Who was right about invading Iraq?

The ten-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is generating a variety of post-mortems and reflections from many of the participants in the pre-war debate. Andrew Sullivan has been especially forthright in acknowledging his own errors during that time and has a lively thread up and running probing what some famous people like Bill Clinton had to say on the matter a decade or so ago.

Going to war is a fateful decision for any country, but it is now clear that most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment performed abysmally during the run-up to the war. Top officials in the Bush administration told several important lies to bolster the case for war, such as the claim that there was no doubt Iraq had WMD — indeed, they said they knew where they were – -and the charge that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda.  

The majority of prominent Democrats and plenty of card-carrying liberals backed the war as well. Indeed, almost all of the top foreign policy officials in Obama’s first term were vocal supporters of the invasion, with the president himself being a notable exception. Denizens of the usual Washington think-tanks — including supposedly "moderate" organizations like Brookings and bipartisan organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations — were also filled with pro-war cheerleaders. The same was true of the New York Times and Washington Post, whose editors and reporters swallowed the Bush team’s sales pitch hook, line, and sinker. All in all, the decision to invade was taken with a degree of carelessness and callowness unworthy of any country with pretensions to global leadership. And one should never forget that this reckless decision cost more than $1 trillion and led to thousands of American battlefield casualties and many ruined lives. Of course, the Iraqi people have suffered even more over the past decade.

But not everyone thought invading Iraq was a good idea. In September 2002, thirty-three senior scholars who specialize in security affairs published a quarter-page ad on the New York Times op-ed page, declaring, "War with Iraq is Not in America’s National Interest."   You can read the original ad here. It is striking how accurate its warnings were. At the risk of sounding like I am bragging, I was one of the signatories, although I certainly take no pleasure in having anticipated the trouble ahead. It would have been better for the United States, not to mention Iraq, if the hawks had been proven right. Sadly, this was not to be.

As the ten-year anniversary nears, I want to call attention to the other people who signed the ad and helped pay for its publication. Some of them are no longer with us, but their prescience and their willingness to resist the stampede for war should not go unremembered. Here are the other signatories, with their professional affiliations at the time.

Robert Art, Brandeis

Richard Betts, Columbia

Dale Copeland, Univ. of Virginia

Michael Desch, Univ. of Kentucky

Sumit Ganguly, Univ. of Texas

Alexander L. George, Stanford

Charles Glaser, University of Chicago

Richard K. Hermann, Ohio State

George C. Herring, Univ. of Kentucky

Robert Jervis, Columbia

Chaim Kaufmann, Lehigh

Carl Kaysen, MIT

Elizabeth Kier, Univ. of Washington

Deborah Larson, UCLA

Jack S. Levy, Rutgers

Peter Liberman, Queen’s College

John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago

Steven E. Miller, Harvard University

Charles C. Moskos, Northwestern

Robert A. Pape, University of Chicago

Barry R. Posen, MIT

Robert Powell, UC-Berkeley

George H. Quester, Univ. of Maryland

Richard Rosecrance, UCLA

Thomas C. Schelling, Univ. of Maryland

Randall L. Schweller, Ohio State

Glenn H. Snyder, Univ. of North Carolina

Jack L. Snyder, Columbia

Shibley Telhami, Univ. of Maryland

Stephen Van Evera, MIT

Kenneth N. Waltz, Columbia

Cindy Williams, MIT

It is worth noting that none of the signatories on this list has held a government position since then, and my guess is that none is likely to do so in the future. Instead, it is mostly people who backed the war who have occupied key policymaking positions in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Even today, a reputation for hawkishness is a prerequisite for being taken seriously in Washington.

Policymakers and pundits love to disparage "ivory-tower" academics for being aloof, out-of-touch, or insufficiently sensitive to how the real world works. Sometimes those charges are valid. But in this case — and many others — it was the "experts" inside-the-Beltway who got it tragically wrong and the academics who got it right.

Postscript: A subsequent effort to critique the Bush administration’s handling of the war — organized under the aegis of "Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy" — produced an open letter signed by 851 people. The text is here; an account of this group’s activities can be found here.