Much has been said about the Iraq war and its failures over the last 20 years, including the roles of key decision makers like President Bush and Vice President Cheney. But what is perhaps not as well known is just how many people were involved in making it a reality. From White House staffers and senior officials, to allied think tank "experts" and prominent media figures, the Iraq war had many, many authors.
We asked nearly two dozen experts, journalists, former government officials, and others, which individual — outside of Bush or Cheney — was the underrated architect and promoter of the war in Iraq, and why. It's important that we understand just how this country could end up on such a disastrous course by chronicling the widespread enthusiasm for in Washington and beyond.
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Jim Antle, Andrew Bacevich, Medea Benjamin, James Carden, Bob Dreyfuss, Dan DePetris, Jacob Heilbrunn, Scott Horton, Karen Kwiatkowski, Daniel Larison, Jim Lobe, Lora Lumpe, John Mearsheimer, Robert Merry, John Mueller, Christopher Preble, Assal Rad, Barbara Slavin, Craig Unger, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Walcott, Stephen Walt, Sarah Leah Whitson
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Jim Antle, politics editor at The Washington Examiner — Joe Biden
The men who were president and vice president 20 years ago are the most responsible for the Iraq war. But a subsequent vice president, the man who is president right now, played an underrated role.
Joe Biden repeated most of the talking points that became indispensable to the push for war — Saddam Hussein as a menace beyond his borders, the need for regime change in Baghdad to be an American policy and priority, existence of weapons of mass destruction, and the possibility of WMD being transferred to terrorist groups like the one that attacked us on 9/11.
Mainstream Democrats repeating those warmed over neoconservative talking points — establishment types with the right committee assignments, liberal but not quite of the Left — kept the case for the Iraq war from being ghettoized in conservative circles.
Biden voted for the war and then denied having done any such thing, saying he was only empowering George W. Bush’s diplomacy. But Biden personally played a major role in the more expansive AUMF Bush favored being the one that made it through Congress.
The current president sometimes seems to have learned from his Iraq mistakes, though his handling of the war in Ukraine may be the ultimate test.
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Andrew Bacevich, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and Chair of the Board of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft — Colin Powell
Only one person in the innermost circle of the Bush administration could have dissuaded President Bush from invading Iraq. That person was Secretary of State Colin Powell, a seasoned soldier-statesman who had an inkling of the risks that war was likely to involve. Quiet opposition by Powell did not suffice to sway the president, however. The clamor from other senior officials and from media warmongers was too great. But just imagine if two or three weeks before the invasion, Powell had resigned in protest. Imagine if he had then made a series of presentations arguing against the prospective war on political, strategic, and moral terms. Maybe, just maybe, he might have averted the debacle that ensued.
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Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK — Robert Kagan
I nominate Robert Kagan, cofounder of Project for a New American Century. Back in 1998, he co-penned a letter to President Clinton insisting that removing Saddam Hussein from power must be the aim of U.S. policy and that the U.S. should not be “crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.” Kagan seized the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to insist that Bush’s war on terror should include the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Today, he says of the Iraq debacle, “It didn't go exactly the way we wanted it to…but the objective was a worthy objective and the world is better for it.” Let’s ask the Iraqis about that.
Unfortunately, Kagan and those he has influenced continue to dominate U.S. foreign policy despite their record of miserable failure.
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James Carden, columnist, Globetrotter Media — Michael R. Gordon and The New York Times
Any future account of the long decline ofThe New York Times, from the days when giants such as Harrison Salisbury and Hedrick Smith graced its pages, will have to include a (long) chapter on the role two of its reporters played in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Most are already well familiar with the saga of Judith Miller, chastised by an erstwhile Times colleague as a “woman of mass destruction."
Yet on some of her most notorious stories, including the “aluminum tubes” fabrication, she had a co-author, Michael R. Gordon. After having helped grease the skids for the initial invasion, Gordon went on to become the Times’ principal cheerleader for “the surge.”
Gordon has continued to reveal his true (neocon) colors, authoring tendentious hit pieces masquerading as “news analysis” on the Iran nuclear accord and later signing on as a “writer in residence” at the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. And as the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeff Gerth has so painstakingly shown with regard to its hollow reporting on RussiaGate, 20 years on from Iraq, the Times hasn’t yet learnt from its past mistakes.
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Bob Dreyfuss, contributing writer at The Nation — Abram Shulsky
Unless you paid extremely close attention during the run-up to the war in Iraq, you’ve probably never heard of Abram Shulsky.
But Shulsky — a college roommate of Paul Wolfowitz and a neoconservative acolyte of Richard Perle, — was installed in the summer of 2002 at the head of a little-noticed intelligence shop at the Pentagon. Started as a two-person unit, within a few months, Shulsky’s operation evolved into what became known as the “Office of Special Plans.” I know that because in a November 2002 article for the American Prospect, called “The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA,” I broke the story that Shulsky had settled into the job.
Shulsky, who’d carved out a career as an intelligence specialist since working for Perle in the 1980s, apparently knew enough about the spy trade to be able to cherry pick intelligence factoids — some gleaned from the skilled fabricator, Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress — and to create others out of whole cloth. The OSP generated reams of fake “intelligence” about Saddam Hussein’s mythical ties to al Qaida and nonexistent WMD that Vice President Cheney used to combat the CIA’s more sober analyses.
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Dan DePetris, syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune — James Woolsey
As John F. Kennedy once said, “victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” Concerning the U.S. war in Iraq, the opposite is the case: there weren’t many victories to speak of, and there are too many fathers of defeat to mention.
One of them, however, is at the top of the list: James Woolsey. A former CIA Director during the Clinton administration, Woolsey spent little time before jumping into the media and pontificating about Saddam Hussein’s potential involvement in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. A day after 9/11, he surmised that Osama Bin Laden may have been working with Saddam to carry out the operation. Woolsey even launched his own investigation to prove that Iraqi intelligence was involved in the previous attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 (the Iraqi government had nothing to do with either attack).
When a wave of anthrax attacks hit the U.S. in October 2001, Woolsey suggested Iraq was behind it (also not true). In 2002, when chatter about regime change in Baghdad was heating up, Woolsey used his contacts in the Defense Department to elevate claims of Iraqi defectors about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction programs that did not exist.
Woolsey continues to make television appearances to this day.
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Jacob Heilbrunn, Editor of the National Interest — Bill Keller
If I had to pick a culprit — and there is a rich rogue’s gallery to choose from — it would be Bill Keller, the former columnist and executive editor of the New York Times. No, Keller did not guide Bush administration policy or whisper in Vice President Dick Cheney’s ear. But what he did was bad enough. He wrote in February 2003 the locus classicus of liberal hawk justifications for the war. It was called “The I Can’t-Believe-I’m–a-Hawk Club.” The key sentence: “We reluctant hawks may disagree among ourselves about the most compelling logic for war — protecting America, relieving oppressed Iraqis or reforming the Middle East — but we generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold.”
Actually, it did. In its credulous coverage of the George W. Bush administration, the Times helped pave the road to war.
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Scott Horton, Editorial Director, antiwar.com — David Wurmser
David Wurmser recommended Israel or America overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq and replace him with King Hussein of Jordan or his cousin, Sunnis from the Hashemite family.
Though Saddam was a minority Sunni dictator ruling a super-majority Shi’ite population, Wurmser thought this would break Iran’s Shi’ite region alliance because their reverence for the Prophet’s blood in Hashemite veins would bind Iraqi Shi’ite religious leaders to the king’s will. He would then have them insist Lebanese Hezbollah stop being friends with Iran and Syria, empowering the American-Israeli-Jordanian-Turkish alliance at Syria’s expense, so Israel wouldn't have to implement the Oslo Accords.
Wurmser’s thinking was tragically stupid. Jordan had little influence in post-invasion Iraq. His adviser Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi Shi’ite exile, had been playing him for a sucker. After the U.S. fought an 8-year war for the Shi’ites, Baghdad became allies with Tehran, Damascus and Hezbollah instead.
But they did kill Oslo.
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Karen Kwiatkowski, retired U.S. Air force Lt. Colonel and columnist – Bill Luti
Bill Luti, as Director of the Near East South Asia Directorate in the office of the secretary of defense, and the Office of Special Plans, was a forward-leaning and rabid manipulator of intelligence and the media in the rush to war, and a man unburdened by his multiple oaths to uphold the Constitution. A U.S. Navy veteran, an SES with an earned PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a yes-man for war, he added a cachet of seriousness to the team of civilian neoconservatives who had never fought a war, and never wore a uniform. He was a non-intellectual intellectual, a lawless and undiplomatic "student" of diplomacy and law, and the kind of person who plays an extremely important role in U.S. government war and foreign policy.
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Daniel Larison, journalist — Colin Powell
There were other members of the Bush administration who bore greater direct responsibility for launching the Iraq war, but there was one top U.S. official that did a great deal to pave the way for the invasion and lent an air of legitimacy to an unnecessary, illegal war. That official was Colin Powell. In his capacity as secretary of state, Powell not only had significant influence within the administration that he could have used to oppose the invasion, but he had a good reputation with the media and the public that he put in service of a bad cause. Powell’s decision to be a “good soldier” for the Bush administration made it easier for Bush to start a terrible war that could have been avoided.
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Jim Lobe, contributing editor at Responsible Statecraft and Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service (1989-2016) — Richard Perle
As one of Cheney and Rumsfeld’s closest advisers dating back to his work for Sen. “Scoop” Jackson in derailing détente, Perle promoted Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith as deputy defense secretary and undersecretary for policy, respectively, and was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board. That post gave Perle both bureaucratic influence and public credibility to disseminate disinformation about Saddam’s purported ties to al-Qaida and WMD, particularly from his long-time Iraqi co-conspirator, Ahmad Chalabi, and to undercut his two bêtes noires, the CIA and State Department.
He used his stature in Washington’s hardline neoconservative universe — from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Center for Security Policy to the Hudson Institute and the Project for the New American Century, as well as some favored journalists, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, and the “scholars” at his perch at the American Enterprise Institute — to build a formidable echo chamber that was carefully coordinated with like-minded hawks within the administration and that persuaded most Americans that Saddam Hussein posed a dire threat to the United States.
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Lora Lumpe, CEO of The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft — Laura Bush
Laura let us down. While I have no reason to think that Laura Bush was a promoter of the war, I have always wondered whether this highly intelligent and by all appearances compassionate woman did anything to try and prevent her husband from launching a war of choice and unleashing hell on Iraq and the greatest mistake of his presidency.
It doesn’t appear so. In her memoir, “Spoken from the Heart,” published in 2010, she said that he told his daughters in December 2002 that he did not want war. “No president ever does. He knew how precious any child is, and every person sent into war is someone’s child, and often someone’s mother or father too.” She writes that “There would be no war for oil or some kind of U.S. presence in the Middle East. There was war because only one man would not choose peace. That was Saddam Hussein.”
By failing to speak up, she failed her husband, her faith, her country, and certainly the people of Iraq.
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John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago — The Israel Lobby
The Israel lobby played an important role in causing the Iraq war and this was widely recognized at the time. In recent accounts of that disaster, however, the lobby’s influence is hardly mentioned or greatly minimized. In fact, two months before the war, AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, said that “quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” AIPAC was not alone in its efforts to sell the war, as a 2004 editorial in the Forwardnotes: “As President Bush attempted to sell the … war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement, community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein.”
Unsurprisingly, top Israeli officials — including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, and Ariel Sharon — lobbied hard to push the United States into war. Yet even then, few people talked publicly about the lobby’s influence. As the journalist Michael Kinsley put it, Israel “is the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one mentions it.”
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Robert Merry, author of “Where they Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians” — Woodrow Wilson
The philosophical progenitor of the Iraq folly was Woodrow Wilson, that fuzzy-headed idealist who donated his name to the idea that great powers such as the United States can wander the world, planting seeds of good intention that will grow into mighty oaks of democratic enlightenment and civic stability. Some 80 years after that idea came a cropper at Versailles, George W. and his people embraced it as their key to success in Iraq. Their rationale of necessity was Saddam's presumed weapons of mass destruction. That turned out to be bogus. But the rationale of ultimate success was gauzy Wilsonism — -the idea that the U.S. wouldn't get bogged down in the Middle East because the Wilsonian ethos would make it all come out just fine, with the peoples of Iraq and beyond pulling to their bosoms all the hallowed principles of American democracy and thus eradicating tyranny for all time. Beware the siren song of Wilsonism.
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John Mueller, senior fellow, Cato Institute — Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein’s evasive behavior with regard to his weapons of mass destruction was important in bringing the Iraq War about. He declared he had abandoned his WMDs — a claim that later proved to be essentially accurate. But the puzzle, stressed by hawks at the time, was that, if he had nothing to hide, why was he being so evasive? There seem to be two reasons. One was his fear that U.S. infiltrators within international inspector teams were seeking to triangulate his location so that he could be killed — a fear that several reports indicate was reasonable. The other, completely unappreciated by foreign observers at the time, was his rather bizarre conviction that chemical weapons had saved his bacon in his war with Iran in the previous decade and therefore that he needed to be evasive about his WMD in order to deter an attack from that country.
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Christopher Preble, senior fellow and director of the Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program — Robert Kagan and William Kristol
Well before 9/11, a loose coalition of think tankers, Iraqi exiles, and Capitol Hill staffers pushed U.S. policy from containing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq toward what author Joseph Stieb calls “the regime change consensus.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol were among its leaders. In January 1998, the two co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times which began “Saddam Hussein must go.” The following month, a Kagan and Kristol op-ed in the Washington Post called for “U.S. air power and ground troops to get rid of him.” When President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law on October 31, 1998, regime change became U.S. policy — but stopped short of war to achieve it.
Such limitations were removed after 9/11. Within weeks of the terrorist attacks, Kagan and Kristol explained in The Weekly Standard that “taking decisive action against Saddam does not require absolute proof linking [the attacks] to Iraq.” They were pushing on an open door, having laid the foundation for war years earlier.
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Assal Rad, Nonresident Fellow, Eurasia Group Foundation — Thomas Friedman
Two decades later, many have come to admit that the Iraq war was a major U.S. foreign policy disaster. However, there was a chorus of voices before the invasion — from experts to activists—who understood that the Bush administration’s narrative did not match the reality on the ground.
While President Bush’s legacy has been defined by this disastrous war — which caused large-scale death and destruction, gave rise to groups like ISIS, and has left Iraq an unstable state to this day — there are many architects and enablers that made the war possible.
The role of the U.S. mainstream media in selling the war to the American public cannot be understated. Rather than challenging the narrative of the state, calling for evidence, or even humanizing the would-be victims of the war, the Iraqi people, reporters such as Thomas Friedman with significant platforms like The New York Times most often parroted the talking points of U.S. officials. There was little critical journalism to question the existence of WMDs and little reflection on important issues, such as the U.S. role in supporting Saddam Hussein in the 1980s against Iran, international law, or the humanity of Iraqis.
Perhaps the most telling instance of the media’s acquiescence was a year after the Iraq invasion, when President Bush’s joke at the White House Correspondents’ dinner about finding no weapons of mass destruction was met with uproarious laughter from an audience of journalists.
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Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington — Richard Perle
The U.S. decision to invade Iraq had many cheerleaders, from exiled Iraqi con man Ahmad Chalabi to neoconservative Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and uber hawk John Bolton. Among the most egregious was Richard Perle, dubbed “the prince of darkness” for his distrust of diplomacy as a means of dealing with adversaries. An enemy of arms control with the Soviet Union when he served as an assistant defense secretary under the Reagan administration, Perle became a raging neocon associated with the so-called Project for the American Century that advocated using what turned out to be a brief period of U.S. global dominance to overthrow troublesome regimes.
As a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Perle squired Chalabi at so-called black coffee briefings at which the Iraqi drummed up support for the U.S. invasion and peddled false intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Perle later criticized the conduct of the war but not the decision to invade. At least, he has had the decency to retire from the Washington scene unlike many of his fellow travelers.
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Craig Unger, author of “The Fall of the House of Bush” — Unknown mastermind behind the Niger memo forgery
Whoever it was should be at the top of the list.
To make a very long story short, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered his military intelligence chief, Nicolo Pollari, to disseminate documents purloined from the Niger Embassy in Rome to other intelligence agencies. On October 20, 2001, Pollari sent the documents, including a fraudulent memo that purportedly concerned the sale of 500 tons of yellowcake uranium to Iraq, to the CIA. Although the documents were repeatedly discredited, Bush cited them as the casus belli for the Iraq War in his 2003 State of the Union Address.
The FBI never pursued individuals who promoted the dubious intelligence. Neocon operator Michael Ledeen told me he had nothing to do with it. A friend and bridge partner of Pollari, Ledeen had been on SISMI’s payroll for a different operation and had secret meetings with then deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley —but that, he said, was “just a coincidence.”
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Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation — Christopher Hitchens
The Iraq War debacle was the U.S media’s greatest failure in modern times. Its abettors have yet to be held fully accountable for trumpeting lethal mendacity in the march to war.
One of those enablers, The Nation’s own Christopher Hitchens, adopted a pose of “Byronic heroism" (as a pro-war New Yorker writer noted), denounced “his comrades” with ferocious invective, noisily and self-righteously resigned from the magazine on the war’s cusp, and ended up on a Potemkin trip to Iraq in Paul Wolfowitz’s entourage.
In signing up for action as an armchair warrior, “Hitch” paved the way for pro-war liberals to join that disastrous crusade.
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John Walcott, former editor-in-charge for National Security and Foreign Affairs at Reuters and team leader for national security and foreign affairs at Bloomberg News — Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith
The blame game over the U.S. invasion of Iraq 20 years ago has been raging for years, but much of it has ignored one key fact. Some Bush administration officials who bear the greatest responsibility are still trying to pass the buck to career officers in the intelligence community.
Beginning days after the 9/11 attacks, though, some of these officials ignored dissents and warnings from their subordinates. DOD officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith even formed a rival intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans, to bolster the case for invading Iraq. Doubts about their case, the prospects for success and bogus intelligence from Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress did appear, but mostly in footnotes and marginal notes in the classified version of a October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and in the reporting of Knight Ridder’s Washington Bureau, which I had the privilege of leading at the time.
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Stephen Walt, columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University — Ken Pollack
According to Thomas Friedman, Iraq was “the war the neoconservatives wanted . . . the war the neoconservatives marketed.” Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and other neocons had pushed for toppling Saddam since the mid-1990s, and their efforts finally convinced Bush and Cheney to embrace that goal after September 11. They deserve most of the blame for the resulting debacle, yet few have expressed regret for the damage they did or paid a professional price for it.
But other voices aided their efforts. One important contributor was Council on Foreign Relations and Brookings Institution fellow Kenneth Pollack, whose book ”The Threatening Storm” portrayed Saddam Hussein as a risk-acceptant tyrant who could not be deterred and therefore had to be removed. Pollack also wrote multiple op-eds in the New York Times and made numerous media appearances calling for war. As a former official in the Clinton administration, Pollack’s advocacy gave skeptical liberals an excuse to jump on the pro-war bandwagon, and his contribution to an enduring national disaster should not be forgotten.
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Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director, DAWN — Joe Biden
The American people have still failed to hold President Biden, then-Senator Biden, accountable for championing the resolution authorizing President Bush’s war in Iraq in 2003, which he quizzically justified as an effort to “strengthen diplomacy.” Not only did his push undermine broad public opposition to the war, it paved the way for decades of misused force authorization in Iraq, where U.S. troops still remain, and the country, decades later, is still in shambles.
Sadly, his unprincipled, wobbly approach to the Middle East has remained consistent, with broken promises to end U.S. support for Saudi’s war in Yemen. Today, the Biden administration continues to prioritize arms sales and Israel’s interests ahead of all other national interests, and risks ever deeper entanglement in the region’s conflicts with the prospect of unprecedented security guarantees for Saudi Arabia and the UAE in service of the Abraham Accords. We should have realized that Biden’s approach would be a repeat failure in the Middle East.
