Misrepresenting the Case for Neoconism

Regarding the first problem, I shall focus on the example with which I am most familiar. In Chapter 8 of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Reference Mearsheimer and Walt2007), John Mearsheimer and I argued that “the driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives” and we showed that the Bush administration's campaign to sell the war was supported by many of the key organizations and individuals in the broader Israel lobby. Our account would seem to be a textbook example of what Harvey calls neoconism, except that he falsely implies that we portray these groups as solely responsible for the war. In his words:

There are two problems here. First, whether the story Mearsheimer and I tell about the lobby is at odds with realist theory is beside the point, as no social science theory explains every case and the Iraq War might be an exception. The only pertinent question is whether the core “domestic factors” we identify—the neoconservatives and other groups in the Israel lobby—played the role we ascribe to them in this particular case.

Second, we did not say the strategic factors Harvey points to were irrelevant. On the contrary, we began our account of the Iraq War by noting that “the United States was the world's most powerful country” and pointed out that the “rapid ouster of the Taliban in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 reinforced an image of military invincibility and made it harder for skeptics on Iraq to convince others that going to war was unnecessary and unwise.”Footnote ¹ We also underscored the key role of the 9/11 attacks, which convinced many American leaders “that the United States could not allow even remote dangers to grow in an era where terrorists might acquire WMD.”Footnote ² We described the United States as “simultaneously powerful, confident of its military prowess, and deeply worried about its own security—a dangerous combination” and said these various elements formed the “strategic context in which the decision for war was made.”Footnote ³ Each of these factors, in short, was clearly relevant in this case.

Yet we also emphasized that there was “another variable in the equation,” and that “the war would almost certainly not have happened had it been absent.” That factor was the Israel lobby, “and especially a group of neoconservative policymakers and pundits who had been pushing the United States to attack Iraq since well before 9/11.”Footnote ⁴ We recognized that “pressure from Israel and the lobby was not the only factor” behind the decision to attack, however, and that “had circumstances been different, they would not have been able to get the United States to go to war.”Footnote ⁵ In our view, “the lobby's actions were a necessary but not sufficient condition for war.”Footnote ⁶

Thus, Harvey's claim that, for us, “US self-interest, post-9/11 security threats associated with WMD proliferation and other realist, state-centric self-interests were irrelevant” is false (p. 2 n. 9). In short, one can appreciate the critical role the neoconservatives played while recognizing that other factors facilitated their campaign for war.

What Does Harvey's Evidence Really Show?

To understand the neoconservatives' role, several key facts must be kept in mind. First, the neoconservatives invented the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam. Together with groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), they were the only important actors pressuring Congress and the executive branch to support Iraqi exile groups, impose tougher sanctions on Baghdad and, if necessary, use force to overthrow Saddam. The State Department and the Pentagon weren't pushing for war and neither was the oil industry. Not surprisingly, therefore, President Clinton rejected the neocons' calls for military action and only reluctantly agreed to the AIPAC-sponsored Iraq Liberation Act in 1998. US military leaders remained unenthusiastic even after 9/11, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was furious when Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told a Congressional committee that occupying Iraq would be a difficult task requiring several hundred thousand US troops. America's intelligence agencies did not favor war either, and the Bush administration had to go to great lengths to distort the existing intelligence to make war seem necessary. Indeed, top administration officials told a number of blatant untruths in the run-up to the war.Footnote ⁷

Were it not for the neocons, in short, the idea of attacking Iraq would not have been on the table in the first place and the United States would have focused solely on Al Qaeda after 9/11, as it should have. It is worth remembering that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advised Bush to invade Iraq a mere four days after 9/11, even though there was no evidence that Saddam had anything to do with the attacks. Bush rejected Wolfowitz's advice and went after the Taliban and Al Qaeda instead, but shortly thereafter he ordered the military to begin contingency planning for invading Iraq. As neoconservative writer Robert Kagan later commented, September 11 was “the turning point,” and the neocons' success in persuading Bush to attack Iraq was due to the fact that they had a “ready-made approach” at precisely the moment when the administration was searching for some way to respond to an unprecedented disaster.Footnote ⁸

A proper understanding of the neoconservatives' role places Harvey's counterfactual argument—and especially his evidence of bipartisan support for the war—in a different light. He is correct that many Democrats and liberal interventionists began talking about the threat from Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, and that many of them ultimately supported the war. But their testimony was not independent of the political context in which they were operating, and the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration were working overtime to shape that context. Bush's popularity had soared after 9/11 and the ouster of the Taliban in the fall of 2001, making it increasingly difficult for Democrats to question the case for war against Iraq. And once Bush had embraced the neoconservatives' idea of “regional transformation” and begun to sell the war in earnest—an effort that involved falsely linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and assorted other deceptions—it was hardly surprising that prominent Democrats went along.

Of course, one cannot prove that Al Gore would not have followed a similar course had he faced the same strategic and domestic circumstances Bush did. Had a Gore administration ignored the same warnings that Bush & Co. received about an upcoming Al Qaeda operation and thus failed to prevent 9/11, and had the United States then conducted a swift and successful assault against Al Qaeda's Taliban hosts, Gore might also have been deluded into believing that invading Iraq would deliver quick and far-reaching benefits. And had Gore faced a crescendo of pressure from neoconservatives and influential pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, he might have ultimately decided to respond as Bush did. But this counterfactual in no way absolves the neoconservatives or the lobby from responsibility for the war; it merely suggests that their influence did not depend on whether Bush or Gore was in the White House.

The bottom line here is straightforward: Although the neoconservatives were not solely responsible for the decision to invade Iraq, they still deserve much of the blame. To be sure, the war would probably not have occurred if the 9/11 attacks had been thwarted, or had the initial campaign in Afghanistan been more difficult. By the same token, the war would never have occurred had the neoconservatives not dreamt up the idea in the late 1990s and promoted it relentlessly for years. And when the stars lined up for them after 9/11, they got the war they had long desired. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times hit the nail on the head when he told an interviewer in 2003 that Iraq “was the war the neoconservatives wanted … the war the neoconservatives marketed …. I could give you the names of 25 people … whom, if you exiled them to a desert island a year and half ago, the Iraq War would not have happened” (Ari Shavit, “White Man's Burden,” Ha'aretz, 4 May 2003.)

To sum up: It was a combination of the neoconservatives' active promotion of the war, the support from other key groups in the Israel lobby, and a particular set of international and domestic circumstances that ultimately led the United States to make the fateful and foolish decision to attack Iraq. Harvey goes to great lengths to interpret things otherwise, and to this end he constructs an intriguing counterfactual narrative. But the facts speak for themselves.