Historians Reflect on the War in Iraq: A Roundtable

As with all papers and commentaries presented during its annual meeting, the Organization of American Historians disclaims responsibility for statements, whether of fact or of opinion, made by its panelists, moderators, and participants.

What follows is a transcription of the roundtable which took place Saturday, April 5 2003 at the 2003 OAH Annual Meeting in Memphis. The presentations are copyrighted by the individual presenter.

Alan Brinkley, Columbia University

Copyright (©) 2003. Alan Brinkley. All rights reserved.

Thank you, Bill. I'm very glad that the Organization of American Historians has provided this opportunity for historians to gather and talk about these compelling issues of our time. Many people when this war began expressed the opinion that once the war actually started it would be inappropriate for Americans to discuss any longer their varying viewpoints on the conflict. I strongly disagree with that, and I don't believe that in a democracy we simply abandon our views and our consciences in response to events in the world. Having said that, I also want to say that I hope it's clear that both people who support the war and people who oppose the war nevertheless support the well being of our troops in the Middle East, hope for their safe and speedy return, and hope as well that the people of Iraq survive this war with the minimum damage and loss of life possible.

This is the third time in the space of less than a century that the United States has set out to create a new world order. The first time, of course, was in the aftermath of World War I, an effort led by Woodrow Wilson that eventually failed. The second time was the effort at the end of World War II, led at first by Franklin Roosevelt and then renegotiated over the next several years by a number of major figures in American government and diplomacy. In that case, the effort to remake the world was, at least in some ways, a success in that it created an international system that survived for over fifty years. That international system was based, of course, on the doctrine of containment, a doctrine that was devised by the United States as a strategy for opposing the presumed expansionist efforts of the Soviet Union and designed to give the United States a set of principles upon which it would oppose Soviet expansion. But the containment doctrine was not simply, as it turned out, a doctrine that served to contain the Soviet Union. It was also a strategy that served to contain the United States. In the years of the Cold War and to some degree beyond -- years in which the containment doctrine remained the centerpiece of our conception of American foreign policy -- the United States, although it took many aggressive actions in the world, always recognized that there were certain constraints on what it could safely do. And so, for example, we did not march into eastern Europe to liberate the so-called captive nations. We did not invade China during the Korean War. We did not invade North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. We did not go to war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis or even bomb the missile sites in Cuba. There was an instinctive and very powerful constraint on America's enormous power derived from both the containment doctrine itself, and, of course, maybe more importantly from the existence of a superpower rival, the Soviet Union, armed with a mighty nuclear arsenal.

Ever since the end of the bipolar world that the Cold War represented, the United States has been struggling to come up with a new conception of its role in the world. Through most of the '90s some remnants of the containment policy survived. There remained at least some restraint on the way America used its power. We did do some things that during the Cold War we almost certainly would not have done--the Gulf War, the Kosovo war, the intervention in Somalia and others; but on the whole until September 11, 2001, the edifice of containment of both containment of our enemies and containment of ourselves somehow survived. September 11, I think, provided the final blow to this already tottering edifice, from which its original rationale had long since been removed; and it opened up a moment in which American foreign policy could have moved in a number of different directions. The administration now in power has, of course, chosen a particular direction that is now both the basis of the war in Iraq and presumably the basis of American foreign policy for some time to come.

This new conception of America's role in the world reflects a number of assumptions. First, it represents a set of assumptions about the alliances and international structures that emerged after World War II or were strengthened after World War II and became the basis of the international character of American foreign policy -- from the World Bank and the IMF, to the system of alliances that were created during the Cold War, NATO preeminent among them, to the United Nations. It's clear that in the new foreign policy that is being articulated in Washington now, there is very little room for any of those things. And instead, we see a foreign policy based on a doctrine that is perhaps articulated most clearly in the now-famous article by Robert Kaplan, "Power and Weakness" which argues that in the new world -- the new post-Cold War and now post-September 11th world -- there is now a fundamental difference between the United States and all the other nations with which it has interacted since WW II, a difference epitomized in the title of the essay. Those who subscribe to this view say that Europe and the United States now live on effectively different planets, that Europe has spent fifty years abdicating any ability or responsibility or commitment to playing an active role in the world; it has maintained almost no military strength; and thus the United States is the only nation in the world capable of dealing with the great crises that face the world. And therefore it is appropriate for the United States to act entirely unilaterally in not only responding to but preempting dangers not just to the United States but to much of the rest of the world as well.

That, I think, is the core on top of which the foreign policy that has produced the Iraq war emerged. The war itself has been defended with so many different rationalizations, so many shifting explanations over the last 6 months to a year, that it's hard, I think, for us to understand what it is that's really driving the administration. My own view is that the real perception in this administration of the threat they're dealing with is not weapons of mass destruction, not the alliance between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, not even Saddam Hussein himself. The real danger is the sense among conservatives in policy positions in Washington that we now face a large if somewhat inchoate threat that is equivalent to the threat that we faced in the late '30s from the rise of fascism or the early, mid-'40s from the rise of communism. That threat, they believe, is radical Islam and the inherent instability and danger of the Islamic world to the survival of the world as we know it. I believe that the war in Iraq is simply the first step in an effort to confront the dangers of this world and to confront it in a primarily military way, which seems to be the only way this administration can envision using American power; and that the success in this war that now seems imminent could well embolden the administration to move on quickly to other wars, other preemptive actions against other nations that similarly, in their view, threaten the stability and survival of the global order as we know it.

Many people, including myself, consider this an extremely dangerous view of American foreign policy. But it is not an irrational or crazy view of the world. It's the product of a real set of intellectual beliefs and decisions. It's the product of intelligent men and women. And it represents a very powerful alternative to the exhausted foreign policy ideas of the past. Not just a politically powerful because the influential people who support it, but ideologically powerful in comparison to many of the visions of American foreign policy competing with it.

One of the problems, I think, that the people who oppose this stance towards the world, and who oppose this war, have is that there is at the moment no clear and coherent alternative model for American foreign policy. There is a instinctive return to the containment idea among some people. There is an instinctive embrace of many idealistic sounding, multilateral slogans. But I have yet to see the production by liberals or people on the left of a coherent alternative to our foreign policy -- one that offers a concrete strategy for dealing with our changed and dangerous world -- that would allow those of us who are opposed to the powerful model being presented by this administration to debate their vision effectively. Thank you very much.