And, of course, there is the ongoing debate over ultimate responsibility for the war’s human, financial, and strategic costs to the US, Iraq, and the region.Īll four authors agree that, to at least some degree, the war was a failure for the United States. Then there are the many questions about the war’s proponents, including not only key figures in the Bush administration but also members of Congress and influential pundits.
There is also the debate over the true causes of the war, including everything from Americans’ fear of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and another 9/11 to the more ideological desire to end Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein’s brutality and transform the region. These include consideration of the 1991-2003 ‘containment era,’ during which the US maintained ‘no fly’ zones, supported UN Security Council sanctions against Iraq, carried out occasional airstrikes on Iraqi targets, and ultimately made ‘regime change’ a matter of US policy via the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. With the advantage of time and distance, they weigh in on a number of debates familiar to scholars of American foreign policy, diplomatic history, and strategic studies. MacDonald, and David Palkki-have crafted insightful, nuanced assessments, each of which deserves a close, careful read. The four specialists in this roundtable-Jane K. Now twenty years on, we are still grappling with many of the most basic questions about that fateful decision and its aftermath: Why did the Bush administration (joined by leaders of the UK and other countries) decide to invade Iraq? Why did so many things go wrong? Why were postwar planning and policy implementation so inept? What have been the long-term effects for the US, its coalition partners, the region, and the Iraqi people? In short, what lessons, if any, can we learn from the war? From the perspective of the 2020s, some new and somewhat less conventional questions also command our attention: To what extent did the Iraq War contribute to America’s current predicament of apparent discontentment and polarization? Did the war play a major role in the long-term erosion of Americans’ trust in their leaders and institutions? The counterterrorism security paradigm of the Bush era focused on counterinsurgency against non-state actors in adversarial or failing states, and it entailed the expansion of America’s force projection capabilities (‘stop them there before they attack us here’), expansion of the surveillance state (ostensibly to prevent another 9/11), pragmatic partnerships with a wide array of governments (many of them authoritarian), moral compromises (Guantánamo, ‘extraordinary rendition’), and of course major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Īrguably the most critical turning point in the War on Terror-the US-led invasion of Iraq-commenced on March 20, 2003. The War on Terror defined US foreign policy in the first decade of this century.
Introduction by Joe Renouard, Johns Hopkins University, Nanjing, China
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