Leap of Faith review: How the US talked itself into the second Gulf war

Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy

Author: Michael J Mazarr

ISBN-13: 978-1541768369

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Guideline Price: £25

Consider this sagacious assessment of the folly of attempting to overthrow Saddam Hussein following the 1991 Gulf war:

“[T]o get rid of him [would have entailed deploying] a very large force for a long time into Iraq to run him to ground and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after.”

These words pull the reader up in their tracks not so much for their prescience as their provenance: Dick Cheney, 1996. How could this seer reverse himself and preside a few years later over the ruinous ousting of Saddam with a big fat “to be determined” slapped over what to do next?

In Leap of Faith, political scientist Michael Mazarr forensically anatomises the US’s foreign policy catastrophe – a maw into which up to half a million lives disappeared, as much as “several trillion dollars” and the US’s good name, and out of which came terrorism more virulent than ever, plus an emboldened North Korea and its ilk.

The result retrieves the episode from lurid myth, debunking theories of a neoconservative cabal (there was nothing “neo” about the conservatism of most of its principals), the machinations of an Israeli lobby, oil “grab” or the Oedipal psychodrama of President George W Bush seeking closure of his father’s 1991 “unfinished business”. Actually, its architects were as a group far from monolithic. Deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, for whom Iraq was a personal hobby horse, subscribed to the quixotic neoconservative view of the venture as “an exercise in liberating an oppressed people”. But Cheney and Rumsfeld conceived of it chiefly as taking out “a threat”. And this divergence helps explain their convergence – Iraq was a vessel that could contain multitudes.

It also recovers the frame through which contemporaries viewed events. Our perspective today tends to be occluded by 9/11, demarcating year-zero for US foreign policy in an “age of terror”. Mazarr restores the thread of continuity through this break. Cheney’s rationalisation of his decisions as defence secretary notwithstanding, US foreign policy poobahs coalesced around the “wisdom” of removing Saddam during the 1990s. After 9/11, this represented a go-to proof of concept for a new “muscular” doctrine in which provocations previously deemed merely nigglesome were now found actionable – today Iraq; tomorrow Syria.

Misguided deliberation

All of which suggests an actual decision as the outcome of formal, if misguided, deliberation. Nothing so overt; instead, a course of action “emerged” as a “revelation of the right thing to do”.

Here, Mazarr offers a study in “groupthink”, organisational dysfunction and personal pathology forged in the crucible of crisis.

Personifying these dynamics: Bush, disposed to view life as a morality play, convinced of the inviolability of gut instinct as a divining rod, and fetishising “decisiveness”. Abetting them: the hawkish Cheney – in his pomp as close as any vice-president to being co-president-plus Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, capable but inclined to please rather than check. Then there’s Rumsfeld, the Pentagon’s cod philosopher-king and a six-sigma samurai of organisational efficiency for whom Iraq was a litmus test of his pared-to-the-bone military (more like a captive – parlously-low troop-counts contributed fulsomely to the fumbled aftermath).

With this shower in charge, what could go wrong? There are moments when the farcical nature of the exercise obtrudes. “It turns out to be painfully difficult to plan for a war that no one will admit is going to happen,” observes Mazarr.

And consider the eerie clairvoyance of these prospective “dangers” spit-balled by Rumsfeld:

“Number 13: ‘US could fail to find WMD on the ground and be unpersuasive to the world.’

“Number 19: ‘Rather than having the post-Saddam effort require 2-4 years, it could take 8-10 years, thereby absorbing US leadership, military and financial resources.’

“Number 20: ‘US alienation from countries in the EU and UN could grow to levels sufficient to make our historic post-World War II relationships irretrievable, with the charge of US unilateralism becoming so embedded in the world’s mind that it leads to a diminution of US influence in the world.’”

Thus flushed out, these “scenarios” were considered “internalized [and] domesticated”.

Trusting to providence

A pall of presentiment pervades as they mount the tendentious case for war, skimp on “due diligence” and “heedlessly” hurtle over the cliff, trusting to providence. But the unease is felt on behalf of the thousands of working-class US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or maimed. Rumsfeld et al are in clover.

If the US “sleepwalked” to disaster, there was symmetry in Saddam’s somnambulism. He had become a dictator-emeritus, disengaged, preoccupied with “writing a novel”. He had long since mothballed his nuclear programme; he wasn’t about to broadcast this and weaken himself domestically, but presumed US intel would pick it up.

Still, Mazarr saves the most chilling words for last.

The grandiosity, “messianism” and “solemn” moral framing that fomented war in Iraq are still kicking in the US’s “national security community”, he writes. As an addendum to their conversation, an ex-Bush staffer offers, “You know, it will happen again …We’ll do it again.”