A Known and Unknown War

 No war is inevitable, but I remember thinking the Iraq War would be the first.  

In 2002, the George W. Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq. They searched for specious evidence and dubious actors to (falsely) prove that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they pushed hawkish views and fear-mongered about a “mushroom cloud” onto the American public to get public opinion behind the war, they relied on a sympathetic media and sheepish Democrats who capitulated to Bush for concern of being labeled “soft on terror,” they moved headlong into war plans that failed to account for how democracy in Iraq would spring forth from a protracted occupation. The largest anti-war demonstrations in history, numbering between six and ten million during protests in early 2003, failed to stop a fait accompli; dissenting voices went unheeded; the sizable public opposition (almost 43 percent of Americans at one point) to the invasion failed to alter the course of the war—it was never given a chance to succeed.¹

Many came to the Washington Monument in D.C. on March 15, 2003 to protest the war, which would start five days later (Wikimedia Commons). 

I was 22 years old when the United States invaded Iraq, when I watched the war move from an abstract possibility to a slow-moving, predetermined reality. I was young, and did not yet know what the war would do to me. For those who don’t remember the war, or didn’t live through it—including many of my students—it is hard to convey the bizarre, immobilizing, disorienting time after 9/11. The feeling of overwhelming helplessness, a feeling that made me question the rationality of my world, was all very new to me. Everything seemed so sudden and fatal.

I tried to do something about it. I meandered toward a political identity after the September 11th attacks. I simply did not buy Bush’s line in his September 20th, 2001 speech to Congress that terrorists attacked us because “they hate our freedoms.”² That line from Bush’s speech is forever seared into my memory. Islamophobia invigorated our foreign and domestic policies, and I was disturbed that the Bush administration could curtail democracy at home in the name of “freedom” abroad with impunity. I tried to make sense of my times. I started reading the New York Times daily—I soon added the Wall Street Journal, Guardian, and Financial Times for balance. I purchased a subscription to The Nation, a magazine that openly opposed the war. I started reading books on U.S. politics and the history of American foreign policy. The more I read, the more informed I was, the angrier I became that the Iraq War was going to, had to happen.

After the invasion, I remember how my anger motivated a lukewarm enthusiasm for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential candidacy. Maybe Kerry could stop Bush and reverse course in Iraq. Maybe I donated money to Kerry’s campaign, I don’t recall. I donated more than enough attention to it that I do know. Kerry’s loss only deepened my hopelessness about the war. Before his electoral defeat, the U.S. had learned of the torture at Abu Ghraib and witnessed the largest battles since the Vietnam War as armed forces fought to retake Fallujah. Shortly into Bush’s second term, the poor planning beyond faith in democratic capitalism spurred massive sectarian violence. By 2007, the year of the “surge,” I was in graduate school getting a PhD in History—I planned to write a dissertation about the United States’ exorbitant military power since the Cold War and why American democracy failed to resist it. If I couldn’t change my circumstances, I could find out where they came from.³

Now, twenty years later, I am living through the making of the Iraq War as history. I’m seeing how historical memory is codified, how the creation of public memory works against the preservation of my own. My formative political experience is subjected to retrospective analysis, to unwitting, external complication.

Southern, Iraq (Apr. 2, 2003) — U.S. Army Sgt. Mark Phiffer stands guard duty near a burning oil well in the Rumaylah Oil Fields in Southern Iraq. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Arlo K. Abrahamson. (Wikimedia Commons)

Time and distance are essential to the historian’s craft. They help us pursue the false promise of objectivity.⁴ I should embrace them when thinking about the Iraq War, but I don’t. Not yet. I bristle when reading recent reflections on the war. With the twentieth anniversary of the war upon us, I’ve read mea culpas from (former) neoconservatives who now regret their support for the war, who have “concluded that U.S. foreign policy should not fixate on exporting democracy” but should not give up on promoting human rights. I have also read post facto justifications for the war, authors who argue that the invasion of Iraq was a judicious, necessary act because it rid Saddam Hussein of power and ensured that “Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.”⁵

I’m told that Iraq now has lessons that can be applied, not just learned. The U.S. military must not forget the lessons of counterinsurgency in an age of “great-power competition.”⁶ This perspective lends itself to articulating what can be described as a “Lost Cause” narrative for Iraq—that by withdrawing from Iraq in 2011 after eight years of war (even as the U.S. returned to Iraq in 2014 to defeat ISIL), “the United States lost its ability to preserve the fragile but hopeful trends that had emerged there” after the invasion. The United States can still remake the world; we must reject a “no more Iraqs” mindset if it wants to be an effective global power.⁷

Journalists have written extensively about the Iraq War since the invasion, but now academic historians, emboldened by access to interviews with Bush administration officials and declassified documents, have started to write about it. The most renowned, Confronting Saddam Hussein, by historian Melvyn Leffler, laments the “tragedy” of the Iraq War, arguing that, contrary to my original perspective, the Iraq War was not inevitable. In Leffler’s account, Bush and the architects of the Iraq War were obsessed with the possibility of another terrorist attack; they genuinely feared that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons and sought a nuclear weapon. Leffler downplays ideology and global oil markets as factors in the coming of the war. Dependent upon interviews with Bush administration officials, Leffler’s book aims to be the “standard” historical account of the war, arguing that “too much fear, too much power, too much hubris—and insufficient prudence” characterized the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.⁸

These “revisionist” narratives are an expected reaction to the clear-cut, normative interpretation of the war I remember: the Iraq War was destined for failure. Time and distance—and new archival materials—are doing their jobs, I suppose. We are getting the nuanced, detached reexamination of the war that we were due: Mistakes were made, foresight was absent, but the best intentions for Iraq and the United States went into the prosecution of the war. Greater planning, a clearer strategy, open dialogue, and debate (instead of groupthink) could have prevented catastrophic outcomes. Maybe the war could have been better, if only the United States invaded Iraq differently.

The anniversary of the Iraq War arrives one year into the war in Ukraine, when the United States has moved on from fighting terrorism to confronting new threats from China and Russia. History reflects the present, and I suspect the revisionists’ disinterest in structural explanations for America’s failure in Iraq (oil, the dynamics of the national security state) are partly due to the state of U.S. foreign policy, where we see agency in U.S. power once again. U.S. arms sales and assistance to Ukraine has turned a certain defeat to Russia into a potential stalemate; American power has preserved the integrity of a nascent democratic country for over a year. American foreign policy is once again a force for good; no need to agonize over the unredeemable past, one might, and will, argue.⁹

I fear therefore that in a new age of “imperial” or “colonial” war, when U.S. foreign policy has regained meaning after twenty years of a War on Terror that produced two failed wars and wasted billions of dollars, the tendency will be to reduce complexity, limit accountability for America’s failures. The scholarly obligation to revise our priors in an era of “great-power competition” will obscure the historical context for the Iraq War rather than illuminate it. An overdependence on contingency among the Iraq War revisionists–analyzing what could have gone right, instead of what was destined to go wrong–will become the handmaiden of poor counterfactuals.

A 2007 protest sign in opposition to the growing cost of the U.S.’s occupation of Iraq (Wikimedia Commons).

Enter historians, who eschew this thinking. And many have done so over the last twenty years. Historians have shown that the Iraq War has a long history before 9/11. The War in Iraq was a product of “America’s way of war” in the Middle East, one that had a history in the 1980s, in a post-Vietnam era, when the United States formed an alliance with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.¹⁰ The invasion of Iraq also had much to do with a Cold War orientalist foreign policy that met the unipolar era after the Cold War, which supplied the American exceptionalism that fed the Iraq War.¹¹ Historians like Joseph Stieb have argued that the origins of the war lie in the 1990s, when the “containment” of Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War morphed into a policy of regime change by 2001.¹² Others have examined Iraq as a post-9/11 story, with an eye toward understanding how Iraq begot Donald Trump.¹³ We also have good accounts of the decision-making prior to the war, even if many of the memoirs from Bush administration figures are unreliable.¹⁴

Because of this scholarship, the narrative I knew no longer makes sense. I now think, like the “revisionists,” that the Iraq War was not preordained. The war was not simply a reaction to 9/11, but a culmination of a series of choices made since the 1990s—not just a “war of choice.”¹⁵ In 2003, I was too blinded by the present, by my youth, what I had not read, what I did not know. I’ve accepted this, while I remain afraid that the ways I remembered the war are slipping away. My version of the Iraq War defined my intellectual path, my politics. It became sacrosanct to me. Historians must have empathy for their actors, but right now I have too much for my 22-year-old self—and for those whose lives were shaped by the war in more profound ways than I was.

An indelible image and moment. Have two words or a banner better expressed the tragedy of a war? “Mission Accomplished” banner that greeted President Bush when he came aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 (Wikimedia Commons).  

I will let go, eventually. I am gathering research for a book on the War on Terror, and that will force me to see things clearer, to get closer to objectivity. The writing of recent history demands a reconciliation between the self and the scholar, for one’s willingness to rely upon historical evidence to defy individual memories, to change one’s mind, to disabuse oneself of preconceived notions.  For now, though, anniversaries summon emotions from hindsight, not historiographies. Twenty years after the start of the Iraq War, I’d like to think that I have sufficient introspection about who I was and what I’ve learned since 2003—which seems to be in short supply among the architects of the Iraq War, who seem more content with rationalizing, or ignoring, their way out of thinking about the repercussions of the war.

There are other historians like me. Many of my friends can claim the Iraq War as an event that reorganized their lives in some capacity. Some, like me, will write about the war. The twenty-five-year mark on the declassification of national security documents related to Iraq is on the horizon, and more archives are expected to open before then. Historians will revise our premises through history. We will use history to understand our present ourselves—as historians and citizens of a global empire. Here is the power of the historian’s craft.

Given the state of the historical profession, though, I wonder how many historians will be able to pursue this project alongside me.¹⁶ How much more scholarship on the Iraq War—indeed, on any historical topic—can be done at a time when the profession is being hollowed out by decades of budget cuts and indifference to the fate of the profession? When the field of history is left uncrowded by historians with full-time employment, historical actors—with self-serving intentions—who wish to exculpate and justify their actions will fill the vacuum. Will the historical memory of the Iraq War be created by those wishing to elide the past, to flatten contestable moments to serve an inexorable conclusion? Without a thriving historical discipline, our narratives of the past will be determined by those looking to force history’s salience on a particular version of the present, who exclude interpretations of history beyond its “lessons.”  While I lack confidence in the future of the profession, I will always have faith in the power of my discipline to shape the human condition, to change how we view the world. I just wish I had more colleagues to share that faith with.

1. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Public Support for Invasion of Iraq Holds Steady,” Gallup, Feb. 28, 2003.
2. “President Bush Addresses the Nation,” Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2001.
3. That dissertation became my first book, where I explored how the political economy of American military spending created a “Cold War coalition” that limited the possibilities for a more democratic politics and foreign policy in the United States. Michael Brenes, For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).
4. For more on the elusive but aspirational goal of “objectivity” as the basis for the historian’s craft, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
5. Max Boot, “What the Neocons Got Wrong,” Foreign Affairs, March 10, 2023; Eli Lake, “The Iraq War, 20 Years Later,” Commentary (March 2023).
6. On the “lessons” of Iraq, see Peter R. Mansoor, “The Counterinsurgent’s Curriculum,” Foreign Affairs, March 13, 2003; and Paul Poast, “The Iraq War’s Lessons are Easier to See Than to Learn,” World Politics Review, March 17, 2023.
7. Hal Brands, “Blundering into Baghdad,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2023).
8. Melvyn Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 252.
9. On the efforts to forget, or move on from the Iraq War, see Stephen Wertheim, “Iraq and the Pathologies of Primacy,” Foreign Affairs, March 17, 2023.
10. On the military history of America’s involvement in Iraq, see Williamson Murray and Kevin M. Woods, The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Knopf, 2004); Michael Knights, Cradle of Conflict: Iraq and the Birth of Modern U.S. Military Power (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005); Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2017); and Marjorie Galelli, Searching for Victory: How Counterinsurgency Shaped Operation Iraqi Freedom (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, forthcoming). On the “American way of war,” the classic text is Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). For a counterpoint, see Brian M. Linn, “The American Way of War Revisited,” Journal of Military History, Vol. 66 Issue 2 (April 2002), 501–33.
11. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945: Third Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). On unipolarity, see Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); and Nuno P. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). On Iraq and American exceptionalism, see Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
12. Joseph Stieb, The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990–2003 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
13. Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (New York: Viking, 2021).
14. Michael J. Mazarr, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (New York: Public Affairs, 2019); Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2020). For memoirs from Bush administration officials, see Condoleeza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011); Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008); Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2011); and L. Paul Bremer with Malcolm McConnell, My Year In Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Threshold Editions, 2006).
15. Richard N. Haas, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
16. Daniel Bessner, “The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession,” New York Times, Jan. 14, 2023.

Michael Brenes

Michael Brenes teaches history at Yale University. He is the author of "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy."