Overreach
Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a fair number of Americans thought the idea was crazy. Now everyone, except a few die-hards, thinks it was. So what was going through the minds of the talented and experienced men and women who planned and initiated the war? What were their assumptions? Overreach aims to recover those presuppositions.
Michael MacDonald examines the standard hypotheses for the decision to attack, showing them to be either wrong or of secondary importance: the personality of President George W. Bush, including his relationship with his father; Republican electoral considerations; the oil lobby; the Israeli lobby. He also undermines the argument that the war failed because of the Bush administration’s incompetence.
The more fundamental reasons for the Iraq War and its failure, MacDonald argues, are located in basic axioms of American foreign policy, which equate America’s ideals with its interests (distorting both in the process) and project those ideals as universally applicable. Believing that democratic principles would bring order to Iraq naturally and spontaneously, regardless of the region’s history and culture or what Iraqis themselves wanted, neoconservative thinkers, with support from many on the left, advocated breaking the back of state power under Saddam Hussein. They maintained that by bringing about radical regime change, the United States was promoting liberalism, capitalism, and democracy in Iraq. But what it did instead was unleash chaos.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With gloomily apt timing, as U.S. bombs drop once again on a now deeply fractured Iraq, international relations specialist MacDonald analyzes the usual explanations for why the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and finds them lacking. MacDonald argues that, beyond oil, the Israeli lobby, or Bush family history, the Iraq War and its horrific outcomes owe their existence to a more general trait in U.S. foreign policy, namely, a tendency to equate the country's values with its interests. As he relates, a Fukuyama-like belief in the permanent triumph of so-called democratic capitalism over communism prompted a political elite of neoconservatives and Democratic hawks the latter including pragmatic neoliberals like Hilary Clinton to grant "moral approval" to the war while demurring over tactics. This groupthink, the argument continues, was premised on an American exceptionalism that saw the United States as a historically righteous force for modernizing and liberating the planet. Such a belief is hardly new or ignored, and, indeed, in part MacDonald's argument is merely an update of political scientist Louis Hartz's liberal consensus paradigm. MacDonald adds a darker twist with his examination of the way material interests morph into ideals, but readers may still feel that the book is too abstract to fully make sense of a contentious war.
