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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Revisiting The Iraq War Debate

Reihan: I’m sensitive to this in part because I remember when pro-war conservatives spent huge amounts of time taking on the notion that President Bush wanted to invade Iraq to seize its oil wealth, to expand America’s empire, or to serve Israeli interests. It was a lot of fun to tackle these arguments because they […]

Reihan:

I’m sensitive to this in part because I remember when pro-war conservatives spent huge amounts of time taking on the notion that President Bush wanted to invade Iraq to seize its oil wealth, to expand America’s empire, or to serve Israeli interests. It was a lot of fun to tackle these arguments because they made critics of the Iraq War look like kooky conspiracy theorists. And some of them — very large numbers of them, perhaps — were kooky conspiracy theorists! But I wish that we in the pro-war camp had spent more time thinking about and not dismissing arguments about the opportunity costs of a prolonged military occupation of Iraq or the dangers posed by Iraq’s ethno-sectarian divides.

Mind you, the vast majority of arguments put forward by antiwar conservatives (including most of the arguments published by TAC) and war opponents generally focused on “the opportunity costs of a prolonged military occupation of Iraq or the dangers posed by Iraq’s ethno-sectarian divides,” but there were also a good number that addressed the empire and “pro-Israel” angles. Pro-war conservatives preferred to fixate on the latter because these arguments made it easier to demonize the antiwar position in the eyes of other conservatives, most of whom support the empire and would be happy to serve Israeli interests (which many of them readily conflate with our own), but they never made much of a case that these arguments were wrong, much less obviously “kooky.” Yes, of course, pro-war conservatives believe them to be kooky, but these people also usually believe that the Iraq war was a vital and necessary campaign of national defense and some of them still hang on to the fiction that invading Iraq without cause had something to do with anti-terrorism, which are ideas so far removed from reality that one might almost call them kooky. So perhaps their judgments in this area should not be relied on too heavily.

I have always marveled at the pro-war right’s insistence that Iraq had nothing to do with imperialism or Israel. On the whole, pro-war conservatives agree that the U.S. should have an active, aggressive foreign policy, and they believe the U.S. should work to maintain and increase American primacy in the world. They fully support the empire of military bases we have scattered around the world, and they are quie convinced of the virtues of Pax Americana.

When hegemonists eagerly support a given policy overseas, it is not a great leap to conclude that they support it because they believe it will help preserve and extend American hegemony. As they often are, they may be spectacularly wrong in their expectations, but what they hoped to accomplish is quite clear. Furthermore, when you set out to launch a war of aggression to depose another country’s government and install one more to your liking, it is not unreasonable to describe this as imperialism. There are some, such as Max Boot, who positively gloried in the possibilities of neo-imperialism, while others were more circumspect, but what most pro-war conservatives seemed to share was a desire to project U.S. power and increase it. What is more, they wished to increase it through the blunt instrument of military invasion and occupation. Were any other state to do what our government did, we would immediately hear accusations of imperialism from the very same people who pretended that invading Iraq was nothing of the kind. Indeed, during a much less clear-cut war in Georgia it was Iraq hawks who were the loudest and most irrational in their warnings about “Russian imperialism.” When zealous “pro-Israel” advocates constantly agitate for aggressive policies in the Near East, it is difficult to pretend that their “pro-Israel” zeal and their desire to support Israel are not major factors.

Pro-war conservatives prefer to speak of U.S. hegemony rather than empire, but the case of the Iraq war reminds us that the distinction doesn’t mean very much in practice. They are also reliably among the most ardent and hawkish “pro-Israel” people in the country and they judge every U.S. policy in the region according to its impact on Israel, but it is somehow unforgiveably “kooky” to point out that their views on the Iraq war were driven to a significant extent by their (exaggerated) concern for Israeli security. What is even more strange is that pro-war conservatives always take great offense when they are “accused” of believing things that they believe as a matter of course.

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