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Thread: On realism and Iraq. @McFaul, affronted that some in US progressive politics are calling for a "progressive realist" foreign policy, insists: realism is responsible for war and destruction over centuries, the Iraq war was realist, & his liberal values are innocent. 1/
2/First, let's distinguish between realism as a pessimistic intellectual tradition about international relations that has moved some practitioners, and what @McFaul (I think) has in mind, a kind of crude machtpolitik, of uninhibited, amoral power maximisation.
3/Is realism implicated in policy failures abroad? Clearly. Most big, consequential ideas are implicated in atrocity and disaster. So too for liberalism and attempts to apply it abroad. Show me an idea that has clean hands, and I'll show you an inconsequential idea.
4/The better question is whether progressives are wrong to incorporate realist insights into their thinking as they define president-elect Biden's policy agenda. Surely it is smart to try, given that US statecraft for decades has not enjoyed uniform success.
5/Realism thought/done conscientiously is best conceived, as Marc Trachtenburg argues, as a "theory of peace." That doesn't mean one must agree with its premises. But it attempts to create some security for a polity in an anarchic, insecure world.
6/Salient for this debate is one of its concerns, that while states should prepare strong military capabilities and be prepared to fight, war can deplete or destroy the state, not least wars launched for extravagant goals to transform the internatioanl system, heedless of limits.
7/Granted, not all realists have stuck to this tradition, and indeed have departed from sound realist principles. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/henry-kissinger-an-occasional-realist/
8/Which brings us to Iraq. For McFaul, the Bush II Administration went to war for realist reasons, only uttering realist rationales. Ambitions for liberal transformation were only a later alibi. For a more sophisticated version of this argument, go here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2017.1349757
9/But behind closed doors, the administration and the hawkish intellectuals they listened to offered several rationales. Among these, the desire to alter an entire region, towards pro-American capitalist democracy, was real. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-017-0115-z
10/Memoirs of David Frum, Karen Hughes, Scott McClellan agree on Bush's transformative ambitions for ME. The 'Delta of Terrorism'- an influential memo of hawkish intellectuals, helped persuade Bush & Cheney that change in Baghdad necessary to cure ME 'malignancy.'
11/The secret Presidential Directive of 29 August 2002, “Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy,” stated that one aim was to “liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny, and assist them in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy"
12/More diffusely, visions of uprooting authoritarianism, creating an alternative ME base to Saudi dependency, and creating conditions for a resolution of Israel-Palestine, were all entertained and seriously held.
13/There were other impulses too: counterpoliferation, to strike at a perceived, gathering of bad forces (terrorism, rogue states, WMD), and to signal US resolve and thereby restore general deterrence. See @ahsanib on this point: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636412.2019.1551567
14/For wider utopian visions, read memoirs/papers of Douglas Feith, and vision of he & other officials of campaign to eliminate terrorism & its suspected sponsors, turning it into a taboo like slavery. They saw Iraq as part of that project.
15/More broadly, in saying it was "really" about x, with all else as propaganda, a false model of warmaking and domestic coalition-building is assumed. As I'll argue in an article hopefully in future, the post-9/11 superpower went to war in a state of muddled belligerence.
16/The Iraq war was, from the outset, a war in search of a justification. To adapt from Daniel Yergin, wounded by terrorist atrocity, sensing its power and opportunity, looking for arguments to define it and carry opinion, a unipolar power reached for its mandate of heaven. END
