Frank Harvey has written a provocative and interesting book that admirably questions the conventional wisdom that Al Gore would not have initiated the Iraq War. His arguments raise often unacknowledged and untested assumptions about the counterfactual alternative of a Gore foreign policy after 9/11.

While there is much to admire about the book, in this brief commentary I focus on one aspect of the counterfactual of the Iraq confrontation under a potential Gore presidency that Harvey does not address in detail but that deserves more attention: the nature of the war the United States might have fought in Iraq had Gore been elected, and the implications of Gore's potential strategy for the overall decision to fight in Iraq. Given Harvey's aim to challenge the prevailing few that Gore would not have attacked Iraq, his analysis primarily concerns whether Gore would have initiated the war. He makes the intriguing argument that Gore would have pushed for a multilateral inspection regime, which, in turn, would have set the United States on a path to war similar to that which unfolded under President George W. Bush.

The initiation of the war is only one aspect of the Iraq counterfactual, however, and cannot be separated from the conduct of the war itself. The nature of the intervention strategy a president contemplates is deeply intertwined with the decision to intervene in the first place, because he (or she) will view the decision to initiate a conflict through the prism of his (or her) preferred strategy. In the extreme, the options will narrow to a choice between the president's favored strategy or choosing not to intervene. Thus, the way the Bush administration prepared for and conducted the war was bound up with the decision to go to war in Iraq. Similarly, considering the question of how Gore might have prosecuted the war also affects our consideration of the counterfactual question of whether Gore would have initiated the war at all.

Among other features, Harvey's arguments highlight structural pressures that would likely have been the same in President Gore's world, a useful corrective to knee-jerk assumptions that events would have unfolded differently under a Gore administration. His discussion of individual leaders and Gore's views focuses on key similarities between Bush and the hawkish Gore (along with his running mate, Joseph Lieberman, and many of his advisers). But although Harvey argues that his “conclusions reveal serious deficiencies with first-image (leadership) theories of US foreign policy” (p. 286), Harvey glosses over some key differences between Gore and Bush that have important implications for the Iraq counterfactual. A recent wave of research in international relations has placed renewed emphasis on the role of leaders. This research differentiates among leaders along key dimensions, such as past experience, beliefs, threat perceptions, and other politically relevant attributes, and suggests that it is possible to distinguish leaders systematically beyond simple hawk/dove or even unilateral/multilateral preferences.Footnote ¹

One dimension that is relevant to the Iraq counterfactual concerns how leaders perceive and prepare to address threats. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, presidents differ systematically in how they perceive threats, leading to differences in the intervention strategies they favor for addressing those threats. If presidents believe that the way other states are organized internally is the source of their threatening behavior—in the case of Iraq, a belief that the nature of the Iraqi regime led it to be potentially aggressive—then they are more likely to endorse an intervention strategy that will transform the target state's domestic institutions. Nation building would fall under the category of a transformative intervention. Alternatively, if leaders believe that any state can behave aggressively regardless of its institutions, they will be more likely to back a more limited intervention strategy, which might include removing the leadership of the target state but would not necessarily transform its institutions.Footnote ²

Leaders' threat perceptions also have consequences for the capabilities available to presidents when they confront decisions to intervene. Presidents who arrive in office believing that threats arise internally are likely to make “policy investments” in capabilities that would bolster their ability to conduct transformative interventions. In contrast, those who do not see internal institutions as the ultimate source of threats are less likely to invest in transformative capabilities. These investments affect preparedness for different types of intervention and can constrain options when decisions arise, since leaders have effectively stacked the deck in favor of certain strategies. Even if they try to shift strategy, presidents may find themselves hampered by a lack of preparation that stems from their previous choices. Preparedness, in turn, affects the likelihood of initiating an intervention because it shapes estimates of costs and the probability of success for different intervention strategies. Thus, leaders' threat perceptions and their corresponding responses to those threats can shape war planning, rendering strategy inseparable from decisions to initiate war.

How did Bush and Gore compare in terms of their views on threats and strategies to respond to those threats? One crucial difference concerned nation building. Gore was a strong believer in nation building, whereas Bush came to office with a hearty disdain for it. During the first presidential debate in 2000, for example, Bush asserted that he and Gore had a “disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place.”Footnote ³ In the second debate, when asked whether he would support a “civil force” to undertake nation building, Bush responded, “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations…. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation building core from America? Absolutely not.” He also argued that “our troops ought to be used to help overthrow the dictator when it's in our best interests. But in [the Somalia] case it was a nation-building exercise, and same with Haiti. I wouldn't have supported either.”Footnote ⁴ Bush thus drew a contrast between overthrowing dictators and nation building, suggesting that it was possible to do one without the other.

In contrast, Gore consistently defended nation building, both during the 2000 campaign and in the run-up to the Iraq War. In the second debate, Gore stated that he did not agree with Bush's position. Acknowledging that “this idea of nation building is kind of a pejorative phrase,” Gore went on to give a strong defense of American nation-building efforts in the wake of World War II, noting that the effort was “economic … but it was also military.” He argued that “having troops there” gave recovering countries “confidence,” while civil administrators helped with rebuilding.Footnote ⁵

In his speeches during the run-up to the Iraq War—including two speeches Harvey emphasizes in support of the argument that Gore would have initiated the war—Gore repeatedly highlighted the importance of postwar planning and of nation building, again explicitly endorsing the involvement of the United States in such endeavors. In his February 2002 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, Gore argued that a “final reckoning” with Iraq “should be on the table,” but that “finishing it on our terms means more than a change of regime in Iraq” and must include “a workable plan for preventing the disintegration of Iraq into chaos.” He also argued that “it isn't enough to destroy what is evil, and then seek to leave by the nearest door. We must make the commitment to work with those whom we have rescued until they can stand on their own feet.”Footnote ⁶

In his September 2002 speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Gore included a section on the “Dangers of Abandoning Iraq,” arguing that “if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq … the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam [Hussein].” He criticized Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for dismissing questions about “restabilizing Iraq … in the aftermath of the invasion,” and quoted Bush's 2000 debate assertion that he would “absolutely not” support a separate nation-building capability. Drawing an explicit contrast with Bush, Gore argued that “the events of the last 85 years provide ample evidence that our approach to winning the peace that follows war is almost as important as winning the war itself.” He went on to discuss the virtues of “enlightened nation building” and the perils of leaving the field too early, specifically criticizing the Bush administration for failing to follow through after its intervention in Afghanistan. Finally, he urged Congress to “establish now what the administration's thinking is regarding the aftermath of a US attack for the purpose of regime change,” and called for a congressional resolution requiring “commitments from the President that action in Iraq will not be permitted to distract from continuing and improving work to reconstruct Afghanistan, and that the United States will commit to stay the course for the reconstruction of Iraq.”Footnote ⁷

The difference between the Gore and Bush stances on nation building has important implications for the way we set up the counterfactual of a Gore administration confronting Iraq because strategy and war planning constrain the options that presidents consider. Arguably, the relevant decision Gore faced was between intervening with a plan for a potentially lengthy postwar period and not intervening at all. For Bush, in contrast, the choice was between what he thought would be a limited intervention and no intervention.

Consider first the case of Bush, simpler because we have concrete information about how his views affected planning and available capabilities for the Iraq War.Footnote ⁸ Bush's anti-nation-building stance set the tone for his administration: When he arrived in office, he appointed advisers like Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, who also disdained nation building, and took bureaucratic measures to undo some of the Clinton administration's emphasis on it. These measures reduced material, bureaucratic, and intellectual capabilities for nation building, with important consequences for the way the war unfolded.

At the decision stage, Bush's opposition to nation building meant that he preferred a more limited intervention strategy, with the aim of removing Saddam and the top layer of leadership, but without a serious commitment to rebuilding the country. A nation-building intervention was explicitly taken off the table, as illustrated by the well-documented lack of postwar planning. The initial U.S. strategy was one of “decapitation”: As Rice later put it, the “concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces…. You would be able to bring new leadership but we were going to keep the body in place.”Footnote ⁹ Of course, U.S. policy later shifted to encompass rebuilding Iraqi institutions from the ground up, but it is important to recall that such an effort was not part of the initial strategy.Footnote ¹⁰ Even the decisions concerning de-Baathification and disbanding the Iraqi army were not part of the initial plan. When the United States shifted in a more transformative direction in the wake of the power vacuum and the emerging insurgency, the lack of preparation for a nation-building intervention caught up with the administration. Military strategy is difficult to shift on short notice, and presidents must live with the policy investments (or lack of investments) they make at the outset of their administrations. Even if we stipulate that Bush's views changed after 9/11, his initial opposition to nation building had important consequences for the United States and Iraq as the war unfolded.

In the case of Gore, Harvey alludes to the nature of a potential Gore war only in passing. At the very end of the book, for example, he notes that Gore “would probably have recommended a much larger troop deployment, in line with General Anthony Zinni's plan under the Clinton administration,” perhaps in the 400,000 range. Harvey argues that this larger deployment would have given Gore more confidence and that he would have been reluctant to maintain such a large deployment during a prolonged period of inspections, so that “Gore would have been more, not less inclined to accept the risks of war” (p. 305).

In the spirit of evaluating the counterfactual of a Gore presidency, however, it seems important to consider the implications of his explicit and consistent emphasis on nation building for his consideration of a war in Iraq. This emphasis suggests that he would plausibly have insisted on a plan for the postwar phase, leading to a choice between a potentially protracted war and no war at all. It is difficult to know how Gore would have evaluated the trade-off between a full-scale nation-building intervention in Iraq and staying out, but assessing that counterfactual would require information beyond the hawkish views that Harvey highlights.

Some aspects of a Gore assessment would likely flow from his views about the origin of threats and how intervention should be undertaken. One would expect that a President Gore would have continued the Clinton administration's efforts to institutionalize capabilities and lessons from the nation-building interventions of the 1990s. Those interventions were by no means entirely (or even mostly) successful, and my purpose here is not to suggest that Gore would have been right to emphasize nation building or that a Gore-initiated war in Iraq would have avoided the problems the United States confronted once the war began.Footnote ¹¹ To be sure, even a hypothetical Gore intervention with more investment in nation-building capabilities might well have struggled in Iraq. But this possibility, in turn, might have informed Gore's decision to intervene at all. He might have examined the trade-off between a decision not to intervene and the full-scale, transformative intervention he believed was required to secure Iraq, and concluded that the potential cost of intervening was too high or the probability of success was too low.

Had he decided that the costs were prohibitive or the chances of success (defined on his terms) were too low, could Gore have stayed out of Iraq? Harvey suggests that the political costs of starting down the path of multilateral, intrusive inspections and subsequently backing down would have been too high for any president—particularly a Democrat—in the wake of 9/11. But scholarship on public opinion and war has long emphasized that the public knows little about foreign policy and takes its cues on foreign policy from elites.Footnote ¹² The Bush administration made a major effort to garner the support of other elites on Iraq and to suppress elite criticism. The lack of criticism (and, in many cases, overt support) from Democratic members of Congress may have reflected Democratic caution about opposing a popular president in the wake of 9/11 once he put Iraq firmly on the agenda, but it does not necessarily imply that the Democrats themselves put such a high priority on attacking Iraq. Furthermore, recent scholarship has suggested that democratic publics may not punish leaders for backing down in crises, contrary to earlier arguments about “audience costs.”Footnote ¹³ As one study found, punishment is especially unlikely when the president explains why backing down was the right course.Footnote ¹⁴ One could imagine that a politically savvy president who wanted to maintain the inspection regime in Iraq without resorting to war could have marshaled arguments, backed by an elite coalition, that would have kept public opinion largely quiescent on this issue.

Explaining the Iraq War is helpful in reminding us that counterfactual claims must be subjected to rigorous theoretical and empirical testing, and Harvey highlights often-ignored structural factors that would not likely have been different under a Gore administration. But it is important to consider not only whether Gore would have intervened but also how. After decades of ignoring the role of leaders, international relations scholarship has gotten much better at identifying how individuals affect key foreign policy and international political outcomes. In the case of the Iraq War, there is evidence that Bush's beliefs and decisions did influence the course of events in Iraq—not only the decision to intervene but also the choice of intervention strategy—suggesting that a President Gore might have chosen differently. This provocative book reminds us that despite their differences, presidents are constrained by international and domestic factors largely beyond their control. But individual leaders can have a profound impact on the ways in which states wage war, well beyond the moment the first shots are fired.