Perhaps the tensest moment in Saturday's Republican presidential debate came when Donald Trump finally said something so outrageous that the other candidates onstage and even the debate audience closed ranks against him.
Here is what Trump did: He accused George W. Bush of launching the Iraq War based on a lie:
You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Trump's 10-second history of the war articulated it as many Americans, who largely consider that war a mistake, now understand it. And, indeed, Bush did justify the war as a quest for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.
The other Republican candidates, who have had this fight with Trump before, did not defend the war as their party has in the past, but rather offered the party's standard line of the moment, which is that Bush had been innocently misled by "faulty intelligence."
But neither version of history is really correct. The US primarily invaded Iraq not because of lies or because of bad intelligence, though both featured. In fact, it invaded because of an ideology.
A movement of high-minded ideologues had, throughout the 1990s, become obsessed with deposing Saddam Hussein. When they assumed positions of power under Bush in 2001, they did not seek to trick America into that war, but rather tricked themselves. In 9/11, and in fragments of intelligence that more objective minds would have rejected, they could see only validation for their abstract and untested theories about the world — theories whose inevitable and obvious conclusion was an American invasion of Iraq.
This is perhaps not as satisfying as the "Bush lied, people died" bumper sticker history that has since taken hold on much of the left and elements of the Tea Party right. Nor is it as convenient as the Republican establishment's polite fiction that Bush was misled by "faulty intelligence."
If the problem were merely that Bush lied, then the solution would be straightforward: Check the administration's facts. But how do you fact-check an ideology, particularly when that ideology is partially concealed from the public view? How do you guard against that ideology, which still dominates much of the GOP, and some of whose ideas are shared by more hawkish Democrats, from leading us astray again?
The moment at Saturday's debate should highlight the degree to which many Americans, from voters right up to presidential candidates, still misunderstand — and failed to learn from — the story of how America came to expend 4,500 of its citizens' lives in a war that would kill well over 100,000 Iraqis, destroy an entire nation, and help send the Middle East spiraling into chaos.
Why did the United States invade Iraq?
To understand the American decision to invade Iraq, and to learn the lessons of that mistake, one must begin not with George W. Bush's claims of Iraqi WMDs or with the 9/11 attacks, but rather with a series of initially obscure ideological debates on elements of the American right.
Those debates, which played out throughout the 1990s, had their roots in disagreements within the Republican Party over American power — and in the evolution of a right-leaning but surprisingly heterodox intellectual movement known as neoconservatism.
Neoconservatism, which had been around for decades, mixed humanitarian impulses with an almost messianic faith in the transformative virtue of American military force, as well as a deep fear of an outside world seen as threatening and morally compromised.
This ideology stated that authoritarian states were inherently destabilizing and dangerous; that it was both a moral good and a strategic necessity for America to replace those dictatorships with democracy — and to dominate the world as the unquestioned moral and military leader.
Neoconservatism's proponents, for strategic as well as political reasons, would develop an obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That obsession would, by the end of the decade, congeal into a policy, explicitly stated: regime change.
Their case was always grandly ideological, rooted in highly abstract and untested theories about the nature of the world and America's rightful place in it. Their beliefs were so deeply held that when 9/11 shook the foundations of American foreign policy, they were able to see only validation of their worldview, including their belief in the urgent need to bring democracy to Iraq.
It was this ideological conviction, more than any piece of intelligence or lie told about it, that primarily led America into Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction were the stated justification, but they were never the real reason, nor was bad intelligence.
The lesson of the Iraq mistake is not the dangers of lying or of anything as narrow as faulty intelligence, but rather of sweeping ideologies and ambitions that can take on a momentum all their own.
That particular ideology, neoconservatism, remains a major force in the Republican Party, and a number of its tenets are held by some Democrats as well. Its mandate for war, and its faith in the power of American military force, still animates that ideology, particularly toward the Middle East.
It is remarkable and alarming that more than a decade and thousands of lives later, neither Republicans nor Americans more broadly have fully confronted how that ideology developed to lead us into a catastrophic war — and the dangers that it, or any other blindly fervent ideology on the right or the left, could still pose.
The radical ideas that led to the neoconservative obsession with Iraq
The story of neoconservatism's evolution in the 1990s begins and ends with Iraq, but at its start it was a disagreement among Republicans.
In late 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded the oil-rich neighboring kingdom of Kuwait, and a few months later President George H.W. Bush led a brief military intervention to expel Saddam.
But where many Americans saw a rousing success, and the start of a decade that they would experience as overwhelmingly peaceful, a dissident faction of Republicans in and outside of the administration experienced it as a formative moment of national disgrace.
As the American-led mission wound down, the elder Bush urged Iraqis to rise up. But Bush had stopped the war short of destroying Saddam's Republican Guard or his helicopter units, which were able to quickly crush the short-lived Iraqi uprising.
Some administration officials, particularly then-Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, argued that the US should intervene against Saddam's crackdown — if not to aid in regime change, then at least to stop the slaughter.
Wolfowitz "wanted to finish Saddam's regime, and not only did he want to finish it, he believed there was a strong basis for doing so," Richard Perle, another major neoconservative figure, told the journalist George Packer for his book The Assassins' Gate.
Wolfowitz, an idealist and humanitarian, had long believed in America's responsibility to promote democracy abroad. In the mid-1980s, as Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Wolfowitz successfully pushed for the US to abandon Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who, though a reliable anti-communist, was violent and corrupt.
For Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives in the elder Bush administration, the 1991 Gulf War embodied of everything that was morally wrong — and indeed dangerous — with America's practice of tolerating dictators.
Throughout the 1990s, Saddam Hussein only became more defiant and disobedient, ignoring United Nations mandates on weapons inspections and issuing increasingly anti-American rhetoric. While many Middle East analysts suspected Saddam's actions were primarily designed to help him save face at home after his humiliating 1991 defeat against the Americans, neoconservatives saw not just American humiliation but alarming evidence of American decline.
This played into a growing school of thought among the dissident Republicans, which went far beyond Iraq. It said that America had a special responsibility to spread democracy for the betterment of humanity, that Republicans had forgotten the world-changing idealism of Ronald Reagan, and that the end of the Cold War was not an excuse for America to retreat from its military adventurism but rather the moment when it was needed most.
A historian and scholar named Robert Kagan helped lead this charge. He argued that America's unilateral assertion of power — the mere fact of American military action — was not just strategically but morally necessary. It would spread democracy and thus human rights, but also deter rogue states and thus promote peace.
In 1996, Kagan co-authored, along with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, a seminal essay in Foreign Affairs calling on America to bring about an era of "global benevolent hegemony."
They predicted that the world would welcome American military dominance as a force for stability and for the promotion of values such as democracy and human rights. In this view, nearly any expression of American military dominance was an act of moral good, whereas the absence of US dominance would invite chaos and, ultimately, threats against the US.
The neoconservatives' attention would inevitably return, over and over, to Iraq and to the anti-American dictator who had wrongly escaped justice. Iraq was a perfect example of their criticisms of Democrats and Republicans alike, its defiance a seemingly undeniable argument for their worldview.
Building the case for war
In 1997, the year after their Foreign Affairs essay, Kagan and Kristol helped found a group called the Project for a New American Century, meant to instill these foreign policy ambitions in a Republican Party that had tilted away from Reagan-style idealism.
PNAC included in its members Wolfowitz and Perle, as well as other senior Reagan administration officials and neoconservatives such as Elliott Abrams, James Woolsey, and Donald Rumsfeld. From the start, it made Iraq its central issue.
In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to the Clinton administration warning that "we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War." It urged a new strategy that "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power."
Partly this was specific to Iraq. The world was generally pliant to American will in the 1990s, but the defiantly anti-American Iraq stood out as a glaring exception; neoconservatives simply had few other examples to justify their view of a dangerous world that had to be subjugated by American power.
Perhaps just as importantly, Iraq was seen in Washington as a policy failure for Bill Clinton — tempting many Republicans, whether they were particularly invested in neoconservatism or not, to take hard-line positions from which to attack him.
But more than that, this was about using Iraq as a proving ground for the neoconservatives' larger and more ideological mission.
"They saw Iraq as the test case for their ideals about American power and world leadership," Packer writes. "Iraq represented the worst failure of the nineties and the first opportunity of the new American century."
As it happened, PNAC and its allies had an unprecedented opening to harden their radical proposal into mainstream Washington consensus.
In 1998 came the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in which congressional Republicans, sensing Clinton's political weakness, sought opportunities to both embarrass him on other fronts and win concessions he might have otherwise resisted. Iraq gave them both: That October, seizing on PNAC's call for regime change, congressional Republicans passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which stated that regime change was US policy.
Clinton caved to the pressure, signing the Iraq Liberation Act and thus announcing to Saddam Hussein, and to the world, that America was bent on his removal. Saddam, in retaliation, expelled UN weapons inspectors that same day.
These two acts would prove crucial in laying the groundwork for the US invasion five years later. In Washington, regime change had suddenly and with little thought become a comfortably bipartisan policy position. And the George W. Bush administration would later argue that Saddam had expelled the inspectors not as political retaliation, but rather to restart his 1980s chemical and biological weapons programs.
In the final year of Clinton's presidency, Kristol and Kagan co-edited a book of essays titled Present Dangers, meant to argue for a new era of neoconservative Republican foreign policy. It included an essay by Richard Perle that argued the US should not just promote an Iraqi uprising but also provide US ground troops to assist them. Perle also urged installing in Saddam's place an exile group known as the Iraqi National Congress, which was headed by Ahmed Chalabi — the very man the US would try to install three years later.
A few months later, Texas Gov. George W. Bush became president. Moved by neoconservatism's idealistic faith in democracy and perhaps sympathetic to its fixation on Iraq — Saddam had attempted to assassinate Bush's father — Bush filled several top positions with members of PNAC and other neoconservative adherents, including Rumsfeld as defense secretary and Wolfowitz as deputy secretary of defense. Richard Perle chaired the Pentagon's defense policy advisory board.
