Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq

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. (Oct.)