Iraq Was a Setback for Conservatism

By W. James Antle III

Thursday, March 16, 2023

 

The invasion of Iraq was the biggest foreign-policy blunder in a generation. The United States went to war with a country that had no meaningful connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks to disarm it of weapons it did not have, ultimately to create a regime that resembles a liberal democracy only in comparison with Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.

 

We were not greeted as liberators. It was not a cakewalk. Freedom was not on the march. The global wave of democracy did not wash over the Middle East.

 

The Iraq War eliminated a regional counterweight to Iran and replaced it with a government in Baghdad far more congenial to Tehran. The chaos resulting from the war unleashed the Islamic State, initially empowering a faction more closely related to the al-Qaeda death cult that carried out 9/11 than was the deposed Iraqi government. The war fractured the international coalition responding to those attacks and diverted resources and attention from the Afghanistan War, which was a clear-cut retaliation for the mass murders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

 

All this came at a cost of $3 trillion (according to an estimate by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes), the deaths of more than 4,400 U.S. troops and the wounding of nearly 32,000 more, the displacement of millions of Iraqis, and the devastation of Iraq’s Christian community.

 

The lesson that leaders of rogue states took from the Iraq War was that it was best to actually have weapons of mass destruction to deter Western military powers. This lesson was reinforced by Barack Obama’s “kinetic military action” in Libya toppling Moammar Qaddafi, whose surrender of his WMD had been one of the unambiguous achievements of the Iraq War.

 

The United States, tyrants concluded, might want regime change in your country but will not actually invade if there’s a serious WMD threat.

 

And all this unfolded as China grew in power and international influence, while the United States was devoting years to the quagmire in Iraq.

 

The Iraq War was followed by years in which our enemies, at great cost to America in blood and treasure, grew stronger rather than weaker, further incentivizing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by hostile and tyrannical governments, the very behavior we intended to deter. The only measures by which it can be judged a success are that Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, eventually obtained a functioning government.

 

Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

 

Far less important but of some consequence, the Iraq War was an enormous setback for modern American conservatism. Absent this ill-fated Mesopotamian adventure, George W. Bush might have been able to hold on longer to the post-9/11 moment of national unity. Bush’s 2004 margin of victory and Republican congressional majorities might have been bigger, with the latter enduring at least until the election following the financial crisis in 2008.

 

What could have been done with this power? We’ll never know. In the public’s mind, the Iraq War exceeds the Great Recession and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina as a monument of Republican failure.

 

The Bush-era GOP eschewed conservatism for a kind of radicalism. In order to justify the war in Iraq, Republicans spoke with increasing naïveté of the ease with which democracy could be exported to a variety of societies by force of arms.

 

“We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” Bush said in his second inaugural address. “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”

 

This was always nonsense, however well intentioned. Even granting greater global interconnectedness, there is ample precedent for American freedom and security surviving the failure of liberty elsewhere. To the degree there is a relationship, why Iraq rather than, say, China, which has far greater reach into and impact on the United States? Security, more than the survival of liberty, was what we were seeking by ousting Saddam. And the governments we were propping up in Baghdad and Kabul were arguably less hostile to Washington but hardly models of ordered liberty as we would understand it. Liberty in a place like Iraq simply wasn’t something we knew how to create.

 

The United States’ post-9/11 interactions with Saudi Arabia also clearly communicated to anyone who cared to pay attention that not even the most idealistic members of Bush’s national-security team really believed our country’s vital interests and deepest beliefs were one. Saudi Arabia is not a free society. Its government and wealthy individual Saudis hardly have a spotless record on funding terrorism. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens; the kingdom has been sued by the families of 9/11 victims. And yet the U.S.–Saudi relationship was little changed by the attacks because the country is a useful ally in the region — not least on counterterrorism efforts, and especially compared with the realistic alternatives.

 

George Will, the dean of Washington conservative columnists, compared the fledgling Iraqi democracy to a baseball team that was just two players away from winning a championship. “Unfortunately, the two players are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig,” Will quipped. “Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.”

 

It became a common conceit on the right during this period that to express such authentically conservative skepticism of the United States’ ability to create a free society in Iraq was giving in to left-wing defeatism and despair. To believe there was something unique about the American system that could not easily be transplanted to other countries and cultures, especially with as blunt an instrument as military force, was somehow unpatriotic.

 

Whatever the problems of contemporary conservatism — and there are many — the Right today is far more willing to grapple with the lessons of Iraq. It is no longer taken for granted that projects like the Iraq War are necessary to defend America against its enemies. Conservative observations about the limits of government, the unintended consequences that often spring from interference in complex systems, and the immense difficulty of top-down social change apply abroad as well as at home.