Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq

by Michael MacDonald

Overview

In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a fair number of Americans thought the idea was crazy. Now everyone, except a few die-hards, thinks it was. So what was going through the minds of the talented and experienced men and women who planned and initiated the war? What were their assumptions? Overreach aims to recover those presuppositions.

Michael MacDonald examines the standard hypotheses for the decision to attack, showing them to be either wrong or of secondary importance: the personality of President George W. Bush, including his relationship with his father; Republican electoral considerations; the oil lobby; the Israeli lobby. He also undermines the argument that the war failed because of the Bush administration’s incompetence.

The more fundamental reasons for the Iraq War and its failure, MacDonald argues, are located in basic axioms of American foreign policy, which equate America’s ideals with its interests (distorting both in the process) and project those ideals as universally applicable. Believing that democratic principles would bring order to Iraq naturally and spontaneously, regardless of the region’s history and culture or what Iraqis themselves wanted, neoconservative thinkers, with support from many on the left, advocated breaking the back of state power under Saddam Hussein. They maintained that by bringing about radical regime change, the United States was promoting liberalism, capitalism, and democracy in Iraq. But what it did instead was unleash chaos.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674729100
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2014
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael MacDonald is Frederick L. Schuman Professor of International Relations at Williams College.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Why Elect a Self-Defeating War? 7

2 Bring 'Em On: Making the World Safe for Democracy 38

3 What Went Wrong: The Decapitationist Consensus of Washington Elites 72

4 What Were Neoconservatives Thinking? 99

5 Democratic Hawks 142

6 American Exceptionalism Meets Iraqi History 183

7 The Semi-Sovereign Shi'i State 222

Conclusion 256

Notes 267

Acknowledgments 309

Index 313

Editorial Reviews

09/08/2014
With gloomily apt timing, as U.S. bombs drop once again on a now deeply fractured Iraq, international relations specialist MacDonald analyzes the usual explanations for why the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and finds them lacking. MacDonald argues that, beyond oil, the Israeli lobby, or Bush family history, the Iraq War and its horrific outcomes owe their existence to a more general trait in U.S. foreign policy, namely, a tendency to equate the country’s values with its interests. As he relates, a Fukuyama-like belief in the permanent triumph of so-called democratic capitalism over communism prompted a political elite of neoconservatives and Democratic hawks—the latter including pragmatic neoliberals like Hilary Clinton—to grant “moral approval” to the war while demurring over tactics. This groupthink, the argument continues, was premised on an American exceptionalism that saw the United States as a historically righteous force for modernizing and liberating the planet. Such a belief is hardly new or ignored, and, indeed, in part MacDonald’s argument is merely an update of political scientist Louis Hartz’s liberal consensus paradigm. MacDonald adds a darker twist with his examination of the way material interests morph into ideals, but readers may still feel that the book is too abstract to fully make sense of a contentious war. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Excellent… MacDonald is profoundly and chillingly right in his diagnosis of the mentality that ultimately set this disastrous chain of events in motion.

Dissent - James B. Rule

It is easy to forget how many supported the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. For anyone who wants to remember what happened—and what went wrong—this is an absorbing read. We misunderstood Iraq and the war, MacDonald shows, because we misunderstood ourselves—profoundly and tragically.

Russell Muirhead

In Overreach, MacDonald methodically dissects the top ten reasons most often used to explain why the war was a failure, and in the process shows each to be self-serving, inadequate, misleading—or all of the above. He does the same for explanations of why we went to war in the first place.

Bookforum - Scott Beauchamp

Overreach is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how and why the project of ‘regime change’ in Iraq not only failed, but was incoherent from the outset. With his characteristic political acumen, meticulous research practices, and marvelously lucid prose, MacDonald reveals the tragic political (not cultural!) blindness suffered by American architects of that project. This is a gripping, sad, and immensely important story.

Wendy Brown

2014-07-30
An academic employs a variety of theories to explain the failure of American policymakers after the invasions of Iraq that began in 2003.MacDonald (International Relations/Williams Coll.; Why Race Matters in South Africa, 2006, etc.) does not come across as neutral, despite employing sometimes-abstract theory to discuss on-the-ground warfare; in fact, he calls the war "destructive and irrational." While the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke provide material for MacDonald in substantial sections of the book, the author mostly integrates theories from a variety of modern academic disciplines to explain why the George W. Bush administration chose to mount a war that seemingly had no chance of achieving even most of the stated objectives. Although keenly critical of Republicans, MacDonald does not spare the Democratic supporters of the war, and he discusses the apparent calculations of then-Senator Hillary Clinton for voting, however reluctantly, to wage war. If the American war machine had simply settled for ousting Saddam Hussein, the war may have been considered at least a partial success. However, writes MacDonald, the regime change so desired by the war's supporters failed to result in anything resembling American-style democracy, thus rendering the costly (both in the financial sense and regarding the loss of life) war counterproductive. The author calls into question some of the popular theories about why Bush chose to invade, theories that revolve around Israeli influence, the quest for Iraqi oil reserves, and the Republican Party's electoral campaigns to win the White House as well as both chambers of Congress. While knocking down certain theories, MacDonald demonstrates vigorously and with intellectual clarity why the tenets of American exceptionalism do not usually translate to other areas of the world, with Iraq being just one example. A useful analysis of failed American military initiatives that could inform future debates about interventions in traditionally despotic nations that are also split among historically hostile religious factions.

Kirkus Reviews