“The forgotten decade that made the invasion of Iraq possible”: Ross Caputi on Joseph Stieb’s *The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003*

Joseph Stieb’s The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is coming to us as a professional historiography of the 2003-2011 invasion and occupation of Iraq. The American memory of the conflict, however impoverished, was shaped largely by partisan media coverage of the occupation. Recent scholarship has pushed back, reframing and recontextualizing our understanding of the occupation within a broader period of American foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly its military commitments beginning in the 1980’s. Stieb’s book offers just this—a bridge between two wars—linked in popular consciousness by the fact that they were waged by father and son; the decade of US policy in between them is less well known. The Regime Change Consensus fills in these gaps, detailing the evolution of US policy towards Iraq from the ’90’s to the new millennium, from support to regime change, and situating it within the broader foreign policy debates over regime thinking, post-Cold War interventionism, and preventative war.

With great consistency throughout the book, Stieb focuses on how the “foreign policy establishment”—which included policy makers, journalists, academics, and activists— discredited alternatives to the policy of containment that emerged after the 1991 Gulf War, leading to a bipartisan embrace of regime change in 2003. However, the details of this policy shift were often overlooked in the media commentaries that attributed the rush to war almost entirely to the neoconservatives within the administration of George W. Bush. Stieb’s account offers an important corrective. In reality, the voices that formed what he calls “the regime change consensus” were more bipartisan than they were remembered in the polarized media landscape after 2003. In fact, the regime change consensus was consolidated under the democratic administration of Bill Clinton, which sought a tougher position against Iraq, with respect to other members of the international coalition, calling for stricter enforcement of sanctions and weapon inspections and punishing Iraqi noncompliance on multiple occasions with military strikes.

The detail with which Stieb has documented these debates within the foreign policy establishment is a treasure. Moreover, he renders a decade’s worth of tedious debates and standoffs remarkably readable. The period between Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom was filled with confrontations with Saddam Hussein to coerce compliance with weapons inspections, political tug-of-war within the international coalition enforcing containment, and constant critiques from foreign policy hawks. Though often overlooked as a period of frustrating policy stagnation that could only manage Iraq without solving the problem entirely, Stieb details how this sense of frustration withered the set of available options within the thinking of the foreign policy establishment. By the time the Iraqi Liberation Act was signed in 1998, the view that security and stability would not return to Iraq as long as the Saddam Hussein remained in power was diffuse within the foreign policy establishment, who now embraced regime change as the only solution to the Iraq problem.

It is important to note that other members of the international coalition—France, Germany, Russia, and China—were not as discouraged as the US with the results of containment. By their view, Saddam had been severely weakened, his capacity to threaten his neighbors mitigated, and the humanitarian toll that sanctions were taking on the Iraqi public, along with the their own interests in normalizing trade with Iraq, left little incentive to continue with containment. By contrast, the American and British hardline on Iraq was seen as inappropriate interference in Iraq’s internal affairs and more a response to domestic political needs than actual security threats coming from Iraq. Thus, the consensus was only a consensus within the US. And Stieb locates the pressures that created this narrowing of available policy options within the broader tradition of “regime thinking,” which held the spreading of democracy to illiberal states to be imperative, and American ambitions for post-Cold War primacy.

Though consensus formed around regime change as the ultimate policy goal, there was no clear path forward to make that a reality; that is, until the attacks of 9/11 and the impetus it gave to controversial thinking about preventative war. Stieb identifies the fault line between preemptive and preventative war as the existence of an imminent threat, explaining that it was the concept of imminence that came under attack in the Bush Doctrine. The Bush administration argued that the reality of global terrorism forces us to consider the necessity for military action against states that might possess WMDs or could providing aid and sanctuary to terrorists who do. Thus, the foreign policy establishment was already primed to accept military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power when the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 provided the rationale for preventative war.

Much changed in the period between Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and most of it below the level of public consciousness. “Foreign policy is one of the least democratic areas of political life,” Stieb writes, “given the power of the executive to make and direct policy, the expert status of the foreign policy bureaucracy, and the public’s general lack of knowledge about global affairs.”^[1] This comment comes almost as a side thought, buried within a discussion of George Kennan’s views on insulating foreign policy from public opinion in the conclusion of the book. Nonetheless, the comment hits, especially after reading over 200 pages of foreign policy debates that vacillate between support for the regime of Saddam Hussein to constructive engagement, containment, and eventually regime change, with the public being brought along with the policy rather than the policy options being delimited by public opinion.

Overall, the relationship between the foreign policy establishment and the public, and the flow of information between the two, receives little attention. In Stieb’s reading of the sources, the internal policy documents and the public addresses tell the same story. The rhetoric of each presidential administration is well documented, though taken at face value as transparent declarations of intent. For example, in his 2002 address to West Point, President Bush argued that in the context of global terrorism containment was no longer an acceptable policy option when the existence of WMDs are at play and dictators could ally with terrorists. Stieb’s reading is straight forward: “Bush thus saw the containment of Iraq as both a broken policy and something that even if revived could not fulfill perceived US security needs following 9/11.”^[2] He does not engage with other interpretations put forward by scholars who argue that the Bush administration’s policy ambitions far outreached their public professions. For example, Andrew Bacevich argues that in invading Iraq without a UNSC authorization the Bush administration hoped to set a precedent that would in perpetuity exempt the United States from the constraints of international law and reserve for itself the exclusive right to wage preventative war.^[3] Others have interpreted the argument of a potential “nexus” between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda as a scare tactic to garner domestic support for a war that had unstated strategic ambitions, such as greater control over Iraq’s oil resources or Israeli national security.

Stieb does not weigh in on these debates, instead sticking to a largely documentary account of the Iraq discourse that leaves the coded lingo of the foreign policy establishment unchallenged with deeper analysis. Its assumptions about American “leadership” in diplomacy, “skepticism” towards international law, and the imperative of the “free” flow of oil from the Middle East pass without comment or translation. It is only in the discussion of the intelligence failures leading up to the 2003 invasion that Stieb identifies a disparity between the public statements of policy makers and reality. Similarly, just as the book’s documentary nature accepts the ideological parameters set by its subject, the foreign policy establishment, it also accepts its priorities, leaving the legality of the 2003 invasion and the humanitarian consequences of sanctions as peripheral issues that go largely unexamined.

The Regime Change Consensus does not methodologically offer more than it promises: a rigorously documented account of the foreign policy establishment’s hand in shaping US policy toward Iraq from Operation Desert Storm to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Its contribution to the interwar period is especially valuable, as this important phase in the history of Anglo-American aggression against Iraq often goes overlooked. Stieb’s account of how the regime change consensus formed in the ’90’s and set the stage for invasion in 2003 is an important corrective to accounts that see sharp policy rupture with the administration of George W. Bush. At the same time, the foreign policy establishment is both the protagonist and antagonist of this book, a body at war with itself. Thus, the victim of the book is not the Iraqi people, but the policy of containment, which dies at the hands of outdated policy thinking, born in the Cold War and unable to adapt itself to the complexities of the situation with Iraq.

^[1] Stieb, Joseph. The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American politics, 1990-2003. Kindle Edition. (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 254.

^[2] Stieb, “Regime Change Consensus,” 203.

^[3] Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East. (New York: Random House, 2017). 240-245.