Frank Harvey's work is less an attempt to explain the invasion and occupation of Iraq than an effort to challenge a central argument in most accounts of President George W. Bush's “war of choice.” Harvey repeatedly says that he wants to refute the near-universal consensus that neoconservatives were the decisive factor in an administration that deliberately organized a push toward war. His secondary goal is to show that a counterfactual analysis and an argument about path-dependent momentum can provide a more credible account of the war than can “neoconist” orthodoxy.

Counterfactual analysis can be useful in reexamining one-time events that cannot be replicated, but one must be careful about setting up the argument. James Fearon's classic 1991 article suggests that Harvey has to make a choice between two—and only two—acceptable strategies.Footnote ¹ Either he can imagine what would have happened in a Bush administration that did not have any neoconservatives, or he can search for other actual cases that resemble the Bush administration in all significant respects except for the presence of neocons. In either case, Harvey would then have a relatively straightforward way of controlling for the one variable whose importance he wants to test.

Instead of pursuing this line of inquiry, though, Harvey takes us through an entirely different counterfactual: a Gore presidency. This decision has important consequences, for it takes his argument one significant step away from the immediate variable in question and asks his readers to imagine something dramatically different from a Bush presidency or a real-world alternative. Moving away from the neoconservatives as the independent variable weakens the power of the counterfactual by introducing other variables for which it is difficult to control. The author tries to examine many of them, but his effort is incomplete because it is no longer the neoconservatives for which he is controlling: it is the Bush presidency in general.

Harvey wants to counter the familiar argument that if Gore had won in 2000, there would have been no Iraq War. He does so by considering Gore's stated policy preferences and those of his principal foreign policy advisors; domestic political influences; organizational and bureaucratic forces (particularly the well-documented intelligence failures); the role of the media and American public opinion; the international environment; and Saddam Hussein's miscalculations about the regional situation and Washington's intentions. He argues that all of these forces would have pushed a President Al Gore in the direction that Bush ultimately took: an internationalist approach that was aimed at getting a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. Far from the unilateralist preemption that Bush's neoconservative advisors wanted, says Harvey, the administration pursued a conventional strategy that embraced containment, multilateralism, and diplomacy. The neoconservatives lost almost every important argument as Bush sided with Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A President Gore, Harvey says, would have done substantially the same thing.

Harvey paints a picture of a conventional Bush foreign policy that was never driven by neoconservative unilateralists. Washington's support for a strong inspections regime was part of a broader aim to reinforce a UN-centered policy organized around a demand for full and complete compliance with Security Council Resolution 1441. But things did not work out as Bush wanted. Once American troops were introduced to provide coercive muscle, things started to get out of hand. Path dependence created an irresistible momentum that led to a war Bush did not want. A combination of previous actions against Iraq stretching back three administrations, broad Democratic support for vigorous sanctions, an inflamed public traumatized by a terrorist attack, wide international support for a coercive inspection regime, faulty American intelligence, and Baghdad's recklessness fueled the momentum toward war. Bush's policy failed, but Harvey maintains that it was centered on getting the weapons inspectors back into Iraq and defusing the threat of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) without war. Given the erosion of the sanctions regime and the failure of containment, he argues, the same factors would have worked in a Gore administration.

The “Gore-War” counterfactual drives Harvey's claim that the neoconservatives were largely irrelevant as the Bush administration debated whether to seek congressional authorization and a Security Council resolution—both of which were opposed by Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the “few” other neoconservatives who had the president's ear. Bush decided to go to Congress and to the Security Council, which Harvey takes as a sign that the neoconservatives were isolated while Bush built a multilateral approach to a problem that had bedeviled American foreign policy for years. But Harvey protests too much about the “neoconist” tendency to construct a simplified, conspiratorial theory of neoconservative leadership that denies the objective factors that were at work. His disclaimers notwithstanding, the real thrust of his book is to absolve not the neoconservatives but the Bush administration.

Explaining the Iraq War raises substantive issues that dovetail with Harvey's methodological approach. Just for the sake of argument, let us grant him his counterfactual that a President Gore would have done the same thing that Bush did. Does that mean that the neoconservatives played no important role in what actually happened? When my coeditors and I were assembling the important primary documents for The Iraq Papers (Reference Ehrenberg, McSherry, Sánchez and Sayej2010), we had to wrestle with many factors—chief among them the role of the neoconservatives. Like most neoconist approaches, and unlike the caricature presented by Harvey, we recognized that there were many different influences at work in the months and years leading up to the attack on Iraq. We considered—and included—broad discussions of American foreign policy, debates about containment, the question of oil, the “Israel lobby,” Judith Miller's work at the New York Times, the international environment, and a host of other matters. Acknowledging that there were several forces at work does not mean that they were of equal weight. Harvey addresses this question, but the neoconist thesis does not stand or fall with a recognition that there were multiple impulses in play. Our careful reading of this historical record led us to include, and give much weight to, the role of neoconservatives in this particular administration at this particular moment in world history.

A worthy successor to organizations like the Committee on the Present Danger, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) made its first public appearance with its “Statement of Principles” in 1997. Its neoconservative predecessors had repeatedly talked of imminent threat from a relentless Soviet foe that was intent on world conquest, issued dire warnings about the dangers of containment, and castigated Jimmy Carter for his naïve emphasis on negotiations, the Third World, and human rights. But the Project took shape in a drastically altered world, one shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union and overwhelming American power. All that was lacking, it said, was the will to take advantage of a historic opportunity and reshape world politics in accordance with American interests and values. The PNAC announced its intention to argue for increased military spending and a more assertive foreign policy.

Six months later, the Project's statement of principles was followed by a letter to President Bill Clinton that specifically addressed the question of Iraq. It urged the president to abandon his strategy of containment and move toward a unilateral policy of regime change. Four and half years before September 11, 2001, and six years before the American invasion of Iraq, the Project for the New American Century had announced its views.

Harvey repeatedly accuses the neoconists of exaggerating the influence of the few neoconservatives who served in the Bush administration. But there were more than a few of them. Twenty-four people signed onto the PNAC's statement of principles. Eight of them went on to influential posts in the Bush administration, particularly in the Department of Defense and the office of the Vice President. They were joined by several other influential neoconservatives, like Douglas Feith and John Bolton, who were not signatories of the Project's statement. This is not a handful of marginalized advisors. This is a grouping of powerful and experienced people that was already on record about Iraq years before Bush became president.

The author takes Bush's decisions to seek congressional authorization and a Security Council resolution as a sign that the neoconservatives were defeated and marginalized. But he adopts a simplified and inaccurate picture of who they were, what they wanted, and what defeat means. Neoconservatism was never simply about unilateralism or preemption. Its core project was maintaining American military, economic, and diplomatic supremacy in what Charles Krauthammer called the “unipolar moment.” Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and their colleagues certainly shared, and frequently expressed, a deep contempt for international law, the United Nations, Europe, human rights, multilateralism, and many other foundational pillars of traditional American foreign policy and the contemporary international environment. But this contempt was rooted in their desire to weaken the limits that the international community has erected to constrain the destructive potential of powerful states. Many of them were perfectly willing to live with the United Nations if it could be used to further American power without giving too much away. There might have been significant differences among them, and some of them were probably more willing than others to accept Bush's decisions about Congress and the Security Council. But in the end, it all worked out well. Saddam was to be the poster child for the “new American century,” and the neoconservatives got the invasion they wanted.

Harvey characterizes “neoconism” as a conspiratorial view that features a handful of powerful advisors bamboozling a naive president, manipulating domestic opinion, and lying to dozens of experienced foreign leaders. But the historical record is quite clear. The administration threw a whole series of arguments up on the proverbial wall and waited to see which ones would stick. One of the reasons it was so difficult to have an honest debate about Iraq was that the administration constantly changed its arguments. This situation was messy and confusing, but it is also perfectly compatible with a picture of neoconservative preeminence. We summarized many of their initiatives in The Iraq Papers:

Most accounts of the Iraq War are more sophisticated and nuanced than Harvey suggests. For our part, we never believed that neoconservatives forged some sort of grand conspiracy to manipulate the president, dissenting colleagues, popular opinion, and foreign leaders into war. History seldom works like that. On the contrary, they took advantage of emerging conditions, debated with their opponents, and provided very effective leadership. They thought that history had presented them with a unique opportunity to remake the world, and ultimate responsibility for the Iraq disaster falls squarely on their shoulders. There is plenty of room for others. At the end of the day, we are left with Bush, Powell, Blair, Condoleezza Rice, the neoconservatives, and their war. Harvey's flawed counterfactual and his selective reading of the historical record cannot change that. Nor should they.