After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, many commentators argued that the Vietnam War would have gone differently had he lived. Some imagined a whole new world in which the pressures that led the United States deeper into that conflict would have disappeared under JFK.Footnote ¹ In 2005, a groups of scholars and Kennedy-era policymakers held a conference to reconsider the “virtual JFK.” While there was a lively debate, most of the policymakers and scholars present would not cede to the fantasy. On the key issue, they agreed that while Kennedy had decided in October 1963 to begin a withdrawal of American forces to be completed by the end of 1965, intervening events—including attacks on U.S. facilities in Vietnam, the 1964 presidential election, a collapsing South Vietnamese regime, and a growing hawkish camp within the administration—would have reversed the decision had he lived.Footnote ²

It is interesting to note that this “JFK war” scenario has been supported by both conservative historians like Diane KunzFootnote ³ and radical polemicists like Noam Chomsky.Footnote ⁴ Both agree, along with others, that it was the liberal interventionist proclivities of a powerful United States that, rightly or wrongly, would have led JFK deeper into Vietnam. This is why James Blight and his colleagues, in their summary of the 2005 conference, call Vietnam “a Liberal's war.”Footnote ⁵

After Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election, a similar thing happened with respect to the Iraq War. Gore, it was argued by many respected scholars,Footnote ⁶ would have acted differently than George W. Bush did, avoiding war and continuing the containment of the bothersome but not threatening Saddam Hussein regime. Like the JFK example, the peaceful version of the “virtual Gore” has been slow to come under scrutiny. Frank Harvey's greatest achievement in Explaining the Iraq War is to show how embarrassingly thin is the evidence for such a scenario. It is, as he writes, “a popular historical account that overlooks a substantial collection of historical facts and relevant causal variables that, when combined, represent a serious challenge to the core premises of accepted wisdom” (p. 3).

Laid out in meticulous fashion, Harvey's book provides the evidence that Gore was long a liberal hawk, especially on Iraq (Chap. 2); that his advisors and likely cabinet members were no less so (Chap. 3); that bipartisan congressional pressures to do something after 9/11 were immense (Chap. 4); that intelligence failures were not caused by Bush but by the anxieties that followed 9/11 (Chap. 5), as was public support for war against Iraq (Chap. 6); that UN weapons inspectors and key allies, including not just the UK but also Germany and France, agreed that Iraq had committed serial and serious breaches of United Nation containment provisions (Chap. 7); and that if there is a “first image” leadership story to be told about Iraq, it should center not on Bush but on Saddam, whose personalistic regime was deeply war prone (Chap. 8).

When we reduce the Iraq War to a childlike tale of a “bad Bush” or “bad neoconservatives,” Harvey argues, we not only do a disservice to history but also lose the opportunity to address the factors that cause wars. Bush and his advisors appear in such a tale as magically able to convince Tony Blair, the U.S. Congress and public, and UN weapons inspectors that Saddam represented an unacceptable threat in the post-9/11 environment.

Harvey's work is both commendable and welcome, and should lead to much soul-searching among the academy, policymakers, and interested citizens, not to mention this country's two million or so Iraq War veterans who are often told that they fought because of a war-mongering president. By eliminating “Bush and the neocons” from the explanation of the Iraq War, Harvey re-centers attention on the factors that international relations theorists should have been focused on all along: U.S. unipolarity and the effects of the 9/11 attacks: “The two dominant forces that pushed the country down the path to war had nothing to do with individuals or ideology—9/11 and the reality of US power were largely responsible” (p. 140).Footnote ⁷

It is not just that without 9/11, the anti-Saddam coalition within the Bush administration would have been whistling in the wind. Harvey's stronger claim is that assuming 9/11, even Gore would have moved aggressively to resolve the Iraq issue, given the risks of another attack and the dangers of a loss of U.S. deterrent credibility. Indeed, the proof of this claim is Bush himself, who came into office espousing a return to prudence and realism in American foreign policy. As Harvey shows, the same muscular interventionists who were waiting in the wings of the Bush administration to seize on 9/11 would have been waiting in the wings of a Gore administration—indeed, Bush emerges from these pages as something of a dove on Iraq compared to Gore's decade of bellicose rhetoric.

Harvey does not propose to review extant literature on the Iraq war, and so he can be forgiven for overlooking the fact that many scholars have in fact dismissed the “Bush and the neoconservatives” hypothesis to focus instead on the nature of the Saddam regime,Footnote ⁸ U.S. unipolarity,Footnote ⁹ and the effects of 9/11.Footnote ¹⁰ What Harvey's work achieves is an exhumation of the centrality of those factors through the novel looking glass of a virtual history experiment in a Gore presidency. In approaching the issue in this way, the author can show both why a virtual President Gore would have gone to war in Iraq and why the real President Bush did not go to war in Iran and North Korea. As he concludes in response to claims of determinism: “[M]ajor foreign policy decisions (especially decisions to go to war) made by leaders of powerful democracies are deterministic” (emphasis in original; p. 282).

The virtual history experiment also allows Harvey to examine causal mechanisms as well as causal factors (history being, if nothing else, strong on mechanisms). By showing how cabinet decision making, the intelligence-gathering process, and diplomatic efforts would have played out much the same under Gore, he rejects the more nuanced “Gore peace” claims of those like James Blight and colleaguesFootnote ¹¹ who argue that Gore would have been able to stall the slide to war because he was smarter. The reason, Harvey argues, is path dependence: Once “President Gore” had decided to pursue a coercive diplomatic solution to the Iraq crisis through the UN—a strategy he had long endorsed and which he would have driven more forcefully in cabinet deliberations than Bush did—there could have been no turning back if the strategy failed. The intelligence community, stung by its 9/11 failure and searching for the most likely source of another one, would have produced largely the same dossiers in cooperation with key allies.

If any mechanism admits of counterfactual variation it is the diplomatic process. The key fact here, buried in the book but probably worth more attention, is that repeated French declarations in late 2002 and early 2003 that they would veto any war declaration fatally undermined the potency of the “enhanced inspections” process begun under Security Council Resolution 1441 in November 2002. Others have made the same point,Footnote ¹² but not with the same devastating clarity as Harvey, who, by eliminating the relevance of the “Bush factor,” shines a sudden glare on Paris. As we have subsequently learned from Saddam's generals, the French attitude was “the single most important element” explaining why Saddam thumbed his nose at 1441.Footnote ¹³ If the post-9/11 pressures on intelligence explain why Bush (and virtual Gore) could not have understood that Saddam was bluffing, the French behavior explains why Saddam could not have understood that the United States was not. As Harvey concludes: “France's decision to reject the military option increased the probability of war” (p. 231).

Bush, in other words, fought another “Liberal's war” in Iraq whose groundwork had been laid by the rise of muscular Wilsonianism in the unipolar Clinton era and whose near inevitability arose from the pathologies of Saddam and the changed national security atmosphere globally after 9/11. That may explain why President Barack Obama has continued most of the Bush foreign policy agenda, including a Lyndon Johnson–like escalation in Afghanistan. In retrospect, the United States may have been fortunate to have had a Republican president in Bush, who could easily revert to realist premises on Iraq once Saddam was overthrown. Only a unified Western alliance could have reduced the probability and consequences of the Iraq War—but then again, perhaps this is an unlikely counterfactual in light of post–World War II French foreign policy.

As with the “JFK war” hypothesis, the “Gore war” hypothesis is not a partisan claim. Many supporters and opponents alike of the Iraq War agree that Gore would have invaded, differing only on whether that would have been a bad or good thing. Rather, it is a bipartisan challenge to the widespread myth that American liberalism is essentially pacifist; it is not. Whether you think that has made the world a better or worse place is another matter.

Finally, on a lighter note, two men can take comfort from Harvey's analysis: Ralph Nader, whose 2000 presidential candidacy split the left-of-center vote, and Elian Gonzalez, now 18, the Cuban boy whose repatriation to Cuba by the Clinton administration in 2000 alienated Latino voters in the state of Florida. Even if they tipped the election, they did not tip the war, however.

Airport bookshops may thrive on contingent accounts of history—how Irish monks saved Western civilization or how Chinese sailors ignited the European Renaissance. But like them, the theory that George W. Bush caused the Iraq War represents an astonishing failure to show that changing one variable would make all other variables irrelevant. Harvey reminds us to take history, and politics that makes it, more seriously.