The near-hysteria that pervaded American discourse about Saddam Hussein in 2002 and early 2003 has echoes in current discourse about China and, to some extent, Russia. So it’s important to remember that there are at least two lessons of the Iraq War. One, to be sure, is the famous one: be skeptical of things a hawkish administration (like the current one) says about adversaries. The other, which may sound easy but is actually hard, is: try to stay calm and think clearly even if that’s not what the luminaries are doing.

“Bush lied, people died” is a common takeaway from the Iraq War, which began 20 years ago this weekend. But it’s a misleading takeaway, one that obscures important lessons of the war and shields from accountability influential Americans whose poor judgment helped get hundreds of thousands of people killed.

It’s of course true that the Bush administration claimed falsely that Saddam Hussein had active nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. And it’s true that lots of American politicians, think tankers, columnists, and assorted other opinion leaders believed these claims and backed a disastrous war.

But here’s the thing: Even if those claims had been true, supporting the invasion of Iraq still wouldn’t have made sense.  

The fog of time makes it easy to lose sight of one of the most amazing facts about that war: In order to invade Iraq and start looking for weapons of mass destruction, the US had to first kick out UN inspectors who were in Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction.

And they’d been looking intensively! Over the previous four months they had inspected more than 500 sites and found no WMDs and no signs of a WMD program.

Given that those inspected sites included the sites US intelligence agencies had deemed most likely to yield paydirt, this result—zero-for-500—suggested to the attentive observer that information coming from the US government about Saddam Hussein’s activities was not to be trusted.

But let’s leave that aside. Suppose the US government hadn’t been thus discredited—suppose that on the eve of the invasion there was still good reason to think that WMDs were out there somewhere. Why not let the UN inspectors—who had been allowed by the Iraqi government to inspect every site they had asked to inspect—keep looking? There just isn’t an answer to this question that holds water. 

So it won’t do for American politicians and opinion leaders to say they supported the invasion of March 19, 2003 because they believed the administration’s claims about WMDs. Supporting the invasion made no more sense if they believed those claims than if they didn’t.

One source of frustration to those of us who opposed the invasion is that it was followed by roughly zero accountability. The American think tanks and media outlets whose luminaries led their country into a catastrophic war continued, in its aftermath, to be run and staffed by those luminaries. Indeed, some luminaries were elevated to new heights. 

Maybe this lack of turnover in the US foreign policy establishment helps explain some foreign policy mistakes that have accumulated in the meanwhile, such as: (1) a disastrous regime change war in Libya (begun under the seductive guise of a limited humanitarian intervention that carried UN Security Council approval); (2) the decision by the US and some of its friends in the Middle East to flood Syria with weapons, turning what would have been a brutal but finite crackdown into an epic, massively lethal, and widely destabilizing civil war that failed to accomplish the goal of regime change; (3) a mindless and ever-expanding sanctions policy that continues to bring pointless suffering to people in Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, among other places.

Even the Ukraine war, though started by Russia, may have a kind of connection to continuity between the pre-Iraq-War and post-Iraq-War American foreign policy establishment. There’s no way of knowing for sure why the Biden administration refused to negotiate seriously with Russia in an attempt to head off the invasion of Ukraine, but one reason may have been the knowledge that success in this endeavor would have been greeted by a chorus of foreign policy elites alleging Munich-style appeasement.

And one reason such a chorus was assured was because the character of the choir hadn’t changed after the Iraq War; supporting the most disastrous US intervention since Vietnam wasn’t considered a blemish on a foreign policy elite’s resume. Which in turn was in part because “I supported the war because I believed my president was telling the truth” was taken as a valid excuse. Even though it made no sense.

The near-hysteria that pervaded American discourse about Saddam Hussein in 2002 and early 2003 has echoes in current discourse about China and, to some extent, Russia. So it’s important to remember that there are at least two lessons of the Iraq War. One, to be sure, is the famous one: be skeptical of things a hawkish administration (like the current one) says about adversaries. The other, which may sound easy but is actually hard, is: try to stay calm and think clearly even if that’s not what the luminaries are doing.

Vir: Robert Wright, Nonzero