 The debrief is a production of faculty at the National Security Affairs Department at the U.S. Naval War College. The views presented here are those of the speakers, and do not represent the positions of the Department of Defense or any of its components. Welcome to the debrief, a production of faculty affiliated with the National Security Affairs Department at the U.S. Naval War College. I'm your co-host, Theo Milanopoulos. It has been more than 20 years since the United States launched its invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the origins of the war remained highly contested among scholars and policy makers alike. As tensions continued to flare in the region, and thousands of U.S. troops continued to deploy to military bases within Iraq, unpacking the history of American involvement in the country is critical to understanding the United States' role in the modern Middle East. Here to help us to understand the causes and consequences of the Iraq War is Joseph Steeb, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, and author of the regime change consensus, Iraq and American Politics, 1990 to 2003. Joe, thanks for joining us here on the debrief. It's great to be here. In your book, you argue that in order to understand the Iraq War in 2003, that we have to look beyond the initial pre-war period in 2002 and the early part of 2003 and look back into the 1990s. What was happening during this period in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War that helped explain the emergence of this conflict in 2003? Well, what I'm interested in in the 1990s and why I think it's a critical decade is because you get the emergence of what I call the regime change consensus. Now the policy toward Iraq in the 1990s was containment. And this was using sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones, and occasional military strikes to try to limit Iraqi influence in the region, deter aggression, and ultimately to try to disarm Iraq if it's WMD programs. This policy ran into a lot of problems in the 1990s. Saddam obstructed the inspectors. They were never able to fully assure the United Nations, the United States. They had found, you know, documented and destroyed everything. The sanctions caused a lot of collateral damage inside Iraqi society, became very unpopular, a number of other problems ensued. And so in American politics, right, in kind of the political establishment, this new consensus formed that because Iraq wasn't really showing evidence of changed intentions, because it was this totalitarian regime, containment would never ultimately solve the problem. We need to pivot towards regime change. That's the basic story I think you have to understand about the 1990s. This is something that happens not just kind of in the neoconservative circles, but I would say across much of the political spectrum, including in much of the Democratic Party. And so it's critical for understanding why when the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, makes this case for war in the spring and summer and fall of 2002, why so much of the establishment, so much of Congress, so much of the media are pretty on board with much of what they're saying. And I think that's a critical step to understanding the Iraq war as a whole. So you're suggesting that this consensus is not just within the foreign policy circles, but across the political spectrum, Democratic and Republican alike. Of course, it was a Democratic president that signed the 1998 legislation that made regime change the ambition in Iraq, in the country. Why did this regime change consensus forge? Particularly among those who maybe were more skeptical of those kinds of emissions in the 1990s. It's a good question. I think part of the reason was you have to look at a larger global context and larger context of ideas. And of course, there were problems with the policy. There was a more technical policy debate about, are the inspections working? Could we change the sanctions to target the regime more and to take some of the pressure off the Iraqi people? That debate is all going on. But I like to look at kind of larger trends about how Americans are thinking about the world at the time to understand how you got not just neo-conservatives like Crystal and Kagan on board, but lots of Democrats. I think about Senator Robert Carey, one of the co-sponsors of the Iraq Liberation Act. And for him, the end of the Cold War, and for a lot of Democrats, a lot of liberals, the end of the Cold War meant that, at least in their minds, the United States shouldn't have to compromise on its values anymore. During the Cold War, we had to make all kind of compromises with pretty nasty regimes in much of the world because they were anti-communist. But for Carey or for Representative Stephen Selaar, another major regime change booster for a lot of people in the Democratic Party, at the end of the Cold War meant that we could be much more universalistic about values. And we could, the fact that there was no Soviet counterbalancer, meant that we could go after states like Iraq, form democracies there, right? And ultimately improve human rights in those societies. And so I think that larger context of kind of a mix of unipolarity and universalism helps us understand how this became such a wide consensus. Instead of being limited to sort of the hyper hawks that we often talk about when it comes to wars of regime change. So kind of in this unipolar moment as some of these scholars were putting it at the time, this end of history moment where democratic values and liberalism, lower case L, is ascendant, right? This is very much part of that mix. Yes, what I like to think about it is if, at the end of the 1990s, if you're someone like Richard Haas, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, he was a staffer who kind of developed some of the main ideas of containment in the first Bush administration. If you were like him going for Congress in 1998 to say, we shouldn't be pursuing regime change, we should be modifying containment so that becomes sustainable. You had to argue against Iraqi exiles who were saying, please help us liberate our country. You had to argue that ultimately the United States will have to live with Saddam Hussein for a long time. And ultimately the Iraqi people will have to stay under this tyrannical regime, more or less indefinitely, right? Maybe until Saddam hands it off to his sons. We have to remember that Saddam at this time is getting older, but not all that old. I believe he was 65 when he was executed in 2005. And so that was an argument that maybe in hindsight makes a lot of sense given the way the Iraq war turned out. But it was a difficult argument to make in the mood of the times. And it opened you up to a lot of accusations of not wanting to use American power for good. And of course, during that time as well, the United States was itself enforcing with the use of force, with troop deployments some of these tactics for the purpose of containment that was ultimately proving to be unsuccessful, or at least less successful than what the policy goals were aiming for. Yes, and I think one of the key questions of the 1990s is, how do you measure the Iraqi threat? Do you measure it by its capabilities? Well, in that sense, Ketemi was clearly a success. We invaded the country in 2003. We found that the Iraqi army was a shadow of its former self. The Iraqi economy never fully recovered. We found much of their infrastructure would be degraded. And so if that was the goal, capabilities, or that was the measurement, then it was a total success. But if it was intentions, it didn't seem to most people, I think this was a reasonable way of looking at it. It did not seem like Saddam was really changing his intentions that he ever would. We had crushed his economy, crushed his military base, and he still was obstructing the inspectors. There was a lot of great research that's come out since explaining the complicated reasons why the Iraqis obstructed the inspectors, why we never were able to find 100% of the nature of those programs. But if you were sitting there in 1988, I don't think it was unreasonable to say, well, his intentions have not changed. And so as soon as Ketemi is lifted, he's going to go right back to becoming this WMD armed threat to stability in the region. And of course, one of the major pivot points is the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. The Social Administration has just come into office. Within nine months, these attacks happen on their watch. What role did the attacks play in shaping momentum for this kind of preventive action? And how did it shape, how did the Bush administration itself, those who were in office, those who had the ability to set the agenda for the aftermath of those attacks, shape the choice to go to war? Because of course, as you're suggesting, there were still potential other options, and including many senators who were suggesting that there were other options for deterring Saddam Hussein from acquiring or using these weapons. Yes. So I mean, my argument, the regime change consensus is really an argument about ends, not means, right? It's an argument that there really is ultimately no way out of this showdown, long-term confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime other than regime change. But if you look at American policy, even in the first nine months of the Bush administration, there wasn't this decisive sudden move to seek regime change in the region. They did a number of policy reviews and they kind of came up with nothing, right? There was just a division between some of the more hawkish members who wanted to put more pressure on, and some who said there's really no point, right? Colin Powell wanted to do smarter sanctions, right? More targeted sanctions. And so September 11th does a couple of things, right? On one hand, it causes the Bush administration and most American policymakers to rethink pretty much every security threat out there, right? And if we had been caught so off guard, if our imaginations had been seemingly too small to encompass something like 9-11, what other threats are we missing? And this is where some connections, at least conceptually, start to be made about, well, what could have made September 11th worse? This is like a question that Dick Cheney asks shortly after 9-11. Well, what if there was a state capable of developing nuclear weapons, right, or other weapons of mass destruction that could hand them off to terrorists, thereby negating normal deterrence, right? So they get to strike the United States. And, of course, the terror scale what they want, which is WMD, to carry out a 9-11, or many 9-11s, on a much greater scale. So that was something that people were rethinking in this atmosphere of fear and vulnerability. And some people then gravitated from that hypothetical threat to Iraq, right? And that is where I think the presence of a number of key, very hawkish, what I would call the neo-conservative policy makers in the Bush administration were very, very important, right? Because they made these connections from sort of hypothetical threats, right, to the specific target of Iraq. And what they argued in particular was the United States after 9-11 needs to do something big, needs to do something grand to shake up the Middle East to deter other potential threats, right, particularly state sponsors. There was a belief, I think, among people like Dick Cheney and Paul Wilfwoods and Donald Rumsfeld that the United States was attacked on September 11th in large part because it was seen as weak. It was seen as having retreated after having its nose bloodied in Lebanon or in Somalia or in many other interventions. And so it needed to go after a big target, someone who had been challenging the United States, thumbing their nose at the United States, if you will, for a long time. And so Iraq kind of came together as a key, almost nexus, right, of all these different impulses in American foreign policymaking. And so I think that those policy makers were critical. And I'm not sure, this may lead to a different question, but I'm not sure that a different administration with different personnel would have made the same linkages. So that was actually gonna be my next question. You've written recently that a hypothetical Gore administration had the election of 2000 turned out differently in terms of the ultimate resolution, would have not elected to go to war in Iraq in March of 2003. And I was wondering if you could help unpack that and why you think hypothetical Gore administration, given how much momentum would have been behind trying to take on a big target like Iraq, a longstanding adversary, why Al Gore as president would have taken a different course? Yeah, it's a great question. So keeping in mind that there's just a certain amount of inherent uncertainty to this question as a hypothetical, I would say that there's a key difference between your priority as a foreign policymaker and your general goals, right? What is seen as a desirable goal. And within the regime change consensus, you can fit both of those things. So Gore in the 1990s had been very hawkish on Iraq. He called on George H.W. Bush to shoot down helicopters and to intervene post-desert storm to try to bring down the regime. And he remained one of the more hawkish members of the Clinton administration toward Iraq. But when you look at the circle of advisors, that he was most likely to put together after 9-11, the people who were advising him on the campaign, I think there's only one who after 9-11 would have done what, excuse me, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wilfulwitz and many other members of the Bush administration did, which was say Iraq is gotta be the priority. Iraq is how we win the war on terror once we've taken care of, or I should put that in air quotes, taken care of Afghanistan. I think only Joe Lieberman would have done that, right? Joe Lieberman signed in 1988. He sponsored the 1988 Recreation Act. He had signed statements from think tanks in the 90s saying we need to take down this regime. I'm not sure anyone else had the same level of fixation on Iraq to set the agenda in that direction. And here's kind of my main piece of evidence for this. When you, I think I've read basically every op-ed written about Iraq between 2001 and 2003, or every policy report, right? Every congressional testimony. And in the three or four months after September 11th, the almost exclusively the only people calling for a focus on regime change in Iraq as a response to September 11th, right? As the next thing we need to do are neoconservatives and Republicans. I, you see very few Democrats with the exception of Joe Lieberman, actually, calling for the same thing. And so that leads me to believe that in a Gore administration, you likely would not have had someone say we need to do Iraq next. Now there's all kinds of other possibilities. Gore could have ratcheted up pressure. That could have led to some form of conflict. He could have expanded no-fly zones. He could have supported the Iraqi opposition, all kinds of things. But a full-scale invasion, kind of betting the farm on Iraq, I see that as less likely. And of course, Joe Lieberman was famously the vice presidential nominee on the Gore-Lieberman ticket. So having him in the administration as vice president may have helped drive at least some of that conversation internally, but as you're suggesting, some of these other players may not have jumped on the same kind of bad market. Yeah, I think the key point is that presidential administrations have policy centers of gravity, right? They have people who at different points in their administrations are really pushing things forward conceptually. And when you look at Colin Powell's dilemma, as many people have in between 2001, 2003, his initial response was not to focus on Iraq, but actually to focus more on a more multilateral war on terror, the war in Afghanistan, of course, and then the Middle East peace process, right? But I think he ultimately lost that strategic policy debate. Now he won a number of other tactical victories in terms of we need to go to the United Nations before we invade the country, we need to build the coalition, we need to go to Congress. But there was a strategic debate that he lost, I believe, right? And then he kind of got on board with it for a variety of reasons. Now, you mentioned Congress. Congress very famously in October of 2002 passes a resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. A resolution we should know that is still on the books. The Senate vote and in the House was even more overwhelming in support of the use of force in Iraq in 2002 than it had been in 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War. Why do you think there was so much overwhelming support, especially among Democrats in the Senate, at this particular time period in October of 2002? Yeah, let me give three reasons for that. The first is the one that most people point out, which is that post-911 everyone wanted to look tough, no one long took a leak on terrorism, right? And people want, I think politicians generally wanted to show bias toward taking care of threats instead of leaving them in their place. Second, of course, a lot of people, a lot of Democrats have come out and said, well, we really thought that the Bush administration, if we gave them a congressional authorization, would use that as leverage going to the United Nations and going to Saddam Hussein himself to say, look, Congress, the United American people are united behind the president. We're serious, right? This is a credible threat of force. And that they really would have followed through on the inspections instead of abandoning them within about two months of their starting. I think they misread the Bush administration's real thinking about inspections, which was hyper-pessimistic. But that was at least their mindset. And again, I don't think that's terribly unreasonable. But third, and this is my maybe more unique contribution to this question, is I think they largely agreed with the idea that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed, that this would let in some fresh liberal air or fresh democratic air to the region, that if you could install a democracy that might change the whole dynamic of the Middle East and ultimately undercut the roots of terrorism, that this would deter other state sponsors of terrorism, like Iran or Syria or what have you. And so I think that's why I focus on this idea of a regime change consensus, because it helps to explain why you actually got a pretty narrow debate on Iraq. It was much more about how we pursue regime change when we pursue regime change, after what steps are procedures, rather than whether this is even necessary at all, whether Americans can achieve a reasonable amount of security without this very ambitious project. So to me, that third reason is maybe the most important reason why so many Democrats, the majority, I think it's 29, voted for it in Congress, sorry, in the Senate, 21 against, supported this resolution. And of course, a potential fourth reason is one should always be aware of the political calendar. October 2002 is less than a month before the midterm elections, the first midterm elections that are post 9-11. And where President Bush bucks the trend of presidents losing more seats of their members of their party in Congress, he actually gains seats in ways that rarely happen in midterm cycles. Yes, absolutely. And so there's a potential fourth element there, as well as a number of those Democrats in the Senate who were contemplating a run for the presidency against President Bush in 2012 and 2014. I can't remember who came up with this quote, but I think it was Democratic. Actually, I think it was Leslie Gelb of the Council of Foreign Relations. And he said later, you had to at least consider the use of force to be seen as a serious person in this debate. And I think it tells you a lot about that context, right? That at least the policy establishment expected that the use of force must be part of our post-Sember, September 11 response, right? And that if you didn't think that that was feasible or that force shouldn't be in the lead, you could be excluded from the conversation. And so if we think about all of these different actors, right, that were in different positions of authority in this debate, I think you've made an interesting case for the roles of individuals when it comes to shaping foreign policy decisions. How should students, policy practitioners understand the influence of individual and ideas on some of these debates? OK, so I'm biased as a historian towards focusing on individuals. It's a more concrete way of telling historical stories. On the other hand, I appreciate that individuals, especially policymakers, are operating within global contexts, political contexts, bureaucratic contexts that they don't really fully control. To me, what makes individuals really important is that they have to interpret those larger structures, right? Now we think about agents acting within structures, right? But agents also, individual agents, individual policymakers, politicians also change those structures over time, right? There's a malleability to those things. And so I think that's where I point to individuals and say they can make a real difference, right, and pivot things in different directions. So one example I'll give, you know, this is a person that most people know is undersecretary defense Paul Wolfowitz, right? So Wolfowitz obviously was one of the drafters of the 1922 defense planning guidance, where he says the United States needs a grand strategy focused on defeating threats before they arise, right, on preventing a peer challenger from reemerging, maintaining military supremacy. There's a connection there to the Iraq War. He becomes intimately involved with the Iraqi exile movement throughout the 1990s. He really identifies with that movement. He sees those, these people like the Iraqi National Congress as the successors to the waves of anti-communist protesters like Solidarity in the 1980s, right, they're the next great wave of liberal democratic reform in history. He testifies before Congress. He makes connections with congressional staffers and with congressmen. He writes op-eds, right, and then he gets this very powerful position in the Bush administration, where he's able to try to shift the debate, right? He's able to make these connections that maybe a policymaker like George Bush wouldn't have made originally, right? I don't want to say that George Bush, I want to acknowledge George Bush as the central figure for understanding the Iraq War, but I think someone like Paul Wolfowitz fills in some of the conceptual gaps for someone who didn't have a lot of foreign policy experience, right? Maybe fills in the gap that removing some who's saying, building a democracy in Iraq, maybe that changes the dynamic of the Middle East and solves the terrorism problem, right? That's, I think, a place where an individual really makes a difference and you have to understand their personality and their worldview, right? Their unique experiences to understand why they do what they do in those critical moments. So maybe what we in political science with John Kingdon have talked about is policy entrepreneurs, right? That have, see these windows of opportunity that open for pushing through longstanding political or policy goals and using the opportunity in office to strike while the iron is hot, so to say. And I don't think when you think about that in a conspiratorial way, right? I don't mean to suggest that's what you're doing. Some people think of it as, oh, there was this cabal, right? That tried to reorient, trick George Bush and reorient policy. If this was a cabal or conspiracy, it was the most open conspiracy ever. They had been putting these ideas on public record for decades. And so anyway, a policy entrepreneur, I think is someone who, as you said, uses that window of opportunity to put forth what they genuinely think is the best course of action, right? And when we think about, as you're suggesting, right, that it was not just one individual, it was a presidential administration sets the agenda, right? But members of Congress that authorize some of those objectives as a way of either building momentum behind them or fully authorizing the use of force. It'll be interesting to see what the historical record continues to reveal as documents become available in the lead-up to what was a very contentious and continues to be consequential choice in Iraq. Absolutely. I'm particularly interested, and I know we've talked about this before, in the State Department's role, because people will focus so much on Colin Powell, but there's these signs that many people in the State Department, like Richard Haas, Richard Armitage, William Burns talks about this in his memoir, that they really genuinely thought that this was a bad idea, that this would have all kinds of negative repercussions in the region. William Burns, in his memoir, talks about writing memos that essentially predict much of what actually happened, right, in the Iraq War. And what he says is really fascinating. Richard Haas says a similar thing in his memoir, that we didn't want to come forward in these policy debates with the more hawkish members of the administration and the Office of the Vice Presidency of the Defense Department. We didn't want to come forward and say, let's not do this at all, right? We wanted to kind of plant a position that we thought was realistic. He phrases it as, we wanted first downs, not Hail Marys, right? And ultimately, we underestimate just how driven these other figures were to achieve regime change in Iraq, and that led us to have less influence overall, right, in hindsight. But I think that's a really interesting way of thinking about policy debates in general, right? Very rarely does someone come into a bureaucratic competition and stake out this absolute claim, right? They're trying to suss out what the other people in the room are thinking, and try to stake out a claim that will move the needle a little bit, right? Instead of Hail Mary, which as football fans know, almost never works, right? Although occasionally it does. Occasionally it does. Well, thank you so much, Joe, for coming on here and sharing your expertise about the Iraq War and use of force more generally. And we will see you next time on the debrief. Thanks very much, Theo.