Liberty Is "God's Gift to Humanity"

This important account of the causes of the U.S. war with Iraq rests on newspapers, magazines, internet sites, secondary materials, and both published and unpublished primary sources. Lloyd C. Gardner, Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University, places events in historical context rather than simply attributing this unexpectedly lengthy conflict to the personal motivations and miscalculations of President George W. Bush. Many historians believe it too early for meaningful assessments, yet journalists such as Thomas E. Ricks in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (2009), and Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack (2004); State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (2006); and The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006–2008 (2008), have written the first drafts of this history (all sharply critical). A few historians too have dared to tread into this minefield, preparing early examinations that are also strikingly negative. George C. Herring has offered a highly critical analysis in his survey, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (2008); and Hal Brands, in From Berlin to Baghdad: America's Search for Purpose in the Post–Cold War World (2008), has examined the period from the end of the Cold War to Baghdad, seeing a generally consistent strategy that nonetheless raises questions about its moral simplicity and denigrating impact on America's reputation. Gardner has expanded this coverage not only in years but by including a philosophical and expansionist base that relates the Vietnam War to the war in Iraq. His well-reasoned and hard-hitting work presents a deeply troubling analysis that sets the bar high for those wishing to defend the Bush administration's preemptive war in Iraq.

Gardner shows that Bush supported a war in Iraq from the outset of his presidency and not as a result of 9/11; and he explains the neoconservative mindset for a New World Order resting on a laissez-faire system that fostered a free-market economy. The Cold War realism of containment, the neocons argued, was a defeatist policy that must give way to an aggressive "liberation" akin to that pursued by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the 1950s. Vice President Richard Cheney assured his colleagues in the Bush administration that the Iraqi people would welcome Americans as liberators in the aftermath of a regime change ousting Saddam Hussein and introducing democracy.

The strength of Gardner's sweeping approach is that it places the president in the broad course of history; the danger is that it can alleviate him of much of the blame by putting many events out of his control. Yes, Gardner asserts, the Iraqi war had roots long before Bush became president; no, Gardner asserts, this does not free him from responsibility for the war. The Bush administration cannot escape the charge of going to war on the basis of two untruths—the manipulated intelligence alleging a connection between Iraq and 9/11 and the unsubstantiated claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

According to Gardner, "the road to Iraq" (p. 2) began after the Vietnam War, when a top adviser in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Walt W. Rostow, advocated an economic growth process that would modernize the backward areas of the world. An economic specialist and successor to McGeorge Bundy as national security adviser, Rostow convinced President Lyndon B. Johnson that the nation's military policy in Vietnam was correct. Rostow was "the real father of creative destruction," Gardner argues—a theorist with a mission to save South Vietnam and the world against ideologies threatening freedom. The only way to do this, as Rostow argued in The Stages of Economic Growth, was "to jolt" underdeveloped and traditional societies into an economic and political "takeoff" through "outside force" (p. 16).

Another major event leading to the Iraqi war was the Iranian...