This is an interesting article though I’m afraid I have to disagree with some its arguments.

Brian Stewart

19 Mar 2023 · 15 min read

The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable.

A review of Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq by Melvyn P. Leffler, 368 pages, Oxford University Press (February 2023)

When asked after the ouster of Saddam Hussein how history would judge the Iraq war, President George W. Bush replied, “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” For all the alluring modesty of this reply, Bush did not reckon on an eminent and conscientious historian of US foreign policy like Melvyn Leffler. Leffler’s new book, Confronting Saddam Hussein, examines the tangled origins of the war without reproducing the historical revisionism that has long disfigured public understanding of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The purpose of his study is neither to denounce the decision to wage war nor to praise it, but to better apprehend how it came to pass.

The Iraq war began on March 19th, 2003, endorsed by Congress as well as a majority of the American public. Confronting Saddam Hussein arrives on the conflict’s 20th anniversary, at a time when historical amnesia has reconceived it as the work of neoconservative warmongers. Leffler aims to set the record straight. Contrary to the reigning narrative, he reminds us that the Bush administration’s Iraq policy was in keeping with America’s approach toward Saddam Hussein in the preceding decade (Bush was the third consecutive president to use military force against Baghdad). If this was a mistake, the burden of responsibility rests not just with the Bush administration—let alone the “Israel lobby”—but with a broad swath of the governing class and the public at large.

Taking his cue from the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, who insisted that the purpose of history is to show how things actually were, Leffler begins his account with the singular figure of Saddam Hussein. The decision to employ force cannot be understood without taking stock of the dictator’s perverse “role and agency,” and no amount of revisionism can efface his incessant malice, aggression, and volatility.

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