Thread by @joestieb

This is a solid review of Coll's book by Gideon Rose, but Rose, and to a lesser extent Coll, still lean a little too hard on the "misperception" thesis of the Iraq War, with the resulting narrative of the war as a "tragedy."

Rose, for example, argues/foreignaffairs.com/reviews/how-ir…

that: “The Iraq War shows what happens when neither side knows either.”

The US misread Saddam, believing that he was trying to preserve WMD programs or actual WMD. Saddam misread the United States, believing that it already knew he was disarmed and just wanted to use/

inspections and other means to overthrow him. The result is the Iraq War as a tragic misunderstanding that could have been avoided had each side known the other's true intentions and capabilities.

Coll, Rose, Leffler, Tony Lake, and many others have gravitated to this thesis/

and it definitely has a lot of truth to it. It's part of what I call the "security school" explanation for the Iraq War, which sees the war as a product of the US pursuit of security in the post-9/11 atmosphere against the conjoined threat of WMD, terrorism, and rogue states/

The subtext of this argument is that if the US had known Iraq wasn't actually a threat, there would have been no war.

But there are two problems with this explanation. First, the Bush admin. often argued that war was necessary to prevent SH from ever/tnsr.org/wp-content/upl…

building significant WMD. At times, they declared that he had a major arsenal now, and at times they argued that he would soon have such an arsenal (esp related to nuclear weapons). So they were slippery on how imminent the threat was, but they easily could have gone to war/

as a truly preventive war, one against a hypothetical future threat. That would negate the misperception thesis: even if he doesn't have WMD now, he COULD have them in the future, so we have to take him out bc we can't trust him (this is war to prevent a shift in the balance of/

power).

The second problem with the misperception-tragedy thesis is this was also a war of hegemony: beating down any potential threat to U.S. power, asserting U.S. resolve post-9/11 (Ahsan Butt makes this argument very well), and spreading lib/dem/market ideology to transform/

the Middle East and hopefully undercut the root causes of terrorism.

In short, key actors in the admin and the larger public discourse wanted this war and worked assiduously before and after 911 to bring it about, seizing on 9/11 to link the terrorism problem to Iraq.

These/

folks, especially Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney, were so convinced the Saddam had these weapons and had to be toppled that they didn't even want to do inspections and worked to discredit them.

This is a problem for the misperception thesis: they did not want to even try to/

seek out the information that might show that Saddam wasn't a threat. They were out to knock off Saddam to achieve a set of larger goals, and it seems like nothing would have dissuaded them from this goal.

So ultimately I think the misperception argument is important but/

flawed. The resulting narrative of the war as a tragedy, moreover, risks letting policy-makers off the hook, as tragedy tends to imply forces beyond human control or understanding.

In short, I don't think we stumbled into this war as much as the misperception/tragedy narrative/

suggests. I think we made this war happen, and as people like @stephenwertheim have argued, it should prompt deeper reflections about the U.S. role in the world.