away from discussion about containment versus regime change,
and towards setting the conditions for war by advising the US to accommo-
date British preferences in its strategy.
The timing matters because it suggests the decision for war was moving on
two tracks: an earlier, unscrutinized and covert resolution for regime change,
and a public process of carefully framing and escalating the issue as one of
disarmament undertaken in a way that could avoid war. We cannot know for
certain what Blair and Bush privately discussed in their conversation during
the meeting at Crawford, Texas in April, though afterwards one official in
attendance believed ‘The whiff of inevitability mingled with the smell of
barbeque at the Bush ranch’.⁹⁴ Blair’s speech at the George Bush Senior
Presidential Library in College Station, after the Crawford meeting, reaffirmed
the logic of the ‘Chicago doctrine’, setting out that, ‘if necessary the action
should be military and again, if necessary and justified, should involve regime
change. To allow WMD to be developed by a state like Iraq without let or
hindrance would be grossly to ignore the lessons of 11 September and we will
not do it’.⁹⁵ The terms of debate were set for the following year, framed not as
degrees of activity, but action versus inaction, loading all of the risks onto a
mythical path of ‘inaction’ which few were advocating.
By the summer of 2002, a ‘likely’ campaign had become almost inevitable.
In mid-May 2002, Britain’s military leadership first received unambiguous
indications that war was going ahead. Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge
recalls an informal meeting between General Tommy Franks, CENTCOM and
the UK Chiefs of Staff, indicating ‘it was not if but when’.⁹⁶ Sir Richard
Dearlove, the head of MI6, returned from Washington ‘convinced that the
Administration have moved up a gear’.⁹⁷ As the quiet campaign in Washing-
ton to refine the case for war took wing in July 2002, British efforts and capital
were spent on diplomatic legitimization. British senior officials put the lion’s
share of their work into persuading Washington to organize their armed
confrontation with Iraq around the enforcement of international law under
the UN’s banner. They were trying to influence the bureaucratic interagency
battle within the US administration over the ‘UN route’ and inspections, to
persuade a doubtful president whose first instinct was to act unilaterally and
strike. Britain’s leading envoys pressed their opposite American numbers on
the point: David Manning with Condoleezza Rice, Jack Straw with Colin
Powell, Blair with Bush.⁹⁸ Advice from the British Ambassador to Downing
⁹⁴ Anonymous British official, cited in Philip Stevens, Tony Blair: The Making of a World
Leader (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 211–12, p. 212.
⁹⁵ Speech at the George Bush Senior Presidential Library, College Station, Texas, 7 April 2002.
⁹⁶ Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, IIT, 8 December 2009, p. 6.
⁹⁷ David Manning to Blair, ‘Iraq Meeting: 23 July: Anotated Agenda’, 23 July 2002.
⁹⁸ Jeremy Greenstock, Iraq: The Cost of War (New York: William Heinemann, 2016),
pp. 104–5.
50 Blunder
Street in the same period focused on how to garner international support, with
a need to focus on the aftermath.⁹⁹ This battle endured until Bush opted
against the preferences of the Defence Department and Vice President, and
addressed the United Nations on 14 September 2002. Those, like Britain’s UN
Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock who were kept out of the inner decision-
making, pursued a process they believed could prevent war, by maximizing
pressure on Iraq to cooperate, but this brought about an escalation that would
make relaxation or delay hard to accept.
Any doubt about the Blair circles’ agreement on and desire for regime
change should be dispelled by the leaked ‘Downing Street Memo’ of July
2002. It was conducted in preparation for the Prime Minister’s phone call
with Bush, involving the Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney Gen-
eral, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett (JIC), Francis Richards, the Chief of
Defence Staff, chief of SIS Richard Dearlove, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan,
and Alastair Campbell.¹⁰⁰ The emphasis of the meeting was on how to strike,
on what basis, the feasibility of military plans and the building of domestic
consent. While no ‘firm decision’ had yet been taken, there was a basic
predisposition to commit: ‘we should work on the assumption that the UK
would take part in any military action’. There was real anxiety that Saddam
might use his WMD on troops stationed in Kuwait, or on Israel, suggesting the
authenticity of the circle’s fears about his arsenal. ‘C’ (Dearlove) reported that
‘military action now seen as inevitable’, while the Foreign Secretary reported
that ‘Bush has made up his mind to take military action’.
The most notorious phrase from the memo is the line summarizing Dear-
love’s assessment that in Washington, ‘the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy’. There has been much exegetical debate about the
meaning of the term ‘fixed’, and whether it referred to deliberate manipulation
or outright fabrication, or the more innocent organization of intelligence
around policy. Regardless, it is significant that because of a hard assumption
that they ‘knew’ of the WMD programme, policy was shaping intelligence, and
marshalling intelligence for already-determined goals, even though that intel-
ligence was inconclusive.¹⁰¹ Straw, who acknowledged the case was ‘thin’,
argued that the UK should work up an ultimatum, that ‘this would help
with the legal justification for the use of force’. Blair’s concern was making
the strategy work—‘The Prime Minister said it would make a big difference
⁹⁹ Christopher Meyer, IIT, 26 November 2009, pp. 26–8.

¹⁰⁰ Matthew Rycroft to David Manning, 23 July 2002, ‘Iraq Prime Minister’s Meeting, 23 July’.
¹⁰¹ As Fred Kaplan suggests, ‘Either way—“fixed” or “fixed around”—Bush and his aides
had decided to let policy shape intelligence, not the other way around; they were explicitly
politicizing intelligence . . . But that doesn’t necessarily mean they thought their claims were
false . . . They just knew Saddam had WMD, and if the facts didn’t quite prove he did, they
would underscore and embellish the titbits that came close’. ‘Let’s Go to the Memo’, Slate,
15 June 2005.
Warpath 51
politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors . . . If the
political context were right, people would support regime change’.
The taken-for-granted quality of the basic judgement in both capitals that
Britain and its major ally ought to remove Saddam Hussein is all the more
striking, if seen from a wider historical perspective. Like America’s decision
for war, Britain’s was discretionary and premeditated. It was chosen to
forestall a perceived threat, well in advance. Unlike most of Britain’s
modern wars, this choice was not a response to an obvious imminent
threat—as Blair privately admitted—or to an adversary’s direct pressure or
hostile act. It was not a pre-emptive war against an imminent danger. It was
a preventive war, to eliminate a potential threat before it fully material-
ized.¹⁰² In this case, by contrast, the potential ‘axis’ Britain sought to disrupt
was hypothetical and did not take place within a major war. The architects
of the Iraq War saw in this confrontation with a weakened third-world
regime stakes as vital as Britain’s major historical conflicts with nineteenth-
century French imperialism and twentieth-century fascism. They believed
that the 9/11 shock had revealed a world transformed, one where the
empowerment of traditionally minor adversaries meant that the US-led
West had to strike first. It was self-consciously a ‘historic’ decision, in the
terms Blair still uses.
Neither Washington nor London had to interpret 9/11 this way. 9/11 did
not speak for itself, and the road from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon
did not have to lead to Baghdad.¹⁰³ There were several ways of interpreting
the significance of the 9/11 attacks, and whether and how they linked to the
perceived WMD–rogue state–terror nexus. It could be reasoned that ter-
rorism was still a manageable problem to be suppressed, disrupted, and
reduced to a tolerable nuisance, without preventive wars to overthrow
states. 9/11 could have led to a focus on Islamist terror networks and
their known sponsors, with other authoritarian regimes conciliated or
bargained with as part of an anti-terrorist coalition. Alternatively, the 9/11
attacks could be seen as a regrettable cost of projecting power and main-
taining a strategic presence in the Gulf and the wider Arab-Islamic world,
costs to be mitigated but never eliminated. But these alternatives hardly got
a hearing.
Instead, decision-makers instinctively framed the terrorist threat as part of a
wider ambitious agenda, of reordering the world ideologically, and widening
the scope to other adversaries. The view that the confrontation with Iraq
was part of an effort to alter the course of the global system enjoyed some
¹⁰² On the distinction between pre-emptive and preventive wars, see Lawrence Freedman,
‘Prevention, not pre-emption’, Washington Quarterly 26:2 (2003), pp. 105–14.
¹⁰³ As Ronald R. Krebs & Jennifer K. Lobasz argue, ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony,
Coercion and the Road to Iraq’, Security Studies 16:3 (2007), pp. 409–51, p. 413.
52 Blunder
support in government. The FCO’s planning department after 9/11 discussed
the prospects of ‘draining the swamp’ in neglected areas of the world that
produced threats.¹⁰⁴ This phrase echoed throughout the wider public debate,
on both sides of the Atlantic. Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld and Deputy
Secretary of Defence Wolfowitz had already used the phrase to define the
strategy of countering the new security threats by transforming geopolitical
conditions.¹⁰⁵ Advice from the SIS acknowledged the difficulties of invasion,
but also sensed a major geopolitical opportunity to change the region. It would
be a stride towards wider disarmament and it would alter mentalities,
affecting a
climatic change in the psychology of regimes in the region, a precondition for
progress in the Arab-Israel dispute; and revealing a further horizon of intention
to address the regional issue of WMD. The problem of WMD is an element in
driving for action against Iraq. In turn, this should open prospects for Arab-
Israeli talks, and, beyond, regional work to reduce the WMD inventories which
threaten Europe as well.¹⁰⁶
Like Blair, the advice from SIS spoke of the result of removing Saddam as a
‘prize’, namely, an altered Gulf. Such optimistic projections assumed that the
warmakers could impress as wide an audience as they wished, including
potentially dangerous third parties, and that military forces could reliably
send signals that would be properly received. ‘High intensity warfighting at
large scale’, suggested the Policy Director of the MOD in April 2002, ‘would
send a powerful deterrence message to other potential WMD proliferators
and adversaries’.¹⁰⁷ One could strip Saddam of weapons, only he would want
them back. Instead, killing his regime would help stem proliferation gener-
ally. Blair privately averred that regional and world order was at stake.
Regime change was the ultimate goal, not disarmament, as he explained in
a meeting with the Chief of the Defence Staff on 2 April 2002, refuting
General Tony Pigott, who claimed the issue ‘was WMD’. As Campbell noted,
‘TB felt it was regime change in part because of WMD but more broadly
because of the threat to the region and the world’.¹⁰⁸ With invasion underway
later in March 2003, Blair wrote privately to Bush that ‘Our fundamental goal
¹⁰⁴ Stephen Pattison, (former Head of United Nations Department, FCO, 2001–2003), IIT,
31 January 2011, p. 12. They soon dropped the phrase, according to Pattison, but the logic
underpinning the concept persisted.
¹⁰⁵ ‘Rumsfeld: US must “drain the swamp” ’, CNN, 19 September 2001; Ambrose Evans-
Pritchard, ‘US asks NATO for help in “draining the swamp” of global terrorism’, The Daily
Telegraph, 27 September 2001.
¹⁰⁶ Letter, Richard Dearlove’s Private Secretary to David Manning, 3 December 2001.
¹⁰⁷ Declassified Memorandum, Simon Webb, Director of Policy to Permanent Secretary/
Secretary of State, ‘Bush and the War on Terrorism’, 12 April 2002, p. 4.
¹⁰⁸ A. Campbell & B. Hagerty, The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq (London:
Hutchinson, 2012), 2 April 2002, p. 198.
Warpath 53
is to spread our goals of freedom, democracy, tolerance and the rule of law.
Though Iraq’s WMD is the immediate justification for action, ridding Iraq of
Saddam is the real prize’.¹⁰⁹
Beyond Blair’s circle, the choice between ‘tough containment’ and threat
elimination would be quietly canvassed, but mostly with a leaning heavily
towards threat elimination. The Cabinet Office’s Overseas and Defence Sec-
retariat produced an ‘Iraq Options Paper’ in March 2002 in preparation for
Blair’s first visit with Bush at Crawford, Texas. This paper spelt out the
‘endgame’, which had long been ‘to integrate a law-abiding Iraq, which does
not possess WMD or threaten its neighbours into the international commu-
nity. Implicitly, this cannot occur with Saddam Hussein in power’. The first
option was ‘toughened containment’, a strategy that was only ‘partially’
successful, which had lost the faith of the US administration, and which
would not achieve Britain’s long-term aim of reintegrating Iraq into the
international community. The second option was two alternative forms of
regime change: the replacement of Saddam with a Sunni strongman in a
system that might regress back into military coups and the acquisition of
WMD, or the creation of a representative democracy that renounced prolif-
eration and aggression, but only through a long nation-building campaign.¹¹⁰
This was the main Cabinet Office paper on Britain’s strategic choices, and
Blair invoked it before the Inquiry to support a conclusion he had already
reached: ‘we couldn’t go on like this’.¹¹¹ Crucially, the paper was discussed
with a small group of officials at Chequers, the prime minister’s country estate,
but not with cabinet. The position before cabinet, as reflected in the declassi-
fied Briefing Paper to the Parliamentary Labour Party on 5 March 2002, was
that military action was possible and could not be ‘ruled out’, but that the
government was ‘doing everything possible to re-establish under UN auspices
an inspection programme within Iraq’.¹¹² In May 2002, an informal cross-
departmental group was formed to define the ‘end-state’ to inform the MOD’s
military planning, also involving the intelligence agencies, the JIC, and the
Cabinet Office. This group’s advice demonstrates just how easily, and widely,
was accepted the assumption that the endgame should be the political trans-
formation of Iraq. While it baulked at ‘regime change’ as a possibly illegal
formal objective, like the Cabinet Office it advised a far-reaching ambition
for the transformation of Iraq: ‘A stable and law-abiding Iraq, within its
present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer
posing a threat to its neighbours or to international security, and abiding by its
¹⁰⁹ Blair to Bush, private note, ‘The Fundamental Goal’, 26 March 2003.
¹¹⁰ Cabinet Office, Defence and Overseas Secretariat, ‘Iraq: Options Paper’, March 2002.
¹¹¹ Tony Blair, IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 19.
¹¹² Declassified Iraq Briefing for the Parliamentary Labour Party, 5 March 2002, part 10,
attached to Letter, Mark Sedwill to Matthew Rycroft, 6 March 2002.
54 Blunder
international obligations on control of its WMD’. In other words, war should
work as a political surgery, not merely neutralizing or limiting an adversary’s
behaviour, not even overthrowing a government, but curing the whole
body politic of a rogue country.¹¹³ This implied a demanding effort at
re-engineering a whole state. The advice was caveated, indicating that a future
regime might well pursue WMD for rational purposes, given the fear of Iran,
and that ‘behaviour change’ might be more achievable than ‘regime change’,
but the main goal they defined of turning Iraq into an inoffensive state
effectively precluded limitation.
In settling on regime change, a choice that would demand intensive military
action, Blair did not seek the counsel of his Chief of Defence Staff Admiral
Boyce about military options in Iraq before April 2002. Boyce was not
apprised of the dialogue between the Prime Minister and the White House
about the possibility of widening the War on Terror to Iraq. Blair advised
Boyce that British policy was not regime change.¹¹⁴ Thus not only did Blair fail
to consult the military over the prospects for a regime change policy until after
he decided it was his preference—he kept them in the dark over the fact of
the choice.
Regarding Iraq, Blair and his circle perceived the regime itself as the source
of the problem. The Ba’ath order was pathological and vicious, they believed,
incapable of reform, incorrigible in its deadly intentions and its determination
to reconstitute its WMD programme. ‘Regime change’ was the only reliable
way to counter it. Disarmament was desirable, and the demand for disarma-
ment and cooperation with the international community in the course of
disarmament was the most promising basis to create legitimacy for regime
change. But the abandonment of Saddam’s weapons programme was not in
itself the desired end-state. The objective from the formative period until the
invasion was to bring the regime to an end. Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff,
had already advised in November 2001 that ‘our over-riding objective is the
removal of Saddam not the insertion of arms inspectors’, as ‘only a new
regime’ could ensure the end to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear
(CBRN) proliferation, hostility to neighbours, and terrorism, and Blair scrib-
bled ‘I agree with this entirely’ on the note.¹¹⁵ Blair had also penned his
agreement to David Manning’s report of December, stressing that Saddam
¹¹³ Letter, Peter Ricketts (then Political Director, FCO) to Simon Webb, MOD, 3 May 2002;
Minute Ricketts to Private Secretary [FCO], 25 April 2002, ‘Iraq Contingency Planning’.
¹¹⁴ Admiral Lord Boyce (Chief of Defence Staff February 2001 to November 2003), Iraq
Inquiry, Witness Statement; IIT, 27 January 2011, pp. 6, 10; in sending British military planners
to assist CENTCOM’s preparation, Boyce passed on the Secretary of Defence’s instruction that
‘no political decisions have been taken in the UK on our participation in an operation against
Iraq’. Declassified Letter, Chief of Defence Staff to General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, 4 July 2002.
¹¹⁵ Minute, Jonathan Powell to Blair, 15 November 2001, ‘The War: What Comes Next?’
Warpath 55
would only be overthrown if there was an effective strategy that sustained a
coalition.¹¹⁶ In an early and prescient advisory note on 30 November 2001,
Powell advised that a ‘change of heart’ by Saddam would be a plausible public
demand that the US and UK could build support around, but only a ‘change of
regime’ with a compelling pretext would do.¹¹⁷ Likewise, in his note of 28 July
2002 to Bush, Blair himself indicated in unmistakably clear terms to President
Bush that Britain was committed ‘whatever’, that it was a war to neutralize a
‘potential threat’, that it was necessary to assemble a persuasive case, that there
were difficulties in assembling allies, in post-war reconstruction and in the
Middle East Peace Process, and that the main focus was developing a realistic
military and political strategy.¹¹⁸ By this time, as Blair made plain, this was not
a government carefully considering the case for and against striking Iraq. It
was gathering intelligence, wooing allies, and building legitimacy for a deci-
sion that had essentially been taken.
By July 2002, if not before, Blair and his inner circle knew that war was
coming, and their chief anxiety was its legitimation. Blair’s note to Bush on
28 July urged him to seek an ultimatum through the UN, once Anglo-American
forces had begun to raise their presence and preparation in the Gulf from
October. As the Iraq Inquiry found, this was a covert message. It was not
discussed or agreed with colleagues, and ‘set the UK on a path leading to
diplomatic activity in the UN and the possibility of participation in military in
a way that would make it very difficult for the UK subsequently to withdraw
its support for the US’.¹¹⁹ With the exception of a final authorizing UNSC
resolution, the chain of events envisaged by Blair and his advisors was precisely
what happened.
Like Bush, Blair was a ‘proliferation pessimist’. He believed, rightly, that
Saddam aimed to reconstitute his weapons programme if or when interna-
tional sanctions collapsed. In government, there was the added fear that
Saddam rearming would trigger wider proliferation, and that forestalling
this threat would deter others. The government and the opposition also
believed, less accurately, what a number of intelligence agencies and security
officials believed, that Saddam’s Iraq had a highly developed latent capacity to
proliferate, and under an imperfect and weakening sanctions regime could
¹¹⁶ David Manning to Simon McDonald, 7 December 2001, ‘The War Against Terrorism: The
Second Phase’.
¹¹⁷ As Powell advised Blair, the objective should be ‘the removal of Saddam and replacement
by a new, more moderate regime’ as well as the ending of the WMD programme and stocks, the
ending of support for terrorism and peace with neighbours. But the ‘public line’ should be that if
there is ‘no return of inspectors will consider what further action. Not ruling anything in or out.
Change of regime obviously desirable but not our immediate aim’. Regime change would need a
pretext: ‘if he does allow in the inspectors need to find a new demand to justify military action’.
Powell to Blair, ‘Iraq: Change of Heart or Change of Regime’, 30 November 2001.
¹¹⁸ ‘Note on Iraq’, Tony Blair to Bush, 28 July 2002.
¹¹⁹ Report of the Iraq Inquiry, Volume II, p. 3.
56 Blunder
develop his clandestine nuclear programme quickly and covertly.¹²⁰ This was
partly drawn from a widespread misreading of the lessons of the so-called
‘near-miss’ after the Gulf War of 1991 and its aftermath, when IAEA inspec-
tors and intelligence analysts were allegedly caught off guard at the advanced
state of Saddam’s nuclear programme. As an MOD assessment assumed
in February 2002, ‘Iraq came close to developing nuclear weapons before the
Gulf War’, that without an intervention in the Gulf War, it ‘might have
produced a crude nuclear device by late 1993’, and the ‘high level of technical
capacity that Iraq has sustained means they could move forward quickly’.¹²¹
In fact, though observers had underestimated the ‘inputs’ or scale and invest-
ment of the project, the technical ‘outputs’ or results of Iraq’s ten-year, billion-
dollar project were extremely modest. In the words of former IAEA inspector
Robert Kelley, Iraq’s isotope separation programme was a ‘spectacular failure’,
the centrifuge effort had not accumulated any enriched uranium.¹²² Its wea-
ponization effort was barely preliminary, vindicating the JIC’s estimate in
December 1990 that technical difficulties and a lack of fissile material meant
that proliferation within four years was only a ‘worst-case’ scenario, possible
only in ‘ideal conditions’.¹²³
Despite this evidence that Saddam’s Iraq faced imposing obstacles to
proliferating, Blair then and subsequently maintained that in an alternative
world where Saddam was not overthrown, he could have readily acquired a
nuclear weapon under the erosion of sanctions. He cited in January 2010 and
again in January 2011 the influential pre-war analysis of former CIA intelli-
gence analyst and National Security Council official Kenneth Pollack.¹²⁴
¹²⁰ William Hague MP, posed this question and its implications in the House of Commons
on 24 September 2002 and Blair concurred:
‘Does the Prime Minister recollect that, in the half-century history of various states acquiring
nuclear capabilities, in almost every case—from the Soviet Union in 1949 to Pakistan in 1998—
their ability to do so has been greatly underestimated and understated by intelligence sources at
the time? Estimates today of Iraq taking several years to acquire a nuclear device should be seen
in that context, and within that margin of error. Given that, and the information from
defectors five years after the Gulf war, that 400 nuclear sites and installations had been
concealed in farmhouses and even schools in Iraq, is there not at least a significant risk of
the utter catastrophe of Iraq possessing a nuclear device without warning, some time in the
next couple of years? In that case, does not the risk of leaving the regime on its course today far
outweigh the risk of taking action quite soon?’, Hansard, 24 September 2002, column 13.
¹²¹ Declassified Memorandum, ‘Axis of Evil’, Simon Webb to Permanent Secretary/Secretary
of State, 27 February 2002, pp. 2, 8.
¹²² Robert Kelley, ‘The Iraqi and South African Nuclear Weapons Programs: The Importance
of Management’, Security Dialogue 27:1 (1996), pp. 27–38.
¹²³ JIC Report quoted in Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report of a
Commission of Privy Counsellors (House of Commons Report HC 898, London: Stationery Office,
2004), p. 43; see also the discussion in Jacques E. Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists,
Politicians and Proliferation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 84–95.
¹²⁴ Blair, IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 18; Witness Statement to the Iraq Inquiry, 14 January 2011,
p. 3; he also cited Pollack in his memoir, A Journey (London: Arrow Books, 2010, 2011 edn.),
Warpath 57
Pollack had warned in 2002 that Saddam could quickly rearm if left under an
eroding sanctions regime. But he has long since renounced that assessment. As
Pollack admitted in January 2004, he made his initial flawed assessment on the
basis of the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), and the post-invasion
discovery of the pitiful state of Saddam’s infrastructure and programme by the
Iraq Survey Group suggests that ‘in all probability Iraq was considerably
further from having a nuclear weapon than the five to seven years estimated
in the classified version of the NIE’.¹²⁵ In other words, Pollack rejected his own
original pessimistic estimate ten years before Blair cited it as a supporting
authority.¹²⁶ This fits a larger pattern of self-deception, whereby Blair cherry-
picks the most useful factual claims, then closes his mind to further scrutiny.
What about the wider Middle East? As well as the intensive focus on
weapons proliferation, Britain’s second major goal was to begin the trans-
formation of the region through a benign ‘domino’ effect. Strikingly, although
the ‘big picture’ of geopolitics often figured centrally in debate, it often
neglected Iran. When British debate did turn to the wider geopolitics, includ-
ing most anti-war opinion, it focused almost exclusively on the Arab-Israeli
dimension. Across government, only a few voices cautioned that invasion
could tip the balance in a more dangerous direction, by empowering, threat-
ening, and radicalizing Iran all at once. If invasion would likely strengthen the
Shia majority, that could enable Iran to assert its patronage in the region. At
the same time, placing a US-led military coalition in Iraq would effectively
install hostile forces on either side of Iran’s borders, a concerning development
for the country for obvious historical reasons, especially since it had been
officially named as one of the ‘Axis of Evil’ trio, and this could give extra
impetus for its nuclear programme. Iran, with its linkages to Iraqi militias and
parties, and cross-border access, would potentially be able to bleed inter-
national forces and subvert the occupiers’ designs. Britain’s near-obsession
with the Palestinian question was reinforced by the contingent event of the
Second Intifada that had raged since September 2000, and in 2002 as the case
for striking Iraq was being prepared, a number of violent flashpoints brought
to the fore the relationship of terrorism with the condition of the Arab
population of the Middle East. A strong belief persisted that Iraq and Israel–
Palestine were entwined. Addressing the latter would build legitimacy for the
former, while removing the ‘spoiler’ regime in Baghdad that had rejected the
Saudi Peace Initiative in March 2002 would strengthen the chance to bring
p. 384; Blair was referring to Pollack’s book that had warned of the erosion of sanctions and
Saddam’s capacity to reconstitute his nuclear programme, The Threatening Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 211–43.
¹²⁵ Kenneth M. Pollack, ‘Spies, Lies and Weapons: What Went Wrong’, Atlantic Monthly
293:1 (2004), pp. 78–92.
¹²⁶ In Chapter 4, I examine further the flawed claim that a Saddam left in office could readily
have rearmed in a clandestine programme under international scrutiny.
58 Blunder
about a political settlement over Gaza and the West Bank. Blair and others
were conscious of ‘unintended consequences’, but their geopolitical horizons
rarely stretched to Tehran. In his meeting with Cheney, his warnings were
notable for what they left out:
We must ensure that a campaign to bring about regime change in Iraq did not
inadvertently destabilise other countries in the Middle East. The Arab street was
very angry . . . We needed to generate a sense that we were determined to promote
a peace process that would give justice to the Palestinians . . . If this problem were
not tackled successfully, it would dominate the way that the Arabs thought about
the Iraq problem.¹²⁷
Arabs, not Iranians.
The neglect of Iran, and its capacity to intervene in Iraq, went beyond Blair.
In the parliamentary debate of 18 March 2003, Iran was mentioned seven
times only, five times only incidentally in relation to Saddam’s war against the
country, as proof of his aggressive tendencies, once in terms of the nature of
repressive dictatorships, and once in relation to deterrence. The Cabinet
Office’s ‘Iraq Options Paper’ discusses Iran in general terms but not its
inclination or capacity to resist the project: it was likely to be ‘prickly’ but
‘neutral’ in the course of the invasion, deserving ‘special attention’ in building
the coalition, and having an ‘interest’ in opposing Kurdish secession and in
the rights of its ‘co-religionists’ in the south.¹²⁸ This did not even come close
to Iran’s extensive intervention in post-invasion Iraq, revealed by Wikileaks-
released reports, the shadow war between militias backed by Iran’s Quds force
and Western occupiers, and Iran’s supply of weapons to insurgents, including
‘rockets, magnetic bombs that can be attached to the underside of cars’, and
‘explosively formed penetrators’, or EFPs, which are the most lethal type of
roadside bomb in Iraq.¹²⁹
This lacuna around Iran was also a shortcoming of the FCO.¹³⁰ As one
senior FCO civil servant speculated in laying out the options, ‘Removal of
Saddam, if achieved swiftly, would be applauded by his neighbours, the GCC
and the wider Arab/Islamic World’. This was not only an oversimplification,
as Saddam’s downfall was cautioned against by a number of Arab govern-
ments and opposed by the Arab League. It was also untrue of Iran’s reaction,
which went well beyond applause.¹³¹ The FCO’s longest written assessment,
¹²⁷ Letter David Manning to Simon McDonald, 11 March 2002, ‘Conversation between the
Prime Minister and Vice President Cheney, 11 March 2002’. Cited in Report of the Iraq Inquiry,
3.2, 358, p. 450.
¹²⁸ Cabinet Office Iraq Options Paper, March 2002, Overseas and Defence Secretariat.
¹²⁹ Michael R. Gordon & Andrew W. Lehren, ‘Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi
Militias’, The New York Times, 22 October 2010.
¹³⁰ Jonathan Steele, ‘Trouble at the FCO’, London Review of Books 38:15 (2016), p. 10.
¹³¹ Simon McDonald to Michael Tatham (then Blair’s Private Secretary, Foreign Affairs),
3 December 2001.
Warpath 59
‘Scenarios for the future of Iraq after Saddam’, estimated that in the event of
forcible overthrow, the presence of ‘large numbers of forces in sensitive areas’
after a ‘clear military victory’ would generate ‘far more influence’ than if
Saddam fell without an invasion, and optimistically reckoned that the pres-
ence of foreign forces’ ordering influence would mean that ‘The Iraqi popu-
lation would probably remain relatively passive’. Iran did not feature in this
section. Where it did elsewhere, Iraq’s Shia majority ‘would be suspicious of an
increase in Iranian influence and have no desire to see the instillation of a
clerical regime’,¹³² with no recognition that Iranian patronage might become
more attractive if the Shia population felt threatened, and that Iran was
capable of sponsoring friendly regimes apart from ‘clerical’ ones. An under-
lying stability and Shia restraint was presumed. Also presumed was a clear
dividing line between military victory and post-conflict policing, as was the
role of the West as bringer of order into chaos.
These delusions were able to thrive partly because the information base was
poor, as the FCO lacked an embassy and derived much of its information
about Iraqi politics indirectly, via a ‘watching brief ’ from Amman and from
brief visits to Baghdad, increasing the need to project theories onto the
country.¹³³ Jonathan Steele argues that the forewarnings were only from
academics, and ‘nowhere’ in the published Whitehall documents are papers
‘which spelt out that Iran would increase its influence in Iraq and that the
region’s stability would be threatened’.¹³⁴ This is not quite true. There was
some advice on the point. Secretary of Defence Geoff Hoon suggested in
March 2002 that with regards to WMD, ‘Iran may be the greater problem
for the UK . . . There is no current plan to deal with these risks. Ironically, we
have Saddam bound into an established control mechanism’.¹³⁵ The issue of
Iran and the sectarian picture and possible internecine fighting within Iraq
and across the Iran–Iraq border did come up, but in the margins, and
remained an afterthought. Blair later admitted that the government under-
estimated external actors, ‘people did not think that Al-Qaeda and Iran would
play the role that they did’, which ‘caused the mission very nearly to fail’.¹³⁶
What actual failure would have looked like, in that case, is intriguing.
¹³² FCO Directorate for Strategy and Innovation and Research Analysts, ‘Scenarios for the
Future of Iraq after Saddam’ attached to letter, Simon McDonald to David Manning,
26 September 2002.
¹³³ As Edward Chaplin, the FCO’s director for the Middle East, indicated: IIT, Tuesday
1 December 2009, p. 39. Chaplin’s testimony is haughtily dismissive of American naïvety
about a post-Saddam Iraq and its policymakers’ credulity towards exiles’ lobbying, but FCO
documents suggest a persistent failure on its part, too, to anticipate the severity of sectarianized
conflict and the wider difficulties of occupation.
¹³⁴ Jonathan Steele, ‘Chilcot Report: Foreign Office’, Political Quarterly 87:4 (2016),
pp. 484–5, p. 484.
¹³⁵ Minute Hoon to Blair, ‘Iraq’, 22 March 2002. ¹³⁶ Blair, IIT, 29 Jan 2010, p. 182.
60 Blunder
The collective inability to weigh carefully that a new conflict in the heart of
the Middle East could attract other adversaries was a bad error of judgement,
suggesting an implicit ‘best case’ expectation that Iraq’s neighbours would
‘bandwagon’ with the momentum of regime change, and that Iran would be
impressed or intimidated by the campaign. There were fleeting moments
when Blair anticipated darker possibilities. In a sombre private note to Bush
in July 2002, Blair invited the President to imagine that invasion triggered a
range of problems, and that Syria and Iran might be ‘actively hostile’.¹³⁷
Crucially, though, Blair raised this scenario in an implementational context,
not a deliberative one. He was in that note making the case for the value of an
international coalition, arguing that an internationalized effort would be more
likely to mitigate the risks of war, suggesting that a coalition would somehow
make Iranian resistance less likely. It was not until January 2003 that Blair
asked the Chief of the Defence Staff to identify ‘worst-case scenarios’, and he
was advised ‘any rapid regime collapse followed by a power vacuum could
result in internecine fighting between the Shia and Sunni populations, par-
ticularly in Baghdad, and adventuring by adjacent countries and ethnic groups
that irretrievably fractured the country’.¹³⁸
The tragedy of Iraq can be glimpsed in that very meeting.¹³⁹ Despite the
dangers of internecine chaos, the Chief of Defence Staff admitted that the
thinking on this issue was still ‘woolly’. Blair’s response to the warning
betrayed a mind already made up. Coalition forces, he said, ‘must prevent
anarchy and inter-necine fighting breaking out’, asking the MOD to develop a
‘feasible plan’ for the aftermath. The potential for chaos, and for coalition
forces not to prevent but to cause anarchy, was therefore apparent, but at no
stage was this to disturb the commitment to join the invasion. At the same
meeting, Blair indicated his ‘strong view that we wouldn’t be looking much
past the end of February before seeing this take place’. The decision to go to
war was insulated from consideration of the grave problems that could be
caused by doing so. Tragically, this was a failure throughout. When powerful
objections arose within government about the need to invade and the pros-
pects of success, doubters treated their own objections as problems to be
overcome in terms of persuasion and alliance-building, not as reasons to
think twice about invading. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, for instance, who
had privately been more sceptical about the strength of the case for invasion
and emerges as more of a war-supporting sceptic, had suggested in a phone
call to Colin Powell that the case against Iraq was ‘third or fourth strongest’
¹³⁷ Blair to Bush, ‘Note on Iraq’, 28 July 2002.

¹³⁸ Minute, SECOS to PS/Secretary of State [MOD] 22 January 2003, ‘Record of the meeting
between the Prime Minister and Chiefs of Staff to discuss Op Telic’, 15 January 2003.
¹³⁹ The more revealing record of that meeting is the unofficial account, Minute MA/DCJO
(Ops) to MA (CJO) 15 January 2003, ‘Briefing to the Prime Minister’.
Warpath 61
behind other candidates for attention, and that ‘Saddam was evil but not
insane’.¹⁴⁰ This was three days after the Downing Street meeting confirmed
the working assumption that Britain would take part in ‘any military action’.
Decision not only defeated doubt, it predated it.
The Blair circle, then, believed that the regime was the problem, and that it
posed medium- and long-term threats, though not an imminent one, and that
time was running out on a failing containment programme. Blair and his circle
sincerely believed that it was in the British national interest to help the US
wage a preventive war to destroy an emerging threat before it materialized,
with all the other dividends this would bring: ‘freeing up’ a tumultuous region,
signalling to other would-be proliferating rogues that an Atlantic-led inter-
national community would not tolerate any mischief, and bolstering British
influence in Washington. It was not enough for the inner circle to decide it
wanted war. Building a domestic coalition around the issue was the other
necessary step.
PART IV. CARRYING OPINION
Decision-makers realized that to succeed in this war, more than most wars,
they must carry British opinion, to overcome several reservations. Botching
the task of persuasion and acting against majority sentiment could fatally
damage the government. Around the core of believed truths, Blair assembled a
bodyguard, what Manning called a ‘clever’ presentation strategy, that worked
on three levels. First was the time horizon, presenting a preventive war as a
matter of looming urgency by eliding and blurring the distinction between
pre-emption and prevention, characterizing the adversary as a near-term
menace with imminent capabilities.
Secondly, the government framed the diplomatic process of disarmament as
a potential way to avoid war, so that the actual objective of regime collapse
would be understood as the regrettable result of Iraqi defiance. Blair persuaded
the wider UK government and general public that there was a way out of war,
a possibility that a military campaign would not happen, and that the crisis
over Iraqi WMD could be resolved and Iraq rehabilitated as a result of
diplomatic and military pressure. The purpose of putting a disarmament
process before the UN was to build a persuasive case by inducing Saddam
either to capitulate and therefore for the regime to change itself, or more likely
to tempt Saddam to withhold full cooperation from a legitimate process,
¹⁴⁰ Minute, Simon McDonald to Peter Ricketts (then the Political Director of the FCO),
26 July 2002.
62 Blunder
creating a pretext for war. To secure their domestic mandate for war, they
allowed Britons to believe that a decision for war was avoidable, that peaceful
disarmament was still their ambition, long after the decision for war had
effectively been made. Thirdly, in making the case through an intelligence dossier
with commentary, the state placed great weight on ambiguous evidence to make
compelling the forensic case for Saddam’s weapons programme.
At the centre of this exercise was the concept of ‘conditions’. The
decision-makers allowed others to conclude that Britain had specified
preconditions for any participation in a military campaign. But the condi-
tions Blair identified were in his mind suggestions for how the strategy to
mobilize opinion and build legitimacy should succeed (rather than minimal
requirements for UK participation), to support the military campaign he
had already decided to commit to. As he advised his Private Secretary for
Foreign Affairs in advance of a visit by US Secretary of Defence Donald
Rumsfeld, ‘We should say we’ll be with you. Here’s how to make it happen
successfully; not: here are our conditions for being with you’.¹⁴¹ Blair
indicated on multiple occasions to Washington that Britain would support
American military action, as clearly as it was possible to say. Meeting with
Rumsfeld in early June 2002, Blair confirmed that ‘The UK will be with the
US in any military action’.¹⁴² When asked about the UK’s stance towards
Iraq in cabinet later that month, Blair did not mention this meeting or
commitment.¹⁴³
The government’s public case for the severity of the threat was organized
around the publication of intelligence dossiers, in September 2002 and
February 2003. They were designed to answer a simple question: ‘Why Iraq,
Why Now?’, and by doing so, to seize the initiative against significant public
opposition.¹⁴⁴ The process mingled the assessment of threats with the ‘selling’
of the case for war. Because it was organized to synthesize intelligence, against
the clock, to support a case the government already believed in, it jeopardized
the principle that intelligence should inform policy but not be led by it.¹⁴⁵ The
¹⁴¹ Manuscript comment Blair on Minute Rycroft to Prime Minister, 30 May 2002, ‘Don
Rumsfeld’. Cited in Report of the Iraq Inquiry vol. II, p. 23; this is supported by the testimony of
Matthew Rycroft, Blair’s Private Secretary, on 10 September 2010: ‘If your follow-up question is
if one of those had not been pursued, would the UK have not joined the US in military action,
had it come to that, my answer would be they weren’t conditions in that sense. They were things
that needed to be done . . . if they hadn’t been pursued, they would not have fundamentally
altered the equation in our strategy’.
¹⁴² Letter Rycroft to Watkins, 5 June 2002, ‘Prime Minister’s Meeting with Rumsfeld, 5 June:
Iraq’.
¹⁴³ Cabinet Conclusions 20 June 2002, cited in Iraq Inquiry vol. II, p. 26.
¹⁴⁴ On the history of the dossier’s creation and publication, see Rawnsley, The End of the
Party, pp. 107–21.
¹⁴⁵ Alastair Campbell even chaired meetings with intelligence officials on 5 September and
9 September, critiquing drafts and requesting/obtaining changes to the wording of the dossier.
Warpath 63
base of intelligence itself was thin, while language was hardened and caveats
were reduced or removed.¹⁴⁶ The JIC itself had estimated on 15 March 2002
that the intelligence around Iraq’s WMD programme was ‘sporadic and
patchy’, subject to the regime’s ‘concealment and exaggeration’,¹⁴⁷ though
judging that Iraq continued to pursue WMD and delivery systems. Yet Blair
in the Foreword cast the matter as ‘beyond doubt’,¹⁴⁸ and before the House on
24 September characterized the JIC’s picture of Saddam’s weapons pro-
gramme as ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’, a claim refuted by both
Lord Butler and the Iraq Inquiry as an inaccurate account of the meagre
intelligence base.¹⁴⁹ This reflected a wider incuriosity about the strength of
the case for the existence and development of Saddam’s arsenal. Minds were
closing on the issue, as the consumer requested proof of truths that the
consumer believed it knew. Senior aide Sir Stephen Wall reported that Blair
‘didn’t ask a lot of crucial questions’ about nuclear capacity because he ‘didn’t
want to’.¹⁵⁰
In the build-up to war, the government propagated an inflated spectre of
Saddam Hussein’s supposed capacity for rapid assault with chemical weapons,
reporting in September 2002 that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had the capacity to
launch chemical and biological weapons within forty-five minutes’ notice.¹⁵¹
A revelation of the inquiry was that policymakers genuinely failed to appre-
ciate the distinction between tactical ‘battlefield’ and strategic range weapons,
and that there was a striking incuriosity about the actual geographical extent of
the threat.¹⁵² This captured the public imagination. Anticipating the dossier,
The News of the World reported that ‘evil Saddam has enough chemical and
biological stocks to attack the entire planet, and the missile technology to
deliver them’. Tabloid newspapers interpreted the government’s dossier to
mean that Saddam could strike Britons with germ warfare missiles in Cyprus
on forty-five minutes’ notice, mistaking both the limited range of Saddam’s
weapons and the time it would take for them to reach their targets even if they
¹⁴⁶ As argues Mark Pythian, ‘Political Interference in the Intelligence Process’, in Rob Dover
& Michael S. Goodman (eds), Learning from the Secret Past: Cases in British Intelligence History
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011), p. 105.
¹⁴⁷ JIC Report, 15 March 2002, cited in Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruc-
tion, p. 67.
¹⁴⁸ As Sir Lawrence Freedman observed, see Jack Straw, IIT, 21 January 2010, p. 60.
¹⁴⁹ Hansard, 22 February 2007, column 1231; Report of the Iraq Inquiry, vol. IV, Section 4.2,
p. 275.
¹⁵⁰ Cited in Rawnsley, The End of the Party, p. 115.
¹⁵¹ Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government (London:
Stationery Office, September 2002), pp. 4, 17.
¹⁵² Blair told the House of Commons he had been unaware that the controversial
‘45 minute’ claim in the government’s September 2002 Iraq dossier referred only to tactical
battlefield weapons, and not long-range ballistic missiles. Hansard, 4 February 2004, column
772. See also ‘Blair admits misunderstanding “45-minute” claim’, Sydney Morning Herald,
5 February 2004.
64 Blunder
were long-range.¹⁵³ In the public debate, Saddam’s limited capabilities became
‘not a chemical weapon for use on the battlefield, but a weapon of mass
destruction for use in an interstate war’. The government did not knowingly
deceive on this point. But neither did it attempt to disabuse the public of
this fear.
The dossier was part of an effort to define the policy choice in starkly binary
terms, as one of precautionary direct action, in the form of final confrontation,
versus passivity. The Press Office advised on presentation of the dossier that
‘September 11 showed that we cannot safely ignore distant threats simply
because we cannot get into the minds of terrorists or the leaders of terror
states’.¹⁵⁴ Who exactly was recommending that Britain ‘ignore’ future threats,
they did not say. Likewise, Blair in a press conference on 7 September insisted
‘the policy of inaction is not a policy we can responsibly subscribe to’,¹⁵⁵ and
Rycroft briefed Blair on 20 September 2002 ahead of parliamentary discussion,
‘Would be unconscionable to be aware of the threat and do nothing’.¹⁵⁶
By framing the policy picture in these distorted terms, the government
invested the issue with urgency. It took a broad audience from ‘why’, as most
generally agreed that Iraq’s weapons programme was a long-term problem, to
the question of ‘why now’? By doing so, they injected into the Iraq question
a dynamic identified by strategic theorist Thomas Schelling, the ‘premium
on haste’, the advantage of the first-move (or getting in the retaliation first),
‘undoubtedly the greatest piece of mischief that can be introduced into
military forces, and the greatest source of military danger that peace will
explode into all out war’.¹⁵⁷ As well as narrowing the time horizon of the
perceived threat, war proponents framed the issue as a moral test, to act
absolutely or not to act and effectively capitulate. Rupert Murdoch’s press
reflected and reinforced this framing, painting the question explicitly as a
three-part contest between Churchillian heroism, Hitlerian aggression, and
the Chamberlain-ites who were spineless and deluded, embodied in Jacques
Chirac’s France and doubters at home.¹⁵⁸ The government and tabloids’
criticisms of France were an important rhetorical foil, presenting Paris’s
intransigent vow to veto any resolution authorizing force as unprincipled
geopolitical opportunism.
Both Blair and former opposition leader William Hague acknowledged that
the Iraq–Munich parallels could be overdrawn, before going on to draw them,
¹⁵³ ‘Brits 45 Mins from Doom’, The Sun, 25 September 2002.

¹⁵⁴ Minute, John Williams, Press Office to PS/PUS ‘Iraq Media Strategy’, 4 September 2002.
¹⁵⁵ The White House, 7 September 2002, President Bush, Prime Minister Blair Discuss
Keeping the Peace, at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/09/
20020907-2.html.
¹⁵⁶ Minute Matthew Rycroft to Blair, 20 September 2002, ‘Iraq: Tuesday’s Debate’.
¹⁵⁷ Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (Yale: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 227.
¹⁵⁸ See David McKnight, Murdoch’s Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p. 186.
Warpath 65
insisting that the world had changed geopolitically from interstate balance
of power of the past, while drawing on that past’s most extreme and
notorious example. For good measure, Hague accused those who were
merely in favour of economically punishing, patrolling, and occasionally
bombing Iraq of ‘appeasement’,¹⁵⁹ as though opponents of war were pro-
posing making persistent, unreciprocated concessions to Iraq in order to
pacify it, which is what appeasement is. Blair’s case to the House added a
moral dimension. Not only was there an urgent and growing security
problem, there was an urgent moral case, for liberating Iraqis and alleviat-
ing them from a destructive sanctions regime, and, as is often forgotten,
both a strategic and moral case on behalf of international order. And unlike
American neoconservatives, who mostly dismissed international institu-
tions, British hawks argued on liberal internationalist lines that the cred-
ibility of the United Nations was at stake.
The final, necessary causal step on the road to war was the parliamentary
vote on 18 March 2003,¹⁶⁰ passed by convincing majority of 412 to 149. This
debate, too, was conditioned by a sense of urgency and the embrace of
impatience as a virtue in the post-9/11 world. In Chapter 2, we will examine
the ideological assumptions about ‘regime change’ as they were reflected in the
parliamentarians’ deliberations in greater depth. Here, we trace the verdict of
MPs that in the escalating confrontation with Iraq, they dare not back down.
Britain had no codified constitutional requirement for parliamentary au-
thorization, and in 2003, there wasn’t the growing convention of consultation
that evolved later. Traditionally, governments committed military forces
through the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, effectively the fiat of Downing
Street. Parliament historically has been recalled and debated military action,
but this was the first time since the Korean War of 1950 that the government
requested parliamentary approval for a military deployment. This time, the
British people and their elected representatives were presented with an open,
democratic debate over Iraq, but not under conditions of their choosing. Blair
had resisted earlier demands for a parliamentary vote in early 2002, on the
basis that no decisions had been taken about the use of force, until January
2003.¹⁶¹ This position changed as pressure grew. The government decided that
in the absence of a final UNSC resolution and with the question of mandates
¹⁵⁹ ‘The Prime Minister said that analogies with the 30s can be taken too far, and of course
they can, yet in some of the opposition to the Government’s stance there is a hint of appease-
ment’. Hansard, 18 March 2003, William Hague, column 791.
¹⁶⁰ The transcript of the debate can be found at https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=
2003-03-18.760.0 and https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030318/
debtext/30318-06.htm. Accessed 15 November 2016.
¹⁶¹ See J. Strong, ‘Why Parliament Now Decides on War: Tracing the Growth of the
Parliamentary Prerogative through Syria, Libya and Iraq’, British Journal of Politics and Inter-
national Relations 17 (2015), pp. 604–22, pp. 608–9.
66 Blunder
and legitimacy constant, parliamentary approval had become politically
necessary.
There was a genuine discretion to the vote of MPs, and a conscious choice of
war. To be sure, it was not purely through force of argument that the motion
passed. There was back-room cajoling, coercion, and inducement, with the
whip’s office applying discipline. But that discipline would have applied also
if the debate had been held months before, and it was not all-powerful. This
was not a fresh government with a premier at the height of his powers. Rather,
it had been worn down by six years in office, and was well into its second
term, with the continual threat of a party revolt against the government’s
alignment with the Bush administration in the War on Terror. As the whips
and advisors then estimated, they could still have lost an earlier vote. Neither
would it be enough to prevail on the strength of opposition votes of support. It
would be politically hazardous to pass the motion with reliance on opposition
votes. The ghost of Labour Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald left fear that it
was imperative to obtain a majority through the votes of Labour MPs. Even as
things stood in March 2003, a point Blair deliberately delayed until, bringing
the issue before the Commons threatened the survival of his premiership,
something Blair turned to his advantage by making Iraq a vote of confidence,
to raise the stakes of opposition.
The question of time and the fact that Britain was already engaged in an
escalating crisis was crucial. Parliament deliberated effectively under a self-
induced pressure of time sensitivity and apprehension about the dangers of
backing off. British troops were deployed in the Gulf, with their coalition
partners, in high readiness and awaiting the order. An earlier decision had
already been taken, to take a posture ready to strike from a ‘generated start’, or
a longer build-up of forces in Kuwait, which accelerated in the two months
before invasion, with 40,000 troops, sailors, and air force personnel in the Gulf
and Kuwaiti desert. This in itself pro-war MPs asserted as a moral principle to
support already-mobilized troops. The parliamentary resolution included the
proposal that the House ‘offers wholehearted support to the men and women
of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces now on duty in the Middle East’, thus
inverting the civilian-military relationship, implying that rejecting war
would betray those charged to serve the state.
The vote came at the end of a process whereby military preparations had
run ahead of an intensive diplomatic process.¹⁶² By that time, the UNMOVIC/
Blix report of 27 January 2002 had judged that Iraq had offered partial
¹⁶² The parliamentary debate followed on from the escalation and breakdown of a diplomatic
process: after UNSCR 1441 was passed in November 2002, and then after 700 inspections had
been conducted in Iraq from November to March by UNMOVIC; after the reported failure of
Iraq to fully cooperate with 1441; after Parliament had voted twice to endorse the UN process in
November and February; and after the UNSC had rejected a draft resolution in February 2003, as
Russia and France promised to veto any resolution for military action.
Warpath 67
procedural cooperation, while it called for more substantive cooperation and did
not discount the possibility of the existence of WMD. The absence of full
cooperation had been seized upon by Washington and London as evidence
enough of a threat. Even if Saddam had given complete compliance and
verifiable disarmament, it was difficult to prove a ‘negative’ beyond reasonable
doubt, the absence of the arsenal. By loading a heavy burden of proof on
Saddam’s shoulders, a regime that had dissembled and defied UN resolutions
before, the case of regime guilt had become unfalsifiable. The US and its allies
deliberately raised international demands high, to the point where any ‘material
breach, defined as not co-operating fully, immediately and unconditionally’¹⁶³
created a casus belli. At the moment inspectors announced progress and
increased cooperation, the government could argue that the precautionary
principle dictated final military action. Even partial UN inspection processes
effectively made war more likely. Those against invasion effectively opted to
argue for the continuation of an inspection process that was finite, and which
was only occurring because there was a credible threat of force in the Gulf and
a mobilization backing it that could not be sustained. The ‘finality’ expressed
in UN Resolution 1441 added to the pressure. Some MPs fearful of war’s
consequences felt the mobilization pressure. John Randall MP realized that
‘the military build-up is like water behind a dam. We cannot keep it there
forever. That is why I think that what is going to happen is inevitable’.
Blair formulated the problem not primarily as a decision whether to invade,
but a decision not to back down from a crisis that the US-led coalition had
deliberately ramped up, and urged them to end the waiting game: ‘I am not
prepared to carry on waiting and delaying, with our troops in place in difficult
circumstances’, and ‘our fault has not been impatience. The truth is that our
patience should have been exhausted weeks and months and even years ago’.
‘Back away from this confrontation now, and future conflicts will be infinitely
worse and more devastating in their effects’, he argued. Restraint was tanta-
mount to fecklessness and would invite further aggression:
This is the choice before us. If this House now demands that at this moment,
faced with this threat from this regime, British troops are pulled back, that we
turn away at the point of reckoning—this is what it means—what then? What will
Saddam feel? He will feel strengthened beyond measure. What will the other
states that tyrannise their people, the terrorists who threaten our existence, take
from that? They will take it that the will confronting them is decaying and feeble.
Who will celebrate and who will weep if we take our troops back from the
Gulf now?
Commons MPs were free to notice the contradictions and flaws in Blair’s
summons to impatience. Not enough did. By March 2003, the US and the UK
¹⁶³ As Blair reminded the House, Hansard, 18 March 2003, Column 767.
68 Blunder
had already struck hard against al-Qaeda and taken on the burden of occu-
pying Afghanistan. To step back from occupying Iraq while maintaining these
demanding tasks was not the equivalent of being ‘decaying and feeble’. Iraq
could still have been subject to modified sanctions, including prohibitions
on imports of materials for military use and the illicit export of oil. The case
for war erased any sense of a policy middle ground between inaction and
regime change. Blair dismissed over a decade of serious sanctions, inspections,
no-fly zones, and bombing as ‘feebleness’ and ‘indulgence’, the ‘lassitude of
the past 12 years; to talk, to discuss, to debate but never to act; to declare our
will but not to enforce it’, and the biggest recruiting influence on anti-
Western hostility is ‘indecision, and the failure to take action to show that
such resolve matters’.
Most MPs accepted the government’s case about where to think from, in the
middle of a crisis that Washington and London had deliberately reignited.
Most accepted the suspect assumption that the international community had
been hitherto weak with Iraq. David Trimble MP asked rhetorically: ‘Are we
just going to strike camp and go away?’ Donald Anderson MP, chair of the
Foreign Affairs Select Committee, asked,
should we now stand down our troops, and should we fundamentally change our
strategy? In theory, we could indeed fold our tents and glide away, forgetting
about the fact that there are men and women representing our country on the
borders of Kuwait and Iraq. We have chosen to be engaged. In my judgment, we
made a correct strategic decision way back last summer. We remain engaged with
our US allies. To withdraw at this stage would be unthinkable . . . The fact is,
however, that we cannot easily now turn back without undermining our own
credibility and the authority of the United Nations.
The Leader of Opposition similarly argued that ‘the Prime Minister’s decision
comes at the end of 12 years of what was too often indecision by the
international community’. ‘I genuinely urge them all to consider the conse-
quences of turning back now’. Further delay would make ‘any military action
nigh on impossible’, which would ‘split the international community and
wreck the UN’. The imperative to act decisively in order to rescue the United
Nations was a powerful uniting theme, as was the rewriting of recent history to
suggest that the world had done ‘nothing’ about Saddam’s violations until
March 2003,¹⁶⁴ and it gave an internationalist justification to what opponents
branded an ‘illegal’ war. Andrew Mackay MP warned that
¹⁶⁴ For instance, Clive Solely MP charged that ‘The real criticism of all us is that we did
nothing when Iraq first started to breach not just the 1991 resolutions, but the ceasefire itself,
which Saddam had never put into effect. That ceasefire was signed with the UN, not the United
States, and he breached it time and again with genocide, torture, human rights abuses, weapons
of mass destruction and terrorism—the lot—and we did nothing, because of which many people
have died and the misery continues’.
Warpath 69
the whole international community would suffer if we and our American allies
withdrew our troops from the Iraqi border without Saddam Hussein having
complied with the UN resolutions that he has flouted. Every terrorist and tin-
pot dictator around the world would be given a green light. The harm and
damage that that would do, to us and to future generations, is incalculable.
American troops were not going to be withdrawn however, regardless of
Britain’s decision. John Maples MP recognized this probability, but voiced
similar fears with a curious analogy:
If, on the verge of battle, with our troops and their command structure integrated
into an alliance with the United States, playing vital small parts in that military
effort, they were withdrawn, that would destroy the credibility of British foreign
and security policy for a generation. Just reflect what happened at Suez. It took
26 years, till the Falklands war, for the credibility of British foreign policy to be
reasserted.
Suez was a botched and ill-conceived expedition, however, not a decision of
restraint.
The suggestion that British credibility would be badly damaged implicitly
assumed that the US-led invasion would succeed, unlike Suez, and leave
impugned the judgement and nerve of countries that stood back. Long-term
credibility would scarcely be guaranteed by the commitment if, as Tony
Worthington MP presciently warned, ‘We are going to invade a country of
Balkanesque complexity where occupying forces will be unable easily to
withdraw. We are rapidly in danger of becoming piggy in the middle for
every discontented ethnic or religious group in the area’.
‘Who will celebrate and who will weep?’, asked Blair. Among those cele-
brating a drive into Mesopotamia would be al-Qaeda, for whom an alienated
and frightened Sunni Arab population in Northern Iraq could constitute a
new base in the heart of the territory it wished to turn into a caliphate, and
Iranian Shia supremacists and hardline nationalists, who could strengthen
their hand through Iraq while adding to their domestic arguments for going
nuclear. Notice also that in this threat assessment, the terrorists and rogue
regimes hawks branded as suicidal and beyond deterrence were also appar-
ently open to the encouragement and discouragement of example. Ultimately,
the impulse Blair successfully appealed to was one that has plunged states into
draining peripheral wars before, the urge to eliminate rather than contain
problems, and the fear of embarrassment and looking weak.
We can appreciate the tactical guile of the government in investing the
question with urgency, in placing the burden of proof unfalsifiably on Iraq,
and in escalating the crisis to create a fear of backing down and losing
credibility. Nevertheless, the responsibility for judgement still lies with the
Parliament. It chose to accept Blair’s dubious precautionary argument, that the
risks lay overwhelmingly on one side of the equation, and that bringing down
70 Blunder
the government of a country subject to great internal distress amounted to
‘caution’, compared to containing and deterring the regime’s behaviour, all
while still shouldering the burden of occupying Afghanistan. The Parliament
went along with the self-contradictory claims of Blair, that the Iraq that was
groaning and immiserated under the weight of sanctions had yet still amassed
a WMD arsenal and could quickly produce a nuclear weapon, with enough
infrastructure and scientific-industrial base intact; that the unstable and reck-
less regime that apparently already possessed stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons had possessed such weapons yet not used them for fifteen
years; and that a rogue state that was heavily risk-prone was the same regime
that would go to the trouble of transferring weapons to third parties in order to
threaten the West while avoiding retaliation. At least some of the MPs who
voted for war were responsible for yielding to a more reckless impulse, their
built-up sense of fatigue with the Iraq-WMD issue, and the wish to terminate
an already-existing conflict in the hope that it would go away, the symptom of
a view of foreign policy characterized by the need to find definitive solutions
for, and an unwillingness to live with and manage, chronic problems.
CONCLUSIO N
British warmakers hardly stopped to consider ‘whether’ to strike. Powerful

assumptions drove them quickly beyond the most critical choice, tilting them
instead into questions of execution and presentation. Their overriding pre-
occupation was how, when, with what public justification, and the prospects
for getting support at home and abroad. Instead of providing cautionary
advice and generating the creative friction needed to scrutinize choices, the
main task of intelligence services and the professional military was in effect to
service the government as ‘customer’. Unexamined assumptions could stand
undisturbed: that 9/11 was a harbinger, not an aberration; that there were no
viable intermediate measures between invasion and passivity; that any antici-
pated difficulties with regime change should not disturb calculus whether to
invade. Those certitudes, as well as a very politicized time pressure, predis-
posed the majority of the Parliament to give its blessing. The most important
decision of all, whether to kill people and break things to serve policy goals and
create a better state of peace, deserved a more serious deliberation.
To conclude the chapter with the most consequential question one can ask
of a war’s origins, ‘Was there a point when the looming collision might have
been averted?’¹⁶⁵ This chapter suggests bleak answers. For America, the
¹⁶⁵ Michael H. Hunt, Crises in US Foreign Policy: An International History Reader (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 331.
Warpath 71
crossroads point effectively was first reached on 9/11. The balance of opinion,
the exact mixture of fear and confidence, were moving heavily in one direction
from that point. Had the nineteen hijackers faltered, or homeland security
functioned with greater efficiency, Bush would probably have remained a
reluctant warmaker, resisting the entreaties of the Iraq war party, with the
congress and the American populace unaroused. Absent an equivalent, major
strategic shock, a more belligerent Vice President Cheney suddenly promoted
would have lacked a pretext. The only identifiable alternative development
that could have deflected the Bush administration might have been a more
adverse turn of events in its war in Afghanistan. Could the Taliban have
chosen a different strategy to better resist America’s overwhelming force in
the autumn of 2001, reducing their appetite for opening a second front in the
War on Terror?
For Britain, it might seem less clear-cut. There was greater opposition to
regime change in the UK, and support was more conditional, more concerned
for legality and the legitimacy conferred by international institutions. The only
decisive potential moment of reversal lay in the House of Commons’ vote on
18 March 2003. But as Chapter 2 shows, even that parliamentary debate
suggests that the success of the 9/11 hijackers was the principal juncture.
A set of ideas about security and Western power had germinated well before,
and the 9/11 attacks gave them fresh wind. Provided it was framed as the
enforcement of the international community’s will, this made a parliamentary
revolt beyond the left wing of the Labour Party unlikely. According to a
doctrine that was gathering pace throughout the ‘interwar’ period, not only
did globalization make modern states uniquely vulnerable. As an instrument
for producing peace and security, liberal war could work. Britain was both too
frightened, and not frightened enough. The mid to late 1990s, a period in
diplomatic history now attracting renewed attention, created a permissive
ideological context. To that era that we now turn.
Breaking States
The Ideological Roots of Regime Change
In interpreting Iraq’s warnings, commentators rightly call for a more rigorous,

self-critical process of decision in government. They call for the revival of the
cabinet committee system, and advocate more ‘red-teaming’, or the organized
probing of assumptions through creative exercises.¹ To its credit, Britain’s
Ministry of Defence has extracted warnings from Iraq about the need for
critical thinking, careful defining of problems, attention to the gap between
ambitions and capabilities, and wariness of the non-linear and wild tendencies
of war.²
Since we can never be too sure that our assumptions are warranted,
embedding scrutiny in decision-making is a valuable step. But the Iraq
blunder flowed from something more profound than an error in Whitehall
machinery. In his response to the publication of ‘Chilcot’, political scientist
Robert Jervis observed that flawed process on its own does not sufficiently
explain the recourse to war:
If it turned out that Saddam had had active Weapons of Mass Destruction
(WMD) programs, few people would have cared or even noticed that intelligence
had expressed too much certainty, had failed to examine its assumptions, or
exaggerated the reliability of its sources. In parallel, the degree to which Prime
Minister Blair overstated the intelligence and short-circuited standard procedures
would have seemed like the normal ways of handling a crisis. Had the American
and British forces been greeted as liberators and the local population been able to
manage a peaceful transition, the lack of preparation for the less happy events
¹ Michael Clarke, RUSI Briefing Note: ‘Chilcot, The Judgement of History’, 7 July 2016,
https://rusi.org/commentary/chilcot-judgement-history; Jean Seaton, ‘Chilcot Report: Introduc-
tion’, Political Quarterly 87:4 (2016), pp. 476–80.
² Ministry of Defence, The Good Operation: A Handbook for Those Involved in Operational
Policy and its Implementation (London: Ministry of Defence, 2017).
Breaking States 73
that actually unfolded would not have been seen as a major failure, although it
still would have been one.³
Accordingly, the problem was not closed decision-making or a dogmatic
mindset in isolation. In an alternative universe, if the Blair government
undertook exactly the same process but there was a WMD arsenal, and Iraq
was ripe for stable, democratic evolution, there would now be less inquest.
There would be less lamentation about poor decision-making process. The
failure over Iraq is not just that the war initiators were dogmatic, but that they
held bad ideas dogmatically. Former Prime Minister David Cameron claimed,
on Chilcot’s release, that government had already learned the lessons, but as
historian James Ellison observes, ‘those seem mostly about process. The
question of principle remains.’⁴ Dangerous principles thrived because the
instruments of government allowed them to, and because the marketplace of
ideas were receptive to them.⁵ The invaders assumed that it was in the gift of
certain great powers to reorder part of the world as it suited them, all the way
into the political interior of states. At the same time, they regarded it as a
strategic and moral duty, and that the globalized world demanded it.
From the outset, this was an ambitious war. The architects of Britain’s effort
always intended the toppling of the Iraqi Ba’ath regime to transform world
order. It really was an attempt to change the world for the better, with all the
deadliness such good intentions can carry. ‘Our ambition is big’, Blair wrote
privately to Bush one week into the hostilities.⁶ The last chapter demonstrated
the chronology of these beliefs. Blair’s later memoirs were not a retrospective
platitude, but an accurate reprisal of his thinking all along: the Middle East
‘was urgently in need of modernization. It was an alarming melange of toxic
ingredients: a wrong-headed view of the future; a narrative about Islam that
was at best inadequate and at worst dangerous; [regimes] under immense
internal strain’, and it needed a ‘fundamental reordering’.⁷ The causes of
democracy promotion, ‘freeing up’ the Middle East, and modernization were
not post hoc inventions designed to provide cover for a counterproliferation
war that had found no weapons. The inner circles of Washington and London
³ Robert Jervis, ‘The Mother of All post-mortems’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 40:1–2
(2017), pp. 287–94, p. 288.
⁴ James Ellison, ‘War guilt, Blair and the Chilcot Inquiry’, 12 July 2016, http://www.qmul.ac.
uk/media/news/items/hss/178983.html (accessed 15 July 2016).
⁵ See, in the US context, Chaim Kauffman, ‘Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Market-
place of Ideas’, International Security 29:1 (2004), pp. 5–48; on the ideological roots of the war in
the United States, see Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 7–99; Benjamin Miller, “Explaining Changes
in US Grand Strategy: 9/11, the Rise of Offensive Liberalism, and the War in Iraq,” Security
Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2010), pp. 26–65.
⁶ Prime Minister Tony Blair, Note to President George W. Bush, 26 March 2003.
⁷ Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Arrow Books, 2010, 2011 edn.), pp. 386–7.
74 Blunder
were led by ‘daydream believers’ from the very beginning.⁸ Though they
presented their final reckoning with Saddam Hussein as a regrettable step to
remove a defiant rogue after all reasonable efforts to induce ‘behaviour
change’, it was from early on intended to bring about the forcible, externally
driven removal of a government and the remaking of the state’s institutions,
thereby inspiring a benign domino effect.
How did warmakers persuade their countries to share their warlike ideal-
ism? Deception is not a sufficient explanation. As Chilcot found, Blair’s circle
successfully persuaded its domestic audience that the confrontation with
Saddam was intended primarily for disarmament, they presented weak and
ambiguous evidence as cast iron, and delayed debate about military action
until the point of maximum pressure to rally around the flag. But deception
could only achieve so much. Remorseful war supporters offer a suspect alibi,
that they only gave their support because they believed what they were told.
No amount of misinformation or duplicity, however sly, would have sufficed
on its own to take Britain to war. Other major states—Germany, France, and
China—agreed that Saddam’s weapons programme and evasion represented a
security problem, but refused to infer that it was an intolerable risk, and
argued that more time for weapons inspections was preferable to a hasty
invasion. In Britain, as in the US, beneath the immediate arguments about
Iraq there was a structure of general ideas about power and security. Because
of these well-entrenched assumptions, Members of Parliament, much of the
media, the professional military and the public were persuaded that war could
work, and that the risks of the status quo outweighed the risks of full-scale
invasion. If, as Chilcot found, the war was powered by assumptions that were
‘seldom challenged’, it is to those assumptions we now turn.⁹
Before the invasion of Iraq, there was an idea, and an ideology, of regime
change. This idea meant more than the literal overthrow of governments.
It stood for an ascendant assumption within government, that countries like
the UK could only secure themselves properly by eliminating rather than
handling threats. Ultimately, this meant breaking and remaking nation states.
This revolutionary idea, that the world demands the application of systemic
solutions by far-sighted statesmen, took root so deeply that it became a
‘common sense’. The 9/11 attacks heightened the doctrine and made it more
politically achievable. It amounted not only to a zero-sum conception of
‘absolute security’. It also entailed a form of anti-diplomacy. In the desire to
cut the Gordian Knot of problems like Iraq, it flowed from an impatience with
and frustration towards the notion that major powers must manage, limit, and
contain threats, husband their resources, both compete and bargain even with
⁸ A phrase I borrow from Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked
American Power (New York: Wiley, 2008).
⁹ The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary, HC 264, p. 82.
Breaking States 75
despotic states, and accept trade-offs. British foreign policy argument as a
whole—even mainstream anti-war opinion—had become captured by the
conceit that the West’s duty is to correct problems, ‘fix’ or ‘sort out’ the Middle
East, and eradicate the ‘root cause’ of terror. These developments generated a
particular mixture of confidence and fear, and emerged out of the interregnum
between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks.
In this chapter, I trace the ideological roots of regime change. After con-
trasting it with traditions of limited war, I track its origins to older arguments
about Western power, in frustration with the Gulf War settlement, and in the
pathologies of a type of warlike liberalism when applied to foreign policy.
I then identify the flaws of the ‘regime change’ mindset. I argue that the Iraq
War marked a loosening of restraint, a tragic forgetting of limitations and the
agency of Iraqis, the rise of an undisciplined set of concepts, and a confusion
around the concepts of rationality and irrationality.
FROM LIMITED WAR TO REGIME CHANGE
The essence of strategy is limitation, the balancing of power and commitments

in ways that rank interests, prioritize, and trade off things that are valued, and
compromise with lesser evils. Limitation involves refraining from expending
all resources at one’s disposal. It also involves tempering expectations of what
military force can usefully achieve when applied. In the tradition of realpolitik
is the realization that in a world of scarce resources, multiple dangers, and
imperfect knowledge, decision-makers most of the time can hope only to
restrain dangers and reduce threats, and always with an eye to the unintended
consequences of action and inaction. In a nuclearized Cold War world, the
concept of limited war gained fresh salience. After Korea, it became apparent
that the US could contain Soviet Communism while limiting the scale and
intensity of its military activity, and that the nuclear revolution gave them little
choice. Western debate about limited war in a global conflict drew on these
constraining conditions.¹⁰ Even ‘minor’ wars remain dangerous enough, as
they can aggregate into major wars. Seemingly peripheral struggles can unex-
pectedly wear down and exhaust major powers.¹¹ The essence therefore lies
not in the size of the opponent, but in the scale of the policy and ambition.
Military forces, if husbanded carefully, can be effective means of deterrence,
¹⁰ Robert Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1957).
¹¹ See Hew Strachan, ‘Strategy and the limitation of war’, Survival 50:1 (2008), pp. 31–54,
p. 32.
76 Blunder
defence, and disruption—but only with great hazard can they be wielded
effectively beyond those functions.
A useful point of entry is Edward N. Luttwak’s interpretation of the grand
strategy of the Byzantine Empire. In Luttwak’s history, the Byzantines looked
out on a hostile environment, surrounded by adversaries. They developed an
austere ‘operational code’, and survived by holding on to the concept of limits:
To wear out their own forces . . . in order to utterly destroy the immediate enemy
would only open the way for the next wave of invaders. The genius of Byzantine
grand strategy was to turn the very multiplicity of enemies to advantage, by
employing diplomacy, deception, payoffs, and religious conversion to induce
them to fight one another instead of fighting the empire . . . In the Byzantine
scheme of things, military strength was subordinated to diplomacy instead of the
other way around, and used mostly to contain, punish, or intimidate rather than
to attack or defend in full force.¹²
Luttwak used this Byzantine ideal-type to offer strategic counselling to America
in 2009, as it reeled from the Global Financial Crisis and its two grinding wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq:
Replace the battle of attrition and occupation of countries with manoeuvre
warfare—lightning strikes and offensive raids to disrupt enemies, followed by
rapid withdrawals . . . avoid consuming combat forces, and patiently whittle down
the enemy’s strength. This might require much time. But there is no urgency
because as soon as one enemy is no more, another will surely take his place. All
is constantly changing as rulers and nations rise and fall. Only the empire is
eternal—if, that is, it does not exhaust itself.¹³
The refusal to pursue absolute war aims, and the preference for limited
‘raids’, offers other dividends beyond the conservation of resources and the
avoidance of self-exhaustion. A successful deterrence relationship rests on
the deterrer’s willingness to be vulnerable, and to hold back if the ‘deterree’
complies. Whereas an enemy on the receiving end of a war of annihilation,
waged by powers inflexibly committed, has little to lose. In turn, successful
deterrence relies upon the continued self-restraint of states that do have the
capability to go further. If they wish to deter, they must learn to live with
frustrating compromise settlements, and the survival of adversaries that they
would ideally prefer to perish.
As Chapter 1 demonstrated, Blair’s circle resolved early on to abandon the
tenets of limited war, and the associated concepts of deterrence and contain-
ment, and use war instead as a problem-solving tool that they hoped would
have a major, pacifying impact. They refused to be insecure, and believed they
¹² Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Harvard University
Press, 2009), p. 415.
¹³ Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Take me Back to Constantinople’, Foreign Policy, 15 October 2009.
Breaking States 77
could wipe out one source of insecurity. Blair’s rationales for the Iraq War
departed from the limited-war tradition. The Iraq War, and the wider War on
Terror, at its core was based on an unbounded concept of Western security
interests, and the conviction that the liberal order championed by the West
could only be properly secured by defeating and uprooting its rivals, in
particular ‘rogue’ actors and the more amorphous force of ‘extremism’, and
replacing them with constitutional governments and free markets. This
entailed a rejection of the doctrine that had defined the long contest with
the Soviet Union, that the battle of ideas had to be bounded.
Where does the idea of ‘regime change’ come from? The Bush and Blair
doctrines arose in permissive conditions, namely prolonged economic growth
which powered a growth in relative strength, and a relatively benign threat-
environment. In such conditions, the governments of major powers were
more confident than their predecessors, confident enough to attack distant
threats and contemplate military adventures to topple the governments of
middling and minor states. A determination to destroy an enemy state, or alter
it beyond recognition, and replace that regime is implicit in preventive war.
States launch pre-emptive wars to forestall a feared imminent threat, as Israel
did in June 1967 and Egypt did in October 1973, to revise the balance of power
or seize particular territories without usually wishing to topple those regimes
directly. By contrast, states do not usually launch preventive wars just to cut an
adversary down to size but to take that adversary off the board, if not to
annihilate it. The fewer the ‘checks’ on this option, the more tempting it
becomes.
In the chronicle of preventive wars, war initiators usually wish their gamble
of first strike against a more distant threat to result in gains well beyond
disrupting their opponent’s capacity to harm them. From Stalin’s ‘winter war’
to reduce Finland to a protective buffer in 1939, to the Kaiserreich’s preventive
strike against feared Franco-Russian encirclement in 1914, to Imperial Japan’s
effort to evict the US from East and South Asia in 1941,¹⁴ the pay-off was
supposed to be the absolute elimination of a threat and the creation of a new
security order. Such is the scale of the undertaking and the diversion of
resources that lesser goals might seem disproportionate. The more wary
decision-maker eschews preventive war for that reason. Chancellor Bismarck
considered in his memoirs ‘the question whether it was desirable, as regards a
war which we should probably have to face sooner or later, to bring it on
anticipando before the adversary could improve his preparations’ and con-
cluded that ‘one cannot see the cards of Providence far enough ahead’.¹⁵ To
shoot on suspicion is to be frightened enough that the threat is so grave as to
¹⁴ On these and other cases, noting the confusion of terms in the title, see Matthew J. Flynn,
First Strike: Pre-emptive War in Modern History (New York: Routledge, 2008).
¹⁵ Cited in Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (New York: Cosimo, 2007) vol. 2, p. 103.
78 Blunder
be intolerable, even if it lurks over the horizon, yet to be confident enough in
one’s power and foresight that acting now can succeed. The Bush Doctrine was
based on the premise that the potential intersection of terrorism with WMD
required the adoption of a militarized precautionary principle. In Bush’s
words, America ‘must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing
clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun
that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud’.¹⁶
The idea of ‘regime change’ echoes older arguments about how America
should wield its preponderant levels of power. If the master concept that
guided strategic debate during the Cold War was ‘containment’, that concept
always implied a level of threat tolerance. The notion that the US should limit
and abide threats until they withered always attracted opposition. ‘Rollback’
was the main alternative offered up.¹⁷ The point of division was the question of
time. Containment implicitly held that time was ultimately on the side of the
United States and its allies against Soviet Communism. It counselled a firm
and vigilant but slow wearing down of threats until they failed of their own
internal contradictions. Because time favoured the ultimate victory of its
political model over competitors, America could avoid a catastrophic major
war, deter its major opponent from first-order aggression, preserve its consti-
tution and way of life, and wait out and wear down the threat. The advocates
of ‘rollback’ were more impatient and more pessimistic. Time was against
them, as it allowed adversaries to grow and become bolder, and those adver-
saries could not be reliably deterred. These lines of division were first evident
in the 1952 presidential election and periodically revived, with their climax
under Ronald Reagan’s anti-détente stance in the early 1980s, as ‘rollbackers’
accused containment’s architects of mounting a passive and static strategy,
which failed to deter revolutionary adventurism, wrongly appeased a to-
talitarian regime, and legitimized its conquests in Eastern Europe. The
mere existence of the threat, rollbackers argued, was intolerable. Containment
settled for more relative security; rollback for a more absolute security.
Rollback involved regime changes, such as the subversion of puppet officials
or covert operations to support overthrow from within, and led governments
to entertain the possibility of preventive war. In practice, even administrations
like Eisenhower and Reagan that publicly called for rollback ended up holding
on to central tenets of containment, for fear that unrestrained rollback would
escalate dangerously.
The same debate about time, and the trade-offs between containment and
rollback, resurfaced in Washington after 1991, but without the restraining
¹⁶ ‘Bush: Don’t Wait for Mushroom Cloud’, CNN, 8 October 2002.

¹⁷ On this background, see Robert S. Litwak, Regime Change: US Strategy through the Prism of
9/11 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 109–10.
Breaking States 79
structure of the Cold War.¹⁸ The issue arose in practical form around the long
confrontation with Saddam Hussein between 1991 and 2003. The West’s
relationship with Iraq was centre stage in the long debate of whether to accept
a limited victory for limited gains in 1991, and whether to tolerate imperfect
outcomes in exchange for limited costs. Calls for going further and ‘regime
change’ flowed partly from discontentment about the outcome and uncertain
trajectory of that Gulf War. The war of 1990–1 was a brief and territorially
confined struggle. Although it succeeded in its deliberately circumscribed
direct goals, it earnt increasing complaints over time, especially as it became
apparent that it was only an opening chapter in the West’s protracted struggle
with Saddam Hussein. Even while that limited war was raging, it attracted
more extravagant goals. The posse led by US forces on one level ended
operations once Saddam’s forces had been expelled from Kuwait, and Presi-
dent Bush halted the punitive bombing campaign against retreating Repub-
lican Guard units, and resisted the call to drive on to Baghdad and overthrow
the regime. On another level, the course of that war enlarged American
ambitions. While the campaign was on foot, Washington and London pursued
a twin formula of not moving directly against Saddam Hussein beyond his
expulsion from Kuwait, but openly hoping and expecting that his defeat would
result in regime collapse.¹⁹ President Bush in February 1991 incited the Iraqi
people to force Saddam out, and in March 1991, intelligence briefings forecast
Saddam’s downfall within a year. In the twelve years following, this ambition
was frustrated but never-ending. Any relief from sanctions was made condi-
tional on Saddam’s departure: until then Iraq’s Western opponents branded
it a delinquent and outlaw state, and a ward of the international comm-
unity. Neoconservatives and some right-wing nationalists regarded the failure
to remove Saddam in 1991 and beyond as symptomatic of weakness,
and through the Project for a New American Century, they pushed to make
Saddam’s removal a test of American leadership. Their letter of January 1998
to President Clinton warned that ‘If we accept a course of weakness and drift,
we put our interests and our future at risk’.²⁰
In an increasingly predominant America, it proved difficult even for stra-
tegic minds who had once defended Bush’s limited war to remain content with
the outcome. Consider leading defence intellectual Eliot Cohen, who in July
1992 argued that the campaign had scored serious gains:
Were Kuwait’s borders restored? Was its territorial integrity sustained? . . . Was
Saddam Hussein’s attempt at extortion frustrated? Were nations the world over
¹⁸ On the debate in the context of the War on Terror, see Stephen D. Biddle, American Grand
Strategy after 9/11: An Assessment (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, 2005), p. vi.
¹⁹ See Lawrence Freedman & Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict (London: Faber & Faber, 1993),
pp. 411–12.
²⁰ Letter, 26 January 1998, PNAC to President William Jefferson Clinton.
80 Blunder
assured of continuing access to oil at reasonable world prices? Was Iraq’s capacity
to wage nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare crushed, if not as yet . . . totally
eliminated? Was relative stability in the Middle East secured?
The answers were ‘affirmative’.²¹ Yet by December 2001, Cohen advocated war
on Saddam and resolved that overthrowing ‘a menace and a monster’ and
purveyor of terror that was also ‘far weaker’ would be easier than the ‘cake-
walk’ of 1991, and ‘begin a transformation of the Middle East’.²² Saddam’s
Iraq, once a containable limited threat, had become both a peril and an easy
target. Blair would share this logic, and critics such as Robin Cook in his
Commons resignation speech, attacked the contradiction.
Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even
contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces
are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a
few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is
weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a
threat.²³
Hawks may have countered that Saddam could pose dangers with WMD even
while his conventional forces were depleted, but that rests too on a dubious
assumption that sanctions devastated the latter while not affecting the former.
Despite these fallacies, the marriage of superpower capability and post 9/11
insecurity led American and British Atlanticists alike to lose their patience
with the ‘first’ Gulf War settlement.
Externally forced regime change became tempting partly because of a
dilemma, that a defeated Saddam would neither capitulate nor go away.
Throughout the 1990s, statesmen, inspectors, and diplomats were exasperated
at Saddam’s refusal to comply with international inspections and demands.
But he had little incentive to do so, given his Western adversaries had
demanded his demise, and given they had attempted to make it happen
through CIA-backed coups, mutinies, and failed assassination attempts. ‘Dis-
armament’ as a discrete and limited demand was never attempted. It was
always mixed up with—and compromised by—an absolute demand for over-
throw. This is the flaw with Tony Blair’s persistent claim that only ‘diplomacy
backed by force’ could bring Saddam to heel, a claim based on only a limited
set of overlearned historical analogies. In circumstances where the power
exercising such diplomacy is effectively insisting that its target commit suicide,
giving the target no secure path to survival if it capitulates, we should not be
surprised that the targeted state resisted and refused to moderate its conduct.
²¹ Letter, Eliot A. Cohen, Commentary, 1 July 1992.

²² Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Iraq Can’t Resist Us’, Wall Street Journal, 23 December 2001.
²³ Robin Cook, Hansard, 17 March 2003, column 727.
Breaking States 81
Most of the momentum behind the ‘regime change’ era flowed from
Washington. ‘Blair’s wars’, too, had involved military action to defeat sitting
heads of state, with an aspiration to bring about their prosecution, from
Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic to the British-backed coercion of Liberia’s Charles
Taylor. The British version of regime change placed greater stress on the
internationalism of law enforcement, even while selectivity over UN mandates
suggested that the policing might be conducted through vigilantism. In the era
of liberal intervention grew a doctrine that misbehaving states could forfeit
their sovereignty, and be subject to the remedy of overthrow by other parties,²⁴
beyond the replacement of a government to include an overhaul of the
institutions of state and their mode of civic life. Iraq loomed as a decent
candidate, as it had not been a truly sovereign state since Gulf War One.
The notion that certain regimes are intolerable, even ones that did not
command the resources of major states, rested also on assumptions about
‘regime type’. Namely, it assumed that the internal political and economic
attributes of a state determine state behaviour, and that conversion to dem-
ocracy promotes general peace. This dubious half-truth advocates for war
treated as a law of history, drawing explicitly on international relations theory.
With a typically neat antithesis, Tony Blair in July 2003 claimed that ‘any
time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same:
freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the
rule of the secret police’.²⁵ This kind of argument rested partly on a selec-
tive reading of former Soviet dissident and Israel cabinet minister Natan
Sharansky, whose book The Case for Democracy Bush bought for Blair, losing
sight of the historical conditions and contingencies that make stable democ-
racy possible in the first place.²⁶ At the time of writing this book in April 2017,
according to Freedom House, post-Saddam Iraq, even with regular elections,
remains ‘not free’, with political rights and civil liberties scoring at 5 and 6
respectively out of the lowest score of 7 on the ‘free’ scale.²⁷ Assumptions that
Iraqis yearned to be free and therefore would embrace democratic peace were
naïve. People yearn for security, too, and the introduction of ballots into a
fractured population demonstrably made parts of the country more violent,
not less. Majority rule did not remove secret detention sites and death squads
²⁴ See W. Michael Reisman, ‘Why Regime Change is (Almost) Always a Bad Idea’, American
Journal of International Law 98 (2004), pp. 504–13.
²⁵ ‘Tony Blair’s Speech to the US Congress’, The Guardian, 18 July 2003. On the comic Jon
Stewart show in 2008, Blair also surmised that democratization translates into benign external
behaviour, as liberal democracies never fight one another.
²⁶ Chris Suellentrop, ‘My Sharansky: Bush’s Favourite Book Doesn’t Always Endorse his
Policies’, Slate, 26 January 2005.
²⁷ Freedom in the World 2017, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-
world-2017.
82 Blunder
from the state’s apparatus.²⁸ A majority government, representing majority
will, in Iraq at that historical posed a threatening prospect to minorities. Even
if democratic peace theory is true in the long run, the process of democracy
creation is historically often violent. It was ironic that the leaders of two
countries whose own constitutional governments were formed through revo-
lution and civil war would overlook that possibility.
REGIME CHANGE: THE LIBERAL CONSCIENCE,

THE REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT
‘Regime change’ can also be traced to two traditions in foreign policy, of

liberalism and revolution. It was haunted by the ghosts of William Gladstone,
and possibly Leon Trotsky.
Before dealing with the undeniable force of liberalism, or a form of it, that
drove the invasion, there is another possible ideological source. This source
is harder to prove. Britain’s war in Iraq attracted the support of notable
ex-communists. Blair himself has recently admitted that Isaac Deutcher’s
biography of Leon Trotsky, the communist and Red Army founder, ‘changed
my life’,²⁹ and a number of high-ranking colleagues who supported the war
also had Trotskyite revolutionary pasts, such as Alan Johnson, John Reid,
Stephen Myers, and Alan Milburn.³⁰ While they had long repudiated revolu-
tionary socialism, it is possible that a structure of belief remained in their
idealistic internationalism, their vision of foreign policy as a crusade and a
planet reordered, that lent itself to ambitious projects to overthrow an ancient
regime via effective cadres deftly waging political combat.³¹ Equally important
was what they rejected: conceptions of foreign policy built around the ‘national
interest’, narrowly conceived, or the balance of power. Blair himself explicitly
rejected these concepts in addressing the US Congress.³² If American military
²⁸ Amnesty International, Annual Report, 2016–17, pp. 196–8, at https://www.amnesty.org/

en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/iraq/report-iraq/.
²⁹ Anushka Asthana, ‘Blair reveals he toyed with Marxism after reading book on Trotksy’, The
Guardian, 10 August 2017.
³⁰ George Eaton, ‘Tony Blair Isn’t the Only Labour Figure with a Far-Left Past’, New States-
man, 10 August 2017; ‘How Labour’s Contenders See the War’, The Guardian, 21 February 2007.
³¹ The ideological linkage of Trotskyism, or one strand of it, and neoconservatism is better
documented in the American than the British case: see John B. Judis, ‘Trotskyism to Anachronism:
The Neoconservative Revolution’, Foreign Affairs 74:4 (1995), pp. 123–9; Stephen Schwartz,
‘Trotskycons?’, National Review, 11 June 2003. For the argument that it also applied in Britain,
see Peter Hitchens, ‘Usefully Idiotic’, 20 April 2015, at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
2015/04/usefully-idiotic.html.
³² Text of Blair’s Speech, BBC News, 17 July 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/
3076253.stm.
Breaking States 83
power had become the last remaining revolutionary instrument, Iraq was a
revolutionary project, both in the basic sense that it was the toppling of a
fascistic ruler intended to help the emancipation of the region, and because it
was inspired by a Trotskyite impulse and tradition, or one reading of it.
In America, certainly, the case for war attracted Trotskyite company. Kanan
Makiya, the Iraqi-American anti-Saddamist was a leading Arab member of the
Fourth International. Muscular pro-war idealists like Paul Berman and former
labor organizer Stephen Schwartz argued for the ‘psychological, ideological
and intellectual continuity’ between Trotsky and neoconservatism, and noted
Trotsky’s ‘militaristic’ and pre-emptive disposition.³³ Leading US neoconser-
vatives had been formed in the intellectual tradition of Trotskyism as purveyed
by the commanding American figure Max Schachtman.
The revolution that was to be exported, though, was more directly and
primarily a liberal one. By ‘liberalism’, I do not mean the pluralist tradition of
John Stewart Mill and the assumption of fallibility and the value of dissenting
opposition. I mean firstly the family of associated ideas that combine ideals of
individual liberty, free markets, democratic representation, and equality of
opportunity, and a belief in the possibility of irreversible progress. I mean also
one strain of ‘security’ liberalism, the assumption that security is tied to the
active spread of liberal institutions and values, if necessary at gunpoint. The
strain of liberalism that prevailed in Washington and London in the early
twenty-first century resists the notion of limitation. Of necessity, the belliger-
ent liberal impulse is not satisfied with armed efforts that fall short of the
toppling of regimes. Those efforts imply the tolerance and management of
threats rather than their decisive defeat. Such restraint, they judge, is both
immoral and strategically unwise. Liberalism contains the seeds of illiberalism,
as it is a jealous faith that is intolerant of rival creeds and ideologies and feels
threatened by them. The versions of liberalism held by Blair and Bush were
belligerent because they idealized and universalized their country’s material
interests, conflating them with a global struggle that knew few limits.
Consider the striking parallels between Prime Minister William Gladstone
(1809–98) and Blair, who was dubbed ‘Tony Gladstone’ after his Labour con-
ference speech in October 2001 where he urged solidarity with the poor ‘in the
mountain ranges of Afghanistan’.³⁴ Gladstone argued in 1876 for an armed
intervention after the Ottoman Empire’s atrocious suppression of the April
Uprising, demanding that the British government should ‘apply all its vigour to
concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the
Turkish executive power in Bulgaria’, and in 1882, invoked Britain’s ‘moral
duty’ in the invasion of Egypt to convert it ‘from anarchy and conflict to peace
³³ Jeet Heer, ‘Trotsky’s Ghost wandering the White House’, National Post, 7 June 2003.
³⁴ R. Shannon, ‘History Lessons’, The Guardian, 4 October 2001; T.G. Ash, ‘Gambling on
America’, The Guardian, 3 October 2002.
84 Blunder
and order’.³⁵ Gladstone, like Blair, advocated war as a moral duty, on behalf of
the international community but not necessarily with its unanimous consent,
with the end goal of ending regimes and starting new ones. And the campaign
in Egypt, as in Iraq, lasted far longer than a liberal prime minister intended or
expected. In the hands of Gladstone or Blair, liberals at war believe themselves
to be essentially peaceable, that the enemy (in this case, Saddam Hussein)
embodies the belligerent spirit, so that overthrowing it on behalf of the civilized
world serves the cause of peace. At a Press Conference in the earlier crisis with
Saddam in December 1998, Blair claimed that ‘the first stirrings of a new global
reality are upon us. Those who abuse force to wage war must be confronted by
those willing to use force to maintain peace, otherwise the simple truth is that
war becomes more likely’.³⁶ Left untampered by realism and a sense of the
tragic, the tradition of armed liberalism becomes, as Michael Howard noted,
‘the efforts of good men to abolish war but only succeeding thereby in making it
more terrible’.³⁷
Contrary to some interpretations, the Iraq project was not mainly the
product of a cabal of neoconservative fanatics with sinister motives, or the
sudden rise of a new and alien ideology. Instead, it drew upon a deeper,
broader, and more familiar ideological source, namely the ambitious transat-
lantic neoliberalism of the post–Cold War era. As scholars who trace the war’s
intellectual origins observe, the prevailing ‘common sense’ of the time was a
restless form of liberalism that sought to remake the world in its own image.³⁸
The 9/11 attacks ‘re-bellicized’ it, or reawakened its war-like logic. It bred an
underlying confidence in the prospects of regime change. With war underway,
Blair averred that the vast majority of Iraqis were ‘desperate’ to be liberated,
for its government to be ‘representative of the people’, and ‘for the human
rights of the people to be cared for’.³⁹ In the odd, fleeting moment, Blair
acknowledged the risks of post-war chaos.⁴⁰ Overall, however, diplomats and
academic experts reported that the government’s setting was one of unscru-
tinized optimism, aversion to contrary advice, and incuriosity about whether
³⁵ John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1859), II, pp. 121,
241.
³⁶ Report of the Iraq Inquiry, vol. 1, Transcript of Press Conference, 20 December 1998, p. 104.
³⁷ Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Hurst, 1978, 2007 edn.), p. 115.
³⁸ Toby Dodge, ‘Coming face-to-face with bloody reality: Liberal common sense and the
ideological failure of the Bush doctrine in Iraq’, International Politics 46:2/3 (2009), pp. 253–75,
pp. 262–5.
³⁹ Tony Blair, ‘Remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair on Iraq War, Camp
David, Maryland, 27 March 2003’, in We Will Prevail: President George W. Bush on War,
Terrorism, and Freedom (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 244.
⁴⁰ In a note of 24 January 2003, Blair warned Bush, ‘The biggest risk we face is internecine
fighting between all the rival groups, religions, tribes, etc. in Iraq when the military strike
destabilises the regime. They are perfectly capable, on previous form, of killing each other in
large numbers’.
Breaking States 85
occupying Iraq would work.⁴¹ Chilcot’s verdict was that the government failed
to analyse or manage risks adequately, and planning assumed that ‘the UK
would be able quickly to reduce its military presence in Iraq and deploy only
a minimal number of civilians’.⁴² A clue to this failure lies in Blair’s later
confession that he did not realize, amidst the liberal war to release universal
human propensity for democratic liberty, that Iraqis would reject their liber-
ation.⁴³ This mentality was also evident in the leaked memo of a the two-hour
meeting between Blair and Bush on 31 January 2003, authored by David
Manning and authenticated confidentially by two officials to The New York
Times, indicating that the two leaders ‘envisioned a quick victory and a
transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but man-
ageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was “unlikely there would be internecine
warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Mr. Blair agreed
with that assessment’.⁴⁴ In other words, inadequate planning derived from
assumptions about the relative ease of the mission. The liberators expected the
liberated to align themselves with the new state in short order, and wanted it to
be true, more in hope than in hard-headed calculation. It was a necessary
corollary, too, of Blair’s conviction that the threat of ‘extremism’ had to be
decisively confronted and corrected, not merely contained.⁴⁵ Such a doctrine
dictated regime change, no matter the chances of civil strife and disorder.
Optimism also had an Iraqi face: Iraqi anti-Saddam exiles, organized around
the Iraqi National Congress, encouraged belief that native Iraqis would wel-
come their diaspora compatriots as leaders, and there was an underground
democratic movement that would naturally prevail after the decapitation of the
regime. Hand-in-hand with this assumption was the view of Saddam’s regime
as a detachable group that would be separated from the body politic, rather
than a whole political movement that had over three decades embedded itself
through Iraq’s institutions.⁴⁶
The sum of these hopes was an optimism that the US-led strike on Iraq
would succeed quickly, without a tortured political aftermath. President
George W. Bush’s declaration of the end of combat operations on board the
USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003 may have been overhyped. The banner
announcing ‘Mission Accomplished’ was not his creation, and his speech
acknowledged that there was ‘difficult work to do in Iraq’. But the occasion
⁴¹ This is the dominant view of academic experts and ex-diplomats who warned of country’s
intercommunal resentments: cited in Jonathan Steele, Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2008), pp. 18–19, 163–4.
⁴² Executive Summary, Report of the Iraq Inquiry, p. 122. ⁴³ Blair, Journey, p. 372.
⁴⁴ As reported in Don Van Natta Jr, ‘Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says’, The
New York Times, 27 March 2006.
⁴⁵ Blair laid out this logic in his testimony on 21 January 2011, p. 6.
⁴⁶ As Toby Dodge observed, in Alan George, Raymond Whitaker & Andy McSmith, ‘Inside
story: the countdown to war’, The Independent on Sunday, 17 October 2004.
86 Blunder
overall signalled the sense of triumphant finality that also tinged Bush’s
address to troops in Afghanistan in June of that year, that ‘America sent you
on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and
that mission has been accomplished.’⁴⁷
American and British versions of warlike liberalism commonly believed
themselves to be liberating Iraqis to advance their own security. They were not
identical, but Iraq marked a powerful point of intersection and agreement. If
the ‘Bush Doctrine’ was articulated in the form of a strident American hyper-
nationalism, the ‘Blair Doctrine’ consciously sought to build a consensual
international community around a vision of progress and liberation, cham-
pioned by Western arms. True to the tensions within Atlantic neoliberalism,
the process of liberation was seen as natural yet necessarily coercive. Iraqis, the
objects of liberation, would be made to be free, remade as politically and
economically rational citizens, entitled to make a rational choice to become
friendly states whose interests self-evidently coincided with the West’s. With
an illegitimate regime separate from Iraqi society, and then surgically
removed, rational individuals would exercise their natural choice to be free.
Iraqis, they mostly assumed, were not groups formed by the weight of history
and potentially vulnerable to a destructive security dilemma, needing security
guarantees from one another in order to reinvent their polity. Rather they
were individuals to be exposed quickly in the ‘year zero’ of liberation to the
competitive processes of market democracy, their loyalties to the new state
reinforced by development aid. There would be little choice in the matter. New
Labour, like the Conservatives, sought to persuade people to accept capital and
the discipline of the market as facts of life. It drew upon a crude dualism
between the modern and premodern, the old and the new.⁴⁸ Globalization was
a given fact rather than a set of political decisions. Iraq would be subject to the
same logic. Blair’s domestic agenda they projected onto the regency in Iraq. As
Blair once exhorted trade unions, ‘modernise or die’.⁴⁹
Emphatically, not all liberals behave or think in this way. Liberal opponents
of the war, such as Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell, identified
liberalism with strict adherence to international institutions and obedience
to international law, and the preservation of the United Nations’ unity.
Against crusading liberalism, they countered with legalist liberalism. Liberal-
ism for them was supposed to be a restraint, not an enabler, of military
adventures, and it prized unity and process more highly than the enforcement
of credibility. Warlike liberalism in 2003, however, associated liberalism with
⁴⁷ Judy Keen, ‘Bush to Troops: Mission Accomplished’, USA Today, 6 June 2003.
⁴⁸ See Alan Finlayson, ‘Tony Blair and the Jargon of Modernisation’, Soundings 10 (1998),
pp. 11–27, pp. 18–19.
⁴⁹ Barrie Clement, ‘Abrasive Blair tells unions, modernise or die’, The Independent,
9 September 1997.
Breaking States 87
the determined application of power to enforce the United Nations’ credibility
even in defiance of its veto-wielding members.
Blair’s strategic outlook evolved through his experience as a warfighting
prime minister. He deployed armed forces five times, from Africa and the
Balkans to Central Asia and the Middle East, deployments that mostly resulted
in an overthrow. Blair acknowledged the power of these historical experiences,
and drew confidence from them. In his speech at College Station, the day after
the April 2002 Crawford meeting with Bush, he spelled it out: ‘If necessary, the
action should be military, and, again, if necessary and justified, it should
involve regime change. I have been involved, as British Prime Minister, in
three conflicts involving regime change: Milosevic, the Taliban and Sierra
Leone’.⁵⁰ His judgement, he claimed, was vindicated in these campaigns,
against the critics.⁵¹ It was the wars in the Balkans, and the possibilities of
military action in the age of the Pax Americana, that most roused Tony Blair’s
liberal conscience, and the campaign over Kosovo in particular that defined
his moral and strategic worldview.⁵² April to May of 1999 were the most
formative months for him. As he formulated his doctrine of the ‘international
community’ and lobbied Washington to threaten the use of ground troops to
coerce Serbia’s regime to end its butchery of Kosovar Muslims, Blair was also
visibly shocked by his encounter with refugee camps in Bosnia. His ‘first
rudimentary thinking on regime change’ took shape at this time as the
bombardment of Serbia continued. That this unexpectedly protracted
campaign eventually succeeded, after making Blair fear it could be his ‘Suez’
moment, fortified his ambitions about what political will and force could
achieve. The ousting of Milosevic became the minimum for the reintegration
of Serbia into the civilized world, or in his own words, ‘We can then embark
on a new moral crusade to rebuild the Balkans without him’.⁵³ Blair drew
from a flawed world-historical vision that was evident in his address to the
Romanian parliament:
In 1945 Germany was still under Hitler. Within ten years, it had re-established its
democracy, rebuilt its cities, joined NATO and was in at the birth of what is now
the European Union. Germany reconstructed itself within a decade as a peace-
loving nation and an impeccable member of the international community, and
today is a resolute and leading player in Operation Allied Force. Serbia can re-join
the world community too. But that prospect will only be a reality when its corrupt
⁵⁰ ‘Full Text of Tony Blair’s Speech in Texas’, The Guardian, 8 April 2002.
⁵¹ Jackie Ashley, ‘No Moving a Prime Minister Whose Mind is Made Up’, The Guardian,
1 March 2003.
⁵² As Oliver Daddow demonstrates, ‘Tony’s War? Blair, Kosovo and the interventionist
impulse in British Foreign Policy?’, International Affairs 85:3 (2009), pp. 547–60.
⁵³ From John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 55–6, 59–60; Tony
Blair, ‘A New Moral Crusade’, Newsweek, 13 June 1999.
88 Blunder
dictatorship is cast out and real democracy returns to the former Republic of
Yugoslavia.⁵⁴
Blair’s potted history, on which he built his demand for ‘regime change’, is
misleading. Firstly, in the late 1990s the ‘world community’ he spoke of
included powers with authoritarian and illiberal regimes, from China to
Saudi Arabia, that his government conducted high-level diplomacy with.
Historically, the post-war ‘Germany’ Blair referred to was in fact West
Germany. East Germany was a Soviet satellite. The fragile peace between
East and West Germany was kept partly by mutual deterrence—a concept
Blair would disown—and maintained and policed by a deliberate division in
the form of the Berlin Wall. West Germany did not recover and prosper
simply by casting out its old order. It did not have elections for its first four
years, and its proud social democracy, like NATO, retained officials who had
been security elites in the Third Reich.⁵⁵ Former Nazi mandarins stuffed the
Interior ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Justice Ministry and the highest
levels of government. The complicity of its officials and bureaucrats ranged
from membership of the Nazi Party to involvement in formulating and exe-
cuting its repressive policies. Several former Nazi generals would later become
senior commanders in the Bundeswehr, West Germany’s army. The reasons
for this continuity were likely both practical—to retain the capabilities of
experienced civil servants, armed personnel and lawyers—and political, geared
towards the new emphasis on countering the Soviet threat. Understandable
or execrable, it was a compromise that stands in marked contrast to the
De-Ba’athification purge of the bureaucracy and the security services carried
out by the occupying powers in Baghdad from 2003. Blair’s case for absolute
regime change as the baseline standard, like the case for occupation of Iraq, relied
upon the wrongly remembered case of West Germany’s post-war reconstruction.
This was not the last time he would offer a dangerously innocent account of
history. In a remembrance service for the 9/11 victims, he claimed that for the
generation that ‘went through the Blitz’, America was ‘the one country that
stood by us’.⁵⁶ This was not only untrue of America’s diplomatic stance in
1940, but overlooked the solidarity of Commonwealth and European anti-
fascist states such as Greece. Blair’s oversimplified and sanitized historical
narrative underpinned an oversimplified and sanitized account of political
change, which he presented as a bold turning of the page, without compromise
or negotiation with the past. Blair and like-minded Atlanticist hawks also
sanitized the memory of the campaign in Kosovo. Held up as an exemplar of
⁵⁴ ‘Blair: Cast Out Milosevic’, BBC News, 4 May 1999.

⁵⁵ See ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany’,
Spiegel Online, 6 March 2012; Stefan Wagstyl, ‘Postwar West German Ministry “burdened” by
ex-Nazis, study says’, The Financial Times, 10 October 2016.
⁵⁶ ‘We Share Grief, Blair tells America’, BBC News, 20 September 2001.
Breaking States 89
righteous force, prudently applied, it also accelerated the flight of Kosovar
refugees and enabled counter-ethnic cleansing by the Kosovar Liberation
Army, who drove 200,000 Serbs out of Kosovo. These unintended conse-
quences exposed the failure of the war’s architects to assist victims by prepar-
ing in detail. The acclamation of rescued Muslims, cheering Blair’s name as
he visited camps, overshadowed the brutal reciprocities of a civil war, and
cemented the episode as a case of the strong rescuing the weak from the
predator. Tragic historical cases, old and recent, became useful accounts of
history, as stripped of ambiguities and problems as the September Dossier.
Blair’s original doctrine, adumbrated in his Chicago speech of April 1999,
contained the seeds of these errors, but it would take cumulative experience to
turn them into dogma. The Chicago speech was not an untampered, crusading
outburst. With the input of Sir Lawrence Freedman, who is as much sober
strategist as principled liberal, the speech was formulated to bound interven-
tionism with serious preconditions, tests, and caveats. The Chicago doctrine
was an attempt to capture an equilibrium between the stability of a world of
sovereign states, and the revisionist ambition to topple oppressive regimes that
forfeited their sovereignty. As Freedman recalls:
The question in my mind was not how could the interventionist impulse that had
developed during the 1990s be taken to the next stage of toppling dictators—
which had not been attempted with Saddam nor in any of the interventions in the
former Yugoslavia—but how to keep the impulse under control. On one hand, it
seemed that in the circumstances of the time and in the context of the West’s
apparent predominance, demands to intervene would be regular and in many
cases justified. Yet on the other, not all these demands could be met even when
the case to act might be morally compelling. It was also important to meet the
criticisms surrounding Kosovo that the West was acquiring for itself a carte
blanche.⁵⁷
The tragedy of Chicago is not that it was originally a pure doctrine of armed
liberalism, but that the limitations it included, the clauses of self-restraint,
faded over time.
Around Blair were gathered determined minds, who helped to articulate his
vision and impose it on the reluctant. It was not the Foreign Office, the
Cabinet Office or the Ministry of Defence that were the main sources of Blair’s
evolving doctrine. If anything, the Kosovo template strengthened his aversion
to using Whitehall machinery for advice. Blair neglected orthodox channels
of advice, wrote the lion’s share of his own speeches in a personalized process,
literally on the fly in April–May 1999, and when he turned to others for
intellectual input, he tapped trusted outsiders. Advisor Jonathan Powell,
⁵⁷ Lawrence Freedman, ‘Force and the International Community: Blair’s Chicago Speech and
the criteria for Intervention’, International Relations 31:2 (2017), pp. 107–24, p. 115.
90 Blunder
former diplomat from the British embassy in Washington, was a committed
Atlanticist and ‘true believer’ in the cause.⁵⁸ Also central was Secretary of State
for Defence and future NATO Secretary General George Robertson. This son
of a village policeman, from a long family tradition of policing, would become
a hawkish Labour grandee and member of the transatlantic foreign policy
establishment, and would retain a constabulary view of the West’s global role.
He pronounced in his NATO capacity four days before 9/11 that ‘in the global
village, I am the bobby on the beat’.⁵⁹ There is great confidence implicit in such
statements, framing the world as a domesticated small place that can be
pacified by the authority of the transatlantic alliance ‘cop’. Robertson was
significant not only ideologically, but because he believed in backing up liberal
ambitions with ground troops. To US officials, he had repeatedly pledged
‘50,000 troops’ to a proposed NATO ground force campaign in the Kosovo
conflict. Rightly sceptical about the promise of air power as a self-sufficient
instrument, ‘regime change’ visionaries believed in armies as the tools of
democratic modernization.
Robertson had overseen the Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review
(SDR) of 1998.⁶⁰ The Review did not offer a hardened doctrine of regime
change or preventive war, but the early traces of the core assumptions can be
found there. Saddam Hussein’s regime is a ranked focus—appearing four
times, more often than any other named adversary, embodying with his
military forces and WMD projects the ‘significant sources of instability’,
threats that ‘may grow’. There is a strong emphasis on anticipatory security
measures, a preventive orientation, assuming Britain’s ability to avert conflicts
long in advance, while paying little heed to the potential unintended conse-
quences of well-intentioned activism. Evident overall is a desire to forestall
threats with the confident application of power. The fading of great power
threats is treated not as an impermanent development incidental to the
collapse of the Soviet Union, but almost as a permanent transformation of
the world, licensing expeditionary ventures to suppress instability far beyond
Britain’s region:
In the Cold War, we needed large forces at home and on the Continent to defend
against the constant threat of massive attack from an enemy coming to us. Now,
the need is increasingly to help prevent or shape crises further away and, if
necessary, to deploy military forces rapidly before they get out of hand.
Robertson’s underlying notion of the West using anticipatory measures to
bring order into chaos was echoed by Secretary of Defence Geoff Hoon in
⁵⁸ According to Sally Morgan, cited in Rawnsley, The End of the Party, p. 114.
⁵⁹ Mark Thomas, ‘I’m the Global Bobby on the Beat’, Liverpool Echo, 7 September 2001.
⁶⁰ Strategic Defence Review: Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Defence by
Command of Her Majesty (London 1998): the following references in order refer to pp. 14, 17, 68,
29, 7.
Breaking States 91
December 2001, that the only certainty in a complex world was that problems
had to be met ‘upstream’.⁶¹ Above all, Robertson’s Review was founded on the
‘Munich’ worldview, where one model of muscular diplomacy wielded by
righteous nations will always work, and is universally applicable:
Our forces must also be able to back up our influence as a leading force for good
in the world and meet our responsibilities towards the UN, by helping to prevent
or manage crises. In the words of the UN Secretary General after this year’s
climbdown by Saddam Hussein, ‘You can do a lot more with diplomacy backed
up by firmness and force’.
This was only a half-truth. Diplomacy that emphasizes the threat of force
and punishment is not always the most effective approach to hostile re-
gimes. Not every regime is analogous to the unappeasable and undeterrable
Nazi Germany, and attempts at constructive engagement that de-emphasize
military threats can succeed. As the most in-depth study of this tradition
argues,
Long-standing rivalries tend to thaw as a result of mutual accommodation, not
coercive intimidation. Of course, offers of reconciliation are sometimes rebuffed,
requiring that they be revoked. But under the appropriate conditions, reciprocal
concessions are bold and courageous investments in peace. Obama is also right to
ease back on democracy promotion as he engages adversaries; even states that are
repressive at home can be cooperative abroad.⁶²
It was not with overt threats of force, or ideologically fundamentalist claims to
be a ‘force for good’, that Nixon’s Washington engaged and rebuilt relations
with Mao’s China in 1972, likewise when Australia’s Keating government
forged a security agreement with Suharto’s Indonesia in 1995, another case
where a bloodstained regime at home could cooperate abroad.
Whether Saddam’s Iraq would fit this model is uncertain. It had certainly
never been given the chance. The West had not been conducting coherent
‘diplomacy’ with Iraq from 1991. Instead, it had demanded that for Iraq to
return to the international fold, its ruling regime must abdicate. From the
outset, the assumption that Saddam must and will depart under international
pressure was stubbornly held, even as the evidence mounted that he was
determined to ride out the campaigns to bring him down. Perennial escal-
ations against Iraq were not delivering on the hope of regime change, but
rather entrenching the status quo. Ironically, in SDR the success of Western
strategy in achieving its more realistic and limited aim, of weakening Saddam’s
capacity for external aggression, did not get the credit it was due. The worldview
⁶¹ Geoff Hoon, ‘11 September: A New Chapter for the Strategic Defence Review’, speech to
King’s College London, 5 December 2001.
⁶² Charles A. Kupchan, ‘Enemies into Friends: How the United States can Court its Adver-
saries’, Foreign Affairs 89:2 (2010), pp. 120–34, p. 121.
92 Blunder
inscribed in the SDR of 1998 takes for granted that the currency of inter-
national life is one of resolve versus weakness, of forces for good standing up
to hostile states and forcing them to climb down, a world where threats
remain deadly or get even worse. Any sense of the Byzantine alternative, of
judicious management of potential threats, and proportional threat assess-
ment, let alone the possibility of turning enemies into neutrals or friends,
or dividing them against one another, goes missing in action. With these
assumptions, Britain was already primed for the road to Basra.
The jurist and former national security official Philip Bobbitt both
articulated and probably helped define Blair’s worldview, through two
macro-historical works, The Shield of Achilles and its follow-up, Terror
and Consent. Blair endorsed the latter, that applied Blairite ideas to war
on terrorism, as the ‘first really comprehensive analysis of the struggle
against terror’.⁶³ In both works, the victorious West, according to historical
pattern, must impose world order on the vanquished. Bobbitt’s overall
prescription drew on a reading of world history, where major powers
could pursue peace by expanding the principles of a vaguely defined
‘market state’ globally and at home, requiring sustained military domin-
ation and an ability to fight constant minor wars. Ominously, this must
include ‘preclusive’ wars, waged by societies based on consent against those
who practice and embody ‘terror’. The leaning towards long, universal,
and existential struggles of ideas, waged by increasingly powerful states
with moral vision of enforcing rule of law, followed by grand constitu-
tional settlements that restore order to the world, was an oversimplifica-
tion of history. But it appealed to the type of ‘visionary world-making’
that is a tendency of the most powerful states,⁶⁴ and an obvious fit with
Blair’s emerging worldview since before 9/11, one that he intended to guide
Washington towards.
The manifestoes of Robert Cooper, former diplomat and senior advisor on
foreign policy, did most in writing to define and reinforce Blair’s case for
world reordering. Cooper’s public called for a new ‘liberal imperialism’ drew
on his earlier analysis at the think tank Demos, was coined in an attention-
grabbing article published in April 2002, and later turned into a treatise,
⁶³ And Blair’s speech on Iraq, March 2004 may have drawn on Bobbitt’s work, as he spoke of
the old Westphalian order being surpassed in an age of globalization.
⁶⁴ As Nicholas Kitchen argues, there is a ‘tendency of great powers with a surfeit of material
capabilities to attempt visionary world-making. With their territorial and political integrity
secured, interests offer few constraints to check the progress of grand ideas in the policymaking
process, and the international system poses few constraints on a state whose material power and
ideational dominance largely defines international structure. The question “what must we do?” is
replaced by “what shall we do?” ’ Nicholas Kitchen, ‘Systemic Pressures and Domestic Ideas:
A Neoclassical Realist Model of Grand Strategy Formation’, Review of International Studies 36:1
(2010), pp. 117–43, p. 141.
Breaking States 93
The Breaking of Nations.⁶⁵ Cooper was close to the Blair circle. He was
accorded a high status, exempted from the normal civil service prohibitions
on publishing his opinions. He was also asked to provide a position paper on
the WMD threat, and had access enough to supply the Prime Minister’s
Christmas reading. Cooper mirrored Blair’s assumption, that the central crisis
manifested on 9/11 was the proliferation of WMD and ‘pre-modern’ actors
threatening the breakdown of order in a ‘borderless’ world. His offerings
amounted largely to a hyperbolic and rambling discourse about world order.
But he was precise on one point. If the world had a civilized core, there was a
barbarous periphery, creating a warrant for open-ended force. Cooper’s advice
was self-fulfilling:
Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.
But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmod-
ern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier
era—force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those
who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among
ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also
use the laws of the jungle.
The timing was significant, calling for anticipatory force just as the British
government was getting sure signals of Washington’s determination to strike
Iraq. Cooper, like Blair, framed the issue in stark terms. The choice was
intervention in zones of ‘pre-modern chaos’, that could be risky and unsus-
tainable, but the only other option was ‘letting countries rot’. Less ambitious
containing measures, from deterrence to counter-terrorism to shoring up
defences, let alone diplomatic bargaining, he did not consider. Alongside
imperialist military methods, Cooper like Blair advocated systemic neoliberal
solutions to ‘solve’ the ‘underlying problems’. He called for a cosmopolitan
empire in which the pre-modern voluntarily submit themselves to the discip-
line of financial institutions, and European technocrats, soldiers, and police
keep the peace in disorderly regions. The book version, produced in 2004 as
the difficulties of occupying Iraq were becoming apparent, was more chas-
tened than the earlier appeal for a new imperialism. In The Breaking of
Nations, wars—presumably including the preventive ones he had called
for—can ‘weaken and destroy’ states, and fuel and empower fanaticism.
‘Without the wars in Afghanistan there would have been no Osama Bin
Laden’, Cooper observes, yet still he still sympathizes with the ‘doctrine of
preventive action’ out of which emerged al-Qaeda in Iraq. Like Blair’s con-
ception of world order, Cooper’s was self-contradictory and reductionist,
⁶⁵ Robert Cooper, ‘The New Liberal Imperialism’, The Guardian, 7 April 2002; The Breaking
of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004),
pp. x, 64.
94 Blunder
offering a false choice of regime change versus passive threat-tolerance. It
inflated threats. And it was presumptuous of the West’s power and knowledge.
His liberal imperialism was impressed with its own cosmopolitan modernity,
not knowing its own complicity in disorder.
THREAT INFLATION, POWER I NFLATION : THE FALSE

LOGIC OF ROGUE STATES
The case for war rested on a broader appraisal of the dangers of globalization
and the promise of Western power. The West’s free way of life, so it was said,
could be gravely threatened from anywhere and any time, and the intensifying
circulation of capital, materials, and ideas made the rise of ‘rogue states’
dangerous. This worldview penetrated the rhetoric and practices of Anglo-
American strategic behaviour abroad throughout the War on Terror. It offered
a powerful and dangerously overreaching account of national security and
how it should be pursued. It inflated threats, underestimated the risks of
military action, and was insensitive to the conditions in which liberal democ-
racy and free markets historically need to thrive.
At the core of the case for military action was the notion of the ‘rogue state’,
often invoked and rarely scrutinized. On closer inspection, the idea is over-
blown and self-contradictory. The notion of the ‘rogue’ state dates back at least
to the early 1980s, when the US government both formally and informally
attributed roguery to the suspect states of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North
Korea. All were charged with offences from state sponsorship of terrorism to
the pursuit of WMD, along with oppressive internal behaviour that supposed-
ly proved they were externally subversive and sub-rational. By Gulf War One,
the archetype was in place, whereby a rogue was ‘an aggressive developing
country that militarily threatened its neighbours and region while seeking to
overturn the international order through the sponsorship of terrorism and the
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction’.⁶⁶ The ‘rogue’ classification had its
obvious uses. It served as a ‘certificate of political insanity’⁶⁷ and thus licensed
anticipatory measures and rougher treatment. It also bore disadvantages.
States that technically fit the category Washington may wish to bargain with
in pursuit of larger goals. Syria before its latest civil war, for instance, was an
⁶⁶ Mary Caprioli & Peter Trumbore, ‘Rhetoric versus Reality: Rogue States in Interstate
Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 49:5 (2005), pp. 770–91, p. 777; on the persistent
use of the term with similar meanings, see K.P. O’Reilly, ‘Perceiving Rogue States: The Use of
the “Rogue State” Concept by U.S. Foreign Policy Elite’, Foreign Policy Analysis 3 (2007),
pp. 295–315.
⁶⁷ Barry Rubin, ‘US Foreign Policy and Rogue States’, Middle East Review of International
Affairs 3:3 (1999).
Breaking States 95
important part of the ‘Middle East Peace Process’, just as Gaddafi’s Libya was
hostile to Al-Qaeda. Branding a state with pariah status made it harder to
conduct crisis diplomacy, as was the case, for instance, with North Korea in
the 1994 confrontation with the US over its nuclear programme. And the
‘rogue’ charge was potentially embarrassing. Saddam Hussein’s roguery was at
least enabled by other states, at times with their active connivance, in his
largest scale aggression against Iran, and the debts he accrued in the course of
his campaign came from supporting Gulf states. Saddam, as Blair once said,
‘had choices’, but he was historically able to act because of the wider compli-
city of other states. The Clinton administration abandoned the category
precisely because it limited its political flexibility. The Bush II administration,
however, restored it in February 2001. And even the Clinton administration
took the actual idea seriously. There was a distinct class of states, that were
‘outlaw’, ‘backlash’, or ‘renegade’, as articulated in detail by National Security
Advisor Anthony Lake, with the imputation of irrationality, that the adversary
cannot be deterred.⁶⁸
The ‘rogue’ category rests on a perception of power capabilities and a
perception of the rogue’s irrationality. It also rests on an assumption that
there is a family of such states sharing common disorders, a family that can be
effectively combated by treating it as a whole. Blair in November 2002 warned
of the danger of ‘extremism driven by fanaticism, personified either in terrorist
groups or rogue states’, claiming that ‘States which are failed, which repress
their people brutally, in which notions of democracy and the rule of law are
alien, share the same absence of rational boundaries to their actions as the
terrorist.’⁶⁹ Blair maintained the potential threat of Saddam deploying a
WMD-armed terrorist group as a proxy, asking in his autobiography,
Would Saddam want al-Qaeda to be powerful inside Iraq? Absolutely not. Would
he be prepared to use them outside Iraq? Very possibly. Was there a real risk of
proliferation, not only from Iraq but elsewhere, leaching into terrorist groups who
would not be averse to using WMD? I certainly thought so . . . I still think so.⁷⁰
Because there was a family of such states sharing common pathologies, the
strategy of ‘taking out’ one rogue state would deter and dissuade other rogues.
The driving fear behind Bush’s post-9/11 grand strategy was the perceived
danger of WMD transfer, in order to use weapons by proxy, while gaining
anonymity and deniability, thus avoiding punitive retaliation by the targeted
state. The central countermeasure was to inhibit proliferation beyond deterrence
and counter-terrorism, through preventive war. Bush claimed that ‘States like
⁶⁸ Robert S. Litwak, Rogue States and US Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), p. 41.
⁶⁹ ‘Prime Minister’s Address to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet’, The Guardian, 11 November 2002.
⁷⁰ Blair, Journey, pp. 386–7.
96 Blunder
[Iraq], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten
the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes
pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists,
giving them the means to match their hatred’.⁷¹ This was the rationale for
elevating terrorism to a threat level of first rank in official national security
strategy.⁷² The likes of Saddam were fundamentally irrational, or at least
wildly incautious and risk-prone actors, who could not be deterred and
contained. War proponents dismissed deterrence as too passive and noted
that Baghdad’s development of WMD would have permitted one of ‘the
world’s most dangerous regimes . . . to threaten us with the world’s most
destructive weapons’. ‘A WMD-armed Saddam would have, in their view,
broken out of his containment box and then threatened vital American
interests. Finally, war supporters chastised those advocating deterrence as
immoral, blind to the terrible suffering of the Iraqi people under the tyran-
nical Baathist regime’.⁷³ Secretary of State Powell likewise argued that Sad-
dam ‘does have a proclivity toward terrorist activity and he is developing
weapons of mass destruction that he might use or perhaps could make
available to other terrorist organizations’.⁷⁴ National Security Advisor Con-
doleezza Rice repeated that claim.⁷⁵
Blair invoked the rogue state–WMD–terrorist nexus in every signature
expression of threat and need for regime change. WMD terrorism with a
rogue state as intermediary was his main summary of the threat picture,
anticipated in his 1999 Chicago speech, and spelt out in his speech to Parlia-
ment on 18 March 2003, his letter to Bush on 26 March 2003, where ‘terrorists
and rogue states come together in hatred of our values’, and in his Sedgefield
Speech of 2004. His testimony before the Iraq Inquiry was that 9/11 changed
the calculus of risk for this reason, so that living with dangers was the risk,
whereas taking action to exterminate those dangers was the ‘safe’ option: ‘The
point about this act in New York was that, had they been able to kill even more
people than those 3,000, they would have, and so, after that time, my view was
you could not take risks with this issue at all’.⁷⁶
The rogue-WMD threat perception suffers both empirical and logic defects.
It is not clear that such a family exists. Most of the states earmarked as rogues
⁷¹ Bush, ‘State of the Union Address’, 29 January 2002.

⁷² White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington,
D.C.: White House, September 2002), pp. 13–16.
⁷³ As summarized by Elbridge Colby, ‘Restoring Deterrence’, Orbis, 51:3 (2007), pp. 413–28,
p. 417.
⁷⁴ ‘Interview by Tony Snow and Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday’ at https://2001-2009.state.
gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/13324.htm.
⁷⁵ Condoleezza Rice, speech given to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Chicago,
Illinois, 8 October 2003.
⁷⁶ Tony Blair, IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 11.
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 10/9/2018, SPi
Breaking States 97
have different risk calculus, and vary in their willingness to compromise. Most
were not more likely than other states to be involved in militarized interstate
disputes, not more likely to initiate such disputes, and not more likely to use
force when such disputes turned violent. Iraq and North Korea had a greater
tendency than the other candidates to get involved in militarized interstate
disputes and to use force first, but were not usually the initiators of the row.⁷⁷
It also conflates North Korea, which has decided to build a deliverable nuclear
bomb, with states like Iran, that have historically desired the ‘breakout’
capacity but not the complete capability. And confidence that destroying
one regime would clearly signal a ‘deterrence message’ to onlooking states
was suspect. Demonstrating the will and capability to kill off one regime can be
interpreted by other regimes as an added incentive to develop a deterrent
of their own, given that it also demonstrates what can happen to vulnerable
adversaries, and given that those regimes may not wish to exist only at the
permission of the West. The other difficulty with deterrence-via-regime change
is that deterrence requires forbearance if the target agrees to be deterred, and
thus it requires later governments to respect the precedent, by also restraining
themselves from attacking regimes that have, in fact, disarmed. Post-Iraq
events worked otherwise. Looking back, Richard Betts summarized the prob-
lem as Washington debated whether to attack Iran. The costs
might seem justifiable if launching a war against Iran dissuaded other countries
from attempting to get their own nuclear deterrents. But it might just as well
energise such efforts. George W. Bush’s war to prevent Iraq from getting nuclear
weapons did not dissuade North Korea, which went on to test its own weapons a
few years later, nor did it turn Iran away. It may have induced Libyan leader
Muammer al-Qaddafi to surrender his nuclear programme, but a few years later,
his reward from Washington turned out to be overthrow and death—hardly an
encouraging lesson for US adversaries about the wisdom of renouncing nuclear
weapons.⁷⁸
The notion that Saddam was an irrational and undeterrable rogue who would
transfer WMD to terrorist groups was not uniformly the advice that govern-
ment received. A psychological profile commissioned by Downing Street in
November 2002, based on earlier Defence Intelligence Service appraisal,⁷⁹ and
received by Manning and Powell, portrayed Saddam as committed above all to
survival, a ‘judicious political calculator’ who was ‘by no means irrational’,
more likely to be aggressive when feeling his back against the wall, otherwise
calibrating risks carefully. Likewise, JIC assessments judged that Saddam with
his WMD arsenal was potentially aggressive and unpredictable but ultimately
⁷⁷ See Caprioli & Trumbore, ‘Rhetoric versus Reality’.

⁷⁸ Richard Betts, ‘The Lost Logic of Deterrence’, Foreign Affairs 92:2 (2013), pp. 87–99, 94–5.
⁷⁹ Letter PS/C to Scarlett, 14 November 2002, ‘Iraq: Psychological Profile of Saddam’ attach-
ing Paper ‘Saddam Hussein, DIS Psychological Profile Updated’.
98 Blunder
only below a certain threshold, and ultimately concerned for survival. In
November 2001, the JIC judged that Saddam would consider WMD terrorism,
but if his regime was under serious and imminent threat of collapse. In other
circumstances, the threat of WMD terrorism is slight, because of the risk of US
retaliation’;⁸⁰ in September 2001, the JIC estimated that Saddam in calculating
whether to use his chemical and biological weapons pre-emptively would
weigh up the military utility against their political costs, and would only be
likely to use them in desperation with conflict underway or ‘at the death’;⁸¹
and another in January 2003 judged that ‘there is no sign’ that Saddam ‘is
unstable or losing the capacity to make rational tactical decisions’.⁸²
Despite the fact that this alternative interpretation of Saddam’s rationality
was available, the possibility that a regime that had determinedly stayed in
power for decades was not recklessly incautious, or effectively suicidal, hardly
touched internal debate. The JIC itself departed from its own profiles of
Saddam and fell prey to incoherent views of the problem. While preparing
the September dossier, a JIC meeting at which Manning was present spelt out
an ‘important message’,
which needed to be brought out more clearly in the draft, was that if the chips
were down, and Saddam believed his regime to be under real threat of extinction,
nothing was going to deter him from using such weapons. Readers of the paper
needed to be reminded of Saddam’s unpredictability, and of the fact that his
thought processes did not work in a recognisably Western, rational and logical
way. The draft should also distinguish more clearly between the three different
ways in which Iraq might use its offensive chemical or biological capabilities: in
weaponised form against military targets; in an unconventional attack on military
targets; or as part of a sponsored terrorist attack aimed at spreading fear and
influencing public attitudes.⁸³
There are several difficulties here. Firstly, note the flattering portrait of rational
and logical thought processes as predominantly ‘Western’ qualities, with the
implied assumption that deterrence logic was applicable to Westerners only. It
is also unclear why using WMD under ‘real threat of extinction’ amounts to
irrational, illogical behaviour. After all, the threat of punitive retaliation is
central to British deterrence doctrine. If backed into a corner, would not a
‘rational and logical’ actor be moved to use every weapon at its disposal? This
account also suggests that Saddam has waited until then to use them, suggest-
ing a more careful calculus on his part.
There was an overarching tension in pro-war argument about rationality
and irrationality. The family of rogues, hawks argue, is oblivious to the normal
⁸⁰ JIC Assessment, ‘Iraq After September 11—The Terrorist Threat’, 28 November 2001.
⁸¹ JIC Assessment, ‘Iraq Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons’, 9 September 2002.
⁸² JIC Assessment 29 January 2003, ‘Iraq: The Emerging View from Baghdad’.
⁸³ JIC Minutes, 4 September, p. 2.
Breaking States 99
patterns of deterrence or conventional diplomacy, thus deserving of special
treatment. Yet the nuclear transfer scenario begs the question, why transfer in
the first place? Those same irrational rogues will take rational steps to survive
by transferring WMD rather than using it directly. The very fact that the
offending state would place itself at one remove from nuclear use indicates a
rational concern to avoid detection, remain anonymous, and duck punish-
ment, in turn suggesting a commitment to survival and a capacity for sane
means-ends calculation. If, on the other hand, the state contemplating nuclear
transfer is aware that nuclear transfer would probably be detected and pun-
ished, and attract significant retaliation, therefore that kind of state would
probably be deterrable from such behaviour. A risk-prone ‘irrational’ regime,
heedless of its survival, fanatically committed to aggression, and willing to
court the retaliation of a major power, by definition would not worry about
detection and retaliation. Indeed, it would not bother transferring nukes in the
first place with the ‘command and control’ downsides that would bring, but
would use them openly. The wider argument, that a powerful precedent would
teach other rogues (or potential rogues) a lesson, likewise suggests that
undeterrable ‘mad’ regimes can be rationally dissuaded and cowed into sub-
mission by a strong signal, after one of their number has been made an
example of. That implies a process of rational calculation and risk aversion
that the ‘rogue state’ label denies. In the case of a rational state recklessly
betting on the possibility of getting away with a nuclear transfer, there are
measures short of war that could drive down the risk of such a misperception
through signalling measures short of war, as Chapter 5 will argue.
The Bush administration’s intra-war posture towards Iraq in the build-up
to war rested on a similar contradiction, claiming Saddam was undeterrable
yet making punishment threats to induce him to refrain from using the
chemical and biological weapons Washington believed it to possess, thereby
relying on the very deterrence that it insisted was impossible in relations with
Iraq.⁸⁴ While stressing the unstable predatory nature of rogue regimes, Blair
simultaneously invited Iran and Libya to abandon their nuclear programmes.
The orders that were allegedly oblivious to cost–benefit logic were the same
orders that were open to diplomatic persuasion backed by force.
The same have-it-both-ways illogic pervaded the parliamentary debates of
February and March 2003. Supporting the case for war, Iain Duncan Smith
warned that ‘if the international community backs away from dealing with
⁸⁴ As Robert Jervis argued before the invasion: ‘intra-war deterrence implies that goals as well
as means will be kept limited, and since the US now seeks regime change it has few coercive tools
at its disposal. If Saddam is the monster Bush sees him as, why should he care what happens to
his country if he is going to die? And if the US could deter his WMD use in a war, why would
extended deterrence fail in peacetime?’ ‘The Confrontation between Iraq and the US: Implica-
tions for the Theory and Practice of Deterrence’, European Journal of International Relations 9:2
(2003), pp. 315–37, p. 327.
100 Blunder
Saddam Hussein now, that will be seen as a green light by every rogue state
and terrorist group around the world’.⁸⁵ But ‘green light’ suggests a rational
motorist, awaiting a clear signal, not a fanatical driver determined to acceler-
ate. David Trimble MP argued that ‘containment and deterrence will not work
in the situation that confronts us’, in the world of ‘WMD, terrorist movements
and rogue states’, yet also noted that Saddam would only have disarmed ‘if he
believed that massive force would be used against him if he did not comply’,
suggesting the rogue ruler was sensitive to the threat of punishment after all.⁸⁶
William Hague MP warned about ‘rogue states’ in a changed post–Cold War
world, yet urged action to ensure ‘that those who aspire to be rogue states or
sponsors of terrorism know what happens and know how the Western alliance
responds to such a threat’.⁸⁷ That baseline had already been drawn by the
retaliation against Al-Qaeda and its host government in Afghanistan, and the
argument that clear deterrent lines could be drawn presupposed a limitation
on the aggression of rogues. Containment, an active strategy of monitoring,
sanctions, occasional military strikes, and embargo, hawks misrepresented as
passivity, while at the same time lamenting the devastation wrought on Iraq by
the same containment programme.
In the cumulative vision of regime change and its calculus about threat
and solution, there was a flip side, an under-scrutinized assumption that in
a ‘globalised’ world, civilized countries could not abide risks linked to WMD.
Globalization imperilled liberal world order, Blair reasoned, warranting the
direct removal of threats. Interdependence, as Bush and Blair insisted, erased
any distinction between values and interests. In plainer language, evil regimes
in middling minor states like Serbia or Iraq, or impoverished pariah states like
Afghanistan, were not only morally abhorrent, but strategically intolerable.
This was the consistent basis for Blair’s Chicago speech in April 1999, his
address to the US Congress on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and one
he unrepentantly maintains.⁸⁸ To rapturous applause, Blair before Congress
portrayed a systemic virus that changed the rules of the international life.
Coming together as a species
provides us with unprecedented opportunity but also makes us uniquely vul-
nerable . . . the threat comes because in another part of our globe there is
shadow and darkness . . . in the combination of these afflictions a new and deadly
virus has emerged. The virus is terrorism whose intent to inflict destruction
⁸⁵ Hansard, 3 February 2003, column 23. ⁸⁶ Hansard, 18 March 2003, column 845.
⁸⁷ Hansard, 18 March 2003, column 792.
⁸⁸ Tony Blair, ‘What I’ve Learned’, The Economist, May 31, 2007; Owen Bowcott, ‘Tony Blair:
Military Intervention in Rogue Regimes “More Necessary Than Ever” ’, The Guardian,
1 September 2010.
Breaking States 101

is unconstrained by human feeling and whose capacity to inflict it is enlarged
by technology.⁸⁹
Blair made the formation and spread of WMD terrorism sound easy, an
almost inevitable fact of life that had to be countered with determined and
far-reaching preventive measures, and beyond a mere cordon sanitaire.
This was a bad case of ‘threat inflation’, or ‘concern for a threat that goes
beyond the scope and urgency that a disinterested analysis would justify’.⁹⁰
WMD terrorism, whether chemical, biological, or nuclear, is difficult to carry
off, especially against well-prepared developed states. Executing a bioterrorist
attack entails a multi-step process of obtaining, preserving, moving, and
detonating the weapon, while employing specialist skills, maintaining secrecy,
and moving through highly policed territory. A successful bioterrorist attack
requires that
one must obtain the appropriate strain of the disease pathogen. One must know
how to handle the organism correctly. One must know how to grow it in a way
that will produce the appropriate characteristics. One must know how to store the
culture, and to scale-up production properly. One must know how to disperse the
product properly.⁹¹
To execute nuclear terrorist attack, as John Mueller calculates, the atomic
terrorists’ task might involve a twenty-step process, from successfully obtain-
ing HEU (highly enriched uranium), to assembling a team of highly skilled
scientists and technicians, the smuggling of the improvised nuclear device
weighing a ton or more, to the successful detonation.⁹² It requires the secure
procurement, preparation, and secret movement of a heavy instrument
through increasingly monitored space and across borders. Chemical weapons
terrorism has also proven more difficult than feared. They are largely inef-
fective against well-prepared and well-equipped armed forces. To achieve
lethality levels against civilian targets sufficient for ‘mass destruction’, it
requires ‘access to sophisticated delivery means capable of disseminating
CW agents efficiently over large areas’.⁹³
WMD terrorism is not impossible. It is, though, considerably more remote
a prospect than advocates of regime change assumed. Just as importantly, it is
⁸⁹ ‘Transcript of Blair’s Speech to Congress’, CNN, 17 July 2003, at http://edition.cnn.com/

2003/US/07/17/blair.transcript/.
⁹⁰ Jane K. Kramer & Trevor A. Thrall (eds), ‘Introduction: Understanding Threat Inflation’,
American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation since 9/11 (New York:
Routledge, 2009), p. 2.
⁹¹ Milton Leitenberg, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bio-Terrorism Threat (Carlisle,
PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2005), p. 46.
⁹² John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 186.
⁹³ As Stephen Biddle observes, ‘Assessing the Case for Striking Syria’, Council on Foreign
Relations, 10 September 2013, p. 5.
102 Blunder
capable of being disrupted by less expensive and high-risk ‘rollback’ measures.
Contrary to Blair’s claim that globalization renders every security problem
intimate and urgent, states can disrupt threats and reduce them at many
points along the chain between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’, with gradual,
incremental, patient containment to lower probabilities that are already
low, reducing the threat into a third-order, chronic nuisance. This would
entail measures already underway, but without the inflated rhetoric of threat
eradication, without the rushed dismantling of civil liberties, and without the
entrapment of living in a perpetual state of emergency and its continual drive
to escalation. Combinations would bring together ordinary police work,
international cooperation, the cultivation of intelligence within the wider
community, continued efforts to secure stored weapons-grade nuclear
material, with a more measured and discriminate programme of raids
and drone killings to keep ‘havens’ unsafe. Blair’s government blithely
brushed off unspectacular, patient counter-terrorism, as an alternative to
regime change.
The case for war, therefore, was muddled. It suffered self-contradictions
that deserved greater consideration. And it overlooked a basic question.
WOU LD WAR W ORK?
In a memo of 25 March 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked a question

that hardly engaged the war’s architects:
We have also to answer the big question—what will this action achieve? There
seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything. Most of the assessments from
the US have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq’s WMD
threat. But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be
secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be
better.⁹⁴
Straw’s question went neglected. The utility of war, the elementary issue of
what it could deliver, and whether it could deliver with acceptable costs,
deserved dispassionate probing in cold blood. Those charged with making
the decision ought to have drawn on a wide body of historical analogies, to
explicitly test assumptions and weigh up counterfactual scenarios.
Overthrowing states followed by military occupations is a difficult under-
taking, historically, that usually intensifies security competition within states,
⁹⁴ Memo, Jack Straw to Tony Blair, 25 March 2002.

Breaking States 103

and sometimes between them.⁹⁵ It has an impressive record of failure. Since
1815, there have been twenty-six completed military occupations where a
victor has chosen to stay, reform, and rebuild, but only in seven such cases
were occupying powers able to achieve their interests sustainably. Except in
unusually propitious conditions where a threatening external power creates a
level of consent for the occupier, occupations tend to fall short of their goals,
and at a high cost compared to most other forms of statecraft. A ‘selection
effect’ means that the difficulties of occupation are usually inherent. The very
fact that a particular state is targeted suggests a level of interior dysfunction
and prior conflict, a fraught situation into which the occupier is stepping.
‘Outsiders’ occupying can all too easily seem alien, thus energizing and
internationalizing resistance, breeding hardened forms of violent politics it is
supposed to suppress, placing the cost-tolerance of the occupier under strain.
Israel in Lebanon, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, France in Algeria and the
US in Vietnam should have stood out as cautionary tales for would-be
liberators, alongside more successful examples of West Germany, Japan, and
Malaya, and these projects too were long and expensive. Foreign-imposed
regime change is frequently a gamble in which the costs outstrip the gains.⁹⁶
Unfortunately, any intellectual process of careful judgement, with these
considerations, was not the dominant one. Instead, the issue was clouded by
emotive mythologies about power and weakness, appeasement and resolve,
good and evil. The plausibility and reasonable probability of ‘worst-case’
scenario was largely assumed, namely a suicidal rogue state anonymously
transferring WMD to terrorists. The state hardly considered other potentially
ironic outcomes, such as the empowerment of other rogue states or the spread
of the same terrorist networks into Iraq.
Dominating historical memory was the regnant ‘Munich’ analogy of
Churchill, Chamberlain, and Hitler. That particular retelling of history has
propelled states into regrettable conflicts from Suez to Vietnam. It does vio-
lence to the strategic and moral complexities of the late 1930s. Chamberlain’s
Britain in the late 1930s had a weak hand. It was depleted by the Great
Depression and far-flung commitments left it overstretched. It was gradu-
ally rearming to prepare against multiple totalitarian states in Europe and
Asia, without economic dislocation. Any preventive war would have lacked
the vital support of the United States and the largest Commonwealth coun-
tries, and any counter-balancing of Nazi Germany would have inevitably
involved appeasing the territorial demands of Stalin’s Soviet Union. As it was,
⁹⁵ See David M. Edelstein, Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 2, 5, 8, 9; Stephen Walt, ‘Why They Hate Us (1): On
military occupation’, Foreign Policy, 23 November 2009.
⁹⁶ Alexander B. Downes & Jonathan Monten, ‘Forced to be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed
Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratisation’, International Security 37:4 (2013),
pp. 90–131.
104 Blunder
its diplomacy bought valuable time, and ensured that when Hitler struck in
1939, Britain could at least defend its waters and airspace, and that Nazi
Germany was positioned unquestionably as the aggressor.⁹⁷
Munich analogies in 2003 damaged the capacity to debate the Iraq issue
properly. Appeasement is the unilateral, persistent giving of concessions to a
potential aggressor, in order to secure peace. No one in mainstream debate
was proposing giving Saddam Hussein Kuwait. If war was moral duty, and
refraining from war a moral collapse, there was little room for scrutinizing
whether war would serve British security interests better than alternative
forms of coercive diplomacy. Some advocates for war were sheepish about
their Hitler and appeasement similes, yet they pressed them all the same.⁹⁸
Others such as the Murdoch press were less inhibited. The late 1930s—
and the vocabulary of the mythologized interwar period—was the main
interpretive prism.
Serious calculation was made all the more difficult by a primordial reaction
to 9/11 and what it all meant. To belligerent idealists, the terrorist attacks of
September 2001 were the outcome of Western weakness, even appeasement.
Military action would signal the West’s toughness and deter future aggres-
sions, as though Al-Qaeda trafficked on a popular grievance that the West
didn’t project power often enough. Consider the rationale of George Osborne
MP eight months after the invasion, who saw the Iraq War
as a necessary demonstration of Western resolve. For, with the hindsight forced
upon us all by 9/11, it was clear that the West had been woeful in its response to
the escalating menace of international terrorism throughout the 1990s. We had
also been feeble in our efforts to get Saddam to comply with the will of the
UN. Together they created the impression that the West was weak, and that we
were not prepared to defend our values or protect our citizens. The campaigns in
Iraq and Afghanistan have been potent demonstrations that we will stand up to,
⁹⁷ See Gerhard L. Weinberg, ‘No Road from Munich to Baghdad’, The Washington Post,
3 November 2002; Christopher Layne, ‘Security Studies and the Use of History: Neville Cham-
berlain’s Grand Strategy Revisited’, Security Studies 17 (2008), pp. 397–437; Norrin Ripsman &
Jack S. Levy, ‘Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? The Logic of British Appeasement in the 1930s’,
International Security 33:2 (2008), pp. 148–81.
⁹⁸ ‘Blair Likens Saddam to Hitler’, CNN, 1 March 2003 (this was a misleading headline, Blair’s
actual claim was that the war party of the 1930s would have been called warmongers, and the
anti-war protesters would have fallen prey to the appeasement arguments of the time); Anton La
Guardia, ‘Straw warns of dangers threatened by NATO split’, The Daily Telegraph 12 February
2003; see also R. Gerald Hughes, The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy since
1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 164–7; accusations of appeasement were made in both
houses of parliament: William Hague MP claimed ‘The Prime Minister said that analogies with
the 30s can be taken too far, and of course they can, yet in some of the opposition to the
Government’s stance there is a hint of appeasement’, and Julian Lewis MP in the Commons
argued that arguments for appeasement ‘were wrong then, and they are wrong now’ (Hansard,
2003, p. 333), and Baroness Sharples in the Lords indicated that the ‘present situation’ brings
memories of the 1930s ‘flooding back’ (Hansard, pp. 194–5).
Breaking States 105

and defeat if necessary, those intent on causing us harm, and that we can improve
people’s lives by doing so. That is why it is so important in both countries to show
we can also win the peace—which, contrary to the relentlessly negative impres-
sion given by the anti-war lobby and their fellow travellers in the media, we are
now actually doing.⁹⁹
So much for the liberation of Kuwait, and the downfall of Milosevic and the
Taliban. Osborne celebrated the winning of the peace in late 2003, no doubt a
claim he is waiting to revisit in print. He dismissed pre-war crippling sanc-
tions as ‘feeble’: what would serious sanctions look like? His was also an
odd account of the causes of international terrorism, which traded on the
propaganda that the United States was the ‘far enemy’ and leader of a Zionist-
Crusader occupation of holy soil. It was a strange interpretation of the
intentions behind Al-Qaeda’s jihad, which hoped to bait the US into an
escalation, occupation, and a polarizing armed conflict. It was a naively
ahistorical expectation of what potentially long peripheral wars could achieve.
And it set a high standard for the struggle, demanding nothing less than the
‘defeat’ of threats, not their reduction. In any event, those two campaigns
Osborne praised for their potency have foreseeably not worked out that way.
The Islamic State made its assaults apparently undeterred by the displays of
resolve Osborne commended, with their billions invested and thousands
of casualties.
The unfounded optimism that war would work, and the pessimism that
there was simply no alternative choice, also drew on a facile doctrine of
‘newness’ shared by the Bush administration. Blairism emphasized modern-
ization and change. The need to fundamentally alter his party and his country
was his signature theme, which he now enlarged to the reformation and
modernization of the Middle East. He extended it to global politics generally,
announcing that in the wake of 9/11 and globalization, ‘traditional theories of
security’ had to be discarded.¹⁰⁰ This lent itself to a self-deluding ‘year zero’
worldview, where denying or erasing the past was part of creating a better
future. Briefed by Foreign Office expert Dr Michael Williams on the weight of
history in Iraq, its legacies of ethnic and sectarian division, Blair dismissively
replied ‘That’s all history, Mike. This is about the future’.¹⁰¹ To dwell on Iraqi’s
historical legacies was to resist the thrust of revolutionary liberalism, ‘for in
comparison with the glorious future they would create, the past counted for
nothing’.¹⁰² Similar conceits were heard from the Bush administration. Lead-
ing hardline ‘vulcans’ insisted that time had only just begun. Richard Perle
⁹⁹ George Osborne, ‘A Soldier Breaks Ranks’, The Spectator, 1 November 2003.

¹⁰⁰ Text of Blair’s speech, BBC News, 17 July 2003.
¹⁰¹ Cited in Rawnsley, The End of the Party, p. 185.
¹⁰² As John Gray argued, ‘The End was Nigh’, Times Higher Education, 31 August 2017.
106 Blunder
asserted that ‘The world began on 9/11. There’s no intellectual history’;¹⁰³
Richard Armitage, that ‘History begins Today’;¹⁰⁴ Cofer Black, ‘all you need
to know is there was a “before 9/11” and an “after 911”’.¹⁰⁵ These statements
were at odds with the frequent invoking of the historical lessons of the
interwar period. And by dismissing history except the badly remembered
atypical case of Munich and Hitler, by repudiating the only guide we have, it
foreclosed the doubts that a reflective account of the past might have raised,
and left a want of proportionality.
A consciousness of historical legacies does not imply, as some critics do,
that Arabs or Iraqis are historically incapable of developing constitutional
democracy. But awareness of the past could help to resist the equal and
opposite illusion that outside powers can induce others to change in their
way, at their timetable, at will. Peoples can change—the democratic wave that
spread through post-Soviet Eastern Europe proved that—but not under con-
ditions of outsiders’ choosing. Iraqis emerging from the Saddamist period,
both from the oppressed majority and from the once-hegemonic ruling
minority, had powerful reasons to be fearful of a new, competitive politics,
where democratic contest could become a winner-takes-all struggle. Neither is
this only a hindsight judgement. As the Iraq Inquiry found,
Mr Blair told the Inquiry that the difficulties encountered in Iraq after the
invasion could not have been known in advance. We do not agree that hindsight
is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its
interests, regional instability, and Al Qaida activity in Iraq, were each explicitly
identified before the invasion.¹⁰⁶
They were identified—and rejected—because of the delusion that foreseeable
and familiar historical dangers were a thing of the past to be overcome, and
that the Pax Americana had permanently transformed the world.
There was also a broader flaw in the consensus of the time, an unrealistic
view of foreign policy as the search for decisive solutions. Blair and Bush in
this respect resembled Margaret Thatcher, who
tended to see foreign policy, not as a continuum, the stream, largely beyond
governments’ control, on which, to use Bismarck’s image, the powers are borne,
but on which they can navigate with more or less skill, the stream on which Lord
Salisbury would occasionally put out a punt pole to forestall a collision, but rather
as a series of disparate problems with attainable solutions, or even as zero-sum
¹⁰³ George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 41.
¹⁰⁴ Armitage cited in Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghani-
stan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), p. 88.
¹⁰⁵ Mikel Thorrup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (Oxford:
Routledge, 2010), p. 186.
¹⁰⁶ Statement, Sir John Chilcot, 6 July 2016, at http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-inquiry/sir-
john-chilcots-public-statement/.
Breaking States 107

games, which Britain had to win. She regularly complained that her advisers
brought her problems but no answers. The thought that for a middling power in a
disorderly world there would be few answers in the crossword-puzzle sense and
many compromises seemed not to occur.¹⁰⁷
In this respect, Blair was indeed an heir to Thatcher.
Liberal Managerialism and The ‘Phase IV’ Fallacy
Fifteen years on from the invasion of Iraq, there are fewer unambiguous
defenders of the Iraq War. Yet defenders of the general idea of ‘regime change’
are many. It is vital to counter a widespread, convenient and dangerous
misinterpretation of the ‘lessons’ of Iraq. This is what we can term the
managerialist ‘Phase IV’ Fallacy, also known as the ‘incompetence dodge’,
the seductive idea that the war wasn’t a bad idea, just its execution.¹⁰⁸ Phase IV
is shorthand for the ‘aftermath’ and ‘reconstruction’ phase of the operation. It
often comes twinned with the assertion that the idea of regime change and
intervention more broadly is respectable, indeed inevitable, and that the three-
week war to remove Saddam is blameless in the post-mortem. The error in
Iraq, allegedly, lay mainly in the maladministration of Iraq by the occupiers,
and the invaders went wrong when they lost the peace, especially in the first
crucial months.
According to that account, peddled most often by voices keen to hold on to
maximalist interventionism as a doctrine, the avoidable errors of the Coalition
Provisional Authority in 2003–4 and the American proconsul Paul L. Bremer
III were the difference between success and failure. If Iraq holds out lessons,
they are administrative and implementational, not deliberative. The inferences
drawn by Foreign Secretary David Miliband in February 2008 typified the
logic: the lesson to draw was not that Iraq was a mistake but that there were
‘mistakes in Iraq’, and that ‘interventions in other countries must be more
subtle, better planned, and if possible undertaken with the agreement of
multilateral institutions’.¹⁰⁹ How a United Nations mandate would have
forestalled Iraq’s sectarian civil war, he did not explain. In particular, the
‘planning failure’ storyline blames the wrong-headed De-Ba’athification
Order, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and intelligence services, and the
failure to provide enough occupying troops and prepare capabilities for civil
¹⁰⁷ Percy Cradock, In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret
Thatcher and John Major (London: John Murray, 1997), p. 22. I am grateful to Dr Robert
Saunders for bringing this to my attention.
¹⁰⁸ Sam Rosenfeld, ‘The Incompetence Dodge’, The American Prospect, 23 October 2005; see
also Benjamin H. Friedman, Harvey M. Sapolsky & Christopher Preble, ‘Learning the Right
Lessons from Iraq’, Policy Analysis 610, 13 February 2008.
¹⁰⁹ Foreign Secretary Speech on the Democratic Imperative, 12 February 2008.
108 Blunder
reconstruction, steps that created a large pool of alienated Sunni Arab Iraqis
who then revolted. This is a widespread interpretation of the Iraq experience
in the US. It is also endemic in British political and security circles. It has
been offered by other participants, officials, and observers: retired ambassador
to the UN Sir Jeremy Greenstock;¹¹⁰ Major General Tim Cross;¹¹¹ Britain’s
logistical component commander; Secretary of Defence Sir Michael Fallon;¹¹²
former Secretary of International Development Andrew Mitchell, who cites
Libya as an example of government actively ‘learning’ from Iraq, as though
that strengthens his case;¹¹³ and Lord Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown drew this
conclusion as the violence climaxed in mid-2007:
Plan even harder for peace than for war; you will probably need more troops to
provide security after the war than you needed to win it; make the most of the
‘golden hour’ after the war ends; creating security should be the first priority; get
the economy going fast; you may have to remove those at the top of the old
regime, but you will need the rest to run the state; work with the local population
and its traditions.¹¹⁴
This is a sunny account of post-war reconstruction. It assumes that other
societies want, or can be made to want, what the intervening powers want for
them. It assumes that the population is a unity with ‘traditions’ that can be
worked with, rather than a disparate and conflicting plurality of groups with
conflicting memories and anxieties. It assumes that a limited purge of the old
¹¹⁰ Jeremy Greenstock, Iraq: The Cost of War (New York: William Heinemann, 2016), see
passages below.
¹¹¹ Maj. General Tim Cross, Witness Statement, ‘Post Invasion Iraq: The Planning and Reality
after the Invasion from Mid 2002 to the End of August 2003’, Iraq Inquiry, pp. 25, 27; Cross
recalls briefing the Prime Minister on 18th March that ‘he did not believe post-war planning was
anywhere near ready’. In public, however, Cross struck a cautiously optimistic note and
reinforced the impression that the invasion would succeed without major disruption: he dis-
missed critics for ‘overplaying the problems there’ and being ‘almost disappointed that things
weren’t worse when we first went in’, asserting that ‘The coalition fought a magnificent
campaign, the humanitarian crisis was not there, the reconstruction crisis was not there’.
‘Interview with Major General Tim Cross’, BBC News, 25 May 2003. Cross reserved his public
criticisms for later.
¹¹² See passages below.
¹¹³ Andrew Mitchell, ‘Chilcot Report: Department for International Aid’, The Political Quar-
terly 87:4 (2016), pp. 497–7. In limiting and marginalizing Iraq as an educational case in what he
euphemistically calls ‘stabilisation challenges’, Mitchell frames the issue in the typical binary way
of warlike liberals: (at p. 497) ‘Will we continue to support the cause of liberal interventionism, as
we successfully did in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, or will we turn our back on discretionary
intervention—even under UN auspices—and be prepared to stand idly by if, God forbid, another
Rwanda takes place?’ Kosovo came at considerable human cost, as it enabled the counter-terror
of the Kosovo Liberation Army. And the case against warlike liberalism need not be that we
should abandon intervention outright, but that Britain should restrain itself from state-breaking
interventions that overthrow political orders and regimes, and adopt the principle ‘first do
minimal harm’.
¹¹⁴ Paddy Ashdown, ‘When I look to the future in Iraq, I start by studying the past’, The
Guardian, 27 May 2007.
Breaking States 109

order will satisfy the majority. And like advocates of war, Ashdown bases this
account of Iraq as an educational case study on the atypical case of allied
occupation of Germany, where successful occupation was possible over a
population shattered by global war, held together by fear of the Soviet
Union and relatively unified. The contrast with Iraq is pronounced.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon interpreted the report of the Iraq
Inquiry in similar terms. Fallon stressed the need to enhance the working of
institutions and prevent failures of planning, and the imperative to act pre-
ventively to rescue fragile states, ‘to promote good governance, tackle corrup-
tion, and build capacity in defence and security forces’. Paying tribute to the
service personnel who had overthrown Saddam, Fallon framed the issue
suggestively:
the initial war-fighting phase was a military success. They did fight to help topple
a tyrant who had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people and the
subsequent failures in the campaign at whoever’s door they are laid, cannot and
should not be laid at the door of those who did the fighting on our behalf.
Notice that ‘failures’ began only later, and are divorced from the act of
invasion. He then placed a limit on the Iraq case, asserting that ‘Despite
the report and the Iraq campaign, we must still be ready to act’.¹¹⁵ Neither
the Iraq Inquiry nor many of the war’s critics suggest otherwise, but the
emphasis drives towards quarantining Iraq into merely a cautionary tale
about execution and implementation, treating the management of foreign
societies as an engineering and logistical problem more than a political one.
Ashdown and Fallon’s managerial accounts of how to make occupation
succeed, bounded by an undisturbed belief in the essential wisdom of ambi-
tious military action, helps explain why their appetite for armed intervention
remains undimmed.
Consider also the memoir of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Britain’s
Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003. Green-
stock’s interpretation is a notable case of the drive to quarantine Iraq and its
lessons, and reduce its failures to planning failures. Greenstock argues that
The fundamental error of the Coalition was to have lost control of security almost
immediately after the invasion was over . . . [we] needed to deliver not just an Iraq
without Saddam, but a secure and functioning Iraq without Saddam. This would
have required pre-invasion planning for at least a full year after the Iraq forces
had been defeated, with detailed estimations of the resources necessary to lay the
foundations for the next stage.¹¹⁶
¹¹⁵ Michael Fallon, Hansard v.613 House of Commons, 14 July 2016.

¹¹⁶ Jeremy Greenstock, Iraq: The Cost of War (New York: William Heinemann, 2016),
pp. 418, 419, 423–4.
110 Blunder
Greenstock contrasts Iraq with two atypical cases, the careful planning for
administration and recovery of Germany and Japan after 1945, selecting on
the dependent variable of occupation success, and not considering the many
cases of occupation failure. As Greenstock makes clear, invaders must ‘deliver’
security and design a better future for the liberated through careful prepar-
ation (‘Libya and Afghanistan are still teaching us that’.) Amongst other vital
tasks, invaders must identify and elevate a ‘visibly capable leader to assume
power after the dirty work has been done’. For Greenstock, the overarching
insight is that we should respond to the problems of invasion not by ques-
tioning the prudence of invasion in the first place, but by making invasions
more efficient. Reluctance to commit ground forces and ‘refusal to engage in
messy regional conflicts has led to criticism of US passivity in Syria, Libya and
indeed Iraq itself ’. Greenstock goes further, alleging that ‘perceptions of
withdrawal from proactive engagement in the Middle East’ fed into calcula-
tions by China and Russia that America could be challenged more assertively,
claiming American retreat contributed to Russia’s actions in Ukraine and
China in the South China Sea.
Greenstock’s critique is partly technocratic and managerial, in its assump-
tions about how bureaucratic preparation can overcome the security dilemmas
of invading a country like Iraq. This argument hardly considers the possibility
that the idea of invading itself might be reckless. And the vision is partly
colonial. It suggests that Iraqis, like Libyans and Afghans, need to be more
efficiently and intensively administered into stable market democracy. It
reduces host populations into passive recipients of the foreigners’ gift. Missing
here is any sense of the wiliness and politics of the host peoples and exiles who
presume to speak for them. In 2011, with the fall of Colonel Gaddafi immi-
nent, Libyan revolutionaries made clear to coalition allies of the UK, France,
and the US that they would not accept international ground forces. It was their
country and they were in charge. Likewise, as we will see, Iraqi political elites
representing the majority demanded, and did not oppose, the policies Green-
stock blames for fuelling chaos, an American purge of Sunni Arabs from the
civil service, police, and army. No amount of planning could have eliminated
the sectarian fractures that would later be wrenched apart. Greenstock’s
assertion that Iraq is a lesson in the need to find a prominent national leader
after the ‘dirty work’ is done suggests a strangely apolitical concept of state-
building. In the case of Iraq, Washington and London believed that in Ahmad
Chalabi, the tireless Iraqi exiles and the Iraqi National Congress, they had
found such a talisman. These Iraqis in exile effectively exploited their links to
the anti-Saddamist ‘vulcans’ inside the government, and promoted the cause
of driving Saddam from office. They helped persuade policymakers that swift,
successful liberation was achievable. Chalabi’s network supplied willing Iraqi
defectors to offer up dubious evidence of Iraq’s WMD programme and its
alleged ties to Al-Qaeda hijackers, intelligence that was eagerly devoured by
Breaking States 111

the Bush administration to confirm its hypothesis, also attracting a wide media
coverage that extended to the British press.¹¹⁷ ‘Dirty work’, then, does not
finish with regime overthrow, but with the ensuing power struggle.
Contrary to Greenstock, America did not then withdraw from Iraq because
its own leaders were feckless. Iraq’s government and parliament demanded it,
and insisted otherwise that any remaining US troops would be subject to Iraqi
law.¹¹⁸ This reality undermines Greenstock’s loose accusation of ‘passivity’ in
Iraq. As for Afghanistan, developmental and governance failures were not
primarily a problem of insufficient pre-war planning but flowed from the
willing corruption of ruling kleptocratic elites, who have a different vision for
their country. Foreign peoples often act as agents, not objects.
The calamitous Syrian civil war, which interventionists falsely present as a
case of ‘Western non-intervention’ has become the counterpoint for those
who wish to limit the power of Iraq as a cautionary case. But in Syria, the
Obama administration and the British government in fact intervened inten-
sively, along with their Gulf clients. By branding the Assad regime illegitimate
and sponsoring a revolt that by 2012 had already become infiltrated by
Islamists, they internationalized the conflict and raised the stakes. Washington
supported elements of the Syrian rebels with over $1 billion a year through the
CIA, training, and equipping approximately 10,000 vetted ‘moderate’ fighters,
supplying intelligence, and coordinating logistical supply, in league with a
broader, multi-billion-dollar effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey
to bolster a coalition of militias known as the Southern Front of the Free
Syrian Army.¹¹⁹ This active programme had perverse results, inadvertently
empowering al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the al-Nusra Front, and allowing
weapons and money to fall into the hands of the Islamic State, a movement
energized by conflict in Iraq. In other words, Syria suggests not the defects of
restraint as a ‘counter-case’ to Iraq, but rather the hazards of intervention in
support of insurgent forces. Contrary to the claim of a general withdrawal,
¹¹⁷ Jane Meyer, ‘The Manipulator: Ahmad Chalabi Pushed a Tainted Case for War’, The New
Yorker, 7 June 2004; Richard Bonin, Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi and the Selling of the
Iraq War (New York: Anchor, 2013), pp. 194–200.
¹¹⁸ Chapter 4 will demonstrate this point further.
¹¹⁹ Greg Miller & Karen de Young, ‘Secret CIA Effort in Syria faces large funding cut’, The
Washington Post, 12 June 2015; Gareth Porter, ‘How America Armed Terrorists in Syria’, American
Conservative, 22 June 2017; Julia Harte & R. Jeffrey Smith, ‘Where Does the Islamic State Get Its
Weapons?’, Foreign Policy, 6 October 2014; academic and ‘grey’ literature suggests that external
support for rebels, especially in wars as complex as that in Syria, tends to make wars longer, more
violent, and more intractable: Doug Mataconis, ‘Arming the “Good” Syrian Rebels Would Not
Have Prevented the Rise of ISIS’, Outside the Beltway, 12 August 2014; David E. Cunningham,
‘Blocking Resolution: How External States can Prolong Civil Wars’, Journal of Peace Research
47:2 (2010), pp. 115–27; The Political Science of Syria’s Civil War, 18 December 2013, pp. 5, 34–6,
61–3; a CIA study prepared for President Obama reached the same conclusion: Mark Mazzetti,
‘CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels’, The New York Times,
14 October 2014.
112 Blunder
Obama reduced troop levels in the Middle East to over 30,000 troops, a level
of garrisoning that reverted to Reagan/Bush I levels; it was hardly a retreat.
Greenstock offers no evidence that Western policies in Middle Eastern con-
flicts emboldened China’s expansion in the South China Sea or Russia’s lunge
in the Crimea. China’s land grabs in contested waters predated America’s
policies in Syria during the Arab Spring era, and the more likely proximate
catalyst was America’s military and alliance build-up in Asia. For its part,
Putin’s Russia did not need to be emboldened by perceptions of American
disengagement. After all, Moscow had forcefully pursued its regional interests
by invading Georgia in 2008, a strategic partner of Washington and at the
height of America’s deployment in Iraq. It was more likely moved by the
strategic value it saw in the Crimea, Sebastopol, and the Black Sea that it saw
threatened, and the fear of EU expansion into its orbit that it denounced, than
by Obama’s reluctance to commit ground troops in Syria. It is alarming that a
diplomat of Greenstock’s stature could overlook all of these details, and the
profound problems of ‘regime change’ suggested by the very cases he cites.
Despite his title (The Costs of War), he treats these costs only as lessons in
implementation, and leaves undisturbed a Western-centric view where the US
and UK must intervene regularly and intensively, placing themselves in the
centre of civil wars and revolutions.
The ‘Phase IV’ explanation for failure is flawed in several respects. Firstly,
it assumes, as a counterfactual, that the ascending power holders in post-
Saddam Iraq who represented the majority, in particular the main Shia reli-
gious parties and the Iraqi National Congress, would have acquiesced to a new
order where the apparatus of Saddam’s rule was left intact or only dismantled
at the top echelons. It assumes that, given the right physical conditions and
equilibrium, the significant Iraqi actors would have aligned their interests and
ambitions with those of the occupiers. This was obviously not the case.
Firstly, failure to purge the Baathist order would have alienated the most
important wielders of power amongst the Iraqi Shia. At the ‘aftermath’
meeting on 16 May 2003 between Bremer and seven leaders of Iraqi groups,
the Iraqi representatives present demanded that de-Ba’athification proceed
quickly and thoroughly, against the threat of Ba’ath resurgence. With the
support of all present including Chalabi and the Kurdish leader Talibani,
Dr Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shiite Dawa Party voiced concern ‘about signs
that the Baath Party is regrouping. The Coalition must never let this happen.
We hope that you act decisively to nip this resurgence in the bud’.¹²⁰ Bremer’s
aide Dan Senor likewise recalled that ‘if we hadn’t [moved against the Baath
Party], there may have been severe retribution against the Sunnis. And the
Shia and Kurds might not have cooperated with us. Those symbolic steps were
¹²⁰ Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2006), p. 48.
Breaking States 113

very important early on’.¹²¹ Bremer and Senor had an obvious interest in
emphasizing that the momentum for the purge came from Iraqis and the
instruction of the Pentagon. But their accounts are supported by former
cabinet minister Ali Allawi, who was critical of the order but recognized that
De-Ba’athification enjoyed overwhelming initial support, had long predated
the invasion, was a staple of exile literature and a demand of Shia and Kurdish
parties.¹²² Iraqi Shia parties’ demands for the sacking of the old order were so
great that when the CPA handed over the implementation of the policy to
Iraqi politicians, ‘they broadened the decree’s impact far beyond our original
design. That led to such unintended results as the firing of several thousand
teachers for being Baath Party members’.¹²³ De-Ba’athification was not just a
fantasy of American officials in the Department of Defence and Vice Presi-
dent’s office. It had a strong Iraqi constituency, both of exiles returning and
indigenous Iraqis.
Iraq was not in a political condition where the chances of a transcendent
shared nationalism were strong. With its dictator overthrown, the country was
already a violent and volatile place. Between the completed fall of Baghdad
(a few weeks after the recorded fall on 9 April) and before the Bremer purge
even took force on 25 May 2003, the Baghdad city morgue was already
recording a sharp rise in deaths by bullet or explosive, 458 in May compared
to 246 in January 2003, rising again to 612 in June.¹²⁴ Much of this is
attributable to the onslaught of criminal gangs, but conditions were forming
for general heightened insecurity. Political relations were already so disfigured,
the sense of the Iraqi nation state as the common property of its citizens so
weak, that there was widespread looting across cities and towns as soon as the
regime collapsed, with participation by government employees, targeting
civilian infrastructure such as power plants and hospitals, Ba’ath elites’ prop-
erty, and national symbols of Iraqi heritage such as the National Museum in
Baghdad. It began on the day Saddam’s government fell, six weeks before the
De-Ba’athification Order, and climaxing on the weekend of 11–12 July with
what Patrick Cockburn called a ‘social revolutionary ferocity’.¹²⁵ Crucially for
our understanding of cause and effect, Shia Iraqis, at this moment when the
occupiers were tilting the balance of power in their favour, still took part
energetically in the plunder, especially of Sunni homes and businesses. This all
suggests that the majority political groupings would not have peacefully
¹²¹ Cited in Richard Lowry, ‘What Went Wrong?’, National Review, 25 October 2004.
¹²² Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale: Yale
University Press, 2007), pp. 150–1.
¹²³ L. Paul Bremer, ‘What We Got Right in Iraq’, The Washington Post, 13 May 2007.
¹²⁴ ‘Violence Continues to Plague Bagdhad’, Institute for War and Peace Reporting,
5 April 2004.
¹²⁵ Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr And the Shia Insurgency in Iraq (London: Faber &
Faber, 2008), p. 161.
114 Blunder
reconciled to a less favourable political settlement. One of the most pivotal
power figures of the new order, the charismatic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, in May
issued a fatwa that entitled his followers to take part in looting, provided they
donated a share of the spoils to their local Sadrist office. Sadr himself with his
considerable leverage was opposed to the occupation of Iraq from the very
outset. Even the most intensively planned and even-handed dispensation that
gave greater protection to Sunnis and balanced the claims of all groups would
probably not have met with broad support.
The failure to recognize the situation in Iraq in that transitional period also
points to a deeper fallacy, the assumption of an alignment between the
ambitions of the occupiers and the perceived interests of the host population.
Evidently, from the very outset, critical players in the drama and their Iranian
patron did not want the creation of a new order of social harmony and
equitably distributed power and wealth. They wanted to strip away and
plunder the old order in its entirety, seize the institutions of the state, pursue
vengeance, treat elections as a winner-takes-all contest, and pursue security in
a zero-sum competition. Shia parties insisted on the prompt holding of free
elections, not out of a desire for a unified democratic state, but because they
were rightly confident that they had the numbers. If this was their competitive
orientation in conditions where American policies effectively favoured them,
it is hard to see how they (or their international sponsors) would have
moderated their behaviour if the Ba’ath state and army were left largely intact.
As with many cases of intervention crisis, there was a ‘misalignment
problem’.¹²⁶ It is difficult to bring stable governance to fragile states by
increasing their technical capacity to govern, if the new ruling elites don’t
share the intervening power’s vision. Other actors, empowered by Western
intervention, often have a separate, and sometimes conflicting view of their
interests. Providing predatory or partisan governments with weapons, skills,
and money may reinforce rather than reform abusive or kleptocratic behav-
iour, and implicate the occupier in what victims see as repression, stoking
resistance and hardening division. If a host government is predatory on parts
of its population, for instance, this can undermine security sector reform, as it
did later in Iraq. Given the intense centrifugal forces that were already in play
in the spring and summer of 2003, it is naïve to assume that the roots of the
problem lay in inadequate administrative preparations. The rapid sectariani-
zation of Iraq in the wake of the regime’s fall flowed from an older struggle
over competing Iraq visions for the state’s identity, ownership, and legitimacy,
entrenched in the 1990s era of sanctions, Ba’ath governance, and US-
sponsored opposition in exile, which saw the rise of an assertive Iraqi Shia
consciousness. Iraqis were not primordial beings forever on a default setting of
¹²⁶ Stephen Biddle, ‘Afghanistan’s legacy: Emerging lessons of an ongoing war’, The
Washington Quarterly 37:2 (2014), pp. 73–86, pp. 80–1.
Breaking States 115

internal conflict, but neither were they merely subjects to be administered
badly or well. They were political agents who made choices, in pre-existing
circumstances that ‘proved conducive to the advent of identity politics’¹²⁷ and
the exploitation of such politics by skilful entrepreneurs. The main defect of
the regime change project was the idea itself, which is inherently flawed in
most cases. As soon as the occupiers kicked in the door and decided to stay,
there was an appointment with strife.
This is not to pronounce on the wisdom, or folly, of the post-Saddam purge.
No doubt, the purge did alienate Sunni Arab Iraqis. The flip side, however, was
that without de-Ba’athification, or with a more limited purge, this would court
the serious risk of resistance among the Shia groups that were treating the fall
of Saddam as an opportunity not to forge a reconciled power-sharing federal
democracy, but to compete for power advantage. Either way, the invaders in
2003 could not easily have avoided civil turmoil that would flow, given the
strong majority demand for the overturning of the old Ba’ath order, and
minority fear of that process of change. The task of imposing order and
balance on the post-Saddam settlement, to offset pre-existing centrifugal
forces, would have required a very adroit manipulation of competing groups
with bribes and threats of abandonment. To meet an adequate troops-to-
civilians ratio, it would have taken an estimated 380,000–500,000 troops in
total to ensure Iraq’s post-Saddam stability.¹²⁸ That would have been an
unsustainable and indeed imprudent commitment given the demands for
deployments elsewhere and the need to relieve and rotate those deployed.
The very improbability of getting all of this right makes the whole venture
simply too difficult and too complex, beyond acceptable costs. The root
problem lay in an intractable and older problem, of competing political visions
among Iraqis who in a new and fluid environment had powerful reasons to
fear one another, both the Shiite majority with its experience of oppressive
minority rule, the Sunni minority who feared retribution (and whose Sad-
damist elements had long planned a guerrilla resistance should this day come),
Kurdish Iraqis who would view restoration of the old order as threatening,
other actors from Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda franchise, and Iran, which also had a
stake in supporting competition over cooperation. These potentialities would
very probably have erupted into open conflict whether the occupiers disman-
tled the old order, purged only part of it, or kept it entirely in place under a
milder Sunni strongman. There is no simple resolution of this dilemma. That
the choice lay between different poisons was—and is—a powerful reason in
itself not to invade in the first place.
¹²⁷ See Fanar Hadad, Shia-Centric State-Building and Sunni Rejection in Post 2003 Iraq
(Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), p. 12.
¹²⁸ James Quinlivan, ‘Force Requirements in Stability Operations’, Parameters (1995),
pp. 59–69; also James Dobbins, ‘Who Lost Iraq?’, Foreign Affairs 86:5 (2007), pp. 61–74.
116 Blunder
A L IBERAL WAR AFTER ALL
We now turn to an argument that challenges my interpretation. According to

G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, two of the world’s most sophisticated
observers of international relations, this war, for all its democracy-promoting
effort and ambitious doctrine, was predominantly a realist war, not a ‘liberal’
one.¹²⁹ Declarations of a higher purpose were merely gestures to carry opinion,
especially after WMD claims were proved false. Instead of asking, as others do
(Van Rythoven, 2016; Schmidt and Williams, 2008)¹³⁰ why anti-war realists
failed in their advocacy for restraint and were trumped by neoconservatives
and liberal hawks, they suggest that a different faction of realists carried the
day. If America’s most disastrous war since Vietnam had intellectual founda-
tions, those foundations were allegedly laid more by hegemonic realists like
John Mearsheimer, who opposed the war, than ‘liberal internationalists’ like
Anne-Marie Slaughter, who supported it.
In laying the groundwork for Operation Iraqi Freedom, which intellectual
tradition is more to blame, realism or liberalism? Policymakers may baulk at
the suggestion that theory shapes their behaviour, but theory simply means the
map with which we interpret the world, and besides, the Iraq War more than
most attracted intellectualized discussion. What theory led them to Baghdad?
This historical question has high stakes. By shifting the blame and giving
American liberalism an alibi for the disaster, by arguing that the Iraq War
mostly reflects the pathologies of a species of realism, the authors try to clean
liberalism’s scorecard. In other outlets, both give liberal ideas credit for the
successes of the post-war international order, like the Bretton Woods financial
system and the Marshall Plan.¹³¹ Here, they absolve those same ideas of
failure. And if disasters like Iraq are not built into Washington’s post-war
design, but are instead the result of deviations from liberalism, the argument is
stronger that America should persist in leaning forward, maintaining a ‘liberal’
kind of hegemony, using its power to spread free markets and democracy, a
project that is more peace-producing than war-generating.¹³² Thus, for their
grand strategic vision, the unimportance of liberal ideas to the Iraq War is
convenient.
¹²⁹ Daniel Deudney & G. John Ikenberry, ‘Realism, Liberalism and the Iraq War’, Survival
59:4 (2017), pp. 7–26.
¹³⁰ Eric Van Rythoven, ‘The Perils of Realist Advocacy and the Promise of Securitization
Theory: Revisiting the tragedy of the Iraq War debate’, European Journal of International
Relations 22:3 (2016), pp. 487–511; Brian Schmidt & Michael Williams, ‘The Bush Doctrine
and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists’, Security Studies 17:2 (2008), pp. 191–220.
¹³¹ Daniel Deudney & G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Nature and Sources of Liberal International
Order’, Review of International Studies 25 (1999), pp. 179–96; ‘Democratic Internationalism’
(Working Paper, Council on Foreign Relations, 2012), pp. 7–12, 13.
¹³² Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry & William C. Wohlforth, ‘Lean Forward: In Defence
of American Engagement’, Foreign Affairs 92:1 (2013), pp. 130–42.
Breaking States 117

To their credit, Deudney and Ikenberry remind us that realism is hetero-
geneous and does not necessarily counsel restraint. Realism does indeed
contain streams of thought that warrant wars for dominance through ‘regime
change’. There is such a thing as ‘primacy realism’. Officials in the operational
policy world espouse it, even if their academic counterparts don’t. Their
argument also shifts the question. Instead of asking, as others do,¹³³ why
realists failed in their advocacy for restraint and were trumped by neoconser-
vatives and liberal hawks, they suggest that a different faction of realists
carried the day. To make their case, however, they offer only an impoverished
potted history of the Iraq War’s origins and conduct, a re-telling that does little
justice to the ideas that shaped it.
The issue is not whether realpolitik can inspire hegemonic wars. It can. The
issue is whether the Iraq War was primarily ‘the product of liberalism’ or
‘straightforwardly the result of the pursuit of American hegemonic primacy’.
As I demonstrate, liberals and liberalism were deeply implicated. The Bush
administration’s forceful reassertion of American primacy was not an amoral
exercise in power maximization. It was infused with an idealism that has deep
historical roots. Moreover, liberalism and the pursuit of hegemony are not
antithetical, as the authors imply. Liberalism married with the capabilities of
a superpower gives America a proclivity for reckless military adventures.
So long as liberalism, untampered by prudential balance-of-power realism,
remains a central engine of American grand strategy, the US will be prone
to further such tragedies.
This section divides into three parts. In Part I, I define liberalism, realism,
and ‘liberal’ wars, as Ikenberry and Deudney’s treatment of all three requires
some definitional untangling. The authors don’t offer a clear or falsifiable
account of what a ‘liberal’ war is or what it would look like, against which to
test the Iraq case and identify its conceptual underpinnings. In Parts II and III,
I demonstrate the flaws in Ikenberry and Deudney’s effort to get American
liberalism off the hook. Firstly, their account is bad and reductionist history. It
narrows the causes of the war to three policymakers whose views they wrongly
elide, neglecting other significant voices and the wide coalition of liberal minds
whose account of security led them to support a preventive and hegemonic
war, not as the antithesis but the necessary condition for the spread of liberal
values. Secondly, for two internationalists this is a strangely parochial account
of the Iraq War. Other international agents also shaped the struggle, from
¹³³ On this issue, see Eric Van Rythoven, ‘The Perils of Realist Advocacy and the Promise of
Securitization Theory: Revisiting the tragedy of the Iraq War debate’, European Journal of
International Relations 22:3 (2016), pp. 487–511; Brian Schmidt & Michael Williams, ‘The
Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists’, Security Studies 17:2
(2008), pp. 191–220.
118 Blunder
Prime Minister Tony Blair to Iraqi exiles, and their visions are not reducible
to narrow realpolitik.
Part I. Liberalism, Realism, and War
A restatement of definitions is in order, as well as an account of ‘liberal wars’

and how to recognize them. Deudney and Ikenberry frame the issue in a way
that ‘games’ the argument.
Realism is a pessimistic intellectual tradition that views international life as
insecure and defined by the possibility of war, because the world is anarchic, or
lacking a supreme, supranational sovereign.¹³⁴ Without a ‘Leviathan’ to keep
the peace, this condition of anarchy places a premium on self-help and a
sensitivity to dangerous power imbalances. Realists often disagree on specific
policies but are generally concerned for stability over progress, emphasize
material capabilities, are wary of overzealous crusading, and are above all
averse to the impulse to reinvent the world, and transform other countries, in
one’s own image and at one’s own timetable. This translates into a general
unease with waging wars to export American values. Most realists who
whisper in princes’ ears—from George Kennan to Henry Kissinger to Brent
Scowcroft—share this orientation, though not all.
As America became a ‘unipolar’ superpower without a peer competitor to
restrain it, most American academic realists directed their energy both to
theory-building and to prophesying about the impermanence of unipolarity
and the perils of overstretch. There were limits even to American power, they
warned. Despite appearances, the triumph of Atlantic democratic capitalism
under Washington’s stewardship would not permanently transform the world.
Americans were not immune from the historical patterns whereby overexpan-
sion generated resistance and counter-power. And they argued that America’s
commitment to primacy, often euphemized as ‘leadership’, and to spreading
the ‘democratic peace’ made the country dangerously war-prone, and endan-
gered the very democratic institutions they were supposed to protect. This
critique grew more urgent as the Global War on Terror unfolded.¹³⁵
¹³⁴ On the realist tradition and its unifying facets, see Joseph M. Parent & Joshua M. Baron,
‘Elder abuse: How the moderns mistreat classical realism’, International Studies Review 13
(2011), pp. 193–213; Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones & Steven E. Miller, The Perils of
Anarchy: Contemporary Realism and International Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995);
Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 45.
¹³⁵ See Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Pressc & Harvey M. Sapolsky, ‘Come Home America: The
Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation’, International Security 21:4, (1997), pp. 5–48;
Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International Security 19
(1994), pp. 5–49; Sebastian Rosato, ‘The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory’, American
Political Science Review 97: 4 (2003), pp. 585–602.
Breaking States 119

Most senior realists of the academy opposed the Iraq War.¹³⁶ They argued
that the military adventure was not in the national interest, that overthrowing
the Iraqi state would spread instability in the Middle East, that invading this
divided society would lead to occupation for years, and that the US should
focus its efforts on combating Al-Qaeda and to deterring Saddam’s adventur-
ism. More broadly, they warned that the Iraq War was part of Washington’s
overexpansion, an expansion driven by the lack of a major power competitor
and by the motor of liberal ideology. Some observers, including realists critical
of the Iraq War, trace a lineage from Woodrow Wilson to the ‘Bush Doctrine’
in which the Iraq War was grounded.¹³⁷
For Ikenberry and Deudney, realists who argued that their faith dictated
opposition to Iraq, failed to understand the breadth and multiplicity of their
own tradition. Realism, they rightly note, has several variants. The realism that
apparently inspired Iraq was more to be found amongst the ‘practical-
operational’ stable of realists within government. These realists proffered a
twofold form of realism that has strong purchase in Washington. It was firstly
‘hegemonic realism’ or the pursuit of American primacy on the basis that
order flows from favourable concentrations of power, and ‘interdependence
realism’ that stresses the dangers of violent interdependence and the need to
alleviate anarchy in an increasingly lethal industrial and nuclear age by rever-
sing weapons proliferation. For realists of this stripe, there was obvious appeal
to the reassertion of American dominance in a vital oil-rich power centre, and
the preventive removal of a WMD threat. Even when liberal internationalists
joined them in supporting war, they were actually following a narrower
counterproliferation agenda, being driven more by worries about interdepend-
ence in a nuclear age than by Wilsonian idealism.
And then there is the family of liberal theories. In the field of foreign policy,
American liberalism is committed to the possibility of progress and change.
Liberalism combines ideals of individual liberty, free markets, democratic
representation, and equality of opportunity. It is optimistic about the ability
to replace international anarchy with trustful, harmonious relations, and to
forge lasting cooperation. Liberals typically identify three pathways to a better
world, through economic interdependence, through the spread of democracy,
¹³⁶ See the advertisement that a group of academic realists placed in the The New York Times:
‘War with Iraq is not in America’s National Interest’, The New York Times, 26 September 2002;
see also John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy 134
(2003), pp. 50–9; Paul Starobin, ‘The Realists’, National Journal 39:37 (2006), pp. 24–31.
¹³⁷ Michael C. Desch, ‘America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction
in U.S. Foreign Policy’, International Security 32:3 (2007), pp. 7–43; Christopher Layne,
‘Wilson’s Ghost: Spreading Freedom around the World Will Destroy It at Home’, The American
Conservative 4:4 (28 February 2005), pp. 9–11; Lloyd E. Ambrosius, ‘Woodrow Wilson and
George W. Bush: Historical Comparisons of Ends and Means in Their Foreign Policies’,
Diplomatic History 30 (2006), pp. 509–43; David M. Kennedy, ‘What “W” owes to “WW” ’,
The Atlantic 30:5 (2005), pp. 36–40.
120 Blunder
and through the creation of international institutions. Liberals generally are
oriented to a strategic vision where the world is, or should be, a harmony of
interests, altering the political and economic character of other states in
order to achieve common security. In the Wilsonian tradition, liberals seeks
to institute peace by spreading liberty and creating liberal subjects abroad.
‘Wilsonianism’ is a conflicted thing. Some liberals emphasize President
Woodrow Wilson’s historic stress on international law and institutions, others
the need to spread democratic freedom at the point of a bayonet if necessary,
but Wilsonians agree on the ‘basic proposition that America’s national secur-
ity requires a liberal world order’.¹³⁸ In turn, that liberal world order flowed
from and was underwritten by American primacy, a primacy anchored and
legitimized in international institutions.¹³⁹
The American neoconservatives, as they had evolved by the time of the late
1990s, blended democratic idealism and military assertiveness. Like liberals,
‘neocons’ believe that American security rests on the ‘regime type’ of other
states, and that the world’s security relies upon America’s benign superin-
tendence. Like liberals, neocons self-consciously reject what they see as an
amoral, deluded realism that is alien to the best traditions of the republic.
Their frame of reference is the interwar period, the failures of appeasement
and the resulting catastrophe. Washington should use its unprecedented
power not merely to acquire more material advantage, but to expand the
sphere of market democracy. Unlike liberals, who worry more about inter-
national institutions, legality, and the cultivation of allies, neocons prefer the
unabashed and unfettered assertion of American power, where allies or
institutions are means, not ends.¹⁴⁰ But for their common missionary impulse
and their presumption in favour of military action, liberals and neocons both
belong to the Wilsonian family. As we will see, the ‘Bush Doctrine’ that
embodied neocons’ ideas, and the Iraq War that was their signature project,
drew on liberal ideas about security.
At first glance, Ikenberry and Deudney’s treatment of ‘realism’ and ‘hegem-
ony’ seems tautological. As the illogic goes, realism of a certain kind prescribes
hegemonic war, Iraq was a hegemonic war, therefore the Iraq War was realist.
But a closer look suggests that their error is a historical and conceptual one,
¹³⁸ John A. Thompson, ‘Wilsonianism: The Dynamics of a Conflicted Concept’, International

Affairs 86:1 (2010), pp. 27–48, p. 28.
¹³⁹ Though Ikenberry has separately argued that Washington could create the institutional
framework to ‘lock in’ the liberal world order even after the decline of American power: ‘The
Future of the Liberal World Order: Internationalism after America’, Foreign Affairs 90:3 (2011),
pp. 56–68.
¹⁴⁰ On the history of neoconservatism, see Michael C. Williams, ‘Morgenthau Now: Neocon-
servatism, National Greatness, and Realism’, in Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Mor-
genthau in International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 216–41,
pp. 217–27; Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York:
Doubleday, 2009).
Breaking States 121

not a logical fallacy. They equate the pursuit of ‘hegemony’ and wars to
perpetuate it exclusively with realism, so that the pursuit of ‘hegemonic
primacy’ is assumed to be antithetical whatever is ‘liberal’.¹⁴¹ If there is such
a thing as a non-realist ‘liberal’ war, at Ikenberry and Deudney’s hands it
becomes such a small target that it almost disappears, thus setting up the
inquest to make practically any assertive military project or enforcement of US
dominance necessarily ‘realist’. This will not do.
Ikenberry and Deudney skate over it, but a significant wing of liberalism is
hawkish. There are anti-war liberals, but there also does exist a group of liberal
hawks with privileged access to government and the commentariat, who
support the forceful pursuit of material power to promote liberal goals. This
group was especially galvanized by debate over intervention in the Balkan
Wars of the 1990s. If there is a true divide between liberals and realists over
hegemony, it lies not in a disagreement about whether or not to pursue it. The
belief that hegemony is a desirable, peace-promoting and security-producing
state is a monopoly neither of realists or liberals. It was, after all, Ikenberry’s
seminal work that cast America approvingly as the post-World War II ‘Liberal
Leviathan’, exercising its hegemony to transform the world, its institutions,
and norms in a liberal direction.¹⁴² In that moment of creation, American pre-
eminence lay at the core.
A fairer test would be for what purposes, and according to what theory of
security, hegemonic wars are intended. A ‘realist’ hegemonic war would eschew
larger ideological goals or the creation of a constitutional system of govern-
ment in Iraq as a result, and focus instead on war generating changes in the
distribution of material power as a valued end in itself. It would be conserva-
tive, fearing that democratization would increase rather than decrease security
threats in the region. Realists of this kind might countenance the preaching of
human rights but only as an enabling ‘cover’ for an exercise in austere
geopolitics. A ‘liberal’ hegemonic war would proceed on a different basis:
that accommodation with dictatorships in the region was itself the source of
the security problem, and that the purpose of the war would be to alter the
destructive convergence of weapons proliferation, rogues, and radical Islamist
ideology by replacing dictatorship and corruption with democracy and free
markets, beginning in Iraq as part of a benign domino effect. A realist
hegemonic war would aim to bring the monarchies and dictatorships of the
¹⁴¹ The authors claim that ‘the Iraq War . . . was straightforwardly the result of the pursuit of
American hegemonic primacy. Its origins flowed readily from an ancient and prominent body of
realist thought’; they characterize neoconservatism as ‘partially liberal and partially primacist’.
These statements imply a necessary separation of liberalism from the commitment to ‘primacy’,
which is presented as exclusively a realist concern.
¹⁴² John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American
World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
122 Blunder
Gulf under American tutelage; a liberal war would aim to transform their very
character.
Part II. The Liberal Road to Baghdad
It is artificial to ascribe major foreign policy initiatives to a single intellectual

source. Both idealist liberals and cut-throat realists, for instance, have their
reasons for supporting NATO expansion.¹⁴³ The resort to arms, too, normally
requires a domestic coalition of factions, interests, and lobbies. Deputy Secre-
tary of Defence and hawkish intellectual Paul Wolfowitz recalled there were
multiple rationales within the administration for attacking Iraq. Decision-
makers settled on WMD as the central rationale because ‘it was the one reason
everyone could agree on’.¹⁴⁴ Among multiple agendas was a genuine drive to
assert American hegemony, eliminate competitors, and demonstrate strength
to great power competitors. Momentum built for ‘regime change’ in the
wake of the grave fears caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax
attacks that followed soon after. Exhilarated by unexpected early success in
Afghanistan, US decision-makers felt the wind at their back. A visceral ‘rally
around the flag’ emotion took hold. Henry Kissinger, who had been sceptical
of earlier interventions, supported the invasion ‘Because Afghanistan was not
enough. The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. And we need to
humiliate them.’¹⁴⁵ It will not suffice, however, to settle on the banal observa-
tion that wars are caused by a combination of factors. Was liberal idealism
central, or marginal?
With startling brevity, Ikenberry and Deudney claim that the principal
architects of the Iraq War were three ‘hegemonic realists’ within the executive,
Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld
and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz. ‘There are many ways to
describe the political ideologies of these three figures’, they note, ‘but “liberal-
internationalist” is not among them.’
Strangely, in Ikenberry and Deudney’s account, the most senior figure
who had to sign off on the war is missing in action. Over Iraq, President
George W. Bush was a driving force. He was not a puppet of his court, but
¹⁴³ Liberals could point to the benefit of locking in and extending the democratic peace,
realists to the geopolitical gain of acquiring new allies and territorial predominance. See Joshua
R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, ‘Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the US Offer to Limit
NATO Expansion’, International Security 40:4 (2016), pp. 7–44.
¹⁴⁴ Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair, May 2003; Wolfowitz specified also that the main four
reasons were WMD, terrorism, the criminal mistreatment of the Iraqi people, and the linkage
between the first two: Jamie McIntyre, ‘Pentagon Challenges Vanity Fair Report’, CNN,
30 May 2003.
¹⁴⁵ Cited in Mark Danner, ‘Words in a Time of War’, Asia Times, 2 June 2007.
Breaking States 123

independent and strong-willed in his decision-making style.¹⁴⁶ If the ideas and
assumptions carried by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are deemed to be
evidence of the war’s origins, it also matters what the President believed he was
doing. Every account from close observers, who independently agree, suggest
that Bush’s private sentiments about Iraq, and the War on Terror, were
predominantly liberal ones that invested American power with ideological
ambition. Bush told his counsellor Karen Hughes a week after 9/11, ‘We have
an opportunity to restructure the world toward freedom, and we have to get it
right.’ Officials, congressional representatives, and other confidantes agree
that the President in private interpreted the historic juncture opened by 9/11
in ‘grand, emphatic and even Manichaean terms’, his belief in the ‘goal of
wiping out terrorism’,¹⁴⁷ his ‘strong moral streak’,¹⁴⁸ and his ‘propensity to be
idealistic and see that democracy is the innate right of mankind’.¹⁴⁹ In an
otherwise critical memoir, Bush’s estranged former Press Secretary Scott
McLellan affirmed the strength of the President’s commitment to the ‘Free-
dom Agenda’: ‘There was nothing I would ever see him talk more passionately
about than this view, both publicly and privately’.¹⁵⁰ These rationalizations
were not merely post hoc ones used to justify the war in public, but prior beliefs
articulated in private. The sincerity of Bush’s public enthusiasm for idealist
visions such as Natan Sharansky’s manifesto, The Case for Democracy, is
suggested by his underreported private meetings with exile groups. If Bush
secretly doubted the doctrines he articulated intensely when away from
the cameras, those doubts were very secret. And if, as the authors argue, the
privately held convictions of Cheney and his ‘one per cent doctrine’ are
¹⁴⁶ For instance, against lobbying by Vice President Dick Cheney, Bush insisted on appointing
Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. Bush dismissed Donald Rumsfeld, and refused to pardon
‘Scooter’ Libby, both against Cheney’s opposition. He resisted Cheney’s urging for a more
hardline stance on North Korea and Iran. And at one stage in 2004 he considered dismissing
Cheney from the presidential ticket. See Julian E. Zelizer, ‘5 Myths About George W. Bush’, The
Washington Post, 7 November 2010.
¹⁴⁷ Cited in Frank Bruni, ‘A Nation Challenged: White House Memo’, The New York Times,
22 September 2001. See also the idealistic fervour reported by Bob Woodward from their
conversations: Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 340.
¹⁴⁸ Condoleezza Rice, cited in Amy Zegard, ‘The Legend of a Democracy Promoter’, The
National Interest 97 (2008), p. 51.
¹⁴⁹ According to Victor Davis Hanson, a classical historian who had private talks with both
Bush and Cheney, comparing Bush’s idealism to Cheney’s more ‘tragic’ view: cited in Barton
Gellman, The Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 250–1; Eliot
Cohen reported Bush’s real, core belief in the Freedom Agenda and the rejection of the practice
of accommodation with ‘thuggish regimes’. Cited in Stephen Dyson, Leaders in Conflict: Bush
and Rumsfeld in Iraq (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 46; and John Lewis
Gaddis, also in contact with the White House, saw the Bush Doctrine as powered by a recurrent
Wilsonian view of the spread of American values as the path to security: John Lewis Gaddis,
‘Bush’s Security Strategy’, Foreign Policy 133 (2002), pp. 50–7.
¹⁵⁰ Scott McLellen, What Happened: Inside the White House and Washington’s Culture of
Deception (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), p. 197.
124 Blunder
admissible as evidence for the war’s ideological drivers, then so too are those
of Bush. Indeed, in assessing the evidential value of rhetoric and what ideas
underpinned the Iraq War, the authors are methodologically inconsistent.
They treat spoken rationalizations as a reflection of real motives and causes
when it supports their case, and as mere surface gloss when it doesn’t.
The consistency of Bush’s beliefs suggests that there was authenticity to the
‘Bush Doctrine’, which predated and supplied the rationale for the Iraq War
and was laid out in the President’s West Point address of 1 June 2002 and the
White House’s National Security Strategy of that year.¹⁵¹ The Doctrine codi-
fied liberal assumptions about security and American interests,¹⁵² and its
namesake invoked the Wilsonian tradition in advancing it.¹⁵³ These ideas
were: that the ‘regime type’ of foreign states is the primary determinant of
their behaviour; that globalized security threats, culminating in the potential
marriage of terrorism, destructive technology, and revisionist states, must be
met with anticipatory measures such as preventive war; and that the promo-
tion of democracy and capitalism, universally applicable, can transform the
world into a more peaceful and secure place. That is not to say that the
Doctrine in its entirety conformed with the preferences of liberals. Even
pro-war liberals were critical of its unilateralism above collective endeavour
and institutions. But in the heavy emphasis on the ascent of American
ideology, there was far more for realists to dislike than liberals. Iraq, then,
flowed primarily from a liberal view of the sources of foreign policy, namely
the character of regimes themselves in which America has a large stake, and a
liberal view of the solution, namely enforcing a democratic peace. The prop-
osition of a democratized Iraq that would be better for Iraqis and Americans
helped swing American liberals behind the effort.
The summary of the three ‘architects’ of Iraq is also a simplistic treatment of
Wolfowitz. Cheney and Rumsfeld, it is true, were clearly not liberal ideologues.
They were conservative nationalists, sceptical of declared liberal war aims such
as democracy promotion and nation-building. (Indeed, Rumsfeld for these
reasons advocated for a quick withdrawal from Iraq after Baghdad fell, and his
failure on this front also suggests hardline realists were not in the ascendancy).
Paul Wolfowitz, however, cannot usefully be grouped with these two figures.
¹⁵¹ ‘Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the Unites States Military
Academy’, White House Press Release, 1 June 2002; President of the United States, National
Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: US Government Printing
Office, 2002).
¹⁵² See Robert Jervis, ‘Understanding the Bush Doctrine’, Political Science Quarterly 118:3
(2003), pp. 365–88, p. 367; Andrew Flibbert, ‘The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and intellectuals in
explanations of the Iraq war’, Security Studies 15:2 (2006), pp. 310–52.
¹⁵³ ‘From the fourteen points to the four freedoms to the speech at Westminster (Ronald
Reagan), America has put its power at the service of principle’. Speech in Whitehall, November
2003, G.W. Bush, ‘Both Our Nations Serve the Cause of Freedom’, The New York Times,
20 November 2003.
Breaking States 125

Wolfowitz long held an idealistic concept of the purposes of American
hegemony. In battles over dictatorship, democracy, and American patronage,
for instance, over ending Washington’s support for the Marcos regime in the
Philippines in 1986, and in his criticisms of Henry Kissinger’s alternative
vision of stable equilibriums among major powers, Wolfowitz spearheaded a
school of foreign policy ‘willing to forsake the status quo in pursuit of
democratic ideals’.¹⁵⁴ The same Wolfowitz co-drafted the notorious ‘Defence
Planning Guidance’ document of 1992, which envisaged America generating
overwhelming military superiority to prevent the re-emergence of rivals.¹⁵⁵
Again, liberal idealism can work in synthesis with ruthless hegemonic asser-
tion. It was Wolfowitz who in late November 2001 oversaw the secret advisory
paper ‘Delta of Terrorism’, that anticipated a two-generation war with radical
Islam and called for the overthrow of Saddam’s Iraq in order to transform the
Middle East out of its ‘malignancy’. This went beyond the assertion of material
power, and called for a regional political transformation, to reverse what
Wolfowitz called the ‘stagnation’ that produced ‘radicalism and breeds terror-
ism’. The paper had great influence on Bush.¹⁵⁶ As it was not meant for wider
consumption or public discussion, and was written fifteen months before the
invasion of Iraq, it is hard to dismiss the paper as a rhetorical posture
‘to sustain public support for the war and provide a template for post-war
Iraqi reconstruction’.
It did not just take a handful of well-placed individuals to translate the idea
of war into policy. It took the formation of a broad, bipartisan, and civil-
military consensus. What were liberals doing on the eve of war? ‘In reality’,
assert the authors without evidence, ‘most liberal internationalists opposed the
war’. This is a puzzling claim, since in 2008, Ikenberry wrote that ‘After all,
many liberals did in fact support the invasion’.¹⁵⁷ He was correct the first time.
While there is no exact count available, there was significant support for war
among self-identifying liberal commentators and policymakers. Support came
from liberal intellectuals, some of whom had been in and out of the revolving
door between academia and government: Paul Berman, David Remnick, Peter
Beinart, Leon Wieseltier, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya, Harvard
professor and The New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Ignatieff,
¹⁵⁴ James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin,
2004), pp. 134, 76.
¹⁵⁵ Patrick E. Tyler, ‘U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop’, The New York
Times, 8 March 1992.
¹⁵⁶ Bob Woodward, State of Denial (London: Pocket Books, 2006), pp. 83–5; Wolfowitz on
‘stagnation’ in The Jerusalem Post (2003) cited in T. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military
Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 30.
¹⁵⁷ G. John Ikenberry, Introduction, to G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie
Slaughter & Tony Smith, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the twenty-first
century (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 2.
126 Blunder
and former senior officials such as Richard Holbrooke and Madeline Albright.
Liberals in Congress lent their full-throated support, including Senator Hillary
Clinton and Senator John Kerry. A critical shaper of liberal opinion was Bill
Clinton’s former national security advisor Kenneth Pollack, whose The
Threatening Storm was ‘the most influential book of the season’, helping
persuade commentators at the main East Coast liberal organs from op-ed
regulars at The Washington Post and the editors of The New Yorker to The
New Republic and Slate.¹⁵⁸ Liberals’ rationales were always mixed but included
avowedly liberal causes: ‘to liberate the Iraqi people from their dungeon’ and
to establish ‘a beachhead of Arab democracy’, for ‘Iraq as a secular democracy
with equal rights for all of its citizens’.¹⁵⁹ Liberal visions viewed the humani-
tarian and strategic grounds for war as mutually complementary. As Leon
Wieseltier wrote, ‘it is quite easy to defend the necessity and the justice of
separating Saddam Hussein from his lethal devices, which is the same thing as
separating him from his power, which is the same thing as aiding in the
formation of a democratic government in Baghdad’.¹⁶⁰
Ikenberry and Deudney deploy the term ‘liberal internationalist’ in ways
that obfuscate. Does ‘internationalist’ encompass foreign policy liberals of any
kind, since it would be difficult to be a non-internationalist liberal? Elsewhere,
Ikenberry has defined the essence of liberalism as follows: ‘Autocratic and
militarist states make war; democracies make peace. In retrospect, this is the
cornerstone of Wilsonianism and, more generally, the liberal international
tradition’.¹⁶¹ In which case, this must include liberals who believe that
American primacy is the best vehicle towards that peace, and that the lib-
eral international order needs occasional muscular enforcement. A vocal and
influential war party has resided within the ranks of American liberalism and
has been at the core of America’s most significant wars since Korea. These
numbered John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson in
the era of Vietnam, and the likes of Wesley Clark and Bill Clinton in the era of
Kosovo. It includes the influential liberal hawks Samantha Power, Susan Rice,
and Anne-Marie Slaughter who urged President Barack Obama to conduct
airstrikes against Libya in 2011.¹⁶² The latter two also supported the invasion
of Iraq, undermining Ikenberry and Deudney’s ahistorical claim that liberals
¹⁵⁸ Bill Keller, ‘The I Can’t Believe I’m a Hawk Club’, The New York Times, 8 February 2003;
Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random
House, 2002); Michael Tomasky, ‘Beyond Iraq: Toward a New Liberal Internationalism’, in
Neil Jumonville & Kevin Mattson (eds), Liberalism for a New Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), pp. 209–19.
¹⁵⁹ Cited in George Packer, ‘The Liberal Quandary over Iraq’, The New York Times Magazine,
8 December 2002, pp. 104–7.
¹⁶⁰ Leon Wieseltier, ‘Against Innocence’, The New Republic, 3 March 2003.
¹⁶¹ G. John Ikenberry et al., The Crisis of American Foreign Policy, p. 10.
¹⁶² Michael Hastings, ‘Inside Obama’s War Room’, Rolling Stone, 13 October 2011.
Breaking States 127

with a preference for ‘international arms control and security regime-building’
are against ‘preventive war and hegemonic rule’.¹⁶³ This is also true of the
majority of Senate Democrats whose consent to use force in Iraq the President
requested and obtained.
Another historical problem confronts the liberal alibi. If America was
driven narrowly just to strengthen its hegemonic rule, it went to a great deal
of extra trouble voluntarily. Nowhere in their account is there an explanation
for the bold experiment in ‘year zero’ reconstruction and nation-building in
Iraq. How do we reconcile cold realpolitik with the determination to purge the
old order through De-Ba’athification? This decision was driven partly by
Chalabi and Shia and Kurdish demands, partly by America’s dogmatically
idealistic proconsul Paul Bremer III (who is missing from Ikenberry and
Deudney’s history), and was approved by Bush at least after the fact and
possibly before.¹⁶⁴ The purge of the bureaucracy and army was justified as a
wise ideological purification, through appeals to the examples of earlier
democracy-promoting efforts in post-war Japan and West Germany. America
could have installed a client dictatorship and exerted minimal institutional
impact, perhaps with a protective garrison, as it had done in other cases where
it wanted a strategic foothold. Instead, it embarked on an ambitious nation-
building programme to remake the Iraqi state along liberal lines. Is that
realism?
Part III. Beyond Washington
Coalition partners and international policy entrepreneurs go missing in Iken-

berry and Deudney’s parochial account. Whatever happened to Prime Min-
ister Tony Blair? Iraq was primarily America’s war, and it could and probably
would have been fought without others’ participation. But Blair’s inner circle
was at the forefront of crafting the international case for war, and the pursuit
of an international mandate. The logic and appeal of Blair’s arguments cannot
adequately be explained by pointing to hegemonic realist theory, to put it
mildly. For Blair, this was a great struggle of ideas. Britain’s alignment with the
US over Iraq was partly fuelled by an attempt to bandwagon for influence in
Washington. But it also had a genuine ideological element. Saddam’s Iraq,
Blair and his circle believed, embodied a growing systemic threat. Removing
his regime would begin the positive transformation of the Middle East.
A leaked memorandum from Secretary of State Colin Powell to President
¹⁶³ Benjamin H. Friedman, ‘The Real Problem with a Secretary of State Susan Rice’, CATO
Institute Commentary, 27 November 2012; Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘Good Reasons for Going
Around the U.N.’, The New York Times, 18 March 2003.
¹⁶⁴ Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 150–1; Bremer, My Year in Iraq, p. 48.
128 Blunder
Bush in the lead-up to the Crawford talks in April 2002 neatly summarized it:
‘On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary. He is
convinced on two points: the threat is real; and success against Saddam will
yield more regional success.’¹⁶⁵ This is consistent with the record of Blair’s
private deliberations in Downing Street, his personal notes to Bush, his
memoirs, and the public case he settled on in March 2003 on the eve of
invasion. With invasion underway later in March 2003, Blair wrote privately
to Bush that ‘Our fundamental goal is to spread our goals of freedom,
democracy, tolerance and the rule of law. Though Iraq’s WMD is the imme-
diate justification for action, ridding Iraq of Saddam is the real prize’.¹⁶⁶
It is not clear how far his advocacy helped build a bipartisan consensus in
Washington for regime change in Iraq. But it helped internationalize the war.
America’s coalition in invading Iraq was larger than the coalition it mustered
for the Korean War. And it led to Britain occupying southern Iraq, suffering
179 fatalities and almost 6,000 non-fatal casualties. Blair’s liberalism rein-
forced the hopeful ambitions of hawkish liberals on both sides of the Atlantic,
that the Iraq War should be waged within a wider effort to advance the Middle
East Peace Process, accelerate the economic and social development of the
region, refracted through the social democratic and internationalist idiom of
Britain’s New Labour.¹⁶⁷ These hopes would be disappointed, but they helped
build initial domestic and international support.
Whatever happened, also, to Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi exile and later president?
Chalabi’s network of Iraqi exiles also invested the war with liberal, indeed
revolutionary impulse, and had a tangible intellectual effect on the lobby for
creating a new order in Baghdad. Long before 9/11, Chalabi and his network
prepared and strengthened the case for regime change in Washington, in the
hope that favourable conditions would emerge. Chalabi also cannot be brack-
eted amongst the hegemonic primacists. Alongside his talent for political
operation, he had a life-long dream of a liberated Iraq with himself as the
‘Shia’s great emancipator’. That is a long way from Machiavelli.
For wars to happen, adversaries must agree to fight each other. There is one
other figure whose calculations, and miscalculations, also made war possible,
but who is also absent from the liberal alibi: Saddam Hussein. He could have
chosen otherwise, to run the risks of complete capitulation to weapons
inspections during the escalating crisis. He could have taken up the offer to
leave. As invasion was at hand, he could have taken up President Bush’s offer
¹⁶⁵ Internal memo to Bush ahead of Crawford meeting, ‘Memorandum for the President,
Your Meeting with the United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, April 5–7 2002 at
Crawford’.
¹⁶⁶ Blair to Bush, private note, ‘The Fundamental Goal’, 26 March 2003.
¹⁶⁷ See also Tim Dunne, ‘ “When the shooting starts”: Atlanticism in British security strategy’,
International Affairs 80:5 (2004), pp. 893–909, p. 898.
Breaking States 129

to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours to settle abroad in voluntary exile and
immunity,¹⁶⁸ an offer backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Britain. Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s envoy also offered Saddam an opportunity to
abdicate, yet he refused. Bahrain’s King Hamad made an offer, hours before
the expiry of America’s ultimatum for he and his sons to leave Iraq.¹⁶⁹ Past
rulers have sometimes fled and survived in exile, such as Kaiser Wilhelm II. Of
course, survival couldn’t be guaranteed. A certifiably disarmed Saddam could
have been overthrown internally. A Saddam in exile could have been killed or
arrested. These options were bad, but conceivably offered higher odds of
success than accepting war and the near-certain consequence of flight, and
violent death. In a meaningful sense, Saddam chose war.
It is strange that Ikenberry and Deudney fail to consider these other figures.
Given that the authors believe in an international order of ‘cooperative
problem-solving’ and ‘broad international coalitions’, writing a more inter-
national history of the episode would have been a good place to start.
In trying to get liberalism off the hook, Ikenberry and Deudney stretch
definitions, concepts, and history to breaking point. Realism in their hands is a
grubby business, tainted by a pursuit of power that is morally empty and self-
defeating. Liberalism, by contrast, almost stands outside time as a set of
pristine concepts. At the heart of their framework is an ahistorical innocence
about liberalism, as though liberalism cannot be complicit in empire, in the
assertion of hegemony, in preventive war or other projects of imperial dom-
ination. Theirs is the antiseptic liberalism of Davos, with its clean vocabulary
of the ‘rules-based world order’ and ‘global norms’. Liberals who fall prey to
these conceits seem unaware of the coercive and violent pathologies of their
own tradition. It was Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy Ikenberry works so hard
to distinguish from Bush, who made war and toppled governments often in
the belief that benevolent force would create lasting peace, from Mexico
and Latin America to the Russian civil war. Like Bush, Wilson argued in
World War I that the US had entered the war for ‘the overcoming of evil, by
the defeat once [and] for all of the sinister forces that interrupt peace and
render it impossible’, to leave ‘utterly destroyed’ the old ‘balance of power’
order.¹⁷⁰ In 1916, Wilson drafted a speech that claimed ‘It shall not lie with
the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be’.
His Secretary of State added in the margin ‘Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua,
Panama’.¹⁷¹ This is the imperialism that doesn’t know itself.
¹⁶⁸ ‘Straw backs Exile Deal for Saddam’, BBC News, 20 January 2003.
¹⁶⁹ Gerald Butt, ‘Bahrain offers exile as Egypt reviles Saddam’, The Daily Telegraph,
20 March 2003.
¹⁷⁰ Woodrow Wilson, War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers,
2 vols (New York: Harper, 1927), 1: pp. 255, 342–3, 547–8, 129.
¹⁷¹ Cited in Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2002), p. 476.
130 Blunder
Ikenberry and Deudney conclude by inviting realists to engage with the
central security crisis of our time, the need to transform a world threatened
by ‘violence interdependence’ and weapons proliferation, and implicitly, to
downgrade deterrence as a foundation of security. Bush and Blair worked
from the same diagnosis. This led them to preventive war and liberal hegem-
ony. That these ideas lead consistently to bad results suggests that the very
obsession with fictitious, undeterrable rogue states recklessly transferring
WMD to terrorists, the exaggeration of threats linked to globalization, and
the temptation to try systemic new ‘solutions’ to threats, is itself part of the
problem. If academic liberals, to adapt their words, ‘seek to return to engaging
with the pressing security issues of this time’, they might consider realists’
argument that even in a globalized world, deterring, disrupting, and contain-
ing threats is a more prudent path.¹⁷² But first they might reckon with the
realization of the young journalist Karl Marx, who noticed in another moment
of anxiety over globalization, the mid-nineteenth century, that it was the
modernizing liberals who now preached ‘red hot steel’.¹⁷³
CONCLUSIO N
Regime change as a system of ideas rested on a series of misconceptions. There

was the warped relationship with history. The makers of war held that the
post-9/11 world had transformed from an era marked by the deterrence and
containment of threats, changing the rules of the game and demanding a focus
on the future as a year zero. Yet still, Britain had to be guided by cherry-picked
historical cases showing the failure of appeasement from the late 1930s, and of
successful post-war reconstruction in Germany and Japan. Supposing that
they were embarking on a new project, decision-makers were in fact condi-
tioned by the cumulative experience of short victorious wars in the recent
past. There was also the claim that rogue actors like Saddam were irrational,
pathologically aggressive, and undeterrable. Yet they were also apparently
calculating survivalists, and would transfer weapons to terrorists for fear of
reprisal, and could be disciplined into compliance by example and precedent.
Regime change was necessary to deter other undeterrable rogues. Saddam’s
Iraq, hawks argued, posed a clear and present threat to neighbours and the UK
with its growing WMD arsenal. Yet war was necessary because it would relieve
¹⁷² On the salience of deterrence and the need to adapt it to today’s conditions rather than
abandon it, see Keir Lieber and Daryl G. Press, ‘Why States Won’t Give Nuclear Weapons to
Terrorists’, International Security 38:1 (2013), pp. 80–104; Elbridge Colby, ‘Restoring Deter-
rence’, Orbis 51:3 (2007), pp. 413–28.
¹⁷³ Cited in Douglas Hurd, The Arrow War: an Anglo-Chinese Confusion 1856–60 (London:
Collins, 1967), p. 56.
Breaking States 131

the country of sanctions that had shattered its economy and degraded its
infrastructure, while somehow leaving its WMD programme intact to
grow quickly. The Iraq of 2003, beggared by sanctions, somehow retained
the capabilities of the Iraq of twenty years earlier. As Chapter 3 explores, the
government and the Parliament made one more weighty calculation that the
self-styled modernizers drew from the past, that by taking part in the war,
Britain could guide the American superpower.
Atlantic Ambitions
To oppose the US administration would be a serious step. But this is a

serious matter; and what is influence for?
Sir Michael Quinlan, 2002
He raised steel tariffs and got very little response.
Alastair Campbell diary, meeting of Prime Minister Blair
and Vice President Cheney, 11 March 2002¹
Britain went to war in Iraq partly driven by an old ambition, to gain and
ensure unequalled influence in Washington DC. It was an effort at ‘bandwa-
goning’ that is often misunderstood. Rather than subordinating itself to
receive material benefits, British decision-makers believed that by aligning
with the US in the War on Terror, they were generating the ability to steer a
superpower that otherwise might run amok and jettison itself from the
international community. As we have already seen, British decision-makers
genuinely believed in the merits of striking Iraq, and agreed with their
American counterparts on the fundamentals, that in the words of Richard
Dearlove, Chief of MI6, that it was ‘very much in HMG’s interest’ and the
outcome was of ‘enormous significance’ for the national interest.² The band-
wagoning was not hollow. As well as this real convergence, the ambition to
influence America was driven by a number of forces: a simple fear of how
America might react to the 9/11 attacks; a habitual and reflexive instinct
among the British governing and political class that London could play Greece
to America’s Rome; a desire to shape the consequential military campaigns
that were already being conceived in Washington; a concern for Britain’s
relative place in the Euro-Atlantic pecking order; a confused and sentimental
concept of international ‘friendship’; and as preparations gathered momentum,
a fear of being left out. As before in the history of the Anglo-American
relationship, these ambitions proved unfounded on all major fronts, diplomatic,
¹ Alastair Campbell, The Burden of Power, 11 March 2002, p. 187.

² Letter, Dearlove to Manning, 27 December 2001, Iraq Policy.
Atlantic Ambitions 133

military, and economic. They are based on a flawed understanding of how
American policymaking works. As friendly and as historically intertwined as the
two countries are, the United States is a separate great power that pursues its
interests remorselessly. It is not open to permanent capture by any one state’s
lobbying. That does not make America a lesser power. It makes it unexceptional.
And as an unexceptional power, the United States quickly met its own limits.
Even by the second term of the Bush administration, it was seeking out and
cultivating allies and clients for cooperation and burden-sharing. The implica-
tion is that Britain within the medium term, if not the short term, could have
maintained the capacity to exert influence in Washington even while opposing
the war in Iraq. This episode exposed a confusion around the very concept of
‘influence’: if continual alignment and harmony is required in order to ensure
influence, then such influence can never be meaningfully used, and is effectively
dormant. On the eve of a reckless military adventure, Britain ought to have
tested the limits of its influence, and given its partner some unwelcome but
friendly advice.
This chapter divides into three parts.³ In Part I, I put in historical context
the ambition that London has traditionally harboured since the World War II,
and its disappointments. In Part II, I examine the first reactions of the Blair
circle to the 9/11 attacks, the fears and sense of possibility that it awakened,
and the conception of Iraq as a platform for elevating Britain’s stature in
Washington. In Part III, I identify the flaws in this vision and how those flaws
surfaced in the pre-war planning and the course the conflict then took.
PART I. BANDWAGO NING AND THE BLOOD PRICE
The history of the ‘special’ Anglo-American relationship is one of extravagant

expectation and disappointment. According to Tony Blair, participating
alongside America at risk of serious costs was vital to reforging the relation-
ship with the superpower. As he asked, rhetorically, ‘Are you prepared to
commit, are you prepared to be there when the shooting starts?’⁴ From the
outset, the assumption was that participation would yield influence, abstention
would reduce it. ‘If you just go to someone and say, “You’re completely
wrong. Forget it, the amount of influence you are likely to have . . . is less”’,
reasoned Jonathan Powell.⁵ Laying out this doctrine to an assembly of British
³ I am grateful to the journal International Affairs for permission to use some of the material
from an earlier article: Patrick Porter, ‘Last Charge of the Knights? Iraq, Afghanistan, and the
Special Relationship’, International Affairs 86:2 (2010), pp. 355–75.
⁴ BBC News, 6 September 2002, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2239887.stm.
⁵ Jonathan Powell, Testimony, 8 January 2010, pp. 39–40.
134 Blunder
ambassadors in January 2003, Blair explained that the ‘first principle’ of
foreign policy was to remain America’s ‘closest ally’ and to ‘influence them
to broaden their agenda’.⁶ There was always a tension within these claims.
That Britain should participate in order to create leverage did not easily sit
with the claim that participation against proliferating rogue states was a matter
of absolute principle, born of the harmony of morality, strategic interests, and
trans-Atlantic ties that was a signature theme of Atlanticist rhetoric. What is
the relationship ‘in theory’, and in practice?⁷
The ‘special relationship’ conceit expresses a hopeful, vicarious ambition for
Britain’s role in the world. To ‘bandwagon’ is to align with a stronger power in
the belief that the costs of resisting it outweigh the gains.⁸ Britain’s bandwa-
goning, though, carried an unusually optimistic aim. ‘Special’ means more
than a transactional exchange of services, whereby loyalty is rewarded by pre-
ference or practical benefits like intelligence sharing, consultation rights, or
technology transfer. Britain, allegedly, could guide the direction of American
foreign policy by bandwagoning with it. As the Foreign Office advised in
1944, ‘we can help to steer this great unwieldy barge, the United States of
America, into the right harbour’.⁹ In return for its solidarity, as well as a
European ally and a strategic base in the UK, there would be a great pay-off.
This obviously reflects an assumption about the greater wisdom of the older and
declining power, tutoring the new power which was potentially wayward, a
concern that endures. This vision was supposedly incarnated in the Roosevelt–
Churchill partnership. As former prime minister, Churchill the part-American
most famously sketched the lineaments of the relationship in his ‘Sinews of
Peace’ speech of March 1946.¹⁰ Churchill’s rationale was both sentimental
and hard-headed. Pan-cultural identity, a sense of shared values and history,
formed one part of the relationship. America and Britain were kindred, bonded
⁶ ‘Full Text: Tony Blair’s Speech’, The Guardian, 7 January 2003.

⁷ On the history and anatomy of the Special Relationship, see John Baylis (ed.) Anglo-
American Relations Since 1939: The Enduring Alliance (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997); Alex Danchev, A Very Special Relationship: Field Marshal Sir John Dill and the
Anglo-American Alliance (London: Brasseys, 1986); and On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-
American Relations (London: Macmillan, 1998); for competing arguments on its viability and
future, see John Baylis, ‘The ‘Special Relationship’ A Diverting Myth?’, in Cyril Buffet and
Beatrice Heuser (eds) Haunted by History: Myths in International Relations (Providence:
Berghahn Books, 1998), pp. 118–34; Jerome B. Elie, ‘Many times doomed but still alive: An
attempt to understand the continuity of the special relationship’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies
3 (2005), pp. 63–83; William Wallace and Christopher Phillips, ‘Reassessing the Special Rela-
tionship’ International Affairs 85:2 (2009), pp. 263–84.
⁸ Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 136;
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), p. 126.
⁹ Cited in David Reynolds, ‘Roosevelt, Churchill and the wartime Anglo-American alliance,
1935–1945: towards a new synthesis’, in Hedley Bull and William Roger Louis (eds), The ‘Special
Relationship’: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 85–6.
¹⁰ Winston Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, speech, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri,
5 March 1946, at http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1946/S460305a_e.htm.

through the common inheritance of Anglo-Saxon blood ties, language, and
law. The second was practical and strategic. A marriage of Anglo-American
power made sense because of shared security interests and interlinked global
economic interests. With the US as the mediator, the UK could work through it
to attain a global prestige that exceeded its economic and military muscle.
Britain would attain an unparalleled influence in Washington. This would be
exercised through close cooperation between bureaucracies, collaboration
through both militaries, through intelligence sharing, and after 1958, in relation
to nuclear weapons. After 1945, it was quickly reaffirmed, when Britain’s Attlee
government sent a brigade group to Korea on the basis that meaningful
contributions sustained the partnership. In its most self-congratulatory form,
Britain as the junior but more seasoned partner would play Greece to America’s
Rome, ‘civilising and guiding the immature giant’, in the worlds of Harold
Macmillan, the weaker but more seasoned ex-hegemon educating the uncouth
overdog.¹¹ Britain may no longer be a hegemonic world power. But by working
through the US as well as preserving its nuclear weapons and its place on
the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council, it need never resign itself to
being just another European nation state. By steering the American giant,
Britain could attain an outsized ability to set the agenda and mediate between
the European Union and the US. In the article of faith coined by former
Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd in 1993, it enabled Britain to ‘punch above
her weight’.¹²
The practice of the relationship is more fraught. Later in the same year that
Hurd coined the boxing metaphor, a leaked league table ranked the import-
ance of foreign countries to the US, numbering Britain below Germany and in
the wide company of France, China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Iraq, Canada, and
Israel.¹³ Already in World War II, as the British Empire and the American
republic fought on the same side under the aegis of the Atlantic Charter, there
was between them a constant tension and power struggle. This friction was a
product of the shifting material power balance between them, as Washington
gradually realized its vast latent industrial and mobilization strength to out-
weigh Britain’s bargaining power, and it was driven by conflicting interests.
Britain was fighting partly in the hope of retaining its Empire. America
opposed the colonialism of old Europe, and fought with the intent to disman-
tle the financial and trading structures on which it rested, replacing its
imperial preference system, the Stirling bloc, and the pound’s status as reserve
currency with US-designed institutions (the International Monetary Fund and
¹¹ David Reynolds, ‘A “Special Relationship”? America, Britain and the international order
since the Second World War’, International Affairs 62:1 (1985/1986), pp. 1–20, p. 2.
¹² Speech at Chatham House, reported in The Financial Times, 4 February 1993.
¹³ Patrick Cockburn, ‘Germany tops the US global pecking order’, The Independent,
4 July 1993.
136 Blunder
World Bank) and the dollar. The ‘sheep’s eyes’ telegrams of March 1944
between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill
reflected an uneasy mix of collaboration and competition, as America sought
to replace Britain as the dominant regional power in the Middle East, and prise
open its protected markets.¹⁴ Britain as a victor power emerged as a financial
supplicant, almost exhausted by the strain of the conflict, the task of recon-
struction and the unforgiven debt burden it imposed.
The fragility and realities of the relationship were highlighted by other
points of collision. In the Suez crisis of 1956, the hinge event in the post-war
Anglo-American relationship, the US Sixth Fleet stalked and harassed British
ships in the Mediterranean, fouling their radar and sonar, menacing them with
aircraft and lighting them up at night with searchlights.¹⁵ With Stirling and oil
supplies under pressure, President Dwight Eisenhower coerced Britain with
the simple formula of no ceasefire: no loans. Patronage could be rapidly
withdrawn and regardless of recent history, blood ties, or shared visions of
Western-enforced order. Former Commander in Chief Middle East Land
Forces, Sir Charles Keightley, spelled out the implications of the crisis as
British policymakers saw them: ‘This situation with the US must at all costs
be prevented from arising again.’¹⁶ Even with its nuclear capability and
European garrisons, permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and its
far-flung network of bases and territorial possessions, Suez demonstrated
brutally that Britain had become part of America’s grand strategy. Britain
from that moment was anxious to fit its policies to those constraints. At the
same time, British governments frequently hoped and tried to steer Washington
in favourable directions for the sake of influence as a means as well as an end.
Even so, antagonism periodically flared up when their interests diverged.
Prime Minister Harold Wilson walked a carefully ambiguous line in diplo-
matically supporting President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam and
covertly contributing intelligence, military hardware, and jungle warfare train-
ing, while committing no ground forces.¹⁷ Wilson attracted denunciation at
the time for his accommodation of America, whereas in the age of Iraq, he
was retrospectively praised for keeping his distance. In the 1973–4 slump
in Anglo-American relations, President Richard Nixon and his National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger used coercive diplomacy to punish British
¹⁴ Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Warren Kimball, vol. 3, Alliance
Declining, February 1944–April 1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 14–17.
¹⁵ Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire In the Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 1991,
2011 edn.), pp. 411–12.
¹⁶ Cited in Kyle, p. 412. On the legacy of Suez, the power shift, and the American assumption
of stewardship leading to Iraq, see Martin Woollacott, After Suez: Adrift in the American Century
(London: I.B.Taurus, 2006).
¹⁷ Mark Tiley, ‘Britain, Iraq and the Special Relationship’, History Today 63:12 (2013).

non-cooperation over a US-initiated Declaration of Principles and the privacy
of bilateral and UK–EEC discussions. Accordingly, they suspended intelli-
gence and nuclear cooperation with the Heath government, and Heath later
retaliated by restricting US spy-flight access to bases in the UK and Cyprus.¹⁸
Infamously, the Reagan administration’s initial triangulations between Argen-
tina’s fascist Galtieri regime and Britain over the contested Falkland Islands
created a temporary crisis in relations. And even during the post–Cold War
period of general amiability, when Britain consistently supported US inter-
ventions from the Gulf to Bosnia, the allies clashed over significant policy
divides: the recognition of Sinn Fein, industrial tariffs, and the recognition of
the International Criminal Court. Washington’s preparedness to set aside
historical solidarity to strong-arm its junior partner was displayed most
consequentially during Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union in
June 2016. Despite Britain spending blood and treasure in Afghanistan and
Iraq to support the War on Terror and thereby cement its standing in
Washington, President Barack Obama made a blunt threat on 22 April of
that year, that departing the EU would place the UK at the ‘back of the queue’
when seeking a bilateral free trade agreement.¹⁹ This ought not to shock. Great
powers have a long history of doing what they want. But after constant
affirmations over fifteen years of Anglo-American unity and shared sacrifice,
it shocked.
Thus, in the transatlantic relationship there is persistently a gap between
words and deeds, expectations and reality. Through landmark occasions,
such as D-Day commemoration, the Atlantic idea supplies a body of evoca-
tive rhetoric and politically charged images that celebrate and legitimize the
role of both nations as heroic agents and allies in history. It is often framed
as a ‘friendship’ between two kindred nations. This was instinctively the
language President Bush used in thanking Blair for his in-person solidarity
when attending the Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001.²⁰ Yet
this promise of friendship is bound to disappoint.²¹ It falsely personalized
the totality of interests that link and separate countries. It misapplies to
disparate nation states a social term for relationships between private indi-
viduals and groups, holding out the illusion that the alchemy of particular
¹⁸ R. Gerald Hughes & Thomas Robb, ‘Kissinger and the Diplomacy of Coercive Linkage in
the “Special Relationship” between the United States and Great Britain, 1969–1977’, Diplomatic
History 37:4 (2013), pp. 861–905, p. 881.
¹⁹ On this episode, see Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s
Political Class (London: William Collins, 2016), pp. 231–2, 234–7.
²⁰ The White House, 20 September 2001, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the
American People.
²¹ For a critique of the personalized vision of international friendship within alliances, see
Kelly McHugh, ‘Bush, Blair and Iraq: Alliance Politics and the Limits of Influence’, Political
Science Quarterly 125:3 (2010), pp. 465–91.
138 Blunder
leader-to-leader relationships can supplant deeper interests. The pursuit of
friendship can lead to a failure to ask difficult questions, as it indeed did. In
the unforgiving history of international relations, there are no permanent
friends, indeed there are few friends at all, and even dyads that think of
themselves as friends will meet clashing interests, as Britain and the US did
over Iraq down the track. The very notion that Britain should align itself
with its ‘friend’ in order to shape its behaviour is an instrumental calcula-
tion, and not just born by affection. If harmonious collaboration came
naturally between the republic and the parent country it fought to liberate
itself from, the ‘friendship’ between the two would not need such constant
and anxious reaffirmation.
P A R T I I . TA M I N G THE S U P E RP OWE R
I have already used the term ‘bandwagoning’. One feature of this concept,
salient to the Iraq case, is that when weaker states align with a stronger state,
that stronger state is also the potential source of danger.²² That Britain would
be ‘closely identified’ with the US was already an operating assumption of
government.²³ Part of Blair’s first response to the 9/11 attacks was fear, the
fear of America’s possible reaction, and a desire to open channels with
Washington to tame its response. For the first days after 9/11, Blair fretted
that Washington’s response would be ‘immediate, inappropriate, and indis-
criminate’,²⁴ one minister recalled weeks later, and that ‘TB’s immediate
concern’, diarized Alastair Campbell, ‘apart from the obvious logistical steps
we had to take, was that Bush would be put under enormous pressure to do
something irresponsible.’ In the first intelligence briefing after the attack, the
Director General of MI5 likewise forecast that ‘the pressure on the Americans
to respond quickly, even immediately, would be enormous.’²⁵ With the campaign
in Afghanistan progressing in mid-November 2001, Jonathan Powell urged
Blair to act as a restraining influence on Bush, to counter the ‘right wing of
the Republican Party’ and the Pentagon, and resist the shift to start bombing
Somalia and Iraq.²⁶ The determination to keep America within the frame of
²² Randall Schweller, ‘Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In’,
International Security 19:1 (1994), pp. 72–107, p. 80.
²³ As the Joint Intelligence Committee assumed in its assessment of the terrorist threat.
Minutes, 14 September 2001, cited in The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, pp. 326–7.
²⁴ David Blunkett in BBC interview, On the Record, cited in Con Coughlin, American Ally:
Tony Blair and the War on Terror (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 147.
²⁵ Diary note, Tuesday 11 September 2001, Alastair Campbell, The Blair Years: Extracts from
the Alastair Campbell Diaries (London: Arrow, 2007), pp. 560–1.
²⁶ Minute Powell to Prime Minister, 15 November 2001: ‘The War: What Comes Next?’

existing alliances and institutions—in Blair’s own words, to avert the danger of
the US ‘jumping out of the international system’—was affirmed by a close
aide.²⁷ Contrary to the ‘poodle’ interpretation,²⁸ it was not a case of Wash-
ington actively leaning on allies for support. In the months after 9/11, London
did more to reach out. The Bush administration did not place emphasis on
‘outreach, consultation and good relationships’.²⁹ It was rather Blair who
attempted to orchestrate the reactions of nations to Washington, and to
steer Washington itself, with a heavy campaign of phone calls, trips, and
transatlantic conferences, meeting with fifty-four leaders in the two months
after 9/11.³⁰ The intent, if not the outcome, was to make Britain a tutor, not
a vassal.
This fear, of the superpower becoming a runaway train, flowed also from
older anxieties. Before 9/11 opened the new era, British officials worried that
the new Bush administration was dangerously unilateralist and would dis-
mantle the structures of internationalism and peace, as former ambassador
Meyer recalled, ‘We were very, very worried that if the Americans went
gung ho for getting rid of the anti ballistic missile treaty and started dis-
mantling some of the key elements of old detente that this could unravel—
seriously could prejudice the relationship with Russia and all kinds of other
repercussions’.³¹
In retrospect, it is easy to forget the openness of the post-9/11 moment,
when the international audience held its breath in anticipation of America’s
reaction. Consider that the most powerful state in history had just been on
the receiving end of a major act of urban terror. It had suffered the butchery
of thousands of its citizens and a humiliating attack on its nerve centres.
The hijackers had not just slaughtered, but inflicted unimaginable fear on
civilians who chose to leap from the skyscrapers rather than burn to death.
Anthrax attacks in Washington seemed to have been directed against
members of the administration. This had become personal. Amidst expres-
sions of international solidarity, there were eruptions of anti-Americanism,
from open Palestinian celebrations in East Jerusalem of disputed size, to a
jeering open letter from Saddam Hussein, and before a BBC Question Time
audience, accusations directed at the US ambassador that Washington had
²⁷ ‘He was determined that the US must not feel that it was on its own, and that it had friends
that would stand by it . . . how America responded to these attacks would define its relations with
the rest of the world, and Blair believed it was crucial that we were part of that decision-making
process’. Cited in Coughlin, American Ally, p. 154, ‘system’ p. 113.
²⁸ See Samuel Azubuike, ‘The “Poodle Theory” and the Anglo-American “Special Relation-
ship” ’, International Studies 42:2 (2005), pp. 123–37.
²⁹ As Jeremy Greenstock recalled, Iraq Inquiry Statement, November 2009, p. 5.
³⁰ Peter Riddle, Hug Them Close: Blair, Clinton, Bush and the ‘Special Relationship’ (London:
Politico’s, 2004), p. 156.
³¹ Christopher Meyer testimony, 26 November 2009, p. 12.
140 Blunder
brought al-Qaeda’s aggressions upon itself.³² There were rumours, including
wild ones, of fifth columnists celebrating and preparing further attacks.³³
Whether or not such displays were truly representative of wider reaction,
they were perceived, and a feedback loop formed between hostility, resent-
ment, and retaliation. Going by the historical record, the US was a state
that had struck back remorselessly when attacked or when it met resistance.
It had interned populations, levelled cities and countrysides, destroyed
jungle with napalm, and had been the first and only state to incinerate
civilian populations with atomic strikes. The occupant of the White House
had a Texan drawl that triggered memories of Lyndon Johnson and his
merciless bombing of Indochina. Bush as governor had keenly presided
over the death penalty. As president he was deploying the ‘dead or alive’
language of the Wild West, and at one point, even promised a ‘crusade’.
Even worse, they were not reacting in the knowledge that, over fifteen years
later, 9/11 would remain the only mass casualty terrorist attack of that
magnitude. Fair or unfair, crude or sophisticated, there was, especially in
Europe, a long-standing nightmare that the familiar, English-speaking
power whose capital, protection, and products the world craved could
transform quickly into a brutish and culturally different Leviathan, espe-
cially when wounded. These fears were magnified for the British govern-
ment when the NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson rallied the
transatlantic alliance to invoke Article V of its Charter, committing mem-
bers to common defence on the basis that the attack on the US was an
attack on them all. This historic step, however, met with perceived indif-
ference in Washington. This perception of indifference may have been
unfounded, and may have come about more as a result of procedural delays
than disregard,³⁴ but Robertson and European onlookers feared that
American hardliners in the hour of emergency wished to keep their
power unfettered.³⁵ Officials like Sir Jeremy Greenstock who believed that
Britain’s objective should be to prevent regime change being the default
option, feared a policy vacuum over Iraq and argued there ‘was an urgent
³² Imtiyaz Delawala, ‘What ABC News Footage Shows of 9/11 Celebrations’, ABC News,
4 December 2015.
³³ Joshua Keating, ‘The Long, Strange History of the 9/11 Celebrations Meme’, Slate,
23 November 2015.
³⁴ As M.A. Smith argues, ‘How NATO Survived George W. Bush: An Institutionalist Per-
spective’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 15:1 (2017), pp. 61–76, pp. 70–1.
³⁵ Former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana declared that 9/11 and its aftermath had
shown Article 5 to be ‘Useless! Absolutely Useless!’, quoted in Ivo Daalder, ‘The End of
Atlanticism’, Survival 45:2 (2003), p. 155; see also John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: Free
Press, 2003), p. 117. Robertson judged that ‘The US made a mistake in not taking up our offer of
support’, interview, Coughlin, American Ally, p. 156; James Rubin, ‘Stumbling into War’, Foreign
Affairs 82:5 (2003), p. 59.

need’ to craft a strategy with the US ‘at a level which binds in the whole
Administration’.³⁶
Therefore, British policymakers could be forgiven for anticipating a faster,
bloodier, unilateral, and more indiscriminate response. Only in retrospect
do we know that compared with the speed and violence with which it could
have responded, the US was at first relatively restrained. Compared hypo-
thetically to other great powers in history, the tentatively and carefully planned
military campaign in Afghanistan that did not open until 7th October, almost
a month later, and even the programme of torture and rendition, were
comparatively limited. How might Ottomans, Mongols, Mughals, Hapsburgs,
Romanovs, Caesars, Victorians, Manchus, Shoguns, or Nazis have reacted to
an equivalent atrocity, if they had possessed the same destructive capabilities?
How patient would they have been to appeals for proportionality, to consult
allies, seek the approval of international institutions, or to uphold the nuclear
taboo?
A less dramatic fear also presented itself, one rooted in historical memory
from Suez. The contemplation of war with Iraq could leave Britain marginal-
ized. In December 2001, the FCO in its communication with Downing Street
identified an ‘unwelcome dilemma’, ‘support unlawful and widely unpopular
action or distance ourselves from a key US policy’. This suggested in turn that
Britain take part in the discussion. Before decisions in Washington took place,
‘we need to influence the debate.’³⁷ Downing Street was already engaged in
ways that the FCO and MOD were unaware of, through a traditional channel
of Anglo-American dialogue, the discrete communication between Britain’s
SIS and the CIA.
That the new unipolar Rome would need an experienced Greece to tutor
it in the ways of international life was both a private apprehension and a
public rallying cry. If Britons were averse to a unilateralist, vengeful, and
unruly superpower overreacting to mass terrorism, Blair argued that joining
Bush’s posse under an international banner was a necessary step in applying
restraints. Wariness about America’s proclivities itself became a reason to
participate. Making the case for war in the Commons in March 2003, Blair
warned that standing British forces down at the final hour would damage
American internationalism, turning it into a dangerous lone wolf: ‘if our
plea is for America to work with others, to be good as well as powerful allies,
will our retreat make them multi-lateralist? Or will it not rather be the biggest
impulse to unilateralism there could ever be’,³⁸ an argument he made also to
³⁶ Letter Greenstock to Manning, 29 October 2001, ‘Iraq: Cabinet Office Meeting, 30

October’.
³⁷ Letter, Simon Mcdonald (Principle Private Secretary) to Michael Tatham (then Blair’s
Private Secretary, Foreign Affairs), 3 December 2001.
³⁸ ‘Full Text: Tony Blair’s Speech’, The Guardian, 18 March 2003.
142 Blunder
the cabinet: ‘we must steer close to America. If we don’t we will lose our
influence to shape what they do’.³⁹ UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also
warned that to abandon support for the US at the late stage of March 2003
would accelerate American unilateralism and ‘reap a whirlwind’.⁴⁰ During a
briefing meeting on the campaign plans for Iraq, Secretary of Defence Hoon
had asked Blair to use his influence to restrain Bush, who was ‘going for it’ and
whose ideas could inflict lasting damage on Iraq.⁴¹ Hoon’s consistent view was
that British involvement would enhance US planning, thus putting the Greece–
Rome logic into concrete form, but he had added a qualifier, that if the US
lacked a credible plan, Britain could hold back support.⁴² From the vantage
point of military planning, earlier engagement and earlier commitment were
pressing, as Britain’s lead-time for any deployment to the Gulf was longer than
America’s, but this pressure circumscribed just how far Britain could exert
leverage. As Colin Powell’s leaked memo for the Crawford summit indicates,
Blair knew this was a commitment of political capital. He ‘knows he may have
to pay a political price for supporting us on Iraq, and wants to minimise it.
Nonetheless, he will stick with us on the big issues. His voters will look for signs
that Britain and America are truly equity partners in the special relationship’.⁴³
If the ‘blood price’ was the necessary down payment on continual influence,
that blood would be offered through ground forces and a land commitment.
The British armed forces are one of the main instruments through which the
special relationship is symbolized, asserted, and measured. Britain defines its
military-strategic power in relation to its American ally. Its Defence White
Paper of 2003, Delivering Security in a Changing World (supplemented in
2004), presumes that Britain can only conduct major operations within a
NATO or US-led coalition. It asserts that Britain should aim to shape the
conduct and outcome of such campaigns, and regards interoperability with US
forces as a ‘major focus’.⁴⁴ At a higher level, Britain designs its forces ‘to
maintain its influence with America and its place at the international top
table’.⁴⁵ This asset, of privileged access to Washington, must be recurrently
³⁹ James Naughtie, The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency (Oxford: Macmillan,
2004), pp. 83–4. On Blair’s argument, see also Alex Danchev, ‘I’m with you: Tony Blair and the
Obligations of Alliance: Anglo-American Relations in Historical Perspective’, in Lloyd Gardner &
Marilyn Young (eds), Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam (New York: New Press, 2007), pp. 45–58, p. 49.
⁴⁰ UK Parliament, House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, 4 March 2003, column
173, cited in James K. Wither, ‘British Bulldog or Bush’s Poodle? Anglo-American Relations and
the Iraq War’, Parameters (2003–2004), pp. 67–82, p. 72.
⁴¹ Minute MA/DCJO (Ops) to MA (CJO), 15 January 2003, ‘Briefing to the Prime Minister’.
⁴² Minute Hoon to Prime Minister, 22 March 2002, ‘Iraq’.
⁴³ ‘Memorandum for the President, Your Meeting with the United Kingdom Prime Minister
Tony Blair, April 5–7 2002 at Crawford’.
⁴⁴ UK Ministry of Defence, Delivering Security in a Changing World (London: Stationery
Office, 2003), p. 19; Delivering Security in a Changing World: Future Capabilities (London:
Stationery Office, 2004), pp. 2, 3.
⁴⁵ ‘Britain’s Armed Forces: Losing their way?’, The Economist, 29 January 2009.

fought for. Thus, General Sir Richard Dannatt, Britain’s former Chief of the
General Staff, argued in June 2009 that Britain must increase its commitment
to Afghanistan because ‘maintaining military-strategic “partner of choice”
status with the US offers a degree of influence and security that has been
pivotal to our foreign and defence policy.’⁴⁶ The Army can boast a long history
of working alongside American forces. It has been continuously engaged as a
coalition partner since 9/11. It has a higher rate of deployment abroad than
any other European power since World War II.⁴⁷ And it can draw upon a
heritage of minor wars cherished within its institutional memory.
Whitehall behaves strategically rather in the manner of an inveterate gambler
with a small pot of chips. Britain wishes to stay in the strategic “game,” the rules
of which are set in Washington, and it perceives that in order to do so it needs to
place a stake on the table. That stake is the Army.⁴⁸
As well as seeking long-term diplomatic influence, Britain sought to influ-
ence the Iraq campaign as it was being prepared. Yet paradoxically, this
created the pressure to conform. Momentum to participate triggered fears
that influence would diminish if Britain pulled back once engaged, and that
because of the demands of timetables, failure to engage early enough would
result in the door being closed. Except for helping persuade Bush to address
Iraq via the United Nations, anxiety to be included in CENTCOM’s rapidly
evolving plans trumped any concern to set preconditions for British partici-
pation. These pressures to make a firm land contribution are reflected in MOD
correspondence. On 29 October 2002, the Private Secretary to the Secretary of
State for Defence advised David Manning that the US military was beginning
to plan its campaign with the assumption that the UK would not be involved,
and that,
If we are to keep the option open, and continue to have the strongest military
cards to underpin our political influence, the Defence Secretary believes that we
should indicate to the US that they should plan on the assumption that the land
contribution should be available, subject to final political approval.⁴⁹
That influence might be better exerted through the threat, implicit or explicit,
of withholding support, and a reputation for selective support, even at the risk
of exclusion, was hardly entertained. The permanent Under Secretary of State
for Defence, Kevin Tebbit, placed emphasis on the need to conform with the
⁴⁶ ‘Army Fury at Refusal to Bolster Afghan Campaign’, The Independent, 1 June 2009.
⁴⁷ See William Wallace, ‘The Collapse of British Foreign Policy’, International Affairs 82:1
(2005), pp. 53–68, p. 53.
⁴⁸ David Betz & Anthony Cormack, ‘Iraq, Afghanistan and British Strategy’, Orbis 53:2
(2009), pp. 319–36, p. 326.
⁴⁹ Ministry of Defence advice to David Manning, ‘Iraq: UK Military Options’, 29 October
2002 (from Peter Watkins).
144 Blunder
broad outline of US policy in order to exercise influence within in. Reporting
back from Washington as the US moved to a ‘war footing’, he advised ‘if we
want our advice to be heeded’, ‘we need to place it in the context of counter-
terrorism post 11 September’.⁵⁰ Tebbit in January 2003 advised the Secretary
of State that were ‘HMG’ to fail to ‘go along’ with the US in the event of action
against Iraq without a ‘further enabling UNSCR’,
there would be significant damage . . . having valued profoundly the way we have
stood shoulder to shoulder with them so far, the US will feel betrayed by their
partner of choice . . . the damage to our interests and influence would be felt most
immediately and strongly in the foreign policy and security field.⁵¹
Later recalling the logic of the decision to commit, Tebbit explained that
‘If the United States is making a blunder, we must not allow them to make
it alone’.⁵²
The flawed logic of the ‘special relationship’ is here demonstrated. Influ-
ence, so the theory goes, must derive from acquiescence, and continued
acquiescence to the outlines of US policy is necessary to retain influence.⁵³
This renders any influence highly circumscribed. Having pledged support
for a policy, that support must continue and Britain can only influence its
execution. Otherwise, the ability to influence policy will be withdrawn and
estrangement or even punishment will follow. Past solidarity creates a path-
dependent pressure to tow the line, in order to obtain an influence that Britain
in the most critical hour dare not exercise or test. Accordingly, discussion
within government of the option of holding back and the potentially perni-
cious consequences of joining the campaign was only rare and sporadic. When
one aide suggested Britain not support the war, Blair dismissed the advice, on
the basis that it would be the biggest shift in foreign policy in fifty years.⁵⁴ This
begs the question of when, precisely, influence that has been painstakingly
cultivated can be actually used. This issue was especially troublesome for the
MOD. There was always an undercurrent of scepticism about the feasibility of
the Iraq project, but it remained largely an undercurrent. It was outweighed
by the instinctive traditional Atlanticism reflected in Tebbit’s warnings, and by
the anxiety that participation was not a simple ‘yes/no’ choice but required
prior involvement with US planning, in ways that made early commitment
hard to avoid.
⁵⁰ Telegram 1684 Washington to FCO London, 8 December 2001, ‘Tebbit’s Visit to Washington:
Wider War Against Terrorism’.
⁵¹ Note 14 January 2003, Kevin Tebbit to Secretary of State, ‘Iraq: What If ’.
⁵² Cited by Michael Clarke, at RUSI Conference, ‘The Chilcot Inquiry: Learning Lessons from
Iraq’, 15 July 2016.
⁵³ For a similar critique, see Alex Danchev, ‘Greeks and Romans: Anglo-American Relations
After 9/11’, The RUSI Journal 148:2 (2003), pp. 16–19, p. 18.
⁵⁴ Campbell, The Blair Years, 23 July 2002, p. 630.

Reinforcing these pernicious trends was the problem that military plans and
political choices were delinked in time. Britain’s de facto commitment pre-
dated the concrete consideration of war plans, and Blair was only fully briefed
on military plans on 17 January 2003. Striking is the overall timidity of
military advice regarding the long-term potentiality of the campaign, with
the exception of the worst-case scenarios warned of by the Chief of the
Defence Staff.⁵⁵ Professional military advice only rarely raised problems of
inadequate post-war plans and possible worst-case scenarios, even in the run-
up to invasion, and the focus was restricted largely to the combat phases.
There was scarce discussion between arms of government (MOD, the FCO)
about the major implication of Britain’s campaign plan to advance through
southern Iraq, that it would take responsibility with that region and would be
committing not to leave quickly. An earlier warning in September 2002 by the
MOD Strategic Planning Group that one potential reason for not participating
would be that in the US policy vacuum, British commitment would be ‘open
ended’, was a concern that faded quickly.⁵⁶
Between going in and staying out, there was another option that was
smothered before it could get the airing it deserved. This was the less dramatic
‘Harold Wilson’ model of limiting Britain’s liability, of offering diplomatic
support and limited material involvement, without any appreciable land
commitment. One of the most sophisticated pieces of advice came in a
memo from Peter Watkins, Private Secretary to the Secretary of Defence on
22 July 2002, pulling together the judgements of key advisors. It judged the
case for attacking Saddam ‘deeply flawed’: because of a lack of need given
that containment had kept the WMD programme limited, because the attack
could have ‘unforeseen geopolitical ramifications’ and could be the catalyst
for an ‘upsurge of violence’ from Gaza to Kashmir, and because it could
create a focusing crisis that robbed the occupying powers of the capacity to
act elsewhere. Watkins also feared a long and destructive ‘siege’ of Baghdad
that would benefit al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and given that
Saddam could have prepared such a combat, it was a reasonable caution. Yet
Watkins also estimated that refusing any support, such as basing access in
Cyprus and Diego Garcia would ‘severely damage’ the relationship. But with
the likelihood of a US campaign, the UK should offer ‘reasonable’ support
while avoiding offering more. This option hardly penetrated the decision-
making, however. It would not satisfy the requirement of ‘being there’ when
the shooting starts, however, and would forego the prize of being a senior
coalition participant.
⁵⁵ See Lawrence Freedman, ‘On Military Advice’, RUSI Journal (17 July 2017), pp. 1–7, p. 5.
⁵⁶ The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Volume VI, HC265-VI, ‘Section 6.4: Planning and Prepar-
ation for a Post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, mid-2001 to January 2003’, p. 185.
146 Blunder
P A R T I II . N I G H T AN D D A Y , T H E F L A W S
OF EXPECTATION
Evidently, something was wrong with the expectations entailed in the ‘special
relationship’ as it was perceived in London. The UK does not exert exceptional
influence, though neither is it ‘zero’. Not only does the pursuit of vicarious
power exaggerate British influence. More fundamentally, it misconceives the
nature of policymaking in the United States. It wrongly treats that country
as susceptible to any one country’s designs. And conversely, it overstates
American power, inflating the long-term costs of opposition or disagreement.
We might reduce the confusion generated by the Anglo-American relation-
ship by framing the duality of American policymaking in terms of ‘day’ and
‘night’. By night, American policymakers (and many ordinary Americans)
genuinely revere the memory of the Churchill era, the wartime alliance,
and ties of blood, language, and shared history. If anything, the Churchill
cult is more intense in the United States than in Britain, as the creators
of Winston Churchill High School in Maryland could attest.⁵⁷ In the Iraq
era, elite Anglophilia was strong. Historian Andrew Roberts, promoting his
hyper-Atlanticist History of the English Speaking Peoples, was enthusiastically
received at the highest levels by elites on an American tour in March 2007.⁵⁸
General David Petraeus toured Churchill’s map and planning rooms in
September 2009, and felt ‘transported back to that earlier era of extraordinary
US-UK cooperation’.⁵⁹ On taking office, President Obama praised British
sacrifices in Afghanistan and reaffirmed the common bond of both nations,
and the New England Historic Genealogical Society discovered that Obama
and Churchill are distant relatives.⁶⁰ Blair’s rousing speech to the Labour Party
conference of October 2001 ‘resonated’ around the United States.⁶¹ The
relationship still has mystique. It is a ritual totem to mobilize around.
Affection at night, however, does not necessarily translate into material
influence in the cold light of the Oval Office, or the Congress. At the very
time that Britain deployed 45 Commando into Afghanistan, the US put tariffs
⁵⁷ Michael Lind, ‘Churchill for Dummies’, The Spectator, 24 April 2004; see also Christopher
Hitchens, ‘The Medals of His Defeats’, Atlantic, April 2002.
⁵⁸ Andrew Roberts, ‘Diary’, The Spectator, 21 March, 2007.
⁵⁹ Speech, The Fourth Colin Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, 17 September 2009, at http://
www.policyexchange.org.uk/news/news.cgi?id=749, accessed 26 September 2009.
⁶⁰ ‘The special relationship between the US and Great Britain is one that is not just important
to me, it’s important to the American people. And it is sustained by a common language, a
common culture, and legal system that is directly inherited from the English system. Our systems
of government are based on those same values . . . I expressed my extraordinary gratitude
for the support in Afghanistan and the young men and women of Great Britain who have
made enormous sacrifices’. Macer Hall, ‘Obama: We Do Love Britain’, The Daily Express,
14 February 2009.
⁶¹ As Christopher Meyer observed, IIT, 26 November 2009, pp. 22–3.

on exports from UK of speciality steel.⁶² There is a persistent disconnect
between the payment of the blood price and the response of the recipient.
Sir Christopher Meyer, the British envoy closest to the action in Washington,
observed the American capacity to compartmentalize their ‘sentimental and
sincere affection’ from the ‘single minded pursuit of national interest’, yet
claimed that ‘It is a gap we have to closel.’⁶³ How Britain could close that gap
was not clear.
Iraq exposed the limits of British influence, in the same campaign that was
supposed to confirm its stature as America’s leading deputy. Britain, though,
only exercised a marginal influence at best. Blair privately and unsuccessfully
opposed the siege of Fallujah in 2004.⁶⁴ The Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) overrode British concerns over the De-Ba’athification process of
liquidating the ruling party from the entire Iraqi civil service, as well as British
advice on economic development.⁶⁵ And if one of Britain’s explicit aims,
declared in its Defence White Papers, is to shape the way America designs
and conducts its military campaigns, British officers often did not achieve this
ambition. This became clear in the leaked report for the Chief of the General
Staff, Stability Operations in Iraq: An Analysis from the Land Perspective,
which found that the UK was powerfully constrained by the ‘timetable and
ideological views set in the United States. As one Senior Officer put it: ‘the
train was in Grand Central Station, and was leaving at a time we did not
control.’⁶⁶ An interview with Colonel J.K. Tanner, formerly chief of staff,
Multinational Division South East, also reflected the disappointments and
anxieties of the ‘special relationship’ mindset.⁶⁷ In statements tainted with
the suspect myth that colonial experience from generations before gave the
British a distinctive capability to ‘treat with Arabs’, Tanner claimed that
dealing with Americans corporately is like dealing with ‘Martians’, and that
Britons were treated the same as other European countries such as Portugal.
Americans conducted very little dialogue with them. Worse, they were con-
fronted with the worst fear of British Atlanticists, that America might regard
them no differently than other European nations. President Bush, extremely
⁶² As Christopher Meyer lamented, IIT, 26 November 2009, p. 74.

⁶³ Letter Christopher Meyer to Jack Straw, 5 November 2001, ‘America After 11 September’.
Cited in The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, p. 344.
⁶⁴ Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
(New York: Random House, 2006), p. 307.
⁶⁵ Glen Rangwala, ‘Deputizing in war: British policies and predicaments in Iraq, 2003–2007’,
International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 1:3 (2007), pp. 293–309, p. 300.
⁶⁶ Stability Operations in Iraq (Op Telic 2.5) An Analysis from a Land Perspective, p. 2,
Introduction, paragraph 5.
⁶⁷ John F. Burns, ‘U.K. Documents Show Friction with U.S. on Iraq’, The New York Times,
23 November 2009; transcript of interview at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/
politics/defence/6634115/Iraq-war-files-British-colonels-scathing-attack-on-arrogant-
bureaucratic-Americans.html, accessed 26 November 2009.
148 Blunder
close to Blair, still did not fulfil Blair’s vow that British support in Iraq would
be repaid by a renewed American commitment to the ‘Road Map’ resolution
of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The one notable anomaly is Blair’s successful
move to persuade the US against its preferences to pursue a second UN
resolution authorizing military action in Iraq.⁶⁸ Other than that, if the yard-
stick was influencing the US to ‘broaden its agenda’, this demonstrably failed.
More broadly, as a pattern of observed behaviour, America historically and
recently has often acted against and despite Britain’s expressed wishes, even
during periods of apparent closeness. Overriding British warnings, President
Ronald Reagan’s US invaded Grenada in 1983 and bombed Libya in 1986.
In 1994–5, the US went against British advocacy and recognized the Provi-
sional IRA as a negotiating partner. Kinship made Ireland as special to
America as Britain. The UK has not altered America’s stance on a range of
fronts. It has not persuaded America to sign the Kyoto Treaty, nor did it
dissuade President Donald Trump from withdrawing from the Paris Climate
Agreement. It has not steered it towards signing up to the International
Criminal Court. Similar failure is apparent with the Ottawa Convention on
Land Mines. The two nations persistently diverge on the missile defence
shield, and there is little evidence that President Obama’s change of policy
was attributable to British influence. British solidarity has not resulted in
America making generous concessions on its industrial subsidies and tariffs.
Demonstrably, Britain’s power and capacity to influence America is more
limited than the special relationship mindset allows.
There were tensions in the rationalizations given. At times, Blair publicly
stressed that this was a grand transaction, that British participation was a vital
brake on potential American unilateralism. Yet at other times, as we have seen,
the commitment he articulated was absolute and irreversible. This was born of
a simple defect in the ‘grand bargain’ theory. It overlooked the cold reality that
influence can only be exerted with the coercive threat of abandonment or at
least non-support, express or implied. Support given regardless of repeated
non-reciprocation is more likely to generate complacency, not influence.
Junior allies who wish to moderate the hegemon’s behaviour are more likely
to succeed by playing harder to get. When Blair took the absolute stance on the
day of 9/11 to ‘stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends’,
promising they would ‘not rest until this evil is driven from our world’,⁶⁹
amidst the grand ideological declarations there needed to be hard-headed
calculation. That in turn would require a greater dose of realpolitik even in
⁶⁸ Azubuike, ‘The “Poodle Theory” ’, p. 135.

⁶⁹ National Archives, 11 September 2001, September 11 attacks: Prime Minister’s statement,
at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20080909040211/http://www.number10.gov.uk/
Page1596.

the emotive aftermath of the 9/11 atrocity. At the highest levels of government,
life is not supposed to be easy.
Subsequent diplomatic history suggests fears that non-participation—or
less participation—would damage Anglo-American relations in the long
term were overstated. Within only one presidential term, Washington was
reaching out to states that had opposed its policy.⁷⁰ The Bush administration
had initially been truculent in its treatment of countries opposed to Iraq. It
looked to punish dissidents, only to discover soon afterwards a need for
international cooperation. ‘As we were looking to the first proposals for
rebuilding Iraq’, recalled former National Security Advisor and Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, ‘The Pentagon wanted the contracts to go to the
countries which had supported the war . . . in practice it made the United
States look petty. Eventually we would want help from everyone—a lot of
help—to rebuild Iraq.’⁷¹ The ‘Petraeus revolution’, with its surge of fresh
troops and renaissance in counterinsurgency technique, encouraged greater
American engagement with British practitioners. And the Bush admin-
istration in its second term worked to reverse its isolation among anti-war
European states and ease the strains created by its swaggering unilateralism.
The White House altered its personnel, removing figures who had pressed
for a swaggering unilateralism—Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton,
and later Donald Rumsfeld—and replaced them with pragmatists. It reached
out to cultivate allies in the Middle East and in ‘Old Europe’, and even in
March 2006 revealed that it had attempted to open dialogue with Iran over
the condition of Iraq.
Against claims that Britain had to join the fight to maintain influence, a
suggestive rebuttal is the case of France.⁷² French opposition to the invasion
of Iraq was strong. Its President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominic
de Villepin expressed it in systemic terms, defining a France–German united
Europe as the counterweight to American hyper-power, blocking the attempt
to obtain a final UN resolution supporting war in March 2003, and exerting
pressure on European states that supported invasion to fall in line with Paris.⁷³
With Saddam overthrown and America’s campaign in its ascendancy, American
officials and lawmakers, with the open acknowledgment of Secretary of State
Colin Powell, earmarked France for retaliation, entertaining plans to impose
⁷⁰ See Philip H. Gordon, ‘The End of the Bush Revolution’, Foreign Affairs 85:4 (2006),
pp. 75–86.
⁷¹ Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honour: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York:
Broadway Books, 2011), p. 215.
⁷² On Franco-American relations in Bush’s second term, see Elaine Sciolino, ‘Sarkozy Throws
Open His Arms to Bush, and US’, The New York Times, 7 November 2007.
⁷³ See ‘France, America and Iraq: On the Brink’, Strategic Comments 9:2 (2003), pp. 1–2;
statements cited in James Graff and Bruce Crumley, ‘France is Not a Pacific Country’, Time,
16 February 2003.
150 Blunder
trade sanctions, exclude it from international forums, and lessen its influence
within NATO.⁷⁴ The bitterness of the fallout was impressive. It is therefore
significant that within four years of the invasion, France under a new president
successfully re-embraced the United States, and within six years of the inva-
sion, it joined NATO’s military command. Franco-US relations rebuilt around
agreement on other international questions—the Iranian nuclear programme,
Afghanistan, and Kosovo’s independence. And Paris achieved this without
changing its position on Iraq, and while criticizing the Bush administration’s
position on the environment.
Just as strong British support did not translate into exceptional influence,
so too did outright French opposition not lead to permanent exclusion
or punishment. Not only did the mythology of the Anglo-American ‘special’
relationship overstate Britain’s capacity to shape American behaviour.
It overstated America’s level of strength. Even the superpower’s abundant
resources and appeal could be rapidly spent. Even a swaggering leadership in
that superpower did not want to become a pariah amongst a significant share
of the nations and with a damaged capacity for collective action. America was
a great power of unprecedented relative strength. It was not a ‘hyper-power’.
In a counterfactual universe, Britain may not have been able to prevent the
invasion of Iraq. But the price for trying would have been neither as steep, nor
as lasting, as feared. Opposing war would have alleviated Britain of significant
material costs in the meantime, and would have served one intangible but vital
interest. In another context, one critic suggested what Australia ought to have
done in 1974–5, instead of acquiescing to a more predatory invasion and
annexation of East Timor:
We should have warned the Indonesians that they could not subdue the colony.
We should have warned them that they could expect no support, only condem-
nation, from Australia. And we should have warned them that they were march-
ing into their own Vietnam. Do I believe that this would have made a difference
to the outcome? No. The history of East Timor would have been the same. But
Australia’s history would have been different in one crucial respect. We would
not have shamed ourselves.⁷⁵
This forewarning did not happen between ‘friends’ in 2003, and as a result
Britain took part in a disastrous war that brought shame and humiliation in its
wake. Such friendly advice did not happen partly because of a misconceived
notion of how to pursue and obtain influence. And it did not happen because
decision-makers generally agreed with Washington’s calculus, and sought to
shape its execution.
⁷⁴ Brian Knowlton, ‘Officials Consider Ways to Punish France’, The New York Times, 23 April
2003; Jim V [sic] & eHei, ‘US Lawmakers Weigh Actions to Punish France, Germany’, The
Washington Post, 12 February 2003.
⁷⁵ John Birmingham, ‘Appeasing Jakarta: Correspondence’, Quarterly Essay 3 (2001), p. 102.

A fragile assumption lies at the root of any argument for waging war for the
sake of credibility and reputation, namely the assumption that the campaign
will succeed well enough to generate such dividends. Should a war for cred-
ibility falter, should it have the ironic result of raising doubts about one’s
reliability, commitments create pressure for further commitments. Thus,
fighting for the sake of keeping stocks high in another capital can create a
‘credibility trap’. One significant consequence of Britain’s Iraq campaign, once
it found itself overextended, was to raise pressure to succeed in the concurrent
campaign in Afghanistan. As Tim Bird and Alex Marshall demonstrate in
their account of the fraught ‘Af-Pak’ war, there was a tragic feedback loop
between anxiety over reputation, deterioration of Britain’s position in Iraq,
and the alternative theatre. By early 2004, Britain’s presence in Southern Iraq
was both increasingly unpopular domestically and onerous in terms of resources.
As the Iraqi security situation began to deteriorate markedly through 2004 and
2005, a growing yearning became evident in London to reduce the British
commitment. The problem was how to do this while maintaining the positive
relationship with Washington that had been at the heart of the British decision to
join the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Taking on some of the ‘stabilization and
reconstruction’ burden in Afghanistan appeared to provide a neat solution. UK
forces could be presented not as ‘going home’ but rather as redeploying to the
Afghan theatre.⁷⁶
‘Stabilization and reconstruction’ was an attractive scenario, born of a limited
intelligence picture and a concern to deploy and redeem the Iraq failure, ahead
of rigorous appraisal. As it happened, British forces were about to deploy into
the hardest fighting since the Korean War. Capable of regeneration, the
Afghan Taliban had an insolent way of deciding for themselves whether the
campaign would now move into a low-intensity stage of development in a
fragile state. And the disturbing possibility was revealed within the rationale of
fighting for alliance influence. Not only would commitment in Iraq not create
meaningful strategic leverage once the shooting started. By 2014, according to
a Freedom of Information Request, British forces had fired 46 million rounds
of ammunition in Afghanistan.⁷⁷ Hunting the Great White Whale of transat-
lantic stature, the shooting would have to go on, and with no end in sight.
⁷⁶ Tim Bird & Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: How the West Lost its Way (Yale: Yale University
Press, 2011), p. 157.
⁷⁷ Chris Hughes, ‘British Army Fired 46 million rounds at Taliban costing taxpayer £200
million’, Daily Mirror, 7 April 2015.
Weighing the Arguments
I have mentioned once before in the House the advice that was given by
Archidamus to his Spartan allies. He said that slow and cautious may be
seen as wise and sensible. Many years later, the Athenian superpower, in
its impatience, found out that he was absolutely right: impatience had
imperilled it and led to its destruction. I say earnestly and honestly to the
Government: their impatience will reap a whirlwind . . .
Peter Kilfoyle MP, 18 March 2003
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be
mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell, 1650
If the spirit of this book is to question assumptions, then the book’s critique
should also be placed under scrutiny. Was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a
blunder? I will argue that it was. By blunder, I mean more than a military
misfortune, or the failure of an institution ‘to learn, anticipate, or adapt’ to the
demands of a mission assigned to them.¹ Rather, I mean a failure of judgement
about the most fundamental question, taken by the government with profes-
sional advice, on whether or not to invade, the prospects of success, and
whether it would be worth it. A blunder is a ‘careless error’ with results that
are much worse than intended or expected, when viable alternative courses are
available. If the spirit of this book is to plea for less dogmatism, it is only fair
that the arguments against the war, like those in favour, are properly weighed
in the balance.
I argue that striking Iraq in 2003 was a major error. To be sure, it does not
reach the level of history’s major, self-inflicted military misadventures that
altered the global balance, like classical Athens’ Sicilian expedition in 415 BC or
Imperial Germany’s gratuitous bid for power in 1914. If it does not match
those levels of casualties and financial cost, it was still a consequential over-
reach. It wasted scarce resources and created significant opportunity costs, for
¹ See Eliot A. Cohen & John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War
(New York: Free Press, 1990), p. 247.
Weighing the Arguments 153

the bad overall return of intensifying the turmoil of a region, making inter-
national security problems worse, and damaging the moral authority of the
countries involved. The Iraq campaign did not finish off Britain as a major
power, just as classical Athens after its calamitous Sicilian adventure found
fresh timber and built new ships after the retreat from Syracuse.² Both Athens
and Britain, and the world, could still have done without these blunders. If it
did not match worse historic wars in scale of harm and self-harm, it did match
those blunders in type. A major power driven by a mix of fear and optimism
gravely injured itself—and others—by gratuitously launching a war that was
not triggered by a pressing need, and when there were alternative and work-
able strategies on offer. That premise still needs defending. Operation Iraqi
Freedom, and Operation Telic, still have eloquent advocates. Those of us who
judge it a blunder must honestly confront the price, and the implications, of
our stance. In this chapter, I lay out a test, informed by classical realist
tradition, on which we can make a provisional judgement. I then develop
the strongest possible arguments, both the claims made at the time and
retrospective ones, and test them against considerations of cost, gain, and as
far as possible, counterfactual speculation. I then address each line of defence.
In Part I, I establish a standard or benchmark by which we can evaluate the
decision, and develop a ‘prudential’ test. In Part II, I construct the strongest
possible arguments in defence of the invasion, and the counterfactual scen-
arios they depict. In Part III, I demonstrate that those arguments fail to meet
the test. In Part IV, I argue that there was an alternative strategy available, one
that steered a course between passivity and overreach, one of containment and
deterrence, that would have enabled the international community to monitor
and disrupt Iraq’s weapons programme and checked any future aggression. In
Part V, I refute one of the most forceful arguments in favour of war, made in
hindsight by the Labour political advisor John McTernan. McTernan’s sug-
gestion that without an invasion, the world would be ‘ruled by dictators and
jihadists’ is the kind of counterfactual argument that anti-war critics often fail
to confront, and deserves return fire.
PART I. BY WHAT STANDARD?
Some will regard this chapter’s inquiry as banal. Of course it was a blunder, as
one strand of post-Chilcot opinion assumes. Those who dismiss the Chilcot
Inquiry regard the issue as obvious, the inquest merely confirming what was
already self-evident. A cabal of decision-makers, they allege, forced a conflict
² As John R. Hale argues, Lords of the Sea: How Trireme Battles Changed the World (New
York: Viking, 2014), p. 206.
154 Blunder
on an unwilling people and against international sentiment.³ That Iraq was an
error is a position now held by the balance of opinion at home and abroad.
With this stance, critics take on the closed-minded attitude they criticize in
warmakers. The case should not be considered closed. A proper reckoning
is due.
Firstly, we are trying to learn something from the experience. We are doing
so to guide future judgements when we find ourselves again in the fog, where
we won’t have the vantage point of hindsight. By what standard should we
arbitrate the issue of whether the war was defensible or disastrous? Cases of
military action gone wrong draw lamentation, but so do cases of inaction or
restraint, such as Rwanda. If we are not content to retreat into unreflective
consensus, or conformity with majority folk memory, or wait until afterwards
to commend wars that seem to succeed, and denounce those that fail, we need
to ask what exactly makes Iraq a blunder and offer an accounting of how we
are to judge in the first place.
The issue deserves closer scrutiny also for another reason. Without a
counterfactual case, the indictment against the war is inadequate. Arguments
about war are intrinsically counterfactual. To argue that a party ought not
to have gone down one path is implicitly and necessarily to suggest that
alternative paths were preferable. Yet critiques all too often fail to offer a
spelled-out counterfactual assessment of the decision. Alternatives were not
self-evidently wiser. As one hawk suggests,
the basic decision to use military force to remove from power a man who had
overseen a regime of unspeakable barbarity and cruelty remains, in my view, the
right one. And I mean morally right. The failure to implement that choice
competently does not, for me, change that basic moral conclusion. That view
has, of course, been badly tested over the last 14 years, but I still hold it for the
simple reason that I’ve yet to hear a convincing counter-factual, not least since
most anti-war people can’t be bothered to construct that scenario. They should
work harder: just shouting ‘Blair is a mass murderer, don’t you watch the news?’
isn’t an argument.⁴
Indeed it is not. Hawks pose serious ‘what if ’ questions: what were the
alternatives to war? What risks and costs would US-led allies have borne if
they had refrained from invading? They deserve answers.
Sceptics should explicitly make the case that is too often left merely implicit:
that Britain and its allies could have better coexisted with Saddam’s regime or
its successors left in power, on acceptable terms. Alternatively, they would
have been better off coping from a distance with an imploding post-Saddam
³ Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘The Tragedy of Tony Blair’, Atlantic 294 (2004), pp. 56–70.
⁴ James Kirkup, ‘Tony Blair did not Bewitch us into backing war in Iraq’, The Daily Telegraph,
6 July 2016.

Iraq. Altruistic concerns also demand a counterfactual evaluation: would
Iraqis have fared better if the US-led coalition had avoided war? Those who
argue that Iraq was a blunder and a warning against future preventive wars of
this kind must confront these questions, or abandon the field to those who
would repeat such experiments.
There are divisions too among the war’s critics. For some, the error lay
in its conduct, not it’s conception. Even if it was incompetently waged,
Iraq for this group should not cast doubt on the cause of armed interven-
tionism itself. The West, they say, must still be prepared at times to
overthrow regimes, occupy territories, and use force to transform regional
orders. For those attached to armed idealism as a general orientation,
the main response to Chilcot is not to ponder the errors of liberal wars.
Counter-intuitively, it has become an occasion for them to reaffirm their
belligerence. They do so by quarantining Iraq as a special and atypical
case, from which we learn little beyond the limited and technical ‘lesson’
that it is better to plan thoroughly. For others, the separation of the war’s
execution from its conception represents an ‘incompetence dodge’, an alibi
for what is, in fact, a suspect idea.
The case is not dead within influential opinion circles and especially in the
Anglo-American debate. Defenders of the invasion remain vocal.⁵ They de-
fend the original decision and regularly update their defence. Subsequent
developments, such as Libyan disarmament in 2003, the Arab Spring revolu-
tions and the civil war in Syria from 2011, and the rise of the Islamic State in
2014 have called forth fresh apologias for the conflict. Blair in particular has
made several interventions in the debate. Some critics dismiss these defences
out of hand. Abrupt dismissal risks leaving the case for war unanswered, and
reproduces the unreflective dogmatism that critics claim to oppose.
When the Iraq Inquiry finally published its report, hawks accused it of
misjudgement. They maintain that the war was based on a sound calculus,
despite its disappointments. It was ultimately the right thing to do, strategic-
ally and morally, even if it proved to be harder and more distressing than
expected. Compared to alternative possible worlds in which the invasion did
not take place, they maintain the invasion is defensible. If there was a failure, it
was in the words of Fouad Ajami a ‘noble failure’, given the hazardous
⁵ Philip Bobbitt, ‘Chilcot’s Iraq War Verdict needs Scrutiny beyond the Headlines’, The
Financial Times, 8 July 2016; Niall Ferguson, ‘Tony Blair’s Legacy? Don’t be Too Quick to
Judge’, The Boston Globe, 11 July 2016; for earlier defences of the war after the fact, see Oliver
Kamm, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (London:
Social Affairs Unit, 2005); Robert Kaufman, In Defence of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington:
Kentucky University Press, 2007); Daniel Henninger, ‘If Saddam Had Stayed: Saddam would
have joined the nuclear bad-boys club with Iran and North Korea’, The Wall Street Journal,
2 September 2010.
156 Blunder
alternatives and what was at stake.⁶ There was nothing inherently ‘wrong’ or
misguided about the decision to eliminate Saddam Hussein.
For unrepentant hawks, the main question for the West is not one of
judgement, but one of will. They charge that the error was Western abandon-
ment. Iraq may have been a long and bloody slog, they recognize, but by 2010
and thanks to the leadership of President Bush and General Petraeus, the US
wrested a victory out of crisis, a victory that was then spoiled by a feckless
President Obama for the sake of domestic politics. A counter-history has now
formed.⁷ With echoes of ‘rightist’ American accounts of the loss of China after
1948 and Vietnam after 1975, this is the narrative of the ‘lost victory’. For
those who blame Obama, the main lesson of Iraq is not to focus on the original
sin of its beginning but the failure of its ending, when the US in December
2011 abandoned Iraq prematurely to the Sunni Islamist wolves of the Islamic
State and left it vulnerable to violent sectarian breakdown. There was indeed a
blunder, only it was Obama’s blunder of premature withdrawal. As one
defence correspondent wrote in the wake of the Chilcot Inquiry, if we are
asking who lost Iraq, we should blame Obama, not Blair.⁸
From the perspective of those who take the ‘abandonment’ interpretation,
the main lesson is precisely not to overlearn the instinct for caution or to
agonize over the invasion. If Iraq holds out lessons, they argue, it is two
different ones, technocratic and moral. The technocratic lesson is that we
need more careful and coordinated planning next time. The moral lesson is
that we need the strategic patience to see it through. Advocates of counter-
insurgency often begin from the premise that ambitious expeditionary wars
like Iraq and armed nation-building efforts are almost inevitable, making it
imperative to optimize the West’s ability to wage them again.⁹ This is a
fatalistic stance, that seeks to shift debate from ‘whether’ to ‘how’ to conduct
similar campaigns in future. It assumes, also, that the choice about when to
leave is overwhelmingly the West’s to make. As we will see, Iraqis also had
a say.
How we remember Iraq, whether we judge the war ‘worth it’, who or what
we blame for failure, will shape contests over diplomacy for a generation at
least. It will affect how high a threshold for belligerence is set by states like the
⁶ Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, The Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq (New
York: Free Press, 2006).
⁷ Max Boot, ‘What Chilcot Missed about Iraq’, Commentary, 6 July 2016; James Traub, ‘The
Mess Obama Left Behind in Iraq’, Foreign Policy, 7 October 2016; Victor Davis Hanson, ‘The
Costs of Abandoning Messy Wars’, The National Review, 25 February 2016; Fouad Ajami,
‘The Men Who Sealed Iraq’s Disaster with a Handshake’, The Wall Street Journal, 13
June 2014.
⁸ Con Coughlin, ‘Don’t Blame Tony Blair for the Mess Iraq is in, blame Obama’, The Daily
Telegraph, 6 July 2016.
⁹ John A. Nagl, ‘A better war in Iraq: Learning counterinsurgency and making up for lost
time’, Armed Forces Journal (2006), pp. 22–8; ‘Unprepared’, RUSI Journal 153:2 (2008), p. 83.

UK. Historical verdicts will shape how British policymakers perceive crises
that look similar. Iraq has already cast its shadow over subsequent deci-
sions. The reluctance of intervening powers to insert ground forces into
post-Gaddafi Libya in September 2011 reflected a disinclination to repeat
the experiment of occupying countries against likely resistance. In the
autumn of 2013, led primarily by the Labour opposition, whose leaders
have renounced the Iraq War, the UK Parliament voted not to launch puni-
tive airstrikes against Syria’s Assad regime in response to its apparent use of
chemical weapons against civilians. To some, this represented a calamitous
collapse of internationalism that can be attributed to the memory of Iraq.
To others, it reflects a prudent presumption against the recourse to war
for liberal surgery, a wariness about using force beyond defence or deterrence.
The stakes are high.
Any judgements about Iraq must be provisional. Arguments in favour of the
war have shifted as circumstances have changed. Avowed supporters of
the war, many of whom contributed directly to its public justification, have
since shifted their reasoning, repented of some aspects of the policy, while
raising fresh justifications. Former Bush speechwriter and neoconservative
intellectual David Frum, for instance, judged that Washington overstated the
threat that a disarmed Iraqi regime posed, noting the heavy costs of the war
and the failure to establish a stable, Western-oriented government for all of
Iraq, while pointing to the liberation of the Iraqi Kurds and shifting some
blame onto Iraqis for the choice of sectarian misbehaviour.¹⁰ Acknowledging
five years after the invasion that the war inflicted worse suffering than he
expected, Richard Perle prophesied that ‘Iraqis will look back and say, we paid
a terrible price, but it’s worth it.’¹¹ The outward public reasoning of Tony Blair,
especially, has proved flexible. Blair initially made disarmament the central
justification and declared, in Parliament, that the movers of UN Resolution
1441 would delay it ‘to give Saddam one further final chance to disarm
voluntarily’.¹² He has since claimed that he would have invaded Iraq even in
the event that Saddam fully disarmed,¹³ and that his main aim was nothing
less than to advance the modernization of the Middle East.¹⁴ For a brief period,
some hawks credited the war for making possible the Arab Spring revolutions
of North Africa and the Middle East.¹⁵ This line of argument has since
¹⁰ David Frum, ‘Iraq Isn’t Ours to Save’, Atlantic, 17 June 2014.

¹¹ David Kenner, ‘Seven Questions: Richard Perle’s Advice for Barack Obama’, Foreign Policy,
16 November 2008.
¹² Hansard, 25 February 2003, col. 124.
¹³ ‘Blair: I would have removed Saddam Hussein anyway’, CNN, 12 December 2009.
¹⁴ Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Arrow Books, 2010, 2011 edn.), p. 387.
¹⁵ Kanan Makiya, ‘The Arab Spring Started in Iraq’, The New York Times, 6 April 2013; Peter
Wehner, ‘Vindication for Bush’s Freedom Agenda’, Commentary, 28 January 2011; Christopher
Hitchens, ‘The Iraq Effect’, Slate, 28 March 2011; Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honour:
158 Blunder
receded, given what became of the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and
the attempted revolution in Syria. It is not clear that Iraq did ‘cause’ these
revolutions. Even if it did, the closeness of war with revolution is not an
unambiguously good thing. The debate will doubtless evolve again. Ever since
it began, the Iraq War has been a decision in search of a justification.
There is more to this than cynicism or the desire of the war’s apologists for
self-vindication. The shifting of rationales is inherent to the politics of war.
Opinion about wars changes over time because circumstances and contexts
change, and these changes condition judgement. At first, many Britons
regarded World War I as a hard-won, noble victory over Prussian militarism.
It was not until the Great Depression and Europe’s interwar crisis that opinion
shifted towards regret and disillusionment. As late as 1929, patriotic nation-
alist poets like Rupert Brooke vastly out-sold poets who stressed waste and
futility, like Wilfred Owen.¹⁶ In our own time, only in the light of the crisis in
Iraq after 2003 did the Gulf War of 1990–1 (and President Bush I’s decision
to halt the ground campaign at the Iraqi border) become rehabilitated in
collective memory, from missed opportunity to wise restraint. As former
commander and Secretary of State Colin Powell observed in 2007, ‘in recent
months, nobody’s been asking me about why we didn’t go to Baghdad.’¹⁷
The purpose of this chapter, then, is not to offer a final verdict. It is to refine
the critique of the war in order to strengthen our ability to form judgements.
I do so by offering the strongest possible ‘case against’ to counter the strongest
possible ‘case for’ the invasion. I re-evaluate the decision to go to war, against
both the contemporary calculations and post hoc rationalizations that have
emerged since. As far as possible, we must assess the plausibility of what are
counterfactual claims from what we can know and infer, and judge whether
they are better or worse.
In conducting this audit, auditors must be especially wary of one particular
rhetorical trap. A temptation for either side of the argument over Iraq is to
emphasize the violence resulting from policy they opposed, and to ‘play down’,
euphemize or de-emphasize the violence that resulted from policy they sup-
port. To guard against that bias, here I deliberately identify the extent and
quality of violence at its height, both ‘before’ and ‘after’ regime change, as
impartially as possible and in plain terms.
A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Broadway, 2011); Colleen Graffy, ‘Iraq was a
good war: it sparked the Arab Spring’, The Sunday Times, 11 September 2011.
¹⁶ Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2003), p. xvi: ‘the first edition of
Owen’s poems, prepared for publication by his friend Siegfried Sassoon in December 1920, sold
only 730 copies. A further 700 copies, printed in 1921, were still not sold out by 1929. By then the
collected poems of another poet, Rupert Brooke, who also died during the conflict, had run to
300,000 copies’.
¹⁷ Colin Powell remark, cited https://www.military.com/undertheradar/2015/09/21-facts-
about-the-first-gulf-war.

Through this exercise, I demonstrate that the defences of the war rest on
counterfactual historical claims that are implausible and, in any case, less grave
that what actually happened, even on ‘worst-case’ calculations. The strongest
retrospective case for war still involves fragile gains made at costs so heavy,
with such serious unintended consequences, that decision-makers would have
judged them prohibitive, had they known them in advance. The West, I argue,
could have coexisted with and contained a weakened Iraq even in a situation
where sanctions were breaking down. There was already evidence, before
March 2003, that Saddam’s regime could be deterred and restrained by clear
Western signalling, there are strong reasons to assume that a ‘rogue state–
terrorism nexus’ had not and would not form in Iraq, and that there was time
and capacity to disrupt any rearmament or threatening behaviour. Between
‘regime change’ and ‘doing nothing’ there was a workable middle way of
vigilant ‘overwatch’ available to US-led forces.
No inquest happens in a vacuum. Though critiques of the war often cast
judgement without acknowledging their own assumptions, assumptions are
inevitable. They ought to be surfaced. Before we judge the issue, it is best to
come clean.
To debate whether a particular war is a blunder is to accept the distinction
between wars that are and are not blunders. This premise would be nonsens-
ical to both pacifists and militarists. For pacifists, wars are inherently blunders.
For militarists, no war is a blunder, because a state of war (or at least a
continual warlike state of being) is intrinsically valuable, regardless of its utility
in any one case. These are prior and subjective value judgements that cannot
be easily resolved analytically.¹⁸ To take a pacifist stance, that the application
of violence is always illegitimate and never worthwhile, is a position that gives
absolute precedence to the sanctity of life and anti-violence, a principle that
not even the most lopsided balance sheet and cost–benefit analysis could
overturn, by definition. At the opposite end of the spectrum, militarism, like
pacifism, is an absolute stance that no account of the costs of war will refute.
There are other ‘absolute’ stances that also preclude a debate about whether
war is a blunder. For legalists, a non-negotiable precondition is war’s legal
status. If we estimate that a war is ‘illegal’, this makes it illegitimate and wrong
regardless of all else. For pacifists, militarists, and legalists, there is little to
see here.
My argument is pitched at everybody else. I proceed from an alternative and
equally subjective value judgement, the premise that there are occasions when
the use of force is warranted. Most participants in the Iraq debate contest the
issue within this general framework. This position flows from the ‘just war’
tradition, rooted in classical and medieval Christian thought, that the use of
¹⁸ See further Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 6.
160 Blunder
force can be justifiable if it is waged with just cause, if it secures a better state of
peace than if force had not been applied, if waged under legitimate authority,
and if it is proportional to the costs involved. Believers in the ‘just war’
tradition are not necessarily optimistic about the utility of force. Applied
violence can, and often does fail because of its brutally tragic nature. Para-
phrasing the Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz, war’s purpose is to serve
policy, but its nature is to serve itself. Conflict inevitably harms innocents. It
almost always has unintended consequences, some of them damaging. The
threshold for justification, therefore, is high. But in principle, in classical and
mainstream Christian traditions, it can be met. We can legitimately construct
a ‘balance sheet’, where credits outweigh debits.¹⁹
To guide the exercise, I will attempt a prudential evaluation of Iraq.
Prudence is the pursuit of practical wisdom. Defined by the political scientist
Hans Morgenthau, prudence is the ‘supreme virtue’ that weighs the conse-
quences of competing choices in concrete situations, and negotiates the
conflicting demands of interest and principle. Ideally, it is animated by a
humane scepticism, always aware that choices are bound to produce unex-
pected results.²⁰ It weighs the expenditure of resources against outcomes,
compared to likely alternative scenarios. Whether war is wise, or a blunder,
cannot be determined only or even primarily from the purity of intentions, or
through mechanistic devices such as the letter of international law. The
wisdom—or unwisdom—of decisions for war rests on hard consequences
and weighed alternatives, measured against both immediate circumstances
and the wider context of the national interest. In the classical and the later
Christian Thomist tradition, prudence is a virtue that forbids action which is
likely to be disproportionate.
Prudence, as I attempt to apply it here, flows from a particular worldview of
classical realism.²¹ Realism is an ancient and pessimistic tradition of political
thought, with several different permutations. In common, realists regard the
world as an inherently insecure place defined by the possibility of war, where
human behaviour is constrained by certain realities that are inexorable, and
¹⁹ For one such attempt, applied to America’s war in Iraq, see John S. Duffield & Peter
J. Dombrowski, Balance Sheet: The Iraq War and US National Security (Stanford: Stanford
²⁰ Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p.12; see also Robert Harriman, Prudence: Classical virtue, Postmodern
practice (Pennsylvania: Penn. State University Press, 2003).
²¹ For a discussion of classical realism as distinct from its realist cousins, see Jonathan
Kirshner, ‘The tragedy of offensive realism: Classical Realism and the rise of China’, European
Journal of International Relations 18:1 (2010), pp. 53–75; Joseph M. Parent & Joshua M. Baron,
‘Elder Abuse: How the Moderns Mistreat Classical Realism’, International Studies Review 13
(2011), pp. 193–213; Andrew R. Hom & Brent J. Steele, ‘Open Horizons: The Temporal Visions
of Reflexive Realism’, International Studies Review 12:2 (2010), pp. 271–300; Richard K. Ashley,
‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organisation 38:2 (1984), pp. 225–86.

where states compete for security in a state of anarchy, where there is no
transcendent, supranational authority to enforce the peace. In doing so, states
cannot have clean hands. They will deploy human beings as instruments and
will practise deception. Classical realism is distinct from amoral realism, the
attempt to maximize one’s material interests regardless of all else. It is also
distinct from a more recent scientific realism that assumes states operate as
rational actors responding to the structural pressures of the world, impersonal
forces that operate almost like laws, where agency, the domestic or the non-
material only take effect at the margins.
In contrast, classical realism rejects amorality. Realism only makes sense as
a dialogue of power with morality. The ultimate political act, war itself,
descends into mere slaughter if it is waged without purpose. This kind of
realism begins from the recognition of the constraints of material power, but it
also looks beyond the material. It acknowledges the force of what people most
want: to be secure, to be materially prosperous, and to feel good about
themselves. These considerations all count in decisions about war. Classical
realists are wary of utopian visions of what war is ‘for’, or what it can achieve.
The world tends towards competition. States should therefore keep their
swords sharpened. Even so, prudent accommodation with other states is
possible and sometimes vital to prevent catastrophe, while it is almost always
difficult, impermanent, and fragile. There is an altruistic element to classical
realism, but it is a negative altruism of minimizing excess harm, presuming
against actively ‘doing good’. From a classical realist lens, the inquest into Iraq
must be broad in its regard for national, regional, and international security,
for honour as well as material interest.
Classical realism places greater weight in human agency and ideas. Ration-
ality, or the capacity to link means and ends in coherent ways, is more an
ambition than a given fact. History demonstrates that states often ‘screw up’
and miscalculate, fall prey to bad ideas or gamble recklessly, and the inter-
national system has a way of punishing imprudent behaviour. Realists of this
school accord greater historical importance to consequential diplomacy and
the choices made by decision-makers, for good or ill.²² The future is not a set
of regular patterns waiting to be discovered in advance by scientific study. It is
unwritten. The pressures that create insecurity are powerful, but states and
especially major states have enough latitude to make meaningful choices and
to respond to domestic politics and act on non-material interests such as
national honour. Iraq was not, in this tradition, primarily the kind of thing
states simply ‘do’ in response to the pressures of the international system. It
was a voluntary undertaking, made possible by the West’s capabilities, but
driven by ideas about how to respond to the structural environment.
²² See Jonathan Kirschner’s account of Henry Kissinger as both classical realist and diplo-
matic actor: ‘Machinations of Wicked Men’, Boston Review, 9 March 2016.
162 Blunder
‘Just war’ theory and classical realism are not identical. Realism, though,
resonates with central aspects of the just war tradition. As a recent ‘just war’
theorist observes, the ‘just war’ worldview draws on a threefold realism: an
anthropological realism, that observes the reality of intractable vice on the
international stage; a practical realism that is concerned for the realizability of
ideas when put into practice; and a moral realism, a view of the moral
order rooted in the nature of things as they objectively ‘are’, as far as we can
perceive it.²³
Turning to Iraq itself, a prudential approach requires that we assess the
decision to invade by weighing the costs, gains, and consequences, accord-
ing to the strongest possible counterfactual arguments. From a classical
realist lens, this must place the national interest at the centre of the
equation. The nation state’s first duty is to secure its own citizens. Did
Iraq effectively serve this purpose? We cannot be satisfied, however, by
judging whether ‘we’ benefited even if others did not. The British national
interest does not, and ought not, be narrowly selfish or insular. The
consequences for Iraqis and the wider region also matter. It matters in
terms of material security. We have limited but real interests in the Middle
East, and don’t want a hostile imbalance of power to develop in ways that
could empower international terrorism or disrupt the flow of oil. And it
matters in terms of collective conscience. If the net effect of the Iraq War
was to inflict avoidable surplus death, injury, and terror on a population, in
circumstances short of a supreme emergency, then our honour is harmed in
our eyes and in others’. On the other hand, if the net effect was to prevent
worse suffering and destabilization, and if the hypothetical security threat
was of the first order, then the war is defensible and the grounds for shame
are weaker.
A second reason for judging the national interest broadly is that the war’s
architects asked us to. Advocates of the war mostly did not argue that the
invasion was justified by narrow national interest. They argued something
more ambitious, claiming that the Iraq War was just and necessary because
there was a harmony of interests—what was good for Iraqis was good for us
all—and a merging of interests with ideals: our principles and our security
interests were synonymous. Disarmament, democratic liberation, and the
defeat of terrorism were, they argued, mutually consistent and reinforcing.
That values and interests had become ‘one’ was foundational to the Bush
Doctrine, to Blair’s ‘Chicago Doctrine’, and to the reasoning both gave before
²³ Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 9–12, 328–9.
My critique of the Iraq War shares Biggar’s prudential approach, but unlike his more sympa-
thetic evaluation of the decision (at pp. 251–325), judges that the decision falls short.

and after the invasion.²⁴ This is a harder test, but a self-imposed one, so it is
only fair that they are judged by this standard.
Should we judge ‘with hindsight’ or without? Defenders of the war have at
times cautioned against hindsight bias.²⁵ They claim that their support for
overthrowing Saddam Hussein should only be judged circumstantially, by
what they could be reasonably expected to know or perceive at the time. In
making this historicist argument, they cite the consensus across intelligence
agencies at the time that Saddam probably had an active weapons programme,
and reasonable and shared suspicions that his record of concealment and non-
cooperation suggested grounds for precautionary action. In doing so, they
chide others for judging in the rear-view mirror, a luxury that historical actors
did not have.
This will not do, however. Even if what we know is only a product of
hindsight, it is still reasonable to ask how prudent their risk calculus was in the
face of uncertainty. Given a lack of sufficient knowledge, should they have
presumed in favour or against military action? Should they have judged more
wisely even if they were in the dark? It is also open to us to make post hoc
evaluations, because hawks use hindsight themselves. Looking back, they point
to subsequent developments to make a retrospective defence, claiming that
what happened afterwards vindicates their decision. They invoke the Arab
Spring and the civil war in Syria, for example, to argue that the creation of a
better order in Baghdad released the democratic impulse, or prevented an even
more dangerous crisis. If the war had turned out well, it is hard to imagine the
same hawks urging us to avoid hindsight bias in the war’s favour.
In any event, the notion that the case against the war can only rest on
hindsight knowledge is faulty. There were dissenting voices at the time who
warned precisely of the war’s possible consequences. The civil strife and
conflicts that actually happened after invasion were not especially unforesee-
able ‘non-linear’ and shocking events. If anything, to be shocked that violent
disorder follows the overthrow of a government is a commentary on the
assumptions of the shocked. Here we will probe both kinds of argument,
evaluating decisions against the state of knowledge and debate at the time, and
against what we learned since.
²⁴ Tony Blair, ‘Doctrine of International Community’, speech to the Economic Club of

Chicago, 22 April 1999; before the US Congress in July 2003, Blair argued, ‘The best defence
of our security lies in the spread of our values.’ ‘Tony Blair’s speech to the US Congress’, The
Guardian 18 July 2003; in 2004 at Sedgefield, Blair used the same line, ‘Blair Terror Speech in
full’, BBC News, 5 March 2004; on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, as President George
W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq on 1 May 2003, he observed
that ‘American values and American interests lead in the same direction. We stand for human
liberty’. ‘Bush Makes Historic Speech aboard Warship’, CNN, 2 May 2003.
²⁵ See B. Fischoff, ‘Hindsight Is Not Equal to Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on
Judgement Under Uncertainty’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 1:3 (1975), pp. 288–99.
164 Blunder
P A R T I I . B A L A N C E P OS ITI V E ? WE I GHI NG
THE ARGUMENTS
Here I lay out the strongest possible case for forcibly removing the regime
from power, bearing in mind both what could reasonably have been known at
the time, and what we know now. I draw together the strongest rationales that
have been advanced, from policy experts such as Ken Pollack, Iraqi exiles and
regional authorities such as Kanan Makiya, and from the practitioner who has
most persistently defended the decision, Tony Blair.
The strongest possible case would proceed as follows. Looking out from
London in March 2003, Britain and the established international order was
threatened by a dark form of globalization that had revealed itself on 9/11. If
globalization is the circulation of people, capital, ideas, and things, the gov-
ernment’s risk calculus in the face of such forces was reasonable. Simply put,
the West’s security was increasingly threatened over time. Given that decision-
makers could not know the future, it was reasonable to suppose that the 9/11
attacks were not an aberration but part of a serial wave of assaults. It was
reasonable to judge that the most prudent response to an increasingly dan-
gerous world was decisive anticipatory action. Striking Iraq amounted to
anticipatory war, to forestall an emerging future threat before it could fully
manifest itself. The world we inhabit cannot afford the luxury of ‘last resorts’,
as required in the Thomist tradition. As some strategic minds advise, we must
adapt our conceptions of prudential and just war to a world where time is
against us. Regime change in Iraq was an application of the ‘precautionary
principle’. This principle holds that where an uncertain but potentially cata-
strophic risk is at hand and where we lack extensive or final knowledge, it is
better to err on the side of caution. In the context of Iraq, precaution favoured
action over inaction. It placed the burden of proof on opponents of action. In
the words of Australian former prime minister John Howard, ‘if you wait for
perfect proof, you could end up with another Pearl Harbor.’²⁶ Or as Blair
put it,
The point about this act in New York was that, had they been able to kill even
more people than those 3,000, they would have, and so, after that time, my
view was you could not take risks with this issue at all, and one dimension of
it, because we were advised, obviously, that these people would use chemical or
biological weapons or a nuclear device, if they could get hold of them—that
completely changed our assessment of where the risks for security lay.²⁷
²⁶ Cited in Brendan Nicholson & Paul Cleary, ‘New 9/11 fears set off Iraq invasion, says John
Howard’, The Weekend Australian, 8 July 2016.
²⁷ Tony Blair, IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 11.

Saddam’s Iraqi regime represented the sum of all fears, namely the possibility
of nuclear terrorism. His regime embodied a potential confluence of several
dangerous trends: the pursuit of ultimate weapons technology, the aggressive
and genocidal intent entailed within emerging radical and religious forms of
terrorism, and the collaboration of rogue states. In assessing the new threat
environment, the 9/11 Commission reported that globalization put lethal
weapons in the hands of actors in ways that weakened the force of time and
space, making deterrence, containment, and geographical barriers almost
irrelevant.²⁸ Neither was this only America’s problem. The 9/11 terrorist
attacks killed sixty-seven British subjects, revealing a transnational threat.
The illicit arms trade, too, was a cross-border and cross-ideological phe-
nomenon. In the early twenty-first century, the traffic in nuclear materials
through entrepreneurs like A.Q. Kahn and regressive states like North
Korea, Libya, and Iraq itself was dangerously ecumenical. Radical Islamists,
like the Al Qaeda network, had been historically willing to collaborate even
with ideologically hostile ‘godless’ states, like the Soviet Union, to wage their
jihad. Having endured the 9/11 atrocities, it was not fanciful to recognize
that such a threat could metastasize.
By early 2002, Saddam was rightfully becoming the prime candidate for
elimination, now that al-Qaeda’s host government, the Afghan Taliban, was
toppled and reeling. Saddam oversaw an uncommonly sadistic abattoir regime
of torture, purges, and state terror. To genocide he added ecological atrocities,
such as the draining of the Mesopotamian marshes. He was one of the
few states in the world to deploy chemical weapons, both at home (against
the Kurds) and abroad (against Iran). These instruments are regarded inter-
nationally as abhorrent to the point of taboo. That he turned them against
his own subjects indicates that he recognized few limits. His barbarity
was exceptional, even judging by the competitive standards of Middle Eastern
dictators.²⁹
All this would be bad enough, if the Ba’ath Party had confined its predatory
behaviour to Iraq. Saddam was also a serial aggressor beyond Iraq’s borders.
He had invaded Iran in 1979, launching one of the worst conflicts the Gulf had
seen in living memory. He waged genocidal war on the Iraqi Kurds. He had
invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, bombing Saudi Arabia and Israel in the
process. This regime was historically willing to collaborate with terrorists.
Saddam was a known sponsor of Palestinian suicide bombers in the West
Bank. He offered bounties for the murder of UN relief workers in northern
²⁸ The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2004), p. 362.
²⁹ For the humanitarian indictment of Saddam and the moral case for war, see Thomas
Cushman, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (Berkeley: University
of California, 2005).
166 Blunder
Iraq. His regime had also had sporadic contacts with al-Qaeda. The same
regime had pursued weapons of mass destruction. Its persistence was a source
of conflict and destabilization. His regime was virulently anti-Semitic and was
one of the main ‘rejectionist’ forces in the region, an obstacle to the effort to
end the Arab–Israeli conflict. Indeed, Saddam regarded himself as the leader of
a historical pan-Arab movement that would fight and annihilate Israel. Sad-
dam was not an Arab ‘Stalin’, brutal at home while cold, calculating, and
deterrable abroad. And the Hitler analogy is ill-suited and overworked. He was
more the Mussolini of the Gulf, head of a risk-taking revisionist regime driven
by grandiose visions of empire-building, with a penchant for reckless military
adventurism. The regime and system he had built promised to perpetuate
oppression at home and aggression abroad, long after his passing. His sons
Udday and Qusay, who would be his likely successors, had a record of sadistic
brutality that appalled even their atrocious father. This held out little prospect
of moderation, reformation, or constructive détente.
What of Saddam’s WMD capabilities, or as it turned out, non-capabilities?
While the regime turns out not to have possessed a WMD stockpile, reason
and evidence persuaded a range of international observers that it did, and
these observers included opponents of war. All intelligence experts advised
that the regime retained some ‘CBW’ (chemical and biological weapons).³⁰
There were also good reasons to suppose that Saddam would probably recon-
stitute his weapons programme in future. The ‘Duelfer Report’ of the Iraq
Survey Group concluded that though he had disarmed his WMD arsenal and
programmes, Saddam still had WMD ambitions.³¹ And in an age of non-state
actors moved by apocalyptic ideology, without a return address and uncon-
strained by the traditional logic of deterrence, Saddam might donate WMD to
such a group in order to ‘cheat’ the threat of retaliation and empower a
fanatical group which could not be easily targeted for retaliation and didn’t
care about the threat of punishment in the first place.
Western-led international measures to counter the Iraq threat were proving
to be increasingly inadequate and unsustainable. Over a decade of blockade
had crippled the Iraqi economy and hurt and killed civilians. According to a
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) survey, child mortality was at the
³⁰ See David Fisher, former senior official with the MOD and FCO, senior defence adviser to
the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Office, cited in David Fischer, Morality and War: Can War be
Just in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 200.
³¹ The Duelfer Report found that ‘Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which
was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized,
but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed. Saddam aspired
to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure
and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical
chemical warfare (CW) capabilities’. Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on
Iraq’s WMD, 30 September 2004, ‘Key Findings’, p. 1.

same level as the Congo.³² This was not directly the consequence of sanctions,
but the misuse of food and medicine aid by the regime for its own purposes.
Perversely, the same sanctions strengthened the regime and fed anti-Western
grievance. This, as well as America’s garrisoning of Saudi Arabia to check Iraqi
aggression, created the kind of resentment that nourished Islamist incitement.
The status quo of sanctions and near-permanent military presence left a
dangerous enemy intact while enabling propagandists to portray the West as
an imperialist interloper. At the same time, those sanctions would become
progressively less capable of keeping Saddam in his box. The international
programme of sanctions was breaking down, and the regime was noticeably
becoming bolder in its defiance. Iraq fired on US and British aircraft patrolling
it’s no-fly zone. As sanctions eventually disintegrated, we know that the global
oil price would rise, linked to the economic surge in India and China after
2004. This would enrich Saddam, who would resurface as a dangerous preda-
tor, with the added legitimacy of a defiant ruler who had faced down the
West’s air war and economic strangulation. The regime’s hostility to the US
and its allies was open. Saddam was the only state leader to openly celebrate
the 9/11 attacks. Under his aegis, Iraq was emerging as a possible centre of
what Blair called a ‘loose’ but ‘hardening’ nexus between WMD, terrorism,
and rogue states. In recent years, Saddam had reinvented the Iraqi state, away
from the cause of secular pluralism and towards a realignment with militant
Islamism. In an era when violence could be projected by means short of large-
scale industrial and military power, and at relatively low cost, Western gov-
ernments were now on notice.
In removing Saddam from power, the US-led coalition replaced a hostile
regime with one that is flawed and corrupt, certainly, but also broadly pro-
Western. Unlike the overthrown order, the new government in Baghdad
respects international borders. Iraq’s small Gulf neighbour, Kuwait, is no
longer threatened with predation or annexation, as Saddam attempted in
1990–1 and as he threatened to do by mobilizing on the border in October
1994. In turn, the example of Saddam’s demise accelerated Libya’s peaceful
disarmament of its chemical weapons stockpile in December 2003 and the
abandonment of its nuclear programme. The US Air Force and the Royal Air
Force were no longer required to patrol the skies above Kurdish areas. The
invasion removed one of the foremost obstacles to any eventual Arab–Israeli
settlement. More broadly, the process of change, though fraught, inspired the
wider region. By releasing the Iraqi movement for political liberty, it helped
inspire the democratic impulse in subsequent revolutions across North Africa
and Middle East.
³² Mohamed Ali & Iqbal Shah, ‘Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq’, The Lancet 355:
9218 (2000), pp. 1,851–7.
168 Blunder
The price tag for these gains was higher than wished for or expected. Given
what subsequently happened in Iraq after 2003, any retrospective case for
invasion must contend that the gains were still worth the unexpectedly high
costs. Compared to Iraq’s prior condition, the cost did not, however, exceed
the value of the object. With an oppressive regime gone, Iraqis were free to
choose a better future. It brought forth a new constitution, free elections, and
open debate. Trade and oil embargoes that had devastated the population were
lifted, making possible the economic reconstruction of the country. By 2010,
GDP per capita was three times what it had been, and child mortality had
improved dramatically. There was a brutal escalation of violence in 2005–7,
which gave international terrorism a foothold in the country. Yet the descent
of the country into civil war was reversed by an American-led ‘surge’, as an
infusion of troops and resources as well as a renaissance in counter-insurgency
technique that depressed levels of violence, defeated al-Qaeda’s bid for power
in Anbar province, and created space for political conciliation. This was a
victory that gave invaluable experience to US and international forces in
‘minor wars’, nation-building, and stabilization missions. It was also a victory
that could have become the basis for an Iraqi national rebirth. By 2010–11, as
American troops drew down, Iraq was relatively stable, had consolidated its
new democracy, and was rebuilding its economy.
The violent fracturing of the country since then, with the spread of the
Islamic State into Iraq, de facto partitioning, and sectarian violence, is not the
responsibility of the governments that originally decided on invasion. Iraqis
themselves are responsible for their collective decisions. They are agents, not
objects, are no longer wards of the international community, and are able to
pursue their own course. The West helped created an historic opportunity that
Iraqis squandered. As David Frum tweeted after the release of the Report of the
Iraq Inquiry: ‘US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future. Whatever the
West’s errors, the sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.’³³ Or
as Charles Krauthammer reasoned,
We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites
kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and
has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the
blame on the one player, the one country, the one military that has done more
than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply
perverse. It infantilizes Arabs. It demonizes Americans. It wilfully overlooks the
plainest of facts: Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose
civil war.³⁴
³³ David Frum, @davidfrum, 12:16pm, 6 July 2016.

³⁴ Charles Krauthammer, ‘Who’s to blame for the killing’, The Washington Post,
2 February 2007.

Consistent with this line of argument, weighing agency over structure, is the
blame that apologists place on the Obama administration. As the argument
goes, if there are other guilty parties, they are the later Western governments.
By 2011, US and allies, both foreign and Iraqi, had won the war and wrested
the country back from the brink, securing a stable, friendly new order in Iraq
that was still fragile, that needed Western strategic presence to survive. This
was squandered by President Obama in his inflexible determination to with-
draw all forces, creating a vacuum for the conflict and destabilization that
followed. Indeed, there is a link between the two developments. Without the
assurance of Western support as a security provider, Iraqis lost faith in their
state and the political process, and turned on each other.
Even allowing for these terrible developments, counterfactually, Iraq
escaped a worse alternative world than would likely have come about had
war not been waged. Had the Arab Spring come to Iraq, as surely it would
have, a rearming and resurgent Saddam Hussein would probably have
responded to it with the repressive behaviour that he had used in previous
cases of rebellion or dissent. Either he would have crushed the rebellion
and emerged as a ‘North Korea of the Gulf ’. Or Iraq would have suffered a
Syria-style implosion. Ba’ath Iraq would have unravelled like Ba’ath Syria.
This would have created a vortex into which other regional states intervened
with gold, arms, and proxies, against a Sunni supremacist order fighting
with an existential stake in the struggle. If Iraq in this alternative world
developed as Syria has, in a war that had longevity as well as intensity, this
would have killed and wounded civilians on a magnitude comparable or worse
than what actually happened. Westerners would be debating the missed
opportunity to tip the balance. A major intervention would be possible and
increasingly demanded, not to remove a regime and achieve something
more stable and acceptable, but to impose order on a more multipolar and
more chaotic situation. And, as with Syria today, an imploding Iraq would
set the scene for a possible collision between global and regional powers,
including the US, UK, Gulf Arab states, Turkey, Iran, and Russia.
British security interests are implicated in each of these considerations.
Failure to follow through in March 2003 would have damaged the Anglo-
American relationship, and reduced Britain’s capacity to shape Washington’s
behaviour. Leaving it to the US would have spurred American unilateralism.
Taking part at least reinforced a norm of collective multilateral effort. Capitu-
lating to Saddam Hussein’s defiance would have emboldened other adversar-
ies. An increase in violent chaos in the Arab-Islamic world, especially in the
Gulf, or alternatively the emergence of a North Korea–like state there, would
have threatened the stability of a region regarded as critical to the UK. The
types of threat might vary, though could interlock in dangerous ways: the
disruption of energy and commercial flows, the increase in international
terrorism, and the collision of major powers all seeking to impose order on
170 Blunder
the region. If ‘major wars can begin as an aggregation of lesser wars’,³⁵ a
breakdown in order across Iraq would increase the chance of dangerous
escalation. Iraq today is a deeply troubled state, and host to a number of
misdevelopments such as sectarian conflict. It has, though, avoided becoming
a ‘Syria mark two’.
PART III. MORE HARM THAN GOOD: THE

C A S E ( S ) A G A IN S T
Here I outline the strongest possible case against the Iraq War, and offer a
critique of the arguments above.
The main indictment of the invasion is that it inflicted more harm than
good. In some respects, it perversely brought about and aggravated the very
security threats that it was supposed to counter. It brought excess and dispro-
portionate costs, in return for only fragile and modest returns. The decision to
strike Iraq fails to satisfy the proportionality requirement, central to prudential
judgement, as it harmed the West’s security interests in return for insufficient
security gains.
Invasion did not confer liberty but anarchy on the Iraqi population, at least
for a critical time period. It had perverse results, making Iraq a more lethal
environment for many of its inhabitants, worsening rather than reducing
terrorism, and demonstrating the value of acquiring a nuclear deterrent.
And there were realistic alternatives to war. A ‘North Korea scenario’, where
Iraq’s regime survived in the absence of war, would still have been preventable
if the invasion had not occurred. With regards to the ‘Syria scenario’, where
Iraq imploded in the absence of war, the actual war helped to create
the conditions for wider sectarian breakdown in the region, established a
new form of abusive sectarian rule in the country, and thereby ultimately
empowered Sunni Islamism and its most radical offshoot, the Islamic State.
The ‘abandonment thesis’ is also historically false: the West did not have the
politically realistic choice after 2008 of maintaining a large-scale and lasting
presence in Iraq. Regime change unleashed forces that are not the West’s to
control.
It is sobering to compare what did happen in Iraq with what was supposed
to happen. The architects of the venture expected a lightning strike campaign
with light casualties, rapidly leading to a peaceful transfer of power to a
³⁵ Hew Strachan, ‘ Defence Review: we are as complacent about war as the Edwardians’, The
Daily Telegraph, 17 September 2010.

constitutional Iraqi government, and an estimated cost of £2.5–3 billion.³⁶
Inspectors would locate the WMD stockpile and the interveners would con-
fiscate it. Saddam’s overthrow would eliminate a major sponsor of terrorism
who probably would have strengthened his relationship with al-Qaeda and its
affiliates. Onlooking states would distance themselves from international
terrorism and eschew illegal weapons proliferation. Liberated from an atro-
cious regime, Iraqi civil society would create a new and more humane order.
To the extent that the West was historically implicated in the regime’s
atrocities, by omission and commission, the gift of liberation would repay its
debts. With sanctions then lifted, Iraq’s oil revenue, trade, recovered assets,
and investment would mostly pay for the war and quickly finance reconstruc-
tion. Iraq’s liberation would promote the cause of human rights and democ-
racy worldwide. The United Nations, through Anglo-American leadership,
would have its authority restored. It would avoid the humiliation it was about
to suffer, in May 2003, of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq taking over the chairmanship
of the UN Committee on Disarmament. Anticipating the future verdict on the
Blair government’s decision, historian Andrew Roberts prophesied that Blair,
like Winston Churchill, would be vindicated. The historical act of removing
Saddam would reveal the horrifying extent of the threat. Iraqi expatriates who
also urged for the war, congregating around Ahmad Chalabi’s London-based
Iraqi National Congress, were likewise optimistic.
All these expectations have been disappointed. Contrary to the WMD
claims that were the centrepiece of the case for war, the US Duelfer Commis-
sion found that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his WMD programmes. He
ended nuclear weapons research in 1991 and biological and chemical weapons
research in 1995. In measuring the human costs of war, the first and para-
mount step is to count the dead. Planners wildly underestimated the levels and
type of violence that would occur from 2003 onwards, from insurgent resist-
ance to civil disorder to proxy and communal conflict. Measuring surplus
deaths is a difficult and imprecise exercise, and estimates vary. There is no
exact point in time to ‘stop the clock’ on causation, but a reasonable starting
point is to track mortality over a ten-year period from 2003 to 2013, given the
magnitude of the change in the removal of the Ba’ath regime, and the causal
link suggested by the persistence of many of the same actors who took up the
opportunity to exercise power (such as Nouri al-Maliki, prime minister from
2006 to 2014, and the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army).
The total casualties caused by the conflict over a decade according to the
website Iraq Body Count were 174,000; according to PLOS Medicine they were
³⁶ £2.5 billion was the initial Treasury estimate in September 2002, while the MOD’s estimate
for costs of military action was £2 billion in October, which it then raised to £2.5–3 billion in
February. The Treasury’s first comprehensive estimate in February 2003 was £3.4 billion over
three years.
172 Blunder
461,000; according to the Associated Press they were more than 110,000. At its
climax, the violence that followed the overthrow of the government between
2004 and 2007 reached 1,700 civilian casualties per month.³⁷ To be sure, the
occupying powers were far from the only ones implicated in this violence.
Their culpability is not directly for each death or casualty, but for the struc-
tural situation. In the vacuum that invasion made possible, criminal activity,
sectarian conflict, and the Al Qaeda–backed Sunni insurgency all thrived.
How does this compare with life before liberation? Over the duration of his
reign, 1979–2003, Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the killing of
approximately 200,000 people, according to Western human rights groups
collecting accounts from defectors and émigrés (this figure does not include
the fatalities of the Iran–Iraq War that he launched).³⁸ His body count total
represents a rate of 8,333 people a year. If we consider that casualties from
2003 onwards at the most conservative estimate of 110,000, Iraq’s annual post-
war fatality rate rose to 11,000. In other words, for a decade during the
invasion and occupation, Iraq was a more lethal country to its inhabitants
even than during the Ba’ath tyranny. In turn, this drove a refugee exodus.
Initially, the toppling of Saddam led to a return movement of 300,000 Iraqis.
The surge of internal conflict from 2006 drove many to flee, especially after the
polarizing event of the bombing of the shrine in Samarra and the surge of
violence it generated. By July 2014, according to the United Nationals High
Commission for Refugees, an estimated 1.9 million Iraqis were external
refugees, including approximately half of the country’s doctors.³⁹ This was
one of the worst refugee crises the region had seen in living memory.
A prior order of state repression, destructive sanctions, and occasional
genocide yielded to a new order of sectarian cleansing, multisided combat in
urban areas, rampant criminality, and the continuous damage and destruction
of civilian infrastructure. This is not necessarily proof, on its own, of the war’s
imprudence. It does at least heavily qualify the claim that Iraq was liberated.
That the war left the country a more dangerous place to live in even than
under Saddam is a mark solidly in the debit column.
As for the child mortality claim, it has been revealed that the claim of an
abnormally high pre-war infant death rate and subsequent dramatic reduction
is overblown. It was based on a UNICEF report of 1999 (the ‘Iraq Child and
Maternal Mortality Survey’) that was compiled with the support of Iraqi
government officials, not a source above suspicion. Four subsequent surveys
from UNICEF, the UN Development Programme and the World Health
³⁷ Casualty figures from ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, iCasualties.org.

³⁸ John F. Burns, ‘How Many People has Hussein Killed?’, The New York Times, 26
January 2003.
³⁹ See the findings of the Watson Institute at Brown University, http://watson.brown.edu/
costsofwar/costs/human/refugees.

Organization, as well as the 1997 Iraqi census, found no evidence for a spike in
child mortality in the 1990s.⁴⁰ In Kurdish areas that were also subject to
sanctions but not under Saddam’s control, there was no such rise. Moreover,
the Foreign Office (FCO), with the confirmation of the Department for
International Development (DFID), had advised that there was no reliable
answer about child mortality and that the figure of 131 deaths per 1,000
children under the age of five was suspect.⁴¹ Yet in February 2003, Matthew
Rycroft advised Blair that the alleged pre-war high mortality rate was sound,
and did not burden the Prime Minister with the doubts raised.⁴² Ironically,
Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Blair government reinforced each other’s
efforts to persuade opinion that pre-war sanctions had been lethal to children.
Incuriosity prevailed, as did the search for evidence to bolster a prior decision.
Torture is another revealing comparison point. Saddam’s regime made
torture the apex of its system of rule through fear, described by the United
Nations’ Commission for Human Rights as an ‘all pervasive repression and
widespread terror’. Amnesty International listed the torture methods, from the
gouging out of eyes to tongue amputation, electrocution, and rape, killing
some victims and leaving others physically and mentally damaged.⁴³ Saddam
even had a secret torture chamber installed in the basement of the Iraqi
Mission to the United Nations in New York. The Ba’ath Party elite enthusi-
astically ordered torture and at times personally carried it out. We know much
about Saddam’s tortures, because the regime deliberately exhibited its victims’
broken bodies as a public deterrent. Mutilation of targets in order to exhibit
the price of transgression was a favoured technique. As Kanan Makiya’s
authoritative account of ‘the republic of fear’ graphically demonstrated, after
defeat in 1991, the repertoire of barbaric punishments and rewards increased
and led to new and bizarre kinds of degradation:
The number of ways in which the state was publicly disfiguring the bodies of its
citizens was mushrooming. Depending on the crime, the foreheads of offenders
got branded with a horizontal line three to five centimeters long, or with a circle,
along with the X spelled out in Law 109. Some army deserters and draft dodgers,
and those who sheltered them, got special treatment: the outer part of one ear was
to be cut off for the first offence; a repeat offence resulted in the amputation of the
other ear and a circle being branded on the forehead . . . Only after being caught
⁴⁰ See Michael Spagat, ‘The Iraq Sanctions Myth’, Pacific Standard, 26 April 2013, at https://
psmag.com/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-5b05f6712df5#.i9oh5prjx; ‘Truth and Death in Iraq Under
Sanctions’, Significance 7:3 (2010), pp. 116–20; World Health Organization, Iraq Family Health
Survey 2006–7 (2008), p. 63, Table 25, at http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/
pr02/2008_iraq_family_health_survey_report.pdf.
⁴¹ Fax Owen to Rycroft, 14 February 2003, ‘PM’s Speech Question’.
⁴² Minute Rycroft to Prime Minister, 14 February 2003, ‘Iraq: Scotland Speech—Additional
Points’.
⁴³ Amnesty International, 2001 Annual Report on Iraq, 10 July 2001, p. 2.
174 Blunder
for desertion a third time would a soldier be executed . . . The reaction of ordinary
Iraqis to the new laws was also unprecedented. Two men whose ears had been cut
off immolated themselves in central Baghdad in October 1994. Following the
murder of a doctor in the southern city of Nassirriyya by an amputee, and the
storming of the headquarters of the Ba’th party in the city of Amara by a crowd that
cut off the ears of the Ba’th officials it got its hands on, several hundred doctors
went on strike to protest having to carry out the new punishments. Upon being
threatened with having their own ears cut off, the doctors called off their strike. Law
117 was then promptly issued, directed at the whole medical profession. It threat-
ened immediate amputation of the ear for anyone who insisted in the cosmetic
improvement of an officially disfigured body part. The law’s wording ends with this
strange acknowledgement of the public’s outrage: The effects of the punishment of
amputation of the hand or ear and branding ‘will be eliminated [by the state] if
those so punished go on to perform heroic and patriotic acts.⁴⁴
After Saddam’s overthrow, torture did not end. Against expectations, it
became increasingly difficult to assume that ‘at least’ the invasion alleviated
Iraqis from repression. Instead, now that torture was no longer a state
monopoly, it proliferated and at a higher rate even than under the old order.
It was carried out by security forces, insurgents, and militia groups. Consider
the report in 2006 of UN officials who examined the bodies of kidnap victims
in Baghdad’s morgue:
64. UNAMI HRO [United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, Human
Rights Office] has consistently documented the widespread use of torture in
Iraq. This matter has regularly emerged as a major concern and has been
widely acknowledged as a major problem by Iraqi officials. Periodically,
information has been received by HRO regarding the use of torture in
detention centres. The bodies that regularly appear throughout the country
bear signs indicating that the victims have been brutally tortured before
their extra-judicial execution.
65. UNAMI HRO has received reports and documentation showing the
type of torture inflicted on detainees, particularly during interrogation.
Detainees’ bodies show signs of beating using electrical cables, wounds in
different parts of their bodies, including in the head and genitals, broken
bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns. Bodies found at the
Medico-legal Institute often bear signs of severe torture including acid-
induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin,
broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and
wounds caused by power drills or nails. Individuals who escaped death
in such incidents reported that saw [sic] others being tortured to get
⁴⁴ Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989), pp. x–xi.

information about their sect. For example, an individual reported that he
was beaten by members of a Sunni extremist group with electrical cables
and iron bars to make him confess the sect to which he belonged. The body
of another man kidnapped by Shi’a militias bore signs of facial mutilation,
had fingers missing from his hands and had a significant perforation—
presumably from a power drill—below his left shoulder.⁴⁵
Iraqis reported to the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq that the new realities of
torture were ‘worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein’.⁴⁶ It may
not be easy to evaluate that claim. That post-war conditions were even credibly
comparable is a judgement against the invasion, given that it was supposed to
relieve civilians from oppression. Long occupation of Iraq also became the
occasion for Western torture. Allegations of British prisoner abuse were
upheld in the case of the Baha Mousa Inquiry, with more still under investi-
gation by the Iraq Historic Allegations Team.⁴⁷ Torturers, whether American
or British, actively contributed to the terrorization of the civilian population,
and by doing so, degraded themselves and the states they represented. This
damaged the moral authority of the United States and Britain. It created a
recruitment tool for Islamist terrorist groups, making it easier for hostile
propagandists to portray Western campaigns not as liberation efforts but as
colonial domination.
Given the extent of post-Saddam terror, what of the argument that this was
primarily Iraqis’ decision and agency, choosing civil war over enlightened
nation-building? The flaw in this argument is that it wrongly separates the act
of breaking the state from the violent forces that were subsequently unleashed.
It is true that other developments before the war are causally implicated in the
civil strife that followed, including the deliberately divisive and intentionally
terroristic nature of Ba’ath Party rule. The invasion, though, was the proxim-
ate cause of the subsequent sectarian conflict and breakdown of order, the
mobilization of radical Sunni militias, and the spillover of radical jihadist
groups into Syria.⁴⁸ To characterize the invasion as an act that ‘midwifed
their freedom’ is a perverse account of what happened when invading forces
overthrew a government. If it midwifed anything, it was a state of grave mutual
insecurity between Iraqis, spiralling not into liberty, a condition that requires a
minimal level of security and social cohesion, but instead into anarchy.
Without a Leviathan to restrain competing groups, frightened Iraqis turned
to their primary groups for protection and succour. In those conditions, both
⁴⁵ UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), Human Rights Report (1 July–31 August 2006),
pp. 15–16.
⁴⁶ ‘Iraq torture worse after Saddam’, BBC News, 21 September 2006.
⁴⁷ The Report of the Baha Mousa Inquiry (London: Stationery Office, 2011), volumes 1–3.
⁴⁸ As Malcolm Chalmers assesses it, ‘The Strategic Scorecard’, in Wars in Peace: British
Military Operations Since 1991 (London: RUSI, 2014), pp. 109–35.
176 Blunder
sides found themselves in a security dilemma, where they armed, organized,
and competed in order to ensure their security, only to heighten one another’s
insecurity. In such conditions, the ‘choice’ of taking up arms was not the
irrational awakening of ancient hatreds. With the right triggering event,
namely al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Golden Dome mosque, an escalation of
atrocities followed.
Regarding the net humanitarian and strategic results, the fact that life over a
decade became more lethal and torturous even than under Ba’ath Party rule
might arguably be less weighty if it could be shown that these horrific
developments were at least positively productive, that they purchased a
more humane order that was beneficial to British security interests. As things
stand, however, we do not know that, and there are disturbing signs pointing
in the other direction. Amnesty International reported in October 2016 that
Popular Mobilization Units, or Hashd al-Shaabi (an Iraqi government–backed
organization made up of myriad Shia Muslim militias) now torture and
execute Sunni civilians who escaped the Islamic State.⁴⁹ The post-Saddam
killings and tortures were not the birth pangs of what would become a
pluralistic state under a restrained constitutional government. They marked
the creation of a sectarian Shiite ascendancy that continues to commit grave
human rights violations. British military forces are now deployed in Iraq and
Afghanistan to counter the Islamic State, the worst by-product of the regional
turmoil that the Iraq War helped to generate.
These distressing outcomes also came at significant costs borne by the US
and Britain. According to the Iraq Inquiry, the direct cost to the UK was
£9.2 billion for the 2003–9 campaign.⁵⁰ Overall costs are greater when we
factor in indirect costs, such as the costs of through-life medical care for
veterans, and the costs of military replenishment such as the replacement of
equipment. It is impossible to quantify objectively or precisely how many
casualties or how much expenditure is ‘too much’ in isolation. Evaluations are
inevitably value-laden. We can at least inform judgement through relative
rather than absolute measures. The total cost was £7 billion more than
anticipated, and as we shall see, for a return of decidedly more mixed results
than expected, including perverse and undesired outcomes. Without the
distress of the Iraq War, £9.2 billion could have been allocated more product-
ively, in capital stock such as education or infrastructure, in different com-
binations. The UK government hypothetically could have not spent it,
reducing the budget deficit. If spent elsewhere, it could have covered the cost
of retaining public services that were reduced in later ‘austerity budgets’ from
2010, sparing for years local government budgets to be spent on British public
⁴⁹ Amnesty International, Punished for Daesh’s crimes: Displaced Iraqis abused by militias and
government forces (London: Amnesty International, 2016), pp. 6–7, 13.
⁵⁰ Report of the Iraq Inquiry, v. 10, Section 13.2, p. 580.

libraries (reduced in total by approximately £150 million in 2010),⁵¹ main-
taining the flood defence budget (reduced by £30 million),⁵² and the legal aid
budget (reduced by £350 million).⁵³ These alternative uses of money have a
concrete and direct impact on the populace. Alternatively, the costs of Iraq
could have offset the large-scale defence spending reductions in 2010, such
as the reduction in army personnel, or could have contributed to the recap-
italization of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, or covered annual expend-
iture on operations in Afghanistan for five of its twelve years.⁵⁴
These financial sums are hardly crippling. They do not equal the major
cases of imperial overstretch, such as the ruinously exorbitant campaigns of
Hapsburg Spain’s King Philip II.⁵⁵ As the figures suggest, the Iraq War still
represented non-trivial opportunity costs. Those costs should weigh more
heavily given the larger consequences of the war for British security interests.
To dismiss these costs as relatively inconsequential or easily affordable would
be to betray an insouciance about scarce resources. Even marginal reductions
or reallocations of such resources strongly affect the vulnerable. Money spent
on military operations in Iraq not only contributed to an overall worsening
environment for Iraqis, but was money not spend preventing flood damage,
maintaining a public library, funding police, or supporting under-resourced
troops in Afghanistan.
The expenditure of the United States, on the other hand, does stand com-
parison with major historical episodes. A war whose total direct and indirect
costs amount to approximately $3 trillion helped accelerate America’s relative
decline, adding a legacy of debt to its already unsustainable liabilities, adding to
the ratio of public debt to GDP, worsening the strain on scarce resources in
the competition between debt, military commitments, and social welfare, and
depleting its relative strength as a unipolar power, although it remains a major
power.⁵⁶
⁵¹ Local Government Spending on public libraries, drawn from Institute of Fiscal Studies,
Green Budget February 2012, Table 6.2, p. 140.
⁵² House of Commons Library SN/SC/5755, Oliver Bennett & Sarah Hartwell Naguib, Flood
Defence Spending in England (19 November 2014), p. 3.
⁵³ Proposals for the Reform of Legal Aid in England and Wales, Consultation Paper CP12/10,
November 2010, Cm 7967, p. 5.
⁵⁴ The net additional cost of military operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013 was £20.65
billion, according to Malcolm Chalmers, representing an average annual rate of approximately
£1.72 billion. ‘The Sinews of War’, in Adrian L. Johnson (ed.), Wars in Peace: British Military
Operations Since 1991 (London: RUSI, 2014), p. 268.
⁵⁵ On this case and the thesis of imperial overstretch, where military commitments exceed
and dislocate the state’s economic capacity, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana, 1989),
pp. 39–89; Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (London: Yale University Press,
1998).
⁵⁶ On the long-term costs of the Iraq War for the United States, see the cumulative work of
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq
178 Blunder
British casualties in Iraq were also excessively high, if judged against
expectations, and if judged against the modest gains of the war, especially
the absence of Saddam’s WMD programme and thus the non-imminence of
the threat. Casualties are also high against another revealing measure. Britain
suffered 179 service personnel fatalities and three UK civilian officials. Of
these, 138 were killed as the result of hostile acts, rather than illness, suicide, or
blue-on-blue accident.⁵⁷ Many thousands were wounded. The full figures have
yet to be released. According to the Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) official
figures, since 2006, there were 5,791 total.⁵⁸ These numbers—182 killed, 5791
injured—amount to the equivalent of a major terrorist attack, brought on by
inserting forces in Iraq.
Two caveats are in order. Firstly, these were volunteer personnel electing to
put themselves in harms’ way, rather than civilian bystanders, and they were
doing so on expeditionary operations away from the mainland UK, in contrast
to a major attack on a city in the British homeland. This arguably lessens the
severity to an extent, but the military character of the losses and the fact that
they happened ‘over there’ does not negate the point. Most Britons would
certainly regard a terrorist attack on a military facility in the Middle East that
killed 182 personnel and inflicted thousands of non-fatal casualties as a major
and distressing episode, comparable to America’s reaction to the Beirut
barracks bombing of 1983. The prolonged duration of the losses matters.
Spreading these losses over a decade may be preferable to single attack
concentrated on one day, given what a shock of that magnitude could do to
the state’s functioning and to social cohesion. Given this time period, a better
comparison might be to serial, smaller scale attacks over a decade. Going by
the casualty figures we have, British losses in Iraq are quantitively the
Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton: 2008); Linda J. Bilmes & Joseph E. Stiglitz, ‘The long-term
costs of conflict: the case the Iraq War’, in Derek L. Braddon & Keith Hartley (eds), The
Handbook on the Economics of Conflict (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011) and
‘Estimating the costs of war: Methodological issues, with applications to Iraq and Afghanistan’,
in Michelle Garfinkel & Stergios Skaperdas (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace
and Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2012), pp. 1–51; Bilmes, ‘The Financial Legacy of
Iraq and Afghanistan: How Wartime Spending Decisions Will Constrain Future National
Security Budgets’, Faculty Research Working Paper Series, March 2013; see also Ryan
D. Edwards, ‘Post-9/11 War Spending, Debt, and the Macroeconomy’, Cost of War Project,
Brown University (22 June 2011).
⁵⁷ Ministry of Defence, ‘Operations in Iraq: British Fatalities’, at http://webarchive.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121026065214/http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FactSheets/
OperationsFactsheets/OperationsInIraqBritishFatalities.htm, accessed 12 November 2016.
⁵⁸ I derive this figure from the official MOD figures on British casualties, by subtracting
fatalities from the total of Very Seriously Injured (73), Seriously Injured (149), Field Hospital
Admissions (3598) and Aero-Medical Evacuations (1971), from Table: Summary of Ministry of
Defence Statistics on British Casualties in Iraq, at Casualty Monitor, http://www.casualty-
monitor.org/p/iraq.html. Note that these figures are incomplete, as the MOD has not yet released
the official casualty figures for field hospital admissions and aero-medical evacuations from 2003
to 2005.

equivalent of terrorist attacks killing approximately eighteen people a year and
inflicting non-fatal casualties of almost 580 people a year. This is higher than
the annual rate of terrorist-inflicted casualties Britain has actually suffered
at home over the longer period dating back to 11 September 2001, of 145
fatalities (fifty-three in Great Britain, ninety-two in Northern Ireland), an
average of almost ten per year.⁵⁹ Given that suppressing and defeating inter-
national terrorism was one objective of the Iraq War, and given that it turned
out that the Iraqi regime did not collaborate with al-Qaeda, suffering the
equivalent of a major terrorist attack or a series of smaller terrorist attacks
as a direct result of the war is disappointing.
Tony Blair might respond that removing Saddam at the expense of hun-
dreds of dead and thousands injured is still justifiable proportionately, given
that it disrupted a potential link that could have resulted in an unthinkable,
catastrophic terrorist attack. Though distressing, the losses Britain suffered
were still an expenditure of resources that lowered the chances of a complete
disaster, even if the odds of that disaster were low. As Blair implored the
Commons in March 2003,
what was shocking about 11 September was not just the slaughter of innocent
people but the knowledge that, had the terrorists been able, there would have
been not 3,000 innocent dead, but 30,000 or 300,000—and the more the suffering,
the greater their rejoicing. I say to my hon. Friend that America did not attack the
al-Qaeda terrorist group; the al-Qaeda terrorist group attacked America. They
did not need to be recruited; they were there already. Unless we take action
against them, they will grow. That is why we should act.⁶⁰
In the context of urging for anticipatory war, this position rests on the same
bedrock assumptions of the Bush Doctrine: that the Iraq regime was a prime
candidate for collaboration with the Al Qaeda network or equivalent, and that
strategies of deterrence and/or containment and ‘raiding’ were unrealistic
against such threats.
The most immediate objection to Blair’s argument is that Saddam Hussein’s
regime did not have a direct, collaborative relationship with al-Qaeda, and
showed no signs of doing so. The most thorough and exhaustive investigation
of this issue was issued by the Institute of Defence Analyses (IDA), based on
600,000 captured Iraqi documents. Saddam’s regime did have a long-standing
programme of supporting various Islamist and other revolutionary groups
when their goals coincided, and there were limited communications between
his government and al-Qaeda, just as there were overlaps in short-term goals.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the future leader of AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) did
⁵⁹ House of Commons Briefing Paper, Number 7613, 9 June 2016, Terrorism in Great Britain:
The Statistics (London: Stationery Office, 2016), p. 4.
⁶⁰ Hansard, 18 March 2003, column 769.
180 Blunder
operate in northern Iraq as part of Ansar al Islam (a linked organization) with
the knowledge of Baghdad, but this was Kurdish territory that Saddam could
not directly control, Ansar’s conflict with Kurds coincided with the regime’s
interests, and the regime had attempted to locate and capture Zarqawi in vain.
The relationship was overall ‘one of innate caution and mutual mistrust’, and
there is no evidence of a direct collaborative connection.⁶¹ According to
debriefs from detainees who were ex-officials, Saddam distrusted al-Qaeda
and issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al-Qaeda, and
rebuffed requests for operational and material support. This verdict supports
the independent findings of the 9/11 Commission, the CIA, the Defence
Department in its declassified internal report, and the Senate Select Commit-
tee on Intelligence.⁶²
The war had not only human and financial costs. It also imposed geopol-
itical costs, affecting the distribution and use of power in the wider region in
ways that bear negatively on British security interests. As Blair himself has
partially conceded, without the Iraq War, there would be no Islamic State. One
of the war’s legacies, and most profound failures, was that it created conditions
for sectarian government that persecuted a large Sunni minority, leading to
the collapse of large swathes of the country in face of the Islamic State in 2014.
Because a Shiite regime governed in sectarian ways to alienate Sunni commu-
nities, $26 billion of US investment in the military, police, and justice system
(including about $12 billion on supplying the Iraqi army)⁶³ over a decade
created a force that collapsed and fled in the face of the Islamic State’s
offensive. The net result was to create an army that refused to fight to defend
the state. At the same time, the Iraq War directly contributed to the growth of
the Islamic State and its precursors. By effectively installing into power Shia
supremacists who were backed by Iranian patronage, the US and UK per-
suaded aggrieved Sunnis that they were undertaking ‘a historical pivot towards
Iran and the restoration of Persian hegemony’. Mass detention, and the prison
system in Iraq that evolved under international occupation, in particular
Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, became an incubator and organizing structure
for Sunni jihadis.⁶⁴ Former detainees liken camp Bucca to an ‘al-Qaeda
⁶¹ Institute for Defence Analyses, Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging
Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents (November, 2007, vol. 1), Abstract.
⁶² Department of Defence report, cited by R. Jeffrey Smith, ‘Hussein’s Prewar Ties to Al-
Qaeda discounted’, The Washington Post, 6 April 2007; Senate Intelligence Committee, Phase II—
Bipartisan Report on Prewar Iraq Intelligence (2006) in Senate Reports Nos 330–1 (2007) pp. 105,
106, 108, 109; see also Press Release of the Committee, 5 June, 2008, available at http://
intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=298775.
⁶³ Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), Learning From Iraq: A Final
Report From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Washington DC, 2013),
pp. 90–105.
⁶⁴ See Martin Chulov, ‘Tony Blair was right: without the Iraq war there would be no Islamic
State’, The Guardian, 25 October 2015.

school’, producing jihadists in a factory-like environment. Camp Bucca
housed about twenty-four-thousand men . . . [who] sat at the feet of Salafi-
jihadists, who mentored them and converted them en masse to their Islamist
ideology’.⁶⁵
The Iraq War disrupted the balance of power in the Gulf, empowering Iran,
ironically a state with more extensive ties to terrorist groups. Indeed, decision-
makers underestimated the prospect that a post-Saddam Iraq may create a
vacuum that would attract Iranian influence. More immediately, invasion
opened up a new front in the struggle with al-Qaeda, enabling it to establish
a foothold in Sunni territories, to move in and stoke a sectarian war with
Iraqi Shiites. Allegations of extensive pre-war Ba’ath–al-Qaeda collaboration
proved false. ‘Regime change’ made this a self-fulfilling prophecy, however. It
drove al-Qaeda, former Ba’ath regime officials, and disaffected Sunnis into one
another’s arms. A similar nexus formed in and around the Islamic State.
Invading Iraq, then, made terrorism worse. Whether or not it energized
motivations to attack Britain at home and added to the impetus of the men
who carried out the 7 July London bombings, it generated a straightforward
and concrete benefit for al-Qaeda. It handed opportunities to al-Qaeda that it
otherwise would have lacked, and established the ideological and material
conditions for the Islamic State to grow to the point where it could seize
control of Iraq’s ‘second city’, Mosul. These were perverse outcomes.
Removing a tyrant from power, a process that led to his prosecution and
execution, had another perverse consequence. Blair recalled his ‘primary
consideration’ was to send an ‘absolutely powerful, clear and unremitting
message that . . . if you were a regime engaged in WMD, you had to stop’.⁶⁶
Yet overthrowing Saddam, and then Gaddafi of Libya, signalled the value for
hostile states of maintaining, accelerating, or acquiring a nuclear deterrent.
Saddam’s inability to prevent his overthrow, trial, and execution, having
disarmed, affirmed the reality that disarmament or even ambivalence around
the issue makes a state a possible target. This was supposed to be a counter-
proliferation war that, by disarming a leading rogue, would dissuade other
would-be proliferators.⁶⁷ Instead, removing a pre-nuclear Saddam demon-
strated that consensual disarmament was simply too dangerous, strengthen-
ing incentives for other regimes to pursue their nuclear ambitions.⁶⁸ The
⁶⁵ Fawaz Gerges, ISIS: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 133.
⁶⁶ IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 24.
⁶⁷ See the remarks of Under Secretary of State John Bolton on 13 March 2003, US Department
of State, International Information Programs, ‘Byliner: Under Secretary Bolton on North Korea,
Iraq’, Far Eastern Economic Review, (13 March 2003), cited in Andrew Newman, ‘From Pre-
emption to Negotiation: The Failure of the Iraq-as-Deterrent Nuclear Non-Proliferation Model’
Global Change, Peace and Security 17:2 (2005), pp. 155–69, p. 168, n77.
⁶⁸ See Andrew Newman, ‘From Pre-emption to Negotiation? The Failure of Iraq-as-Deterrent
Nuclear non-proliferation Model’, Global Change, Peace and Security 17:2 (2005), pp. 155–69.
182 Blunder
overthrow of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, another adversary who had disarmed,
has reinforced the pattern. Looking back, President Donald Trump’s Director
of National Intelligence has acknowledged the probability that Kim Jong-un’s
regime calculates ‘The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its
nukes . . . is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you
don’t have them, get them’.⁶⁹ North Korea has also explicitly referred to
these examples while justifying its nuclear and ballistic missile testing. To
accompany its fourth nuclear test in January 2016, a commentary published by
the official KCNA news agency claimed:
History proves that powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasured
sword for frustrating outsiders’ aggression . . . The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq
and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after
being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up
nuclear programmes of their own accord.⁷⁰
Iran’s nuclear ambitions are more ambivalent. When the US-led coalition
struck Iraq, Iran temporarily suspended its nuclear programme, only to restart
it later, probably to pursue ‘nuclear latency’, the breakout ability to produce
bomb at short notice. The presence of US and coalition forces on its western
and eastern borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan, heightened the regime’s sense of
insecurity. Motivations for proliferation and disarmament in both cases are
complex and are not reducible to reactions to the Iraq precedent. We can
confidently judge, though, that all these regimes care strongly about survival,
and the Iraq and Libyan wars did nothing to dampen the powerful incentives
for proliferation, and dealt a strong blow to the message that adversary states
can securely renounce their nuclear capability.
What of the ‘Syria’ counterfactual argument? But for regime change, would
Iraq have faced a worse future, where a Ba’ath Party regime brutally repressed
an Arab Spring uprising in Iraq, resulting in a Syria-style civil war?
The ‘Iraq as Syria’ hypothetical is flawed. Firstly, it overlooks what actually
did happen. Any notion that ‘regime change’ spared Iraq an internally devas-
tating and regionally destabilizing civil war that would have required inter-
national intervention is eccentric. In 2006–7, as a direct result of invasion, the
country did descend into civil war, and one with an Islamist presence. It
prompted a second intervention, led by the United States, in the form of the
‘surge’ to restore stability and give the new state some breathing space. The
surge was itself a costly effort to wrest back control of a crisis, at the price of
five additional brigades totalling 20,000 extra troops. That such a meltdown
could have happened independently without an invasion does not change the
⁶⁹ Daniel Coats, Director of National Intelligence, Aspen Security Forum, 21 July 2017.
⁷⁰ Cited in Skand Tayal, ‘The North Korea Nuclear Test: Quest for Deterrence’, Eurasia
Review, 25 January 2016.

observation that the actual invasion contributed to the meltdown that did
happen, and made it more likely and brought it forward. Secondly, the Iraq
and Syrian wars are not separate things. The invasion and aftermath in Iraq
contributed directly to the later Syrian conflict, inspiring the creation of new
jihadi groups in Iraq and neighbouring countries, such as the Jabhat al-Nusra
Front, drawing on veterans from the AQI network. The al-Nusra Front, along
with other Islamists, seized control of significant parts of the rebellion against
Syria’s Alawite regime, and the Islamic State was strengthened by its ability to
operate and find sanctuary on both sides of the dissolving Syria–Iraq border.⁷¹
This is not to claim that the Syrian crisis would not have erupted without the
invasion of 2003. It is to say that the conflicts unleashed by the Iraq War were
the precipitating event for the dramatic increase in militant jihadism, and this
played a major part in radicalizing opposition forces within Syria.
Rather than suggesting that invasion spared Iraq a Syria-style civil war,
others such as David Frum turn to fatalism to exculpate the invaders of
responsibility, arguing that Iraq was destined for an internal struggle regard-
less. His developing assumption is that Iraq had an historical appointment
with internal conflict that it could hardly avoid, and that ‘the deluge was
coming in Iraq, whatever outside powers did.’⁷² This is at odds with his other
major claim, that regime change in 2003 offered Iraqis the chance for a better
future. Did tectonic forces present for Iraq a historical rendezvous with a
bloodbath, alleviating invaders of responsibility, or did Iraqis have the agency
to wilfully make bad choices? We can’t have it both ways. If Iraq was heading
for an implosion that was impossible for outside powers to arrest, then it
would have been better not to place American, British, and other lives and
treasure in the middle of it, conserving those resources instead for where they
could make a positive difference. If not, and if invasion was supposed to give
them the chance of a better future, given the sectarian and fractured state of
the country, the odds were poor, and the costs were high.
Who Lost Iraq? The Abandonment Thesis
It is necessary also to deal with an argument that has become increasingly

prominent since Iraq’s implosion in the summer of 2014. This is the claim that
the original error was not the invasion, but the premature abandonment of
⁷¹ Jessica Stern, ‘The Continuing Cost of the Iraq War: The Spread of Jihadi Groups through-
out the Region’, 18 February 2014, at http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/
2014/The%20Continuing%20Cost%20of%20the%20Iraq%20War.pdf, and ‘Terrorism after the 2003
invasion of Iraq’, at http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2013/Terrorism%
20after%20the%202003%20Invasion%20of%20Iraq.pdf.
⁷² David Frum, ‘The Speechwriter: Inside the Bush Administration during the Iraq War’,
Newsweek, 19 March 2013.
184 Blunder
Iraq. We can call this the ‘abandonment thesis’.⁷³ Abandoning Iraq was the
source of chaos, allegedly. The US-led West could have stayed, with South
Korea and Japan as the model. As Senator John McCain recommended in
2008, ‘We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for
50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not
being injured or harmed or wounded or killed’.⁷⁴ Paul Wolfowitz likewise
argued that Korea in 1955 offered a model for Iraq in 2010, whereby America
would retain a stable and stabilizing presence in a strategically vital region in
the long term.⁷⁵
This thesis is triply flawed, however. It assumes that Iraq was ‘America’s’ to
lose, in the sense that it overlooks the political reality that this was an Iraqi
decision, and the Iraqis that wielded power had a different idea of their
interests. It overestimates the restraining effect of America’s strategic presence
beforehand. Already by 2010, Iraq was on the road to sectarian friction and
escalating internal conflict. And it loses sight of the fraught geopolitics of the
region, which made the Gulf nothing like the Korean peninsula.
If the ‘abandonment’ charge were true, this would shift culpability from
President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to President Barack Obama. Yet
Obama cannot plausibly be blamed for the decision to withdraw the main
body of US forces. That was pre-decided by the Status of Forces Agreement
between the Bush administration and Maliki’s government in December 2008.
The more developed accusation is that Obama could have tried harder and
possibly kept a smaller residual force in Iraq in a non-combat role to exert a
restraint, to signal continuing US security assurance, to keep Iraq’s political
condition stable, and to stiffen the backbone of its security forces. It was the
absence of guarantees to the fledgling ‘new Iraq’ that loosened restraint, and
enabled the Maliki government to indulge its sectarian impulses.
Would it have been politically possible to leave forces on terms acceptable
both to Washington and to Baghdad and the Iraqi parliament? The
short answer is no.⁷⁶ Iraqi politicians insisted on American forces not being
protected by legal immunity from local prosecution. Such terms, for such a
commitment, were unacceptable to the American Congress and White House,
and certainly would have been a deal-breaker for any Republican president.
The obstacle to any appreciable military presence, whether a division or a few
thousand trainers, was that Iraqis overwhelmingly opposed it. A continuing
US presence was opposed by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose support
was vital for Maliki’s ruling coalition. The emergence of an Iraqi sovereign
⁷³ This section adapts parts of my article, ‘Iraq and Libya were not the West’s to Lose’, The
National Interest, 3 November 2016.
⁷⁴ ‘John McCain’s 100 Years in Iraq’, CBS News, 1 April 2008.
⁷⁵ Paul Wolfowitz, ‘In Korea, a Model for Iraq’, The New York Times, 30 August 2010.
⁷⁶ See also Colin H. Kahl, ‘No, Obama did not Lose Iraq: What the President’s critics get
wrong’, Politico, 15 June 2014.

democracy created not an accommodating US client state but a Tehran-
leaning government.
There is also a deeper problem with the suggestion that a continued
presence was necessary for stability. The state was not respectably peaceful
and settled when the US drew down. Sectarian abuse and corruption was
already rife in Iraqi governance, and the seeds were already planted for civil
strife. Before the last scale-downs from August 2010 to the final withdrawal in
December 2011, there was widespread corruption in the officer corps and the
withholding of oil revenues from Sunni communities. Prime Minister Maliki
was already sectarianizing the army with Iranian-backed Badr Corp fighters.
Once the US began drawing down its combat role from 2009, Maliki refused to
hire the majority of Sunni Awakening Council fighters, only employing 17,000
and excluding 83,000. There were already crackdowns on demonstrations and
torture of detainees. The Erbil power-sharing agreements were already stal-
ling, and the March 2010 parliamentary elections triggered struggle for control
over security services, government ministries, and oil wealth. Maliki was
already exercising state power both to dole out and withhold patronage,
favouring Shiite populations and neglecting to provide sufficient services
such as electricity to Sunni Arab cities. Data from the US National Counter
Terrorism Center (NCTC) shows that Iraq had a consistently higher level of
violence than Afghanistan during 2009–11, with no consistent reduction in
violence since mid-2009.⁷⁷ As even military advisor Rick Brennan concedes,
who blames US withdrawal in 2011 for the state of Iraq, even during the ‘surge’
with the climax of America’s on-the-ground commitment, Maliki ‘mostly
ignored American pleas to govern in a less divisive manner and find ways to
bring the Sunni minority into the political process’.⁷⁸ If 160,000 troops at the
height of the occupation were not enough to curtail the Iraqi state’s abusive
behaviour, it is hard to see how a smaller force could have made a meaningful
difference. If we accept the analysis that the rise of Islamic State in Iraq is
rooted in Sunni alienation, this is causally linked more to Maliki’s refusal to
work for an ‘inclusive, tolerant, multi-confessional democracy’ than to
whether the US deployed a small counter-terrorism force.⁷⁹ A return of US
combat and advisory forces was only permitted years later, once the emer-
gency of the Islamic State’s rise moved Baghdad to let troops back in.
The ‘Iraq as South Korea’ analogy is also flawed. South Korea is a cohesive
society where the majority wanted long-term US protection, whereas the
majority of Iraqis did not in 2010–11. South Korea is a relatively homogenous
⁷⁷ See CSIS, Patterns of Violence in Iraq (Washington DC, 2012), p. 3.

⁷⁸ Rick Brennan, ‘Withdrawal Symptoms: The Bungling of the Iraq Exit’ Foreign Affairs 93:6
(2014), pp. 25–36, p. 28.
⁷⁹ Paul Pillar, ‘The Damaging Myth about “Winning” the Iraq War’, The National Interest,
17 November 2014.
186 Blunder
society, whereas Iraq is fraught with ethnic and confessional divisions. South
Koreans are strongly motivated by the proximate and direct threat of a hostile
North Korea, whereas Iraq faced no equivalent of a large-scale threat on its
borders to unify the population. As one critic notes, ‘When one thinks of a
long-term occupation of Iraq (even with reduced forces), a closer analogy is
the dangerous and frustrating British mission in Northern Ireland from the
late 1960’s through the 90’s’.⁸⁰
The ‘abandonment thesis’ plays off a common and seductive argument, that
Iraq unravelled through poor execution. We can avoid error in future, this
implies, if we organize better. Western military activism is a generally good
thing, this perspective suggests, only more resources and preparation would
have given outside powers a solution to the security problems that beset post-
Saddam Iraq. A more efficient and careful invasion would have been made the
decisive difference, in particular avoiding a large-scale De-Ba’athification
programme and keeping civil service and army intact.
There are good reasons to be sceptical of this mechanical interpretation
of the problems of intervention. The alternative course, of avoiding De-
Baathification, of limiting institutional impact, not purging the bureaucracy
or security services, and preserving greater continuity in the state, may well
have made Sunni alienation and resistance less likely. Conversely, how would
Iraqi’s majority of Shia perceive this development? As we have seen, Shia
leaders had broadly supported De-Ba’athfication. The absence of a post-
invasion reckoning with the crimes of the Ba’ath Party, and the continuation
of Ba’ath officials in power, would probably have been tantamount to con-
firming Sunni supremacy and re-enthroning the old order, only with Saddam
removed and this time, with the support of an international occupying force. It
is not hard to imagine how this move, effectively presenting the Shia majority
with the dispensation of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, probably
would have increased their insecurity, and their disaffection with the process
of reconstruction, and incentivized them to turn to violent self-help.
A concerned Iran would not have looked on such developments passively.
Could a fractured population that was mutually suspicious have been bought
off with more jobs and functioning services? Not when they held a more basic
fear, the need to survive against potentially violent threats. Given the state of
the country as Western troops and diplomats found it, we cannot afford to
adopt a naïvely developmental account of the crisis that ensued. The invasion
was a blunder in the most important sense, not as a sound idea badly executed,
but an unsound idea built on unsound assumptions. From these errors of
judgement, failures of execution flowed.
⁸⁰ Ted Galen Carpenter, ‘Rapid Reaction: McCain’s Folly’, The National Interest, 1 May 2008.
PART IV. ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES
It is incumbent for the war’s critics to articulate an alternative strategic

pathway, if not to prescribe how international powers could have ‘solved’ or
terminated the confrontation with Iraq, at least to suggest how the antagonism
could have been handled more prudently.
Pro-war arguments about the counterfactual future in 2003 rest on a
number of fallacies: that without the invasion, the sanctions programme
would have broken down, leaving Saddam free to reconstitute his weapons
programme; that the regime could not be contained or deterred; that time was
urgently working against the West as the danger rose significantly; and that
the choice for the US and its allies was a polar one, between ‘regime change’
and ‘passivity’. Robert Kaufman makes a representative statement of this
argument:
Without Israel’s preemptive attack of May 1981 on the Osirak nuclear reactor in
Iraq, Saddam Hussein almost certainly would have possessed nuclear weapons
when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, which would have made the cost of
liberating it prohibitive. Without the Gulf War of 1990–1991 . . . Saddam might
have achieved a nuclear capability within two years, according to the inspectors of
Iraqi facilities . . . Saddam’s propensity for risk taking also fell closer on the
spectrum to Nazi Germany’s under Hitler than to the Soviet Union’s during
the Cold War . . . the Kay Commission and Duelfer Report also affirm that it was
only a matter of time before Saddam obtained such capabilities once the sanctions
so painful to the Iraqi people inevitably broke down. WMD exponentially
increased the potential danger of waiting too long to eliminate Saddam, prudently
viewed through the prism of 9/11 and Saddam’s refusal to abide by the inspection
regime.⁸¹
As Kaufman then argues, opting for continuing inspections and the status quo
rather than fighting would have kept the United States ‘paralyzed’ and Saddam
‘defiant—all while the danger mounted’. Four assumptions are visible in
Kaufman’s portrait of the situation: a reckless aggressor, a collapsing sanctions
programme, the West working dangerously against the clock, and a stark
choice between decisive combat and paralysis. All four do not survive
interrogation.
In the summer of 2001, the Joint Intelligence Committee and the UK
Permanent Representative to the UN did indeed fear that the existing strategy
of shackling the Iraqi regime would prove impermanent, that it ‘continues to
⁸¹ Robert G. Kaufman, In Defence of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky, 2007), pp. 39–40.
188 Blunder
erode’.⁸² The UK, France, Russia, and US were exploring ‘smart sanctions’ at
that time precisely through the concern that existing ‘hard’ sanctions would
unravel. Not only had they not successfully broken the regime, they had
inflicted human cost that fed Islamist propaganda against the West. Oversight
in the region and the military presence to support it also came at significant
costs, involving a US garrison in Saudi Arabia that focused Bin Ladenists on
America as ‘the far enemy’.
These fears arose before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and therein lies the first
difficulty with the claim that existing strategies were bound to disintegrate.
The 9/11 attacks altered the decision environment not just for those who
opted for all-out war, but for states whose political will to contain Saddam
increased. For those reluctant to support regime change, the 9/11 attacks
raised incentives to maintain a modified and more discriminate containment
programme. Accordingly, in May 2002, in the wake of fresh apprehensions
about Iraq’s weapons programme, the Bush administration successfully rallied
the international community around new ‘smart sanctions’, imposing a tight
import control system while allowing more civilian goods, under Security
Council Resolution 1409.⁸³ Selectively tightened sanctions were possible,
such as prohibitions on imports of materials for military use and the illicit
export of oil, as well as increased monitoring and increased inspection of
cargoes.⁸⁴ A revised sanctions programme of Resolution 1409, confined to
military and dual-use equipment, Jack Straw told cabinet, would also help
ensure that sanctions could not be blamed for humanitarian suffering
in Iraq.⁸⁵ More could have been done to interdict illicit finances, such as
Saddam’s bank accounts in Jordan, and to curtail smuggling through Jordan,
Syria, and Turkey, as Carne Ross attested, the First Secretary for Middle East at
UK Permanent Mission to the UN in New York.⁸⁶
There was still a ‘menu’ of intermediate choices available to the US and its
allies, including continued vigilance, aerial and on-the-ground monitoring,
shipping patrols, and punitive air strikes. These remained possible, as the 9/11
attacks had focused international attention on the need to disrupt and shut
down the traffic in nuclear materials. Alternatively, the US and its allies could
have attempted a bolder new settlement with Iraq after 9/11, organized around
⁸² Report of the Iraq Inquiry v. 1, pp. 189–90; Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK Permanent
Representative to the UN, 20 November 2009, p. 2; v. 6, pp. 253–4; Joint Intelligence Committee
Assessment, ‘Iraq: Continuing Erosion of Sanctions’, 25 July 2001.
⁸³ On the prior success of containment and its prospects for working hypothetically in the
future, see G.A. Lopez & D. Cartright, ‘Containing Iraq: sanctions worked’, Foreign Affairs 83:4
(2004), pp. 90–103; Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme: The Inspections of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991–1998 (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 253–5.
⁸⁴ As Richard Betts argued in advance, ‘Suicide for Fear of Death?’, Foreign Affairs 82:1
(2003), pp. 34–43, p. 42.
⁸⁵ Cabinet Conclusions, 16 May 2002, cited in Report of the Iraq Inquiry, vol. II, part 42, p. 11.
⁸⁶ Carne Ross, IIT, 12 July 2010, p. 4.

the common adversary al-Qaeda. Whether disarmament has taken place is
difficult to prove, given it involves proving a negative. But there were other
diplomatic goods to trade. In return for actionable intelligence on al-Qaeda
and its affiliates, as well as Iraq suspending support for Palestinian suicide
bombers, Washington could have informally relaxed its prior commitment to
regime change in Baghdad and exchanged comprehensive economic sanctions
for focused antiproliferation sanctions. Saddam’s writ still ran strongly in
northern Iraq, and denying that territory from Sunni Islamist terrorist net-
works would have been a valuable contribution to countering al-Qaeda’s
spread in the region. In return, Baghdad would benefit from the easing of
economic strangulation and enjoy the credit for surviving in a lowered threat
environment, but only in exchange for joining other authoritarian regimes in
assisting the campaign against al-Qaeda. So there were other choices that
deserved to be entertained, modifications of containment of varying ambition.
Either way, the alternative to going ‘all in’ on Iraq was not to walk away from
the table and hope for the best, as hawks imply.
Counterproliferation strategies do not always succeed, however. Arguably,
the Iraqi regime that had a record of deception and non-cooperation could
have resumed an underground weapons programme. If so, the road to con-
structing a deliverable nuclear bomb would have been expensive, technically
demandingn and conducted under the glare of international observation.
Running a clandestine programme impedes and complicates proliferation. It
would have been years yet before Saddam’s regime could complete the job.
Saddam’s nuclear programme was often self-sabotaged and self-disrupted,
falling prey to coercive management and inefficiency. In 1991, inspectors
had discovered that Iraq possessed nuclear facilities but not weapons-grade
highly enriched uranium (HEU), and even before sanctions and safeguards
were imposed, ‘after years of coercive, authoritarian mismanagement, Iraq’s
scientific and technical workers had become exhausted, cynical, and divided.’⁸⁷
By 2003, sanctions had gravely damaged the possibility of weapons pro-
grammes being restored, as approximately three hundred interviews by the
Iraq Survey Group with Iraqi scientists, engineers, and officials revealed.
Scepticism about Saddam’s capacity to reconstitute a nuclear programme to
completion is not just a retrospective judgement. The hurdles Iraq would have
to overcome were known, and knowable, at the time. Firstly, evidence sug-
gested that if there was such a programme, it had made little progress and had
to be conducted in extremely clandestine ways, itself an inhibiting factor. On
the eve of war, on 7 March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency
Director General ElBaradei and the UN Special Commission on Iraq led by
Hans Blix declared to the UN Security Council that there was no evidence of
⁸⁷ Jacques Hymans, ‘Botching the Bomb: Why Nuclear Weapons Programs Often Fail on
Their Own—and Why Iran’s Might Too’, Foreign Affairs 91:3 (2012), pp. 44–53, p. 50.
190 Blunder
resumed nuclear activities or nuclear-related prohibited activities, and noted
the deplorable state of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure. They reported progress
from more than one hundred visits to suspect sites and interviews with Iraqi
scientists, finding no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear
weapons programme in Iraq. They predicted that the agency should be able
to provide the Security Council with an objective and thorough assessment
of Iraq’s nuclear-related capabilities ‘in the near future’. Destruction of the
al Samoud ballistic missiles, which had exhibited ranges beyond that allowed
by the UN, were also underway. There were no stockpiles of chemical
and biological weapons found, though it was not yet possible to document
destruction of all weapons produced since before the 1991 Gulf War. The Bush
administration’s response was swift and negative. In the absence of hard
evidence of rearmament, it fell back on the National Intelligence Estimate of
2002, citing Saddam’s history of aggression and criminality.
Further progress in WMD rearmament by Saddam would face difficult
hurdles. In March 2002, the UK MOD had identified the obstacles Iraq
would have to overcome in order to acquire a nuclear capability. According
to its Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), Iraq lacked the fissile material to make a
weapon, to rebuild its uranium enrichment programme could take ‘years’ and
require ‘extensive foreign procurement’ which would ‘not be possible with
effective sanctions in place’. To make a weapon quickly, Iraq would need to
acquire HEU from the ‘black market’, which would be ‘very difficult’ though
‘credible’. In addition, Iraq would need to acquire a neutron initiator, and had
lacked a nuclear reactor since 1991. It would then need the ‘theory and
practicalities’ of how to use such a component, and this could only be quickly
done with ‘outside expertise’. A missile warhead would take ‘at least two years
longer’. Alternatively, it could acquire a crude nuclear device that would be
large and unreliable and would have to be delivered by large unconventional
and unreliable means (such as a lorry).⁸⁸ A second opinion broadly agreed,
adding that if Iraq against the odds acquired HEU and a neutron initiator
from a third party, it would also require engineering integration and explosive
trials, with a ‘low’ signature for detection.⁸⁹ This expert’s rough estimate for
the highly unlikely achievement of all these steps was a period of two to three
years. In the meantime, Saddam would need to have achieved the nearly
impossible task of indigenously producing enough fissile materials, and this
would produce ‘relatively large signatures’. While the ‘clock’ on the worst-case
estimates was reasonably brief, note the formidable technical hurdles identi-
fied, and the difficulty of keeping it undetected. It would have required tests to
⁸⁸ Minute, DIS to DI ST, ‘What Does Iraq Need to Do to Get the Bomb Quickly?’,
20 March 2002.
⁸⁹ Minute, Dr Paul Roper, Director Strategic Technology to Policy Director, 27 March 2002,
‘Iraq—Nuclear Weapons’.

make any bomb deliverable, and a functioning infrastructure of facilities and
capable personnel. Should an alert international community have suspected
proliferation activity and attacked his facilities, Saddam did not have the
deterrence capability that North Korea does, and could not credibly threaten
a neighbouring state’s cities.
Even if Saddam did rearm covertly but nevertheless successfully, with
chemical and biological if not nuclear weapons, how far can we assume that
he was a reckless actor, who may have collaborated with al-Qaeda and
transferred technology or expertise into their hands? Even if he failed to
acquire a deliverable nuclear bomb, might he have donated chemical or
biological instruments to terrorists?
The war’s defenders suggest Saddam and the regime were almost impossible
to deter because of a general aggressive risk-prone irrationality, bordering on
madness, exhibited by the historic persecution of their ‘own people’ and their
attacks on other states. Such a regime was not capable of being restrained by
the logic of deterrence-via-punishment. In the words of the UK’s Joint Intel-
ligence Committee, Saddam’s ‘thought processes did not work in a recognis-
ably Western, rational and logical way’.⁹⁰ This contention rests on two errors,
a historical error and an analytical error. Historically, Saddam was deterrable
from the most high-risk aggression with unconventional weapons. And ana-
lytically, a regime’s repressive quality at home does not necessarily make it
pathologically aggressive abroad against major powers with the means to
retaliate.
As the recently uncovered tapes of internal regime deliberations suggests,
Saddam’s government was capable of being deterred once a threshold of first-
order interests and significant threat of retaliation was reached. While the
exact point of deterrability is not easy to determine, there was a sometimes
explicit and sometimes implicit calculation that Iraq’s nuclear adversaries
could and might well inflict a price that was too high in return for WMD
use. His regime was demonstrably not successfully deterred from everything.
Saddam was prone to ‘shooting the messenger’, at times distorting informa-
tion to fit his predetermined goals. But the evidence recently revealed suggests
that despite his regime’s suboptimal decision-making and inefficient process-
ing of information, American threats of punishment for the most reckless
behaviour remained credible and focused the mind.⁹¹ Saddam had committed
notable aggressions on his neighbours, but on both occasions (against Iran
from September 1980 and Kuwait in August 1990), the US did not actively try
to deter the aggression, and Saddam calculated that he could attack his targets
⁹⁰ Minutes, 4 September 2002, Joint Intelligence Committee, p. 2.

⁹¹ A point conceded even by a scholar who portrays Saddam as otherwise ‘very, very hard to
deter’: Amatzia Baram, ‘Deterrence Lessons from Iraq’, Foreign Affairs 91:4 (2012), pp. 76–90,
p. 85.
192 Blunder
without a consequential intervention by major powers. In the Iran case, he was
correct. Though Washington gave no explicit ‘green light’ to his attack,
Saddam forecast that the US, while disapproving, would not step in, and
that Iraq would inflict a quick and decisive victory on a weakened Iran to
seize territory, and thus implicitly did not expect the US to enter the confl-
ict as a belligerent.⁹² In the case of Kuwait, Saddam counted wrongly on
Washington’s aversion to a ground campaign, after meetings with US envoys
appeared to signal US reluctance to intervene. When he was given clear signals
by the West with the threat of punishment in return for attacks on first-order
interests above a threshold of aggression, he was demonstrably deterrable. In
the course of the Gulf War 1990–1, Washington threatened him with an
unspecified but definite threat of punishment should he use chemical and
biological weapons, and he accordingly refrained. Tariq Aziz, along with two
defectors (the Head of Iraqi Military Intelligence and the Head of the Iraqi
News Agency), recalled that Saddam believed the US would retaliate with
nuclear strikes if the Iraqis used chemical or biological weapons on US
forces.⁹³ Saddam’s senior ministers feared even threatening to use chemical
weapons would lead to a nuclear strike. At a secret meeting of the Revolu-
tionary Command Council (RCC) in the autumn of 1990, Saddam’s trusted
deputy Izzat al-Douri warned that ‘It is dangerous for us to reveal our
intentions to use chemical weapons. We should not do that’. Tariq Aziz at
the same meeting suggested that Iraqi use of chemical weapons would ‘give
[the Americans] excuse for a nuclear attack’.⁹⁴ Atomic threats were credible in
Iraq. Saddam believed there was the real possibility of Anglo-American
nuclear attacks in any event, practised civilian evacuations, and his deputies
⁹² Hal Brands, ‘Saddam Hussein, the United States, and the Invasion of Iran: Was there a
Green Light?’, Cold War History 12:2 (2012), pp. 319–43, pp. 330–7.
⁹³ See James Baker III, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New
York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 359; ‘Text of Letter from Bush to Hussein’, The New York
Times, 13 January 1991, as reprinted in Mark Grossman, Encyclopedia of the Persian Gulf War
(Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1995), p. 396; Frontline interview with General Wafic al-Samarrai,
cited in Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International
Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 294; Victor A. Utgoff, ‘Nuclear Weapons
and the Deterrence of Biological and Chemical Warfare’, Occasional Paper 36 (Washington DC,
1997) p. 2, n. 4; ‘Saad al-Bazzaz: An Insider’s View of Iraq’, Middle East Quarterly 2:4 (December
1995); while Tariq Aziz may have had a possible ulterior motive in presenting Saddam as
deterrable, in order to weaken the sanctions and inspections programme, the two defectors did
not have such incentives, and in fact otherwise presented Saddam as difficult to deter: see David
Palkki, ‘Deterring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: Domestic Audience Costs and Credibility Assessments
in Theory and Practice’ (unpublished dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013),
p. 146.
⁹⁴ Derived from the Conflict Records Research Centre, SH-SHTP-A-000-848, ‘Saddam
Hussein and his Advisors Discussing Potential War with the United States’, 1990. Cited in
Baram, ‘Deterrence Lesson from Iraq’, p. 85; Palkki, ‘Deterring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq’, p. 124.

warned of behaviour that might increase the chances of it.⁹⁵ If the regime was
reluctant even to threaten chemical weapons use publicly for fear of raising the
probability of atomic retaliation, it is hard to envisage it transferring WMD to
actors who had sworn to attack America, actors who were also beyond Iraq’s
control. Saddam in 1990–1 also wished to reserve his chemical stockpile to
deter the invasion of Iraq, and by aiming to be a deterrer as well as deterree,
this also suggests he ultimately understood the logic of deterrence.⁹⁶ The same
logic defined his stance towards Israel. Saddam intended his future nuclear
weapons not for ‘first use’ against Tel Aviv, but to neutralize Israel’s nuclear
capability with the threat of retaliation, in order to enable him to prevail in a
conventional struggle with the state he obsessively hated. Again, this suggests
a capacity to understand threat-and-response in a ‘rational, logical way’. Once
it had been expelled from Kuwait, the Baghdad regime grew capable of being
dissuaded, by credible threats, from repeating such aggression. In October 1994,
when Saddam’s forces mobilized and advanced on the Kuwaiti border, probably
to pressure the United Nations to remove sanctions, President Clinton deployed
marine and naval forces into the region, along with French and British warships.
Saddam backed down in the face of this imposing correlation of forces, whose
credible threat was buttressed by America’s prior willingness to act on Kuwait,
and Saddam soon afterwards recognized the sovereignty of Kuwait.⁹⁷ True,
threats of retaliatory punishment did not deter Saddam from some prov-
ocations, such as burning Kuwaiti oil fields, firing SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv
and Riyadh in the Gulf War of 1990–1, or suspending cooperation with UN
weapons inspectors. Saddam and his regime were, though, deterred from attacks
on US core interests. The main threat scenario suggested by the war parties in
Washington and London, whereby Saddam would hand over WMD to terror-
ists, is therefore wildly unrealistic. He was an imperfect calculator who was
ultimately willing to limit his risk-taking, not a one-dimensional, reckless
adventurer indifferent to the threat of punishment.
The notion that Saddam’s domestic oppression, namely his assaults on
Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Shia dissidents, indicates that he was an irrational
and undeterrable actor is also flawed. It is based upon the false inference that
the slaughter of a regime’s ‘own’ subjects with conventional and chemical
weapons, relatively vulnerable weak targets not in a position to inflict serious
⁹⁵ See Paul Idon, ‘Saddam Hussein Seriously Feared a U.S. Nuclear Strike During the Gulf
War’, The National Interest, 24 January 2017; David Palkki, ‘Calculated Ambiguity, Nuclear
Weapons and Saddam’s Strategic Restraint’, in Scott D. Sagan, PASSC Final Report: ‘Deterring
Rogue Regimes: Rethinking Deterrence Theory and Practice’, 8 July 2013, Stanford University.
⁹⁶ Hal Brands & David Palkki, ‘Saddam, Israel and the Bomb: Nuclear Alarmism Justified?’,
International Security 36:1 (2011), pp. 133–66.
⁹⁷ On this operation, Vigilant Warrior, see Daniel Byman, Kenneth Pollack & Matthew Wax-
man, ‘Coercing Saddam Hussein: Lessons from the Past’, Survival 40:3 (1998), pp. 127–51,
pp. 137–8.
194 Blunder
punishment, necessarily means that (short of immediate self-defence) Saddam
might elect to use them against targets that can retaliate at high cost. History is
full of authoritarian oppressive regimes who nevertheless limit their aggres-
sion against major states outside their borders: Francoist Spain, Stalin’s Soviet
Union, and Mao’s China (once it had acquired nuclear weapons). Indeed, the
commitment to survival is the logic that ties together their inward cruelty and
their outward caution, putting down resistance that can be neutralized at
acceptable cost, while avoiding external threats that cannot. Proponents of
war in 2003 argued that Saddam might use his arsenal of chemical and
biological weapons, either directly or via a transfer, to attack Western targets.
Without the knowledge that he had already disarmed, however, the reasonable
objection was that if Saddam actually still possessed a WMD arsenal and was
such an incautious and undeterrable rogue, why had he not already used them
in this way? His regime was already in a state of continuous conflict and
confrontation with the US and its allies, yet had not taken these risks. Saddam
was not cautious when he saw opportunities and calculated he would not be
overthrown and could ride out the international response. He was cautious
when direct and credible threats from major powers focused the mind. He was
homicidal, not suicidal.⁹⁸
The post hoc estimate that counterfactually Saddam could have raced to a
bomb if left in power, is implicitly modelled on the Iraq of the 1980s. Even the
Iraq of that earlier period had experienced almost prohibitive difficulties in
conducting its nuclear programme. Blair’s estimate does not take into account
the cumulative degradation wrought by sanctions, or the likelihood of con-
tinued international vigilance, and it falsely assumes a well-resourced, exter-
nally undisturbed weapons organization. This is part of a wider problem with
the justifications for war ever since the British government was making the
case in 2002, that the severe threat assessments assumed Iraq in its earlier, pre-
sanctions state, rather than an Iraq depleted over time. Iraq by 2003
was generally weakened, and this information was available in open source.
According to the assessment of Daniel Byman in 2001, based on the expertise
of Anthony Cordesman,
As Iraq depended on imports for logistical and supply assistance, as well as for
complete systems, its military readiness and effectiveness has plummeted. Efforts
to meet shortfalls through smuggling and by increasing domestic production
have largely failed. Iraqi forces have not been able to conduct routine mainten-
ance, let alone modernization. Iraq’s military capacity is less than 20 per cent of
what it was in 1990. Information on the progress of Iraq’s WMD programs is
limited, but an intuitive argument can be made that a regime under tight
international scrutiny, with its dual-use exports being controlled, has made at
⁹⁸ Also making this argument were John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt, ‘An Unneces-
sary War’, Foreign Policy 134 (2003), pp. 50–9.

best limited progress on these programs, particularly when compared to their
rapid development in the 1980s.⁹⁹
And as Robin Cook observed of the British dossier in September 2002, around
half of it drew upon information about Saddam’s weapons capacity before
1998 as though this were a guide to its state by 2003, failing to take into
account the decay of biological and chemical agents, and the rest presuming
present capacity from historic capabilities.¹⁰⁰ On the same issue looking back,
regarding the state of Saddam’s Iraq by 2003, consider the argument of Jacques
Hymans:
even if, hypothetically, Saddam had resumed pushing for the bomb as hard as he
could, and even if the aluminium tubes had indeed been destined for a reconsti-
tuted gas centrifuge uranium enrichment effort, nonetheless the Iraqi state was no
longer organisationally strong enough to make any progress toward that objective.
A decade of crippling sanctions—and more to the point, two decades of Saddam’s
misrule—had predictably brought both Iraq’s society and its state to a shocking
level of decomposition. The rising corruption—indeed the criminalisation—of
the regime had devoured even its core national security apparatus.¹⁰¹
The supposition that if Saddam was left in office, this would lead to a nuclear
Iraq wrongly suggests that his weapons programme would be undisturbed, as
though there were nothing the US and its allies could have done to disrupt any
revived programme short of removing him from power. This injects a false
polarity into the argument. As Kaufman’s own analysis above concedes,
measures such as airstrikes on facilities, the turning back of expansion beyond
Iraq’s borders, and imposing inspections backed by force, measures short of
outright invasion and occupation, could successfully disrupt, delay, and deter.
In the Gulf War of 1990–1, US bombing severely degraded Iraq’s Tuwaitha
nuclear facility.¹⁰² Using such alternative and more limited measures of force
would not be risk-free. And it would be hardly satisfying in its inconclusive-
ness and its concession of time to the Iraqi regime. Down the track, the US and
its allies would have had a further debate about how to suppress a revived
programme. They may have had an appointment with the ‘Osirak dilemma’,
whereby striking can set back a programme physically, while raising the
⁹⁹ Daniel Byman, ‘After the Storm: US Policy Towards Iraq since 1991’, Political Science
Quarterly 115:4 (2001), pp. 493–516, p. 503.
¹⁰⁰ Robin Cook, The Point of Departure (London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2003),
pp. 215–16.
¹⁰¹ Jacques E. Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians and Proliferation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 120. (My Italics).
¹⁰² Federation of American Scientists, see https://fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/facility/osiraq.htm.
196 Blunder
target’s motivation to nuclearize.¹⁰³ Given the alternative, however, this was
still the best way of limiting and degrading any threat while avoiding the
hazards of occupying a state. There was enough time to manage the risk
without embracing the graver risk of occupying the country. Sustained vigi-
lance, over a long time period, and against a higher standard of proof, was
warranted.
Taken together, these observations suggest that a containment and deter-
rence strategy was the least bad option. Treating Saddam’s hypothetical
rearmament as ‘only a matter of time’ avoids the reality that this was a
weakened state with a demoralized officialdom whose capacity to reconstitute
a nuclear programme was depleted. There was still significant time within
which other more limited measures could be applied. For the regime to ‘go
nuclear’, it would have had to pull off extremely difficult and multiple chal-
lenges within that time. And it would have had to have done so undetected,
and even then, to behave so recklessly would have invited devastating retali-
ation. Given the availability and development of surveillance technologies, and
the attentiveness of states to early warnings, it would have been extremely
difficult to develop nuclear capabilities undetected.¹⁰⁴
Alternative strategies and warnings against the unintended consequences of
invasion were articulated at the time. In September 2002, thirty-three American
scholars laid out the case for vigilant containment, the logic of deterrence, the
lack of credible evidence for Saddam’s ties with al-Qaeda, and gave a warning
that Iraq was a deeply divided society that would require occupation and
policing for years, and that invading would damage US interests.¹⁰⁵ In the
same spirit, the British government was publicly warned. Sir Michael Quinlan,
former Permanent Undersecretary at the MOD, warned in August 2002 that
striking Iraq would be an ‘unnecessary and precarious gamble’, that ‘deter-
rence can be brought to bear’, that containment could be refreshed by a clear
declaration that WMD use would be treated as a crime against humanity, that
governing Iraq afterwards would be difficult, given the difficulty of finding a
regime that suited US interests and held popular support, and that while UN
Security Council assent should not be an absolute condition, an attack would
¹⁰³ On the ‘state of the art’ of this debate, about the slowing and the accelerating effects of a
preventive strike on nuclear facilities, see Uri Sadot, ‘Osirak and the Counter-Proliferation
Puzzle’, Security Studies 25:4 (2016), pp. 646–76; Sarah E. Kreps & Matthew Fuhrmann,
‘Attacking The Atom: Does Bombing Nuclear Facilities Affect Proliferation?’, Journal of Strategic
Studies 34:2 (2011): pp. 161–87; Dan Reiter, ‘Preventive Attacks against Nuclear Programs and
the “Success” at Osiraq’, Nonproliferation Review 12:2 (July 2005), pp. 355–71.
¹⁰⁴ On the implausibility of most states acquiring a nuclear weapon undetected for these
reasons, see Nuno P. Monteiro & Alexandre Debs, ‘The Strategic Logic of Nuclear Proliferation’,
International Security 39:2 (2014), pp. 7–51, p. 25, n. 36.
¹⁰⁵ ‘War with Iraq is not in America’s National Interest’, The New York Times, 26 September 2002.

breach the tradition of just cause, proportionality, and right authority.¹⁰⁶ Time
has vindicated these judgements.
PART V. JOHN MCTERNAN ’S C AS E F OR WAR
In June 2016, former Labour political advisor John McTernan made the case
in hindsight for invading Iraq.¹⁰⁷ His broadside made a number of counter-
factual claims that the war’s critics ought to engage with, but often don’t. Here
I respond to his claims, ad seriatum, which are italicized:
What would have happened if we hadn’t invaded Iraq? Tony Blair’s pre-emptive
framing of the Chilcot Report proceeds apace. The latest instalment is an interview
in which he finally responded to the accusations made against him, and often
repeated by Jeremy Corbyn: ‘I’m accused of being a war criminal for removing
Saddam Hussein—who by the way was a war criminal—and yet Jeremy is seen as a
progressive icon as we stand by and watch the people of Syria barrel-bombed,
beaten and starved into submission and do nothing.
The use of Syria as a counterfactual foil against criticism of the disastrous
invasion of Iraq is now commonplace among hawkish defenders of the war. It
joins ‘Rwanda’ in the arsenal of analogies deployed by the war parties of
London and Washington, being repeated by advocates of war in Iraq from
The Economist to George Osborne MP in the Commons.¹⁰⁸ McTernan’s
statement implies that in order to prevent crises like Syria or Rwanda, wars
like Iraq are an occasional necessary price, a doctrine that would repeat the
experiment with all its costs and unintended consequences. Not only is that
price excessive on any reasonable measure. It is self-defeating. For as we have
seen, the invasion of 2003 played a central role in the energizing of Islamism in
the region, contributing to the chaos across the porous Syria–Iraq border.
Consider also that the invasion of Iraq demonstrably did not deter the Assad
regime nor Islamist rebel groups from committing atrocities, even though
McTernan is about to argue that such wars are necessary to impress and
inhibit dictators and terrorists.
In any event, it is not the case that Britain or the US did ‘nothing’ about the
Syrian crisis that erupted in 2011. Both governments openly declared in July
2011 that President Bashar al-Assad was no longer the legitimate ruler of
¹⁰⁶ Michael Quinlan, ‘War on Iraq: A Blunder and a Crime’, The Financial Times,
7 August 2002.
¹⁰⁷ John McTernan, ‘If Jeremy Corbyn had stopped Tony Blair invading Iraq, dictators and
jihadists would rule the world today’, The Daily Telegraph, 9 June 2016.
¹⁰⁸ ‘The cost of inaction’, The Economist, 24 September 2015; George Osborne, Hansard, vol.
618, 13 December 2016.
198 Blunder
Syria, and that ‘Assad must go’. It is not clear exactly how much this contrib-
uted to internationalizing and hardening the conflict. Given the proximity of
the West’s decrees to the beginning of defections, armed resistance, and
increasing repression, and given that the rebels and regime were intransigent
in their negotiating afterwards, we can reasonably assume it raised the stakes
and prolonged the war.¹⁰⁹ No ruler in 2011 could afford to treat such declar-
ations from these two countries as hollow, given their recent track record of
toppling adversaries. Assad was a committed survivor with determined back-
ers in Russia and Iran, and even when cornered would not agree to be shown
the door by any international fiat. Yet once again, Western officials underesti-
mated the possibility of resistance to their demands. As well as strengthening
Assad’s existential stakes in the conflict, the statements emboldened the Syrian
opposition and precipitated defections from the regime and the formation of
the Free Syrian Army. The UK and US then followed up on their pronounce-
ment by providing further formal encouragement through recognition of the
Syrian National Council, and through material support to rebel groups: arms,
finance, and sanctuary in Turkey, a NATO ally, and granting a licence to an
NGO in Washington to raise money for the rebels. Whether these measures
were wise is open to debate. But they amounted to a significant early inter-
vention. A larger intervention may have been more catastrophic, as the
downfall of Assad or his heirs may have prompted an implosion in Syria
that would likely have created a vacuum for combat-seasoned Islamist groups,
endangering Alawites, Kurds, Druze, Christians, secularists, women, and any
Muslims averse to the severe demands of militant groups. The experience of
other ‘regime change’ experiments suggests that it was reasonable to presume
against it. Wary of the costs of a larger intervention, outside powers did
enough to prolong and escalate the conflict. Clashes about who is, or is not,
a ‘war criminal’ or ‘progressive’ are a poor substitute for judicious analysis of
what happened, and why.
This provokes the thought—what if the Stop the War march in 2003 had been
successful? If the display of public opinion had swayed the Commons and the vote
had ended up like that on Syria. What would that alternative universe look like?
What would have happened if these marchers had had their way? First, it would
have been the end of Tony Blair. His resignation in the face of a rebuff would not
only have been followed by a new Labour leader—probably Gordon Brown—but
¹⁰⁹ As Alexander B. Downes observed, ‘By declaring that Assad has no future as president of
Syria, the United States has effectively torpedoed meaningful negotiations to end the war short of
decisive victory for one side or the other. The reasons are twofold. First, in calling for Assad’s
overthrow, the United States has essentially endorsed the rebels’ principal war aim. The
knowledge that the world’s only superpower supports their primary political objective has
unsurprisingly made the rebels more intransigent’. ‘Why Regime Change is a Bad Idea in
Syria’, in Marc Lynch (ed.), The Political Science of Syria’s Civil War (POMPES Briefings,
2013), pp. 61–3, p. 62.

also by a Tory victory in 2005. Michael Howard would have been swept to power by
his campaign on immigration. And, paradoxically, the UK would probably be
firmly ensconced within the EU—an early referendum, held well before the current
refugee crisis would have seen an easy endorsement of the status quo. Also, Jack
McConnell would have been returned in a minority government in 2007 in
Scotland, halting the ineluctable rise of the SNP. It wouldn’t be a pleasant world,
but at least there would be no British forces deployed abroad.
In the event of Britain abstaining from Operation Telic, there would have been
forces deployed abroad. Britain’s principal deployments in the period April
2003 to April 2004 ranged across twenty-eight countries apart from Iraq, from
Afghanistan where the UK contributed to the NATO-led International Secur-
ity Assistance Force (ISAF), to the NATO Stabilisation Force and Kosovo
Force in the Balkans, to security sector advice and reform in Sierra Leone, as
well as deployments from Brunei and Nepal to Northern Ireland and the
Caribbean. British forces were also deployed continuously at sea in the form of
the Trident nuclear-armed submarine force, and the Royal Air Force recorded
approximately 19,000 hours on operations outside Iraq.¹¹⁰ We can forgive
McTernan’s sarcastic quip, suggesting that non-invasion amounts to global
withdrawal, as an error of haste.
Defeat in the Commons may well have ended Blair’s premiership. It isn’t
clear that this would have led to the fall of the Labour government. As Iraq and
its chaotic aftermath was an electoral liability for the government in the
election of 2005, would non-participation really have induced the British
electorate to embrace the Opposition that also supported the war? To the
extent that voting motivation can be measured, immigration exerted only a
limited salience in the 2005 general election, as those who ranked the issue
most highly were either already Conservative voters or were disaffected non-
voters, while ‘asylum and immigration’ were surpassed in pre-election polls
measuring issue ranking, by health, education, law and order, taxation and
public services, and the economy.¹¹¹ Oddly, McTernan claims that the same
population that was allegedly so aggrieved about immigration that it would
have revolted at the ballot box would have tamely endorsed the status quo in a
referendum on the EU and one of its foundational principles, the freedom of
movement.
Second, the real change would have been in the Middle East—or rather, the real
lack of change. Saddam Hussein, a dictator and a war criminal guilt of genocide,
¹¹⁰ See Ministry of Defence, Annual Report and Accounts 2003–2004 (House of Commons,
London: Stationery Office, 2004), pp. 14–19.
¹¹¹ See Robert Ford, ‘An Iceberg Issue? Immigration at the 2005 British General Election’,
unpublished paper, 2005. I am grateful to Professor Ford for his permission to cite; see also ICM/
Guardian Opinion Poll discussed in Alan Travis, ‘Labour Ahead on Key Issues in Run-Up to
Election’, The Guardian, 22 March 2005.
200 Blunder
would have stayed in place and would be here to this day, strengthened internally
by facing down the United Nations and its sanctions and weapons inspectors.
Nuclear proliferation would have had a major boost. Under no circumstances
would Iran facing a resurgent Saddam abandon its own nuclear programme. Had
Jeremy Corbyn prevailed, Saddam Hussein would still be in power.
McTernan confuses two countries. Britain’s non-participation would not have
prevented the United States invading. Had there been no invasion by the US,
Saddam Hussein would have remained in power and won some prestige for
surviving. This would hardly make him a ‘resurgent’ actor. Iraq would have
remained a weakened, encircled, monitored country whose capacity for exter-
nal aggression was depleted, with no WMD arsenal or ties to al-Qaeda.
Saddam’s recovery to restart his nuclear programme would have faced for-
midable obstacles within a dysfunctional scientific-industrial base. Internally,
the survival of his regime and its control of the army and security services
would have made it more difficult for the Islamic State to rise in northern Iraq.
It is worth considering that this group was also guilty of genocide, also seeks
weapons of mass destruction, and is considered too zealous by al-Qaeda. By
not invading, the US and its allies would not have destroyed a regime that had
effectively disarmed, and thus would not have set a precedent to encourage
nuclear proliferation. There would not be American troops on Iran’s western
border, and less argument in Tehran that nuclear weapons were a necessary
deterrent against encircling powers. The invasion of Iraq did not prevent, and
may have encouraged, Putin’s Russia going ahead with the modernization of
its nuclear arsenal and its aggressive doctrines of warfighting nuclear use.
Libya too would be well on the way to a bomb—Gaddafi would have had no Blair
to persuade him to abandon that programme. Syria would not be the site of a
humanitarian crisis with nearly half the population displaced. Not because the
country would be more democratic but because of precisely the opposite—Assad
would have been an unconstrained hard man. Barrel bombs and gas would have
pummelled the Syrian people into submission. The lesson would not be lost around
the Middle East and North Africa—the rule of hard men prospers.
One overblown claim follows another. Libya’s nuclear programme was not
advanced. The invasion of Iraq may have exerted some marginal accelerating
effect, but was not a significant cause or catalyst of Libyan disarmament, and
was certainly not a precondition for it. Bilateral talks had begun in earnest four
years before the war, indeed Colonel Gaddafi had already offered to disarm
and it was US preconditions (over the Pan Am 130 question and chemical
weapons) and bargaining over the terms that delayed the resolution.¹¹² While
credible force was likely a factor, this was already established, as part of a
¹¹² Martin Indyk, ‘The Iraq War Did Not Force Gadaffi’s Hand’, The Financial Times,
9 March 2004.

coming together of concessions, guarantees, and Libya’s own desire to end its
pariah status.¹¹³ As one of the leading US negotiators explained,
The Iraq war, which had not yet started, was not the driving force behind Libya’s
move. Rather, Libya was willing to deal because of credible diplomatic represen-
tations by the United States over the years, which convinced the Libyans that
doing so was critical to achieving their strategic and domestic goals. Just as with
Lockerbie, an explicit quid pro quo was offered: American officials indicated that
a verifiable dismantling of Libya’s weapons projects would lead the removal our
own sanctions [sic].¹¹⁴
McTernan claims that the example of Saddam Hussein’s survival would
have encouraged regional leaders to rule as ‘hard men’ without restraint, and
Bashar al-Assad to act as an ‘unconstrained hard man’. The difficulty with this
argument is that in history as it actually happened, Saddam’s overthrow did
not prevent those regimes ruling without restraint. It did not relax their
authoritarian grip. Saudi Arabia and Egypt remained internally repressive
American client states. The government of Syria, according to Human Rights
Watch in 2010,
continues to rule by emergency powers. Syria’s security agencies, the feared
mukhabarat, continue to detain people without arrest warrants, frequently refuse
to disclose their whereabouts for weeks and sometimes months, and regularly
engage in torture. Special courts set up under Syria’s emergency laws, such as the
Supreme State Security Court (SSSC), sentence people following unfair trials.¹¹⁵
Syria’s regime was not deterred by the overthrow of Saddam. Rather, it acted
as a spoiler against US interests in Iraq, hosting and assisting networks of
foreign fighters to counterbalance the occupying coalition.¹¹⁶ The Iraq War
did not overawe America’s regional rivals like Syria and Iran into self-restraint
and caution, but provoked resistance.
¹¹³ See Bruce W. Jentleson & Christopher A. Whytock, ‘Who “Won” Libya? The Force-
Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy’, International Security 30:3
(2005/06), pp. 47–86; Lisa Anderson, ‘Rogue Libya’s Long Road’, Middle East Report 24
(2006), p. 46; Gawdat Bahgat, ‘Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Case of
Libya’, International Relations 22:1 (2008), p. 107; Joseph Cirincione, ‘The world just got safer:
give diplomacy the credit’, The Washington Post, 11 January 2004; Peter Viggo Jackobson,
‘Reinterpreting Libya’s WMD Turnaround: Bridging the Carrot-Coercion Divide’, Journal of
Strategic Studies 35:4 (2012), pp. 489–512.
¹¹⁴ Flynt L. Leverett, ‘Why Libya Gave Up the Bomb’, Brookings Institution Op-Ed,
23 January 2004.
¹¹⁵ Human Rights Watch, A Wasted Decade (New York, 2010), p. 2.
¹¹⁶ Matthew Levitt, ‘Syria’s Financial Support for Jihad’, Middle East Quarterly (2010),
pp. 39–48; Anthony H. Cordesman, ‘The Department of Defense Quarterly Report on Stability
and Security in Iraq: The Warning Indicators’, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Washington, D.C., 22 December 2006.
202 Blunder
Third, multilateralism would have collapsed. A triumphant Stop the War coalition
would have carried on—targeting all UK troop deployments overseas. The
RAF would have been withdrawn from patrolling the no-fly zone over the Kurdish
Region of Iraq. British troops would have withdrawn from Afghanistan—
destabilising and, ultimately destroying, the fragile achievement of establishing a
democracy. Blair’s Chicago speech on liberal interventionism would not just have
been forgotten, the world order would have returned to amoral pragmatism—if you
don’t bother us, we won’t bother about what you do to your people. The winner
would have been Vladimir Putin. The whole of Ukraine, not merely Crimea, would
have been reabsorbed back into the Russian Federation, along with Belarus and
Kazakhstan.
McTernan’s picture of a ‘Stop the War’ domino wave is at odds with his other
claim, that the British people would have flocked to the hawkish and Atlan-
ticist Conservative Party. There is also in McTernan’s alternative history a
strangely zero-sum view of foreign policy. To oppose the invasion of Iraq was
not to oppose all multilateral efforts. Countries opposed to the war, such as
Canada and France, remained committed in Afghanistan. Rival major powers
China and Russia, who would have vetoed the final UN Resolution authorizing
war, nevertheless cooperated in imposing sanctions on Iran’s nuclear pro-
gramme. Outside the Stop the War movement, opposition to the Iraq War did
not come hand-in-hand with an outright opposition to containing Saddam
Hussein. Indeed, the burden of the mainstream anti-war argument was that
containment and inspections under the aegis of a military presence deserved
more time. Neither does it logically follow that declining to invade one
country necessarily entails a universal retreat into ‘amoral pragmatism’.
McTernan once again offers a binary morality play, by suggesting that failing
to invade Iraq and the subsequent collapse of cooperative security efforts
would lead Putin to fall on countries in Russia’s ‘near abroad’. Isn’t it possible,
though, that the West could have decided not to invade Iraq, while maintain-
ing NATO and nuclear deterrence and the willingness to use sanctions to
impose costs on aggression? But in McTernan’s self-fulfilling worldview, the
West’s adversaries are not so much major powers with legitimate security
interests to be both bargained with and resisted, but one-dimensional
monsters.
It wouldn’t be a pleasant world, but at least there would be no British forces
deployed abroad. It wouldn’t be a peaceful world either—the violence would be
being done to other people in some far-off country of which we know little. It
wouldn’t, though, bring peace to Britain. The signal to the forces of jihad would
have been unmistakable—Britain is weak, not up for a fight. We would be targeted,
not ignored for precisely that reason. Stop the War isn’t, in the end, about stopping
all war—it’s about conceding the right to wage war and inflict violence to some of
the nastiest regimes in the world. If Jeremy Corbyn had stopped Tony Blair
invading Iraq, dictators and jihadists would rule the world today.

There would be British forces deployed abroad, far and wide, and with more
capacity given they would not be sent into Iraq. The world in 2003 may not
have been peaceful, but Britain at least would not have taken part in a venture
that worsened and spread violence in one region, rather than reducing it. The
forces of jihad were not intimidated by the invasion of Iraq. Reeling from
Afghanistan, they were inspired and galvanized by it as a rallying point
and geopolitical opportunity. The Joint Intelligence Committee warned on
10 February 2003 that the invasion would increase the threat from al-Qaeda at
the onset of military action, and lead to attacks elsewhere, especially in the US
and the UK.¹¹⁷ This does not mean that any force used against militant
Islamists is futile. Wars tend to provoke retaliation, and such retaliation may
be a necessary price of long-term measures to suppress a threat. And there are
no guarantees of immunity from Islamist attacks. The range of targets chosen
by Islamists is wide and varying. But it does suggest that McTernan’s notion of
al-Qaeda only attacking the reluctant is false. As it happened, al-Qaeda in Iraq
was not impressed by the fortitude shown by the invaders. Among other
Islamist groups, it launched continuous attacks on coalition forces. Occupa-
tion did not signal strength, but overstretch, with the US appealing for
international help by 2004. Unable to defeat insurgent resistance decisively,
occupiers were steadily bled to the point of crisis and, in Britain’s case, into
humiliation.
At the root of McTernan’s claims is a crude understanding of the world as a
system defined only by machismo, where dictators and terrorists are easily
impressed by displays of resolve, and where the only decisive test is to appear
tough, and the only way to signal toughness is to be continuously on a war
footing. That prescription proved false about al-Qaeda. It proved false about
Putin’s Russia, which invaded Georgia in the summer of 2008 while the US
had over 142,000 troops in Iraq. It proved false in the civil war in the Sudan,
which raged concurrently with the Iraq War and led to genocide. Like most
international actors, these human organizations are not simply a wolfish killer
breed, repelled by strength and preying on weakness. They also wish to look
tough, and they also strike to counterbalance or reduce perceived threats. If
anything, being attritionally caught in Iraq made the US and its allies appear
less capable of intervening elsewhere. Concentration of effort and attention in
one area took the question of other major excursions off the table. The worst of
two worlds came together: removing Saddam gave a graphic demonstration of
why ‘rogue states’ should ruthlessly protect themselves, while occupying Iraq
made the superpower again appear, as President Richard Nixon once said, like
a ‘pitiful, helpless giant’.¹¹⁸
¹¹⁷ JIC Assessment, ‘International Terrorism: War with Iraq’, 10 February 2003.
¹¹⁸ Richard Nixon, ‘Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia’, 30 April 1970,
at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2490.
204 Blunder
If Britain had not invaded Iraq, dictators and terrorists would not have
‘ruled the world’, an absurd overstatement of their capability and the distri-
bution of global power. Britain would have remained one of the world’s largest
economies, armed with nuclear weapons, a veto-wielding permanent seat on
the UN Security Council, and a proven capacity to use force abroad to protect
its interests. Some steely self-confidence and proportion would have been
preferable to the kind of panicked hyperbole offered by McTernan, an attitude
that left Britain prone to the disastrous war in the first place.
CONCLUSIO N
To summarize this chapter’s arguments, the invasion of Iraq inflicted so much

harm, and damaged British security interests to such an extent, that the
material and opportunity costs exceeded any gains. There were alternative
strategies available. The effort to remove a perceived threatening regime was
simply not worth it. It had already discontinued its weapons programmes,
whose modest level of capability could have been monitored and contained,
and whose hostile relationship with al-Qaeda could have been subjected to
greater standards of proof. The price Britain paid for this undertaking was
steep in terms of blood, treasure, and honour. In terms of blood, it was the
equivalent of self-inflicting a major terrorist attack while opening Iraq to large-
scale Islamist subversion, in a campaign that was supposed to suppress such
threats. In terms of treasure, it was billions of pounds that could have been
productively spent elsewhere. In terms of honour, the unintended conse-
quences and the abuses that the war unleashed damaged Britain’s moral
authority and engendered national shame.
Ultimately, the question of whether a war was ‘worth it’ is a value judge-
ment, not a factual finding. This makes it hard to resolve analytically. It is also
a never-ending question. Circumstances are bound once again to change,
prompting fresh argument. All we can do is refine this imprecise exercise as
far as possible. When Iraq comes up again as an analogical case or parable in
future debate, as surely it will, we can at least try to ensure our interpretation is
as precise and considered as possible. As the story is not yet finished, it is
possible to speculate that ‘regime change’ gave Iraqis the chance for a better
future in the long term. But in the medium term, it made Iraq even more
dangerous a place to inhabit. It unleashed violent disorder that made condi-
tions more lethal and more torturous. It had significant geopolitical costs,
opening up a new front for an al-Qaeda terrorist network that had been
reeling, and empowering Iran, creating a Shia–Iran ascendency in Iraq that,
in turn, abused power and precipitated the formation of the Islamic State. The
invasion demonstrated the value of retaining a nuclear deterrent, it probably

cemented the rationale for proliferation by other ‘rogue states’, and thus was a
blow to the cause of counterproliferation. Even allowing for the possibility that
invasion marginally accelerated Libya’s disarmament and suspended Iran’s,
the West eight years later cancelled out this potentially useful diplomatic
example by undertaking regime change in Tripoli, and on the same basis
that we cannot coexist with what Anthony Lake once called ‘backlash states’.
Once Iran found itself facing hostile Western forces across both of its borders,
it resumed its nuclear programme. North Korea has explicitly invoked these
examples in explaining its own programme. If removing Saddam Hussein was
supposed to signal a broader warning to other adversaries to submit to the
American world order, here too the effects were disappointing.
The central rationale for the invasion flowed from the ‘precautionary
principle’, a flawed principle. It has two general failures. Firstly, it prematurely
assumes what it needs to prove, that risk lies overwhelmingly on one side of
the equation, not the other. And secondly, it is indeterminate. Precaution can
just as reasonably dictate restraint, not action. Yet the principle fails to guide
the fearful which to choose.¹¹⁹ Blair’s circle identified risk almost entirely on
the side of ‘not invading’, and treated the calculation as an absolute rather than
comparative risk assessment. Quite simply, he, his advisors and the Parliament
badly underestimated the risks attached to marching on an adversary’s capital
and overthrowing the state, and in doing so, were blind to the radical quality of
what they were taking on. Historically, external intervention and occupation is
one of the most politically fraught acts. Except in atypically excellent condi-
tions, it galvanizes resistance, polarizes host populations, energizes radical
forces, and invites other interventions, especially in countries with historically
porous borders and accessible geography, located at the intersection of antag-
onistic powers. To offset one risk, the kind of WMD transfer that is a remote
contingency by an order of magnitude less likely than proliferation pessimists
claim, Blair courted other risks. Tragically, while insisting that decision-
makers could not afford to take risks with terrorism and WMD, British
hawks lost sight of the profound risks they were running.
¹¹⁹ For critiques of the precautionary principle, see David Runciman, ‘The Precautionary
Principle’, London Review of Books 26:7 (2004), pp. 12–14; Cass R. Sunstein, ‘The Paralysing
Principle’, Regulation 5:4 (2003), pp. 32–7.
Virtue Runs Amok

How Realism Can Help
Once the doctrine of universal intervention spreads and competing truths

contest, we risk entering a world in which, in G. K. Chesterton’s phrase,
virtue runs amok.¹
Henry Kissinger
The debate about Iraq was always about something larger than one conflict in
one time. It was about idealism and realism, and how those two impulses
could best be fused in the pursuit of security. For Iraqis, too, the downfall of
Saddam was only the opening in a bitter contest over how their country should
govern itself in a hostile world. As we survey the wreckage, and Iraq’s ongoing
consequences, and as we contemplate what other pathways lay open in March
2003, the issue will not go away. The best question is not whether idealism or
realism should prevail. Rather, as I argue in this chapter, realism of a classical
and restrained kind should temper the warlike idealism of our time. If not,
virtue runs amok.
I argue that for the future, a dose of realism can help on several fronts. It can
counsel governments against excess certainty. In particular, it cautions against
the ‘Gordian Knot’ temptation, the impatient urge to eliminate sources of
insecurity and impose decisive solutions on problems, in particular the per-
ennial demand for the downfall of adversary regimes. Realism can inform
policymakers what war can affordably achieve. As well as placing princes on
their guard against predation, it encourages prudent war avoidance. Mindful
that states cannot avoid living with insecurity, uncertainty, and risk, we can
draw upon realist insight to restore deterrence and consequential diplomacy as
the central foundations of security. And with realism, we can guard against the
temptation to view international life as a morality play requiring ideological
crusades, recognizing it instead as a tragedy where good intentions can be
¹ Henry Kissinger, ‘The End of NATO as We Know It?’, The Washington Post, 15 August
1999.
Virtue Runs Amok: How Realism Can Help 207

deadly, as a conflicted world where not all good things go together, and where
major powers can be their own worst enemies. Below, I explore each insight.
P A R T I . I D E A L I S M , RE A L I S M , AN D U N C E R T A I N T Y
In the foreign policy debate of major Western powers, idealism and realism
will always be in contest. That is as it should be. Power without morality is
purposeless, morality without power is impotent, and morality married to
power can be reckless if unchecked. For the realist E.H. Carr, thinking and
wishing, utopia and reality, were necessary elements in any sound political
thought, and the lurching from one to the other constituted the ‘tragedy of
political life’.² Few idealists are pure idealists. Few disown the suggestion that
even if the world can be transformed in the long term, the world ‘as it is’
imposes constraints and trade-offs. Tony Blair’s ‘Chicago Speech’, his touch-
stone statement about values and interests in foreign policy, contained caveats
and limiting conditions that faded only later in the loosening of restraint that
marked the Iraq War. Likewise, few realists are truly amoral in their world-
view. The pursuit of the national interest as a collective common good, even
narrowly defined, is a morally serious business. Realism itself rests on norma-
tive commitments as well as observation. The pessimists of that tradition
concern themselves with stability and equilibrium over other, more destabil-
izing values, but order and peace too are values. If ‘First Do No Harm’ is an
impossible demand in the field of conflict, as a starting ethos the principle of
doing minimal harm has merit, so long as it does not become a cast-iron
prohibition on intervention of any kind. Neither idealists and realists can
afford to unbridle their convictions of all doubt. Idealists must remain wary of
the limits of international life ‘as it is’, and realists wary that power without
ideals is hollow. Both are constrained by the limits on knowledge.
A similar balance is needed in the way we interpret the present through the
past. Like most wars, Iraq was a war fought through the prism of history, or
broad-brush visions of history’s lessons. We cannot abandon historical com-
parison, as it is too hardwired into our brains as a short-cut, and without
history we have no source of information. Rather, because of history’s power
and openness to misuse, an interplay of competing analogies should inform
choices. In evaluating the proper use of power, the universe of historical
analogies we use should always be conflicted. Collective memory of Hitler,
Chamberlain, and Munich haunts our instinct for survival. Vietnam, Suez, and
the Sicilian expedition anchors our wariness for misconceived peripheral wars.
² E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of Inter-
national Relations (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1939), p. 87.
208 Blunder
The July Crisis of 1914 embodies our fear of stumbling into major war. And
the Rwandan genocide stands for the heavy price of non-intervention. Ideally,
we would condition our choices by considering a wide range of competing
analogies, carefully pondered, to isolate the limited but real circumstances and
context where the use of military force can work.
Unfortunately, the question of Iraq re-emerged at a moment when there
was no such intellectual balance. In the build-up to war in Iraq, a striking
quality of British warmakers’ language was the stress on certainty. The lan-
guage of conviction, a rhetorical drive for clarity and urgency, marked the
Blair circle’s threat assessment: the phrases ‘no doubt’, ‘no doubt at all’,
‘without any question’, ‘no one can deny’ punctuated dossiers, testimonies,
and speeches.³ Foreign Secretary Jack Straw assured the Parliamentary Select
Committee on Foreign Affairs on 5 December 2001 that Saddam Hussein
posed a ‘very severe threat’ in terms of weapons proliferation, ‘of that there can
be no doubt.’⁴ Tabloids, quality journals, and opposition MPs also presumed
that their theory of threat and their optimism about a post-Saddam Iraq
amounted to hard knowledge. Just as the anti-war movement rarely paused
to consider the dilemmas its position invited, so too did a jaunty self-
confidence attend hawkish argument, with a brazen and cocksure recourse
to one familiar set of analogies. The historian Andrew Roberts typified the
intellectual failure with the following comparison:
In the face of a danger that the left, the Church of England, much of the
establishment, the press and the French denied really existed, a lone voice told
the truth unashamedly again and again until events forced the rest of the nation
to listen. This brave politician faced public obloquy and collapsing political
popularity, until he was proved right, when he became the most popular prime
minister in recent memory. For Churchill, this apotheosis came in 1940; for Tony
Blair, it will come when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of
³ Consider Blair’s Foreword to the September Dossier of 2002: ‘I am quite clear that Saddam
will go to extreme lengths, indeed has already done so, to hide these weapons and avoid giving
them up . . . What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam
has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to
develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile
programme . . . It is clear that, despite sanctions, the policy of containment has not worked
sufficiently well to prevent Saddam from developing these weapons. I am in no doubt that the
threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on WMD, and that he has to be stopped’.
Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government (London: Stationery
Office, September 2002), pp. 3, 4. In his Sedgefield press conference on 3 September 2002, Blair
stated ‘And I think when that happens that people will see that there is no doubt at all, the United
Nations resolutions that Saddam is in breach of, are there for a purpose. He is without any
question still trying to develop that chemical, biological, potentially nuclear capability’. ‘Prime
Minister’s Press Conference’, 3 September 2002, at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
20080909002012/http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page3001.
⁴ Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, 5 December 2001, Minutes of Evidence, Qs 47–52.

mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam’s
henchmen.⁵
The poor forecast of this mytho-historic argument speaks for itself. One
element warrants explicit discussion. Contrary to Roberts, neither Churchill
nor Blair were lone voices in the wilderness in confronting their respective
crises, the major power of Nazi Germany in Churchill’s case and an immis-
erated Third World state in Blair’s. But in the affectation that Blair and his
supporters were a small group of brave truth-tellers resisting the tide of mass
delusion, there is little room for scrutinizing assumptions. Excess certainty and
the mischief it can unleash is a problem that concerns observers of inter-
national relations.⁶ While fear of the unknown can drive conflict, so too can a
misplaced confidence in one’s foreknowledge.⁷
A profound failure of imagination attended the matter. Warmakers pre-
sented the issue as one of action versus inaction, preventive war versus
capitulation, and as they glibly pressed analogies into service, the shadows of
Hitler and the Rwandan Genocidaires eclipsed those of Tet, Sicily, or the
Egyptian Canal. A battery of slogans accompanied the drive for war in Iraq,
as debate moved ‘away from prudence and moderation toward conceptual
boldness’.⁸ Background analogies were ‘best case’ ones, from post-war West
Germany and Japan to liberated Kosovo, and they were ahistorically recalled.
Grand policy declarations about ambitious goals arose not to give meaning
and direction to strategy but to substitute for it, and the word ‘strategy’ itself as
the alignment of means and ends lost its meaning.⁹ ‘Attaching a Roman
numeral to the prospect of war’, sighed Todd Gitlin, ‘does not make it either
just or smart. Metaphorical overstretch bids to be the thought disorder of our
time.’¹⁰
It is not in itself shocking that warmakers and their supporters deployed
such assurance. What makes this case egregious is that they did so without
responding to an immediate and obvious need, such as the open aggression
of the target, and when there was already a grave enough international clash to
⁵ Andrew Roberts, cited in Matt Seaton, ‘Blast from the Past’, The Guardian, 19
February 2003.
⁶ Brian Rathbun, ‘Uncertain about uncertainty: Understanding the multiple meanings of a
concept in International Relations theory’, International Studies Quarterly 51:3 (2007),
pp. 533–57; David M. Edelstein, ‘Managing uncertainty: Beliefs about intentions and the rise
of Great Powers’, Security Studies 12:1 (2002), pp. 1–40.
⁷ Jennifer Mitzen & Randall Schweller, ‘Knowing the unknowns: Misplaced certainty and the
onset of war’, Security Studies 20 (2011), pp. 2–35.
⁸ As Owen Harries noted, ‘The Perils of Hegemony’, in Gary Rosen (ed.), The Right War?
The Conservative Debate on Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 73–87,
p. 79.
⁹ See Hew Strachan, ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival 47:3 (2005), pp. 33–54.
¹⁰ Todd Gitlin, ‘Do Less Harm: The Lesser Evil of Non-Intervention’, World Affairs 171:1
(2008), pp. 39–47, pp. 39–40.
210 Blunder
attend to. Instead, hawks framed a distant and hypothetical threat as a severe
danger beyond doubt, and generally assumed that war would work. Time itself
was assumed to be a wasting asset, injecting the dangerous element of urgency
into the calculus, when a traditional function of diplomacy is to create time as
a material commodity. That it was strike or collapse, against the clock, was an
a priori position they thought from. Nor can this tilt towards surety be
explained away as a ploy to increase domestic support. As we have seen,
while decision-makers assured their compatriots that ambiguous evidence
was compelling, they were genuinely convinced that the national interest
demanded regime change in Iraq. This decision they arrived at early, and it
curtailed a properly systematic consideration of the choices. It also bred
incuriosity. As Chilcot revealed, decision-makers paid insufficient attention
to the nature of the perceived threat, for instance, in their nonchalance about
the distinction between battlefield and strategic weapons, and to the geopol-
itical consequences of breaking a state that was potentially fractured and
vulnerable to its neighbours’ meddling. That events might ‘go wrong’ after
the invasion was acknowledged, but as an afterthought in early 2003, more
than a year after they decided they wanted to invade, and then only as a
troublesome planning contingency. In an era before the global financial crisis
and indeed the Iraq War, liberal certitudes were strong, precisely as they were
about to unleash a force, war, whose logic once begun is to serve itself. As
Winston Churchill cautioned in 1930,
never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on
the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The
statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is
no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable
events.¹¹
The want of care with which analogies were deployed was symptomatic of a
deeper failure. The preventive war against Iraq, also intended to be a trans-
formational war, was possible because of the particular alchemy of fear and
confidence that normally drives anticipatory war in the first place—inflated
fear and misplaced confidence. The world of irrational rogue states converging
with WMD and terrorism was dangerous enough to threaten ‘mushroom
clouds’, created by shadowy private networks of barbarians without a return
address. At the same time, Western power and the universality of its values
meant that it could tame that world into order, and reinvent the Greater
Middle East in the Western image.
If we conceive of realism as a sensibility as much as an intellectual tradition,
it can help even those who would insist on democracy promotion as the
¹¹ Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Thornton Butterworth,

1930), p. 246.

overriding path to their own security. As Owen Harries lamented, 9/11 shifted
the balance in favour of those who saw things in sweeping terms, who
interpreted the new emergency as a grand historical mission.¹² As he warned,
‘the attempt to force history in the direction of democracy by an exercise
of will is likely to produce more unintended than intended consequences.’
A realism was needed to temper these ambitions, one that ‘calls for restraint
and patience, a sense of limits and an appreciation of the wisdom of indirec-
tion, a profound understanding of the particularity of circumstances’.¹³ Dur-
ing the Iraq War, several lines of disagreement divided realists against hawkish
members of the Wilsonian family, neoconservatives, and muscular liberals.
These disagreements went beyond competing assessments of the Iraq prob-
lem. They were rooted in a fundamental dispute about international politics.¹⁴
Against the hawks’ elevation of democracy as the most powerful force on
earth, capable of being released by intervening powers when they chose,
realists countered that nationalism and other more particularistic loyalties
are generally stronger. Hawks’ emphasis on ‘regime type’ and the repressive
nature of Saddam’s regime, realists believed, was misplaced. States that are
authoritarian at home are not necessarily recklessly aggressive abroad. In
any event, except in atypical conditions, not even the United States has the
sapience or power to spread the democratic peace. Realists also challenged
hawks’ assumptions that the world tended towards ‘bandwagoning’ and that
resistance in Iraq would be slight, warning that invading and occupying Iraq
would more likely trigger balancing behaviour in Iraq, in the region, and in the
world. And in real life, the occupation and the wider ‘War on Terror’ was met
with persistent resistance, from Anbar to Tehran to Pyongyang. With regard
to the international system as a whole, realists were averse to the doctrine of
‘newness’, that the new era of weapons proliferation, religious terrorism, and
‘rogue’ states altered the rules of the game and rendered classical doctrines of
deterrence and containment outmoded. Realism like all paradigms is incom-
plete and flawed. But on each of these issues that surrounded the Iraq debate,
compared to liberal optimism, realists’ warnings were sound.
For many realists the imperfections in our knowledge are a reason for
restraint. In its classical form in particular, realism recognizes that actors—
certainly great powers—have agency even in that constrained world, and that
the future is unwritten.¹⁵ An anarchic world may always threaten predation.
¹² Owen Harries & Tom Switzer, ‘Iraq’s Lessons for America’, ABC: The Drum, 20 March
2013.
¹³ Harries, ‘The Perils of Hegemony’, p. 86.
¹⁴ On these disagreements, see Brian Schmidt & Michael Williams, ‘The Bush Doctrine and
the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists’, Security Studies 17:2 (2008), pp. 191–220,
pp. 203–9.
¹⁵ On classical realism and its stress on agency and contingency, see Jonathan Kirshner, ‘The
Economic Sins of Modern IR Theory and the Classical Realist Alternative’, World Politics 67:1
212 Blunder
That same world makes major powers capable of error. Those unable to place
limits on their ambitions and fears are prone in certain circumstances to self-
defeating wars. States with ample capacity to defend themselves, deter threats,
and survive can be their own worst enemies, from the Habsburgs (under
Charles V and Philip II) to France (Bourbon and Napoleonic) to Germany
(as Kaiserreich and Third Reich) to the Soviet Union or Ottoman Empire. The
history of self-harm and adjustment failure is long.¹⁶ Wars against minor
powers, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, are often imprudent both because
their relative weakness makes them containable, and because a war against
them creates new circumstances—such as the fall of the regime—that might
then involve a protracted and bloody stalemate, despite the low stakes
involved.¹⁷ During the Cold War, realists like Walter Lippmann, George
Kennan, and Hans Morgenthau exhorted the United States to place prudent
limits on itself, particularly with regard to the most important commodity,
material power, and thus to bound their security doctrines geographically and
politically. In particular, realists exhorted the state to focus its master doctrine
of containment on major power centres in Europe and Asia, and resist the
urge to universalize it in Vietnam. Making the world safe for American and
Western democracy was not the same thing as making the world democratic.
In our own time, more ‘structural’, scientific realists, whose academic writing
gives less scope to agency, nevertheless urged the sole superpower to resist the
expansionist lunge into Iraq that their theories predict.¹⁸ Precisely because we
cannot foresee foreign policy outcomes systematically or reliably, that state of
uncertainty means that states should marshal their resources carefully,¹⁹ and
retain what Walter Lippmann called a ‘surplus of power’²⁰ with which they
could adapt to changing circumstances.
Misplaced certainty and the false insistence on clarity remains a danger. It is
particularly tempting for the party of ‘regime change’ that still issues its
demands for decisive Western action. Ever eager to draw the sword in
international crises, they also presume the existence of a strong and
(2015), pp. 155–83, J. Samuel Barkin, Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 100–18.
¹⁶ Karen Rasler & William R. Thomson, The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490–1990
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), p. 146; Charles A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability
of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 3–4, 33–105; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and
Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York:
Random House, 1987); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge
¹⁷ As Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler argue, ‘A Realist Foreign Policy for the United
States’, Perspectives on Politics 9:4 (2011), pp. 803–19, p. 807.
¹⁸ See the discussion earlier in Chapter 2, ‘A Liberal War After All’.
¹⁹ Barkin, Realist Constructivism, p. 158.
²⁰ Walter Lippmann, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown,
1943), p. 9.

inoffensive indigenous surrogate that can provide a stable democracy in the
new order. As they did during the Iraq debate, they presume democracy with
Western support normally trumps nationalism, sectarianism, or other com-
peting loyalties, and are easily encouraged by the lobbying of exiles. In Libya in
2011, as the Foreign Affairs Select Committee found, war advocates gravely
underestimated the extent to which rebel groups were pervaded by armed
Islamists, and barely inquired into the matter.²¹ Without any internal assess-
ment of their extent by the British government, ‘a quorum of respectable
Libyans were assuring the Foreign Office that militant Islamist militias would
not benefit from the rebellion . . . with the benefit of hindsight, that was wishful
thinking at best.’ There was evidence available of a possible strong Islamist
element, given that Libyan connections with transnational militant extremist
groups were known before 2011, because many Libyans had participated in
the Iraq insurgency and in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda. This precedent ought
to have cautioned against similar wishfulness over Syria in 2011–13. Yet hawks
argue that there was a moderate opposition that could securely have been
armed and then installed in power without their rule being compromised by
competing Islamist forces. Cast and location changes. The pathology endures.
PART II. PRUDENT WAR A VOIDANCE
Realism can inform policymakers what war can affordably achieve, what war
is for, and what kind of wars ought to be avoided.²² As well as placing princes
on their guard, it encourages prudent war avoidance. This orientation draws
on the classical and Clausewitzian tradition, whereby force derives its utility,
or its non-utility, from political context. War is not a separate field of activity
but an outgrowth of politics at its most intense, and can only draw meaning
from the political condition of a situation. But more than any other kind of
political behaviour, war once initiated is difficult to control as an instrument of
policy. It tends towards escalation, passion, and the play of chance. Where its
purpose is to serve policy, its nature is to serve itself. The more it is used
beyond the more austere purposes of defence and deterrence, towards more
positive and ambitious goals, the more it is extended into a more protracted
and ambitious process, the harder it is to keep destruction proportionate to
outcomes, and the more likely it is to generate perverse consequences.
²¹ House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Libya: Examination of Intervention

and Collapse and the UK’s Future Policy Options (House of Commons, Third Report of Session
2016–17, 14 September 2016), p. 13.
²² Part of this section draws from my earlier article, ‘Goodbye to All That’, Small Wars &
Insurgencies 25:3 (2014), pp. 685–95.
214 Blunder
This may appear to be an obvious point. But there is a strong appetite for
fresh wars and escalations among security elites on either side of the Atlantic.
Realists usually are hawkish about the need to prepare military capabilities. At
the same time, a prudent realism would raise a presumption against war of any
kind—a presumption and a high bar, not blanket opposition. The regular
use of military force can desensitize a society to the political turbulence of
violence, even to the presence of violence itself. It is a telling indicator of where
sixteen years of military engagements have taken the United States, that critics
accuse President Obama of weakness and a belligerence deficit, the president
who bombed seven countries, intensified an extrajudicial assassination ‘drone’
programme and maintained 30,000 troops in the Gulf.
In defence of being on a regular war footing, hawks typically claim that the
United States and its allies did not seek its conflicts, and indeed cannot choose
its wars. This refrain became especially strong in the era of counter-insurgency
(COIN) when in Afghanistan and Iraq, major states found themselves bled
and beleaguered by weaker but determined adversaries, and minor wars
against shadowy insurgents seemed to be the way of the future. According
to General David Petraeus, the architect of America’s ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq
who was charged with the rescue of a failing expedition, ‘Our enemies will
typically attack us asymmetrically, avoiding the conventional strengths that we
bring to bear. Clearly, the continuation of so-called “small wars” cannot be
discounted. And we should never forget that we don’t always get to choose the
wars we fight.’²³ British proponents of COIN take a similar line. Insurgencies
are here to stay, they argue.²⁴ We have little choice, apparently, than to
learn and relearn the doctrine of COIN, which lays down the need to protect
civilian populations, out-govern the enemy, kill off violent rejectionists, and
win space and time to build up a friendly host state with strong indigenous
security forces.
This is a dangerous fatalism. We should resist it. Major states actually do get
to choose the wars they fight. That is especially the case for offshore, nuclear-
armed states with strong maritime/air forces and large economies and popu-
lations. While adversaries voted for war against the occupiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan once the capitals had fallen, the ‘coalition of the willing’ volun-
tarily chose to seize the capitals in the first place. Violent resistance in the
aftermath of such invasions was not a wildly unpredictable, ‘black swan’
scenario. It was a foreseeable consequence that the invaders treated with slight
regard. And the claim that insurgencies and COIN are inevitably in the West’s
future loses sight of the nature of war itself. War is a political act and involves
²³ David H. Petraeus, ‘Reflections on the Counter-insurgency Era’, RUSI Journal 158:4 (2013),
pp. 82–7; ‘We Must Be Coldly Realistic over the Use of Force’, The Daily Telegraph, 10 June 2013.
²⁴ Alex Alderson, ‘ “Learn from Experience” or “Never Again”: What Next for UK Counter
Insurgency?’, RUSI Journal 159:1 (2014), pp. 40–8.

choices. To claim that one side ‘does not get to choose’ is at odds with the
verdict of Clausewitz, for whom wars were reciprocal and only truly started
once the ‘attacked’ decides to defend. After 9/11, the ‘attacked’ chose to
retaliate and defend in particular ways, beyond suppressing their adversaries’
capabilities. They chose to wage ambitious liberal wars that had high ambi-
tions from the beginning.
Disorder and armed conflict does not reliably end with an opponent’s fall.
Politics happens on a continuum, rather than in pre-prepared phases, and
conflict persists and can re-erupt. As Stephen Biddle and Jacob Shapiro argue,
If the 2003 Iraq campaign, the 2001–2 Afghan campaign, or the 2011 Libya
campaign tell us anything, it is that taking the enemy’s capital does not reliably
end the war. Replacing a hostile regime with a weak successor in a splintered
society or, worse, catalyzing anarchy, simply launches the war’s next phase:
insurgency and civil conflict.²⁵
PART III. DETERRENCE AND DIPLOMACY
One source of excessive Western belligerence is the widespread logic that our
adversaries are mad or irrational, and therefore must be bent to our will or
destroyed. As the refrain goes, because they are irrational, they cannot be
contained, deterred, or bargained with, and therefore responsible states must
pressure them into collapse or eliminate them. This mandates severe meas-
ures, from deliberate crisis initiation to preventive war. In Iraq’s case, it was
borne of a muddled rationale, that Saddam was a reckless aggressor oblivious
to deterrence, unhinged enough to use WMD regardless of retaliation but sane
enough only to use them by proxy, for fear of retaliation. This mix of anti-
deterrence and desire to teach by example lay at the foundation of the War on
Terror. It remains the foundation of demands for regime change today. As this
book was nearing completion, hostility between the United States and North
Korea was intensifying over the ‘hermit kingdom’s’ nuclear and missile pro-
gramme. Hawks, including Bush and Blair, insisted that the regime was ‘mad’,
dangerous abroad because it violated its own population.
The doctrine of taking irrational states off the board is a radical doctrine,
partly because it presumes a world made fundamentally ‘new’, as it sweeps
away core concepts from the history of statecraft. It is radical also because it
presumes adversaries are reckless, greedy states, the modern equivalent of the
thirteenth-century Mongol hordes, driven only to conquer and devour, or of
²⁵ Stephen Biddle & Jacob Shapiro, ‘Here’s Why We Can Only Contain the Islamic State’, The
Washington Post, 1 December 2015.
216 Blunder
Adolf Hitler, one of the rare cases of an aggressor in command of a major state
who could neither be appeased nor deterred. And it is radical because it links
adversaries’ oppressive behaviour at home to their behaviour abroad, making
any kind of offensive rival a candidate for extermination. It is ultimately an
expression not only of anti-deterrence, but of anti-diplomacy. It flows from a
demand for absolute security, and promotes a narcissistic conceit that resist-
ance to the will of the West is itself a symptom of madness.
It is surely time to revisit the intellectual foundations of coercive regime
change and restore deterrence as an imperfect but realistic alternative.²⁶ Thus
far, the dividends of attempts to sack hostile orders have been disappointing,
leading either to prolonged and occasionally dangerous confrontation in Cuba
or the Korean peninsula; to disaster in North Africa and the Gulf. An idea
whose results are often bad, if not uniformly bad, is an unsound idea. In
reverse order, statements that America’s goal is the demise of the North
Korean regime have not dissuaded it from developing a nuclear deterrent,
and probably encouraged it. The demand that Bashar al-Assad abdicate power
in Syria as a precondition for negotiations did not moderate his behaviour,
and neither did the multinational effort to support the rebellion. Overthrow-
ing the Taliban and installing a democratic and constitutional order in
Kabul, a large experiment in modernization theory, was not a necessary step
in disrupting international terrorism, and sixteen years later Afghanistan
remains one of the poorest, most corrupt, and war-torn nations on earth.
Libya, the ‘model’ intervention according to the Responsibility to Protect
faction, has disintegrated into rival parliaments, the oil industry is in a state
of near-collapse, and torture and abuse thrive under Islamist militias. And we
have already surveyed the wreckage of the Iraq adventure, a cure that was
worse than the disease. Voiced and practised continually, coercive regime
change rests on an extravagant conception of our security interests, and an
unrealistic account of how to pursue them.
In each of these campaigns, the invaders misread their adversaries, under-
estimating their determination to survive and their will to resist. And on each
occasion, they misread those they thought were freedom fighters whose
interests aligned with the West’s. Even seemingly pro-democratic, pro-
Western rebel forces have competing interests of their own. The kleptocracy
in Kabul conducts an abusive rule on behalf of its clients, thus provoking
sympathy with the Taliban’s severe commitment to restoring law and order.
The abuses of the Shia regime of Baghdad and Iranian-backed militias drove
²⁶ See Amitai Etzioni, ‘American Needs a Foreign Policy that Doesn’t Center on Regime
Change’, The National Interest, 17 July 2017; Paul W. Schroeder, ‘The Case Against Preemptive
War’, The American Conservative, 21 October 2002; Elbridge Colby, ‘Restoring Deterrence’,
Orbis 51:3 (2007), pp. 413–28; Robert Jervis, ‘The Confrontation Between Iraq and the US:
Implications for the Theory and Practice of Deterrence’, European Journal of International
Relations 9:2 (2003), pp. 315–37.

Sunni Arabs into the arms of the Islamic State. And the armed liberation
movements of Libya and Syria turned out to host atrocious, determined
Islamist killers, who in turn had learnt their fighting trade in the wake of
Iraq. Today, loud death threats made against the Chairman of the Workers’
Party of North Korea are being reciprocated.²⁷ This is creating a reciprocal fear
of surprise attack, reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis, another emergency
brought about by an attempt to kill off a regime, the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
A prudent alternative is to restore deterrence, and consequential diplomacy,
as the foundations of our security. This is not an absolute principle—we have
had quite enough of absolutes applied to foreign policy. It would be artificial to
dismiss any possibility of overthrowing a state. For instance, there are good
prudential arguments for the measured international support given to the Gulf
coalition’s campaign to evict the Islamic State from its captured urban centres
in Syria and Iraq, and returning those cities to their sovereign’s rule, provided
major powers confine the effort to suppressing and containing a chronic
threat, rather than exterminating it. But as an organizing principle, we should
abandon the notion that the US-led West should pursue security by demand-
ing or attempting to force the collapse of other orders, whether through
sponsorship of revolt to full-scale preventive war.
Many things distinguish the ‘rogue’ actors mentioned above. But they share
in common a will to survive and are demonstrably deterrable. Many of even
the most atrocious actors are driven partly by impulses that are also recog-
nizably our own. Even North Korea, treated often as the extreme case of a
rogue state, has not launched an all-out war against South Korea and its allies
in six decades, and its restraint at this level must be partly explained by the
likely consequences of aggression. In common, there are material things that
they value, and which can be held at risk. Deterrence has been successfully
created and maintained against much larger, revolutionary rogue states,
Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China, states whose rhetoric prior to devel-
oping the bomb was overtly hostile. But policymakers had to sustain and
refresh strategies of deterrence always against the criticisms of anti-deterrent
factions within the left and right of American politics, and that argument
resurfaced after the Cold War.²⁸
It is not, in principle, impossible for there to arise an undeterrable and
recklessly high-rolling actor oblivious to the dangers of retaliation and pun-
ishment in international politics in the nuclear age. Only it is extremely rare.
Even the Islamic State, a revisionist ‘insurgent’ state committed to creating a
medieval caliphate and exterminating heretics, turns out in its interactions
²⁷ See Scott Sagan, ‘The North Korean Missile Crisis: Why Deterrence is Still the Best Option’,
Foreign Affairs, 10 September 2017.
²⁸ See Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1983).
218 Blunder
with Israel to be susceptible to the logic of punishment and restraint. Israel
does what it can to interdict chemical weapons to the group, and punish
suppliers, while threatening retaliation for any assaults, and the Islamic State
has complied.²⁹ This does not mean it is prudent, ultimately, to abide the
Islamic State holding onto its conquests. But even if the extreme case of a
contemporary ‘rogue’ actor turns out to be deterrable, the prospect of a rogue
committed to homicide even at the cost of suicide is remote. The insane and
effectively suicidal rogue state has been revealed to be fictitious thus far.
To say that we should restore deterrence and diplomacy is not to assume
that we can or will deter everything. Classical instruments are imperfect.
Actors can miscalculate. Accidents can intensify insecurity and alarm. In a
crisis, a mutual fear of surprise attack can destabilize. Information can be
filtered and distorted, cognitive biases hard to shift, and a regime like
Saddam’s was inhospitable to ‘bad news’. These are generic problems that
must be managed in adversarial relationships. But the history of nuclear
rivalry suggests that the prospect, even the limited possibility, of a nuclear
strike tends to resonate with even the most aggressive actors. The best we can
do is reduce the probability of miscalculation by strengthening the mechan-
isms and communication of deterrence. If clearly signalled and believed,
deterrence generally succeeds in preventing strikes of significant scale on a
deterrer’s core interests. As Chapter 4 demonstrated, Saddam, like the head of
almost all regimes, was demonstrably deterrable when given unambiguous,
credible signals.
Nuclear transfer remains a remote contingency that is an order of magni-
tude less likely and more preventable than pessimists claim. While the odds of
nuclear transfer are low, the potential severity of the threat is undeniably high.
There are straightforward, feasible measures by which UK policy can drive the
risk lower. The task is thus to reinforce deterrence: helping the small number
of potential offenders avoid miscalculation, the incorrect belief that they could
get away with it, and thus shape their incentive structure in a more cautious
direction. This makes it important for the UK and its allies to advertise their
attribution capabilities and make clear its determination to attribute and
punish such behaviour.
If the calculus above sounds as though it carries risks, it does. Deterrence is
not a naturally existing quality inherent in the means of retaliation, even in
nuclear weapons. To succeed, it requires vigilance and signalling, patience and
a willingness to reciprocate restraint for restraint, so that the choice of ‘being
deterred’ makes a meaningful difference to the deterree. The most difficult
political aspect of deterrence, for major powers, is the implicit choice to accept
as a price of stability the toleration of potential threats that they otherwise
²⁹ See Graham Allison, ‘Why ISIS Fears Israel’, The National Interest (2016).

might not. Deterrence is the stance of a ‘satisfied power’. The alternative of
elimination, however, threatens to create the world it predicts, of adversaries
driving harder for deterrence capabilities or even WMD use. A strategy more
likely to prompt nuclear or WMD use is to attack countries that possess those
capabilities. While it may be wise to resist some proliferation where it is
possible, there is no feasible or reliable way of eliminating the security risks
of proliferation, especially once it is accomplished. Where nuclear weapons
already exist in the inventories of hostile states, where they are a political
reality that escalating hostility only makes seem more vital, the choices apart
from deterrence are not only bad, but would likely bring about the phenom-
enon most feared, of nuclear use. The war in Iraq and its stimulation of wider
proliferation demonstrated the dangers of searching for definitive solutions.
Especially in the shadow of the nuclear revolution, there are dark realities that
the West must learn to live with.
PART IV. THE TRAGEDY OF INTERNATIONAL L IFE
With realism, we can guard against the temptation to view international life as
a morality play, and recognize it instead as tragic. ‘Morality play’ visions carry
excessive certainty, dividing the world into good states and bad states.
According to such a view, the problem of insecurity flows mostly from both
the aggression of others, especially dangerous regimes, and the West’s weak-
ness, and therefore one cannot be safe until the world converts to one’s beliefs.
By contrast, though the concept of ‘tragedy’ has many resonances, it has at its
core a great miscalculation and error of judgement—a blunder, in fact—when
confronted with a difficult and conflicted choice. Tragedy flows from, and is
made possible by, the success of the tragic figure, who is usually a wealthy,
powerful, and authoritative figure. In the realm of international relations, as
well as inexplicable suffering, tragedy refers to self-defeating behaviour.³⁰
A tragic world is defined by uncertainty, the possibility of miscalculation,
and the need for agents to make choices within the constraints of forces over
which they can only exert approximate control. In a tragic world, security
threats flow more from tragic clashes of interest than from the malign intent
of single groups. The lens of tragedy framed Thucydides account of the
Peloponnesian war, with Athens as tragic hero unleashed by the premature
death of its restraining guardian, Pericles, then suffering and falling from its
own loosening of restraint, its lapse into brutal imperialism and its disregard
³⁰ See Tom Erskine & Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Understanding Tragedy and Understanding
International Relations’, in Richard Ned Lebow (ed.) Essential Texts on Classics, History, Ethics,
and International Relations (London: Springer International Publishing, 2016), pp. 5–20, p. 8.
220 Blunder
for limits.³¹ It is not overstraining the comparison to recognize that in 2003,
with the contingent event of 9/11 setting the scene, the very success of the
Anglo-American powers loosened their restraint, and tempted them to pre-
sume almost godlike levels of knowledge and prescience.
Yet if Iraq flowed from tragic failure, the tragedy is incomplete, for in
tragedies the flawed protagonist is supposed to learn from their miscalculation
and, through nemesis, come to new recognition. Tony Blair is not the centre
of the problem today. Unrepentant though he is, he at least fully confronts the
decision and accepts responsibility. The greatest danger is more diffuse, in
the collective memory of Iraq. The tragic recognition has not yet come, that
the ideas that propelled Iraq still live, even as we consign the conflict
to history.
In mid-2004, just after the city of Falluja bled under terrible battle, and as
the Iraq project threatened to implode, the Lebanese-American scholar and
hawk Fouad Ajami lamented that the dream was dead. Ajami was one of the
intellectuals who drafted the blueprint that had so moved Bush, ‘the Delta of
Terrorism’. He had hoped invasion would disarm and liberate Iraq, and ‘purge
Arab radicalism’, creating a base for American primacy in the region, ‘a
beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab
world’.³² But the dream, to him, was dead. If only the dream were dead. In fact,
the dream of idealistic campaigns to purge regions and impress rivals into
submission, the dream of war (and the threat of war) working beyond defence
and deterrence, lives on. In every year since withdrawal, op-ed pages on both
sides of the Atlantic carry demands from security elites that one or another
offensive regime ‘must go’, in the name of democracy and reason, and in
the name of preserving the American primacy that Britain supports. Those
same elites demand the use of force not only to constrain threats, but to make
troublesome states from Iran and North Korea to Russia and China more
compliant. A presumption endures that our power is potentially overwhelm-
ing, if we would only have the will to use it. It lives on in the effort to treat Iraq
as a mere lesson in how to nation-build ‘better’ and administer the locals more
wisely. It lives on in the claim that since major states like Britain don’t get to
choose their wars—an odd assertion, given Britain’s maritime geography and
capabilities—they have no discretion but to prepare for overthrowing govern-
ments and occupying countries again. And it lurks in a dangerous general
fatigue about the memory of Iraq, and a desire to isolate the fault to a single
leader in another time. If it is treated as merely ‘Blair’s war’ and a singular
episode, Iraq will linger merely as a sad story that confers only tactical lessons.
³¹ As Richard Ned Lebow argues, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, Orders
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 65–168.
³² Fouad Ajami, ‘Iraq May Survive, but the Dream is Dead’, The New York Times, 26 May
2004.

But there is no collective escape from Iraq as a historical process. The tides of
war that it unleashed are with us yet.
The dilemma over Iraq in 2003 was a choice of agonies. The price of ‘no
Saddam’ was war. The price of ‘no war’ was Saddam. Consider the verdict of
one Iraqi who had to endure both sides of the balance sheet, and intimately
knew both the costs of Saddam’s reign and of his fall. Kadom al-Jabouri ran a
motorcycle spares shop in Baghdad. Built like a mountain, he had been a
champion powerlifter and suffered eleven years imprisonment in Saddam’s
Abu Ghraib prison. As the old order fell in April 2003, he became the face of
Saddam’s repudiation by Iraqis. An iconic photograph captured him taking a
sledgehammer to the fallen dictator’s statue in the capital’s Firdos Square. In
the years to come, violent anarchy proved by a measure worse, and more
threatening, even than Ba’ath misrule. On the tenth anniversary of the fall, he
lamented:
I hated Saddam . . . I dreamed for five years of bringing down that statue, but what
has followed has been a bitter disappointment. Then we had only one dictator.
Now we have hundreds. Nothing has changed for the better. . . . Under Saddam,
there was security. There was corruption, but nothing like this. Our lives were
protected. And many of the basics like electricity and gas were more affordable.
After two years I saw no progress. Then came the killings, robberies and sectarian
violence. . . . And things seem to get worse all the time.³³
³³ Peter Beaumont, ‘Saddam’s Statue: The Bitter Regrets of Iraq’s Sledgehammer Man’, The
Observer, 9 March 2013.
Epilogue
Two Speeches
Here, in order, are two speeches. The first is the actual televised address Prime
Minister Blair delivered when Britain went to war in Iraq. The second is an
address I have written, that a decision-maker could have given. It is based on
an alternative rationale and warnings that were made at the time.
T E L E V I S E D AD D R E S S , P R I M E MI N I S T E R TO N Y
BLAIR, THURSDAY 20 MARCH 2003
On Tuesday night I gave the order for British forces to take part in military
action in Iraq.
Tonight, British servicemen and women are engaged from air, land and sea.
Their mission: to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and disarm Iraq of its
weapons of mass destruction.
I know this course of action has produced deep divisions of opinion in our
country. But I know also the British people will now be united in sending our
armed forces our thoughts and prayers. They are the finest in the world and
their families and all of Britain can have great pride in them.
The threat to Britain today is not that of my father’s generation. War
between the big powers is unlikely. Europe is at peace. The cold war already
a memory.
But this new world faces a new threat: of disorder and chaos born either of
brutal states like Iraq, armed with weapons of mass destruction; or of extreme
terrorist groups. Both hate our way of life, our freedom, our democracy.
My fear, deeply held, based in part on the intelligence that I see, is that these
threats come together and deliver catastrophe to our country and world. These
tyrannical states do not care for the sanctity of human life. The terrorists
delight in destroying it.

Some say if we act, we become a target. The truth is, all nations are targets.
Bali was never in the frontline of action against terrorism. America didn’t
attack al-Qaeda—they attacked America.
Britain has never been a nation to hide at the back. But even if we were, it
wouldn’t avail us.
Should terrorists obtain these weapons now being manufactured and traded
round the world, the carnage they could inflict to our economies, our security,
to world peace, would be beyond our most vivid imagination.
My judgement, as prime minister, is that this threat is real, growing and of
an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that
Britain has faced before.
For 12 years, the world tried to disarm Saddam; after his wars in which
hundreds of thousands died. UN weapons inspectors say vast amounts of
chemical and biological poisons, such as anthrax, VX nerve agent, and mus-
tard gas remain unaccounted for in Iraq.
So our choice is clear: back down and leave Saddam hugely strengthened; or
proceed to disarm him by force. Retreat might give us a moment of respite but
years of repentance at our weakness would, I believe, follow.
It is true Saddam is not the only threat. But it is true also—as we British
know—that the best way to deal with future threats peacefully, is to deal with
present threats with results.
Removing Saddam will be a blessing to the Iraqi people. Four million Iraqis are
in exile. Sixty per cent of the population are dependent on food aid. Thousands of
children die every year through malnutrition and disease. Hundreds of thou-
sands have been driven from their homes or murdered.
I hope the Iraqi people hear this message. We are with you. Our enemy is
not you, but your barbarous rulers.
Our commitment to the post-Saddam humanitarian effort will be total. We
shall help Iraq move towards democracy. And put the money from Iraqi oil in
a UN trust fund so that it benefits Iraq and no one else.
Neither should Iraq be our only concern. President Bush and I have com-
mitted ourselves to peace in the Middle East based on a secure state of Israel
and a viable Palestinian state. We will strive to see it done.
But these challenges and others that confront us—poverty, the environ-
ment, the ravages of disease—require a world of order and stability. Dictators
like Saddam, terrorist groups like al-Qaida, threaten the very existence of such
a world.
That is why I have asked our troops to go into action tonight. As so often
before, on the courage and determination of British men and women, serving
our country, the fate of many nations rests.
Thank you.¹
¹ For the transcript, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2870581.stm.

224 Blunder
AN ALTERNATIVE ADDRESS
Britain will not take part in military action in Iraq.

The gravest decision a government can make is whether to apply force.
I know this decision divides us. Reasonable patriots can disagree.
Sometimes, there are worse things than war. This country has used force to
protect itself from domination, to end slavery and piracy, to protect people
from persecution. When there is need, where goals are achievable, we should
take up arms to secure a civilised state of peace.
Often, war does not work. Wars launched naively for ambitious purposes in
the expectation of quick victory can fail, their price exceeding the value of the
aim. Without foreknowledge, we must weigh it carefully.
When the threat is years or decades distant, when there is no clear
and present danger, the burden of argument lies with those who advocate
force. Those who would join us to this expedition have not satisfied that
burden.
As we speak, British forces help hunt down Al Qaeda’s terrorist network.
The murderers of 9/11 and their fellow travellers are being met with force, and
without apology. This is where we must focus our strength: where it is most
needed. Rather than opening up another dangerous front with high-risk
experiments in nation-building, we must concentrate effort on suppressing
and weaken Al Qaeda, while conserving enough strength for the threats of
tomorrow.
Iraq would be a dangerous diversion form this task. Given what war could
unleash, and put us in the middle of, the case for invading is weak.
Whatever good comes of removing Saddam from power, it will likely cause
more harm than good.
Baghdad may fall quickly. But invasion to solve one problem will unleash
other, graver problems. Iraq is fractured by decades of sectarian rivalry and
misrule. It borders ruthless countries that will also intervene. War in such
circumstances would stir up radical forces, not pacify them, harden divisions,
not cure them, and intensify conflict. The conditions for a successful, exter-
nally forced democratic revolution are not there.
The makers of war say a swift war will release democracy, and help free the
region from the diseases of sectarianism, dictatorship and social ruin.
But breaking a state, and creating another, will be a cure worse than the
disease.
Occupations against determined locals with international backing are a
losing bet, and bad news for the visitors and the locals. History leaves
warnings: Israel in Lebanon, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, France in
Algeria. Experts, diplomats and regional governments warn of chaos. Since
we don’t know, it would be unwise to bet on an unlikely ‘best case’ scenario.
President Bush says that Saddam is a reckless predator who threatens us. He
fears Saddam or his sons will grow their WMD arsenal, and transfer weapons

to Al Qaeda, to attack us and dodge retaliation. Therefore, we must overthrow
him, and send a message to other rogue states. Some compare Saddam to
Hitler.
This is mistaken.
There is no evidence of collaboration between him and Osama Bin Laden.
Al Qaeda has no base in Iraq. If we overthrow the state, we might uninten-
tionally create a base in a dangerous new vacuum. We might strengthen Iran,
which has known ties to terrorists and a nuclear programme.
Saddam is no Hitler. He leads a weakened, impoverished country, not a
military-industrial juggernaut. Unlike Hitler, he can be deterred.
Deterrence is a powerful weapon. It has worked with rogues before—Mao’s
China, and Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the past, when we signalled clearly, Iraq’s
regime held back from using WMD in 1991, and from attacking the Kuwaiti
border in 1994.
If Saddam so fears our retaliation that he would ‘cheat’ and transfer
weapons, that means he cares about his survival. If he cares about surviving,
then he can be deterred. We can hold what he values at risk—his palaces, his
cities, his territory. If Saddam is an aggressor who cares little for survival, he
will not bother transferring WMD to a third party. He will use them directly.
In that case, this has nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
Saddam allegedly held an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons for
fifteen years. Either he scrapped it, making him less threatening. Or he has not,
and didn’t use them against US-led forces, even while encircled and sanc-
tioned, which suggests a will to survive. In which case, he’s evil, not mad.
Every state should know that Britain will retaliate with overwhelming
force against any attack, or any state sponsor of attacks. We and our allies will
relentlessly track down the origins of any assault on our people, and our attribu-
tion rate is high. We will hold responsible the perpetrators and their supporters,
states and non-states alike. We will punish such actions without asking per-
mission. Britain has carrier-born firepower, and nuclear-armed submarines,
continuously at sea. We are prepared to use them if needed. We have the forces
to raid, disrupt and deter. Anyone complicit in an attack on us will have hell
to pay.
We will not allow Saddam to acquire a nuclear weapon. We should apply
modified sanctions, stay within striking distance, and watch him like a hawk.
This is not the Iraq of the 1980’s. This is Iraq now: depleted, lacking resources,
without a proper scientific-industrial base.
Some say we must hit Saddam to send a message to other rogue states.
If other rogue states are capable of being dissuaded from pursuing WMD,
then they too are not so reckless, and can be deterred.
If those states are ruled by irrational madmen determined to acquire WMD,
our war on Iraq won’t change their minds. It might send the wrong message.
Toppling a non-nuclear Saddam would demonstrate the value of a nuclear
deterrent.
226 Blunder
Bin Laden will not get the bomb, and without us invading Iraq. We will
continue to work with America and the world’s leading states, and the IAEA,
in shutting down the flow of illicit nuclear materials. It will be hard for Al
Qaeda to develop clandestine nukes underground, hunted, in hiding, just
trying to stay alive. That is what that miserable gang has brought upon itself.
The Leader of the Opposition accuses the government of weakness. He says
this hour is a test of resolve, that we must ‘sort out’ terrorism and the Middle
East, that we must stand with our ally, all the way, to keep our influence.
This is what makes terrorism dangerous. As well as killing and injuring,
terrorists scare us, sometimes too much, baiting us into self-harm and mis-
guided military adventures. If you want to see our greatest threat, look in the
mirror.
As America’s ally, our duty is to give good advice. We advise America to
hold back, not to let terrorism provoke it into a reckless war. That is what
influence is for.
This is a test of judgement. By holding back, we will not settle the Iraq
problem, or eliminate terrorism, or fix the Middle East. But regime change in
Iraq will not achieve these things. It will put our blood and treasure in the
middle of the chaos to come. That would be neither strong, nor wise.
Thank you.
Index
abandonment thesis 170, 183–6 The Breaking of Nations 92–4

Adams, Colin 18 Bremer, Paul L. III 107, 112–13, 127
adjustment failure, among states 212 Briefing Paper to the Parliamentary Labour
aftermath phase 107–15 Party 53
Ajami, Fouad xiv, 155–6, 220 Britain
Albright, Madeleine 32, 126 in Afghanistan 68, 70
alternative (to Blair’s) address 224–6 financial costs to 176–7
Amman, Kofi 59 intelligence dossiers 62
amoral realism 161 public opinion xv–xvi, 3, 61–70
Anderson, Donald 68 road to war 25, 29–30, 40–61
Anglo-American relationship 1, 2, 4, 6–8, role in war viii
20–1, 47, 132–51, 169 taming US response 138–45
anti-Islamic motivation 15–16 troop deployment Korean War 135
anti-terrorism viii in UN Security Council 135
appeasement 104 and US interventions 137
Arab Spring 155, 157–8, 163, 169 war casualties 178–9
Armitage, Richard 38, 106 see also Blair
Ashdown, Lord Paddy 108–9 Brooke, Rupert 158
Assad, Bashar al- 197–8, 201 Brown, Gordon 9, 11–12
Attlee, Clement 135 Burridge, Air Chief Marshall Sir Brian 49
axis of evil speech 30, 37 Bush Doctrine 11, 31–2, 33, 77, 78, 86, 120,
124, 162
bad faith tradition 16 Bush, George H.W. 79
bandwagoning 132–8, 211 Bush, George W. 6–8, 11, 16, 19, 24, 29, 30,
Beinart, Peter 125 33–4, 37, 43, 48–50, 71, 85–6, 122–5,
Berman, Paul xiv, 83, 125 128, 137, 140, 147–8, 156, 184, 215
Betts, Richard 97 Butler Inquiry 40–1, 63
Biddle, Stephen 215 Byman, Daniel 193–4
Binnendijk, Hans 40 Byzantine ideal-type 76, 92
bioterrorism 101
Bird, Tim 151 cabinet committee system 72
Black, Cofer 106 Cabinet Office 41, 53, 58, 89
Black Hawk Down 26 Cameron, David 73
Blair doctrine 77, 86, 89 Campbell, Alastair 47, 50, 52, 138
Blair’s War see One Man’s War Campbell, Menzies 86
Blair, Tony ix, xi, 1–2, 6–14, 15, 19, 22, 24, Camp Bucca 181
40–64, 69, 73, 77, 80–1, 83–9, 95–6, Carr, E.H. 207
99–101, 127–8, 133–4, 138, 141, 144, The Case for Democracy 81, 123
146, 164, 167, 179, 184, 197, 198, 202, CBRN (nuclear proliferation) 54
207, 208–9, 215, 220 CBW (chemical and biological weapons) 166
televised address 222–3 CENTCOM 143
Blix, Hans 12, 66–7, 189–90 Chalabi, Ahmad 110–12, 127, 128, 171
blood price 20, 142 chapter content summary 19–22
and bandwagoning 132–8 Cheney, Dick 48, 58, 71, 122–5
fallacy of 2 Chicago doctrine/speech 46–7, 49, 89, 96,
Bobbitt, Philip 92 100, 162, 202, 207
Bolton, John 149 Chilcot (Iraq) Inquiry x, xiv–xv, 4, 5–6, 8, 9,
Bowyer, Tom 14 40, 55, 63, 72–4, 85, 96, 109, 153–4,
Boyce, Admiral Sir Michael 52, 54, 60 156, 176, 197, 210
228 Index
Chirac, Jacques 17, 64, 149 Ellison, James 73
choosing war 214–15 Euston Manifesto x–xi
Churchill, Winston 134, 136, 146, 208, 210
Clark, Wesley 126 Fallon, Sir Michael 108, 109
classical realism 161, 162 false intelligence 11–12
Clinton, Bill 6–7, 33, 79, 126 falsification pr1nciple 3
Clinton, Hillary 126 FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth
Coalition Provisional Authority 107 Office) 41, 50, 52, 58, 59, 89, 134,
Coates, David A. 8 141, 145
Cockburn, Patrick 113 Feith, Douglas 149
Cohen, Eliot 79–80 First Armoured Division 25
COIN (counter-insurgency) 214 first strikes vii
conditions concept 62 flaws of expectation 146–51
containment concept 78–80 Foreign Affairs Select Committee 68, 213
Cook, Robin 6, 80, 195 45 Commando deployment 146
cooperative problem-solving 129 Fourth International 83
Cooper, Robert 92–4 Franks, General Tommy 38, 49
Corbyn, Jeremy 197, 202 Freedman, Sir Lawrence 89
Cordesman, Anthony 194–5 French opposition 149–50
The Costs of War 112 Frum, David 38, 157, 168, 183
counterproliferation 36, 189
CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) 147 geopolitical costs, of war 180
Crawford meeting 42, 47, 48–9, 53, 87, 142 Geras, Norman xiv
Cross, Major General Tim 108 Gitlin, Todd 209
Gladstone, William 82, 83–4
Dannatt, General Sir Richard 143 globalization, and liberal world order 100
Dawa Party 112 Global War on Terror viii
Dearlove, Sir Richard 11, 37, 49, 50, 132 Gombert, David 40
De-Ba’athification 107–8, 113, 127, 147, 186 good faith account 18–19
deception 74 Gordian Knot approach 21–2, 74, 206
Declaration of Principles 137 Greenstock, Sir Jeremy 13, 50, 108,
Defence Intelligence Service 97 109–12, 140
Defence Planning Guidance 125 Gulf War (1991) 26, 56, 79, 80, 192, 195
Defence White Papers 142, 147
Delivering Security in a Changing World 142 Hague, Lord William 13, 64–5, 100
Delta of Terrorism 125, 220 Hamad, King 29
democracy, in Iraq 81 Harries, Owen 211
democratic accountability, lack of 29–30 Heath, Edward 137
deterrence hegemonic realists 122
by doubt 27 HEU (highly enriched uranium) 189, 190
and diplomacy 215–19 hindsight bias 163
Deudney, Dan 20, 116, 117, 119, 120–1, 122, History of the English Speaking Peoples 146
126–7, 129–30 Hitchens, Christopher xiv
Deutcher, Isaac 82 Holbrooke, Richard 126
diplomacy, and deterrence 215–19 Hollis, Rosemary 6
disarmament policy 61 Hoon, Geoff 59, 90–1, 142
dishonesty/deceit 4–5 Howard, John 164
dogmatism 39, 40 Hughes, Karen 123
Douri, Izzat al- 192 Hurd, Douglas 135
Downing Street Memo leak 50 Hymans, Jacques 195
Duelfer Commission/Report 166, 171
Duncan Smith, Iain 99–100 IDA (Institute of Defence Analyses) 179
idealism, and realism 207–13
EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) 58 ideas behind war 2
Eisenhower, Dwight 136 ideological roots, and intervention 5
El Baradei, Dr. Mohamed 12, 189–90 Ignatieff, Michael 125
Index 229
Ikenberry, G. John 20, 116, 117, 119, 120–1, Johnson, Lyndon 35, 40, 126, 136
122, 125, 126–7, 129–30 Jones, Brian 14
illegality fixations 4 Jones, Owen 14
inadvertent escalation explanation 8 just war theory 159–60, 162
incompetence dodge 13, 107
insecurity, sources of 44 Kagan, Robert 15
institutional support 10 Kahn, A.Q. 165
international life, tragedy of 219–21 Kaufman, Robert 187, 195
interpretations of the war 5–19 Keightley, General Sir Charles 136
intolerable regimes 81 Kelley, Robert 56
invasion Kennan, George 212
alternative strategies 153, 154, 187–97 Kennedy, Charles 86
case against 152, 153, 170–87 Kennedy, John F. 126
case for 164–70, 197–204 Kerry, John 126
evaluation standards of decision to 153–63 Kilfoyle, Peter 152
Iran Kissinger, Henry 122, 125, 136–7, 206
potential hostility 60 Krauthammer, Charles 33, 168
regional patronage potential 57–8 Krieger, Joel 8
supply of weapons to insurgents 58 Kurdish genocide 165
Iraq Kurdish secession 58
abandonment thesis 170, 183–6
bureaucratic purges, post-war 88, 115 Lake, Anthony 95, 205
casualty figures 171–2 law of the instrument 36
child mortality 166–7, 168, 172–3 legalist tradition 14–16
coups in 27 Lemann, Nicholas 38
De-Ba’athification 107–8, 113, 127, liberal conscience, and regime change 82–94
147, 186 liberal internationalist 126
GDP per capita 168 liberalism 20, 83, 118–27, 129
and inspection bodies 27 liberal managerialism, and Phase IV
internal dissent 28–9 fallacy 107–15
mas regime 215 Libya
military/intelligence disbanding 107–8 intervention in xi, 155, 157, 182, 213
political aftermath 60, 107–15 nuclear programme 200–1
post-war reconstruction 60, 107–15, 167, limitation strategy 75
171, 183–6 limited war, and regime change 75–82
proliferation potential 56 Lin, Bonny 40
refugees 172 Lippmann, Walter 212
road to war 24, 25–30 Logevall, Frederik 39
torture 173–6 Love Actually 6
Iraqi National Congress 171 Luttwak, Edward N. 76
Iraq Inquiry see Chilcot Inquiry
Iraq Liberation Act (1998) 31 McCain, John 184
Iraq Options Papers 37, 53, 58 McEwan, Ian xii
Iraq Survey Group 57, 189 Mackay, Andrew 68–9
Islamic State 111, 155, 168, 217 McLellan, Scott 123
Israel-Palestine Road Map 148 Macmillan, Harold 135
McTernan, John 153, 197–204
Jaafari, Ibrahim al- 112 majority government, realities of 81–2
Jabouri, Kadom al- 221 Makiya, Kanan 83, 125, 164, 173
Jackson, Henry ’Scoop’ 126 Maliki, Nouri al- 184–5
JAM (Jaysh al-Mahdi) ix managerialist accounts 13–14
Jervis, Robert 72–3 Manning, David 7, 37, 43, 45, 48, 49, 54–5, 61,
JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) 41, 46, 50, 85, 97, 98, 143
53, 56, 63, 97–8, 187, 191, 203 Maples, John 69
jihadi groups 183 market democracy, entry to 110
Johnson, Alan 82 market state principle 92
230 Index
Marshall, Alex 151 path dependency 25
Mearsheimer, John 116 Pax Americana 33, 87, 106
MEPP (Middle East Peace Process) 44 Perle, Richard 105–6, 157
Meyer, Sir Christopher 6, 37, 48, 139, 147 Petraeus, General David 146, 156, 214
Middle East Peace Process 55, 95, 128 The Petraeus revolution 149
Milburn, Alan 82 Phase II, in War on terror 35, 45, 47–8
Miliband, David 107 Phase IV fallacy, and liberal
military deterrence 75–6 managerialism 107–15
military occupation, success rate of 102–3 Pigott, General Tony 52
Mitchell, Andrew 108 policy duality, United States 146–51
modernization theory 216 policy momentum 8
MOD (Ministry of Defence) 41, 50, 52, 60, 72, political insanity 94
89, 141, 145, 190 Pollack, Kenneth 56–7, 126, 164
Morgan, Sally 50 poodle explanation 6–8, 19, 139
Morgenthau, Hans 160, 212 Popper, Karl 2–3
multilateralism 202 post-war reconstruction 60, 107–15, 167, 171
Murdoch, Rupert 10–11, 64, 104 Powell, Colin x, 42, 48, 49, 60, 96, 127–8,
muscular diplomacy 91 142, 158
Myers, Stephen 82 Powell, Jonathan 50, 54–5, 89–90, 97,
133, 138
national interest foreign policy 82, 162 power, and morality 207
National Security Strategy 33, 36, 124 Power, Samantha 126
NATO 15, 90, 140, 142, 150 precautionary principle 164, 205
Article V 140 pre-emption 34, 77
neoconservatism 120 premium on haste 64
newness doctrine 105 pre-modern chaos 93
The News of the World 63 presentation strategy 61
NIE (CIA National Intelligence Estimate) 57 preventive wars 34–5, 77
9/11 attacks, consequences of 24, 30, 31, 33, primacy realism 117
36, 43–4, 51, 71, 84, 138–40, 165, Project for a New American Century 79
188, 220 prudential approach 153, 160, 161, 162, 214
Nixon, Richard 136–7 prudent war avoidance 213–15
North Korea scenario 170 public opinion xv–xvi, 3, 61–70
Not in My Name slogan xi punitive retaliation doctrine 98
nuclear terrorism 101 Putin, Vladimir 29, 129, 202
nuclear transfer 218
Quinlan, Sir Michael 196
Obama, Barack 112, 126, 137, 146, 148, 156,
169, 184 Randall, John 67
Oborne, Peter xiii, 15 Rangwala, Glen 14
oil hypothesis 17–18 rationality 161
O’Neill, Brendan xii RCC (Revolutionary Command Council) 192
One Man’s War account 6, 8–14 Reagan, Ronald 78, 137, 148
one per cent doctrine 123 realism 20, 21–2, 118–22, 129, 160–1, 206–22
Operation Desert Fox 45 red-teaming 72
Operation Iraqi Freedom 29, 116, 153 regime change 2, 20–1, 36, 41, 45, 52, 54,
Operation Telic vii–xi, 153, 199 58–61, 65, 164, 181, 212
Osborne, George 104–5, 197 effectiveness of war 102–15
Osirak dilemma 195–6 ideological roots of 72–131
Owen, Wilfed 158 and liberal conscience 82–94
and liberal war 116–30
parliamentary authorization 65–6, 70, 71 and limited war 75–82
Parliamentary Select Committee on Foreign power inflation 94–102
Affairs 208 revolutionary movement 82–94
Parris, Matthew 11 threat inflation 94–102
passivity allegation 111 regime collapse 60
Index 231
regime type 81, 120, 124, 211 Steele, Jonathan 59
Reid, John 82 Straw, Jack x, 29, 43, 48, 49, 50, 60–1, 102,
Remnick, David 125 142, 188, 208
Report of the Iraq Enquiry 168 Suez crisis 136, 141
revolutionary movement, and regime surge strategy 214
change 82–94 surplus of power 212
Rice, Condoleezza 7, 38, 48, 49, 96, 149 Symons, Liz 18
Rice, Susan 126 Syria
Roberts, Andrew 146, 171, 208–9 civil war 111, 155, 163
Robertson, Lord George 90–1, 140 Islamic rebellion in xi
Robinson, Piers 16 potential hostility 60
Rogers, Paul 16 Syria scenario 170
rogue states/regimes 2, 37, 44, 74, 77, 94–100,
103, 130, 217 Tanner, Colonel J.K. 147
rollback concept 78–9, 102 Tebbit, Kevin 143–4
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 134, 136 Tenet, George 38
Ross, Carne 188 Terror and Consent 92
Royal Prerogative 65 Thatcher, Margaret 106–7
Rumsfeld, Donald 36, 38, 39, 52, 62, The Threatening Storm 126
122–5, 149 threat inflation 101
Rycroft, Matthew 24, 62, 64, 173 threat perception 23
threat tolerance 78
Saddam Hussein 26–9, 44–5, 61, 128–9, 139, toughened containment 53
165–7, 169, 180, 188, 192–3, 199–200, Trachtenberg, Marc 2–3
215, 218 Trimble, David 68, 100
Sadr, Muqtada al- 114 Trotskyite influence 82–3
Sands, Phillippe 14 Truman, Harry 35
Saturday xii Trump, Donald 148
Saudi Peace Initiative 57 trust in the state xiii
Scarlett, John 50 Turnbull, Andrew 41
Schachtman, Max 83
Schelling, Thomas 64 unintended consequences 58
Schwartz, Stephen 83 United Nations
scientific realism 161 Security Council 1–2, 8, 14, 40, 61, 65, 135,
SDR (Strategic Defence Review) 90–2 144
Second Infitada 57 Resolution 1409 188
security, public desire for 81–2 Resolution 1441 47, 55, 67, 157
Sedgefield Speech 96 United States
self-harm, among states 212 in Afghanistan 31, 35, 68, 70
Senor, Dan 112–13 assassination attempts on Saddam 27–8, 80
Shapiro, Jacob 215 Britain’s relationship with see Anglo-
Sharansky, Natan 81, 123 American relationship
Shia restraint 59 financial costs to 176–7
The Shield of Achilles 92 neoconservatism 120
SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) 41, 50, policy duality 146–51
52, 141 policy shift 30–1
Sky, Emma 39 rise to Global Power 32
Slaughter, Anne-Marie 116, 125, 126 road to war 24, 29–40
smart sanctions 188 State of the Union addresses 30, 31
social revolutionary ferocity 113 tariffs on UK steel 147
Solely, Clive 68–9 troop commitment numbers 112
Soviet Union, collapse of 32 unipolarity in war 32–4, 118
special relationship see Anglo-American see also Bush
relationship UNMOVIC (UN Monitoring, Verification
Stability Operations in Iraq: An Analysis from and Inspection Commission)
the Land Perspective 147 report 12, 66–7
232 Index
Vietnam, deliberation over 39–40 Wieseltier, Leon 125, 126
Villepin, Dominic de 149 Wilkerson, Lawrence B. 30
violence interdependence 130 Williams, Dr. Michael 105
virtue, running amok 206–22 Wilson, Harold 136, 145
virtue/vice interpretation 15–19 Wilsonianism 120, 126
visionary world-making 30 Wilson, Sir Richard 50
Wilson, Woodrow 120, 129
Wall, Sir Stephen 63 WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) viii,
Waltz, Kenneth 23 8, 11–12, 33, 36, 44, 45–6, 49, 50–4,
The War Against Terrorism: The Second 59, 61, 63–4, 67, 70, 72–3, 80, 90,
Phase 16 93, 95–102, 103, 110, 116, 119, 122,
warlike idealism 2 128, 130–1, 145, 166–7, 171, 178,
warlike liberalism 86–7 181, 187, 189–96, 200, 205, 208–9,
Watkins, Peter 145 210, 215, 219
Webb, Simon 52 Wolfowitz, Paul 36, 52, 122–5, 149, 184
Webster, Daniel 34 worst-case scenarios 60
Weekly Standard 10–11 Worthington, Tony 69

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

Who is the author?

Who is the author?

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/7/2018, SPi

For Jane, Mum, Dad, Em, Pat, Gus, and Molly

For the writing of this book, I am in the debt of many people.

¹³ Ian McKewan, Saturday (London: Random House, 2005), pp. 69–70.

HE’S GOT EM. LET’S GET HIM.

³ Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton:

EXPLAINING IRAQ: I NTERPRETATIONS SO FAR

²⁵ Joanna Chung, ‘Unbiased Murdoch Stands By His Views’, Financial Times, 27

²⁹ Joint Staff, ‘Iraq: Status of WMD Programs’, 9 September 2002.

⁴ Matthew Rycroft, Iraq Inquiry Testimony [Henceforth abbreviated ‘IIT’], 10 September

Before moving onto the invaders’ calculations, we should consider Iraq’s.⁵

PART II. WASHINGTON’S W AR: CO NF IDE NCE

PART III. LONDON: BRITISH CALCULATIONS

The Road to War

⁸² JIC Assessment, 28 November 2001.

⁸⁴ Alastair Campbell, IIT, 12 January 2010, p. 23.

⁹⁹ Christopher Meyer, IIT, 26 November 2009, pp. 26–8.

¹³⁷ Blair to Bush, ‘Note on Iraq’, 28 July 2002.

PART IV. CARRYING OPINION

¹⁵³ ‘Brits 45 Mins from Doom’, The Sun, 25 September 2002.

British warmakers hardly stopped to consider ‘whether’ to strike. Powerful

In interpreting Iraq’s warnings, commentators rightly call for a more rigorous,

FROM LIMITED WAR TO REGIME CHANGE

The essence of strategy is limitation, the balancing of power and commitments

¹⁶ ‘Bush: Don’t Wait for Mushroom Cloud’, CNN, 8 October 2002.

²¹ Letter, Eliot A. Cohen, Commentary, 1 July 1992.

REGIME CHANGE: THE LIBERAL CONSCIENCE,

‘Regime change’ can also be traced to two traditions in foreign policy, of

²⁸ Amnesty International, Annual Report, 2016–17, pp. 196–8, at https://www.amnesty.org/

⁵⁴ ‘Blair: Cast Out Milosevic’, BBC News, 4 May 1999.

THREAT INFLATION, POWER I NFLATION : THE FALSE

⁷¹ Bush, ‘State of the Union Address’, 29 January 2002.

⁷⁷ See Caprioli & Trumbore, ‘Rhetoric versus Reality’.

Breaking States 101

⁸⁹ ‘Transcript of Blair’s Speech to Congress’, CNN, 17 July 2003, at http://edition.cnn.com/

WOU LD WAR W ORK?

In a memo of 25 March 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked a question

⁹⁴ Memo, Jack Straw to Tony Blair, 25 March 2002.

Breaking States 103

Breaking States 105

⁹⁹ George Osborne, ‘A Soldier Breaks Ranks’, The Spectator, 1 November 2003.

Breaking States 107

Liberal Managerialism and The ‘Phase IV’ Fallacy

Breaking States 109

¹¹⁵ Michael Fallon, Hansard v.613 House of Commons, 14 July 2016.

Breaking States 111

Breaking States 113

Breaking States 115

A L IBERAL WAR AFTER ALL

We now turn to an argument that challenges my interpretation. According to

Breaking States 117

Part I. Liberalism, Realism, and War

A restatement of deﬁnitions is in order, as well as an account of ‘liberal wars’

Breaking States 119

¹³⁸ John A. Thompson, ‘Wilsonianism: The Dynamics of a Conﬂicted Concept’, International

Breaking States 121