Blunder: Britain's War in Iraq by Porter Patrick;

Author:Porter, Patrick; [Porter, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198807964
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2018-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Part I. Liberalism, Realism, and War

A restatement of definitions is in order, as well as an account of ‘liberal wars’ and how to recognize them. Deudney and Ikenberry frame the issue in a way that ‘games’ the argument.

Realism is a pessimistic intellectual tradition that views international life as insecure and defined by the possibility of war, because the world is anarchic, or lacking a supreme, supranational sovereign.134 Without a ‘Leviathan’ to keep the peace, this condition of anarchy places a premium on self-help and a sensitivity to dangerous power imbalances. Realists often disagree on specific policies but are generally concerned for stability over progress, emphasize material capabilities, are wary of overzealous crusading, and are above all averse to the impulse to reinvent the world, and transform other countries, in one’s own image and at one’s own timetable. This translates into a general unease with waging wars to export American values. Most realists who whisper in princes’ ears—from George Kennan to Henry Kissinger to Brent Scowcroft—share this orientation, though not all.

As America became a ‘unipolar’ superpower without a peer competitor to restrain it, most American academic realists directed their energy both to theory-building and to prophesying about the impermanence of unipolarity and the perils of overstretch. There were limits even to American power, they warned. Despite appearances, the triumph of Atlantic democratic capitalism under Washington’s stewardship would not permanently transform the world. Americans were not immune from the historical patterns whereby overexpansion generated resistance and counter-power. And they argued that America’s commitment to primacy, often euphemized as ‘leadership’, and to spreading the ‘democratic peace’ made the country dangerously war-prone, and endangered the very democratic institutions they were supposed to protect. This critique grew more urgent as the Global War on Terror unfolded.135

Most senior realists of the academy opposed the Iraq War.136 They argued that the military adventure was not in the national interest, that overthrowing the Iraqi state would spread instability in the Middle East, that invading this divided society would lead to occupation for years, and that the US should focus its efforts on combating Al-Qaeda and to deterring Saddam’s adventurism. More broadly, they warned that the Iraq War was part of Washington’s overexpansion, an expansion driven by the lack of a major power competitor and by the motor of liberal ideology. Some observers, including realists critical of the Iraq War, trace a lineage from Woodrow Wilson to the ‘Bush Doctrine’ in which the Iraq War was grounded.137

For Ikenberry and Deudney, realists who argued that their faith dictated opposition to Iraq, failed to understand the breadth and multiplicity of their own tradition. Realism, they rightly note, has several variants. The realism that apparently inspired Iraq was more to be found amongst the ‘practical-operational’ stable of realists within government. These realists proffered a twofold form of realism that has strong purchase in Washington. It was firstly ‘hegemonic realism’ or the pursuit of American primacy on the basis that order flows from favourable concentrations of power, and ‘interdependence realism’ that stresses the

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