Two cheers for bargaining theory: Assessing rationalist explanations of the Iraq war

International Security

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 7-52

  Lake, David A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79251524589     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/ISEC_a_00029     Document Type: Article

References (270)

1. Positive theories of the Iraq War are few. See Daniel Byman, "An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?" Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (October 2008), pp. 599-643.
2. Andrew Flibbert, "The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War," Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April-June 2006), pp. 310-352.
3. Jacek Kugler, Ronald L. Tammen, and Brian Efird, "Integrating Theory and Policy: Global Implications of the War in Iraq," International Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 163-179.
4. David Mitchell and Tansa George Massoud, "Anatomy of Failure: Bush's Decision-Making Process and the Iraq War," Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 5, No. 3 (July 2009), pp. 265-286.
5. Among other largely journalistic accounts, see Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).
6. Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Three Rivers, 2007).
7. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004).
8. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
9. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006).
10. James D. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer 1995), pp. 379-414.
11. Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
12. Dan Reiter, "Exploring the Bargaining Model of War," Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 27-43.
13. R. Harrison Wagner, "Bargaining and War," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 2000), pp. 469-484.
14. One of earliest statements of bargaining theory comes from a history of selected wars. See Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), especially pp. 292-294.
15. The first formal model was Donald Wittman, "How a War Ends: A Rational Model Approach," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 23, No. 4 (December 1979), pp. 743-763.
16. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, "An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace," American Political Science Review, Vol. 93, No. 4 (December 1999), pp. 791-807.
17. Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
18. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
19. David A. Lake, "International Relations Theory and Internal Conflict: Insights from the Interstices," International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 2003), pp. 81-89.
20. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War.".
21. The classic studies are Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).
22. Irving I. Janis and Leon Mann, Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1977).
23. John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of Political Analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).
24. Arthur A. Stein, "When Misperception Matters," World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 4 (July 1982), pp. 505-526.
25. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War".
26. Powell, In the Shadow of Power.
27. That is, the greater the value of the issue in dispute, the smaller the costs of war, all else constant, and vice versa.
28. A third condition arises when the issue in dispute is indivisible or cannot be the object of an intermediate settlement. No apparent indivisibilities existed in the Iraq case, so I do not discuss this problem further here. On indivisibilities and conflict, see Stacie E. Goddard, "Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy," International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 1 (January 2006), pp. 35-68.
29. Ron E. Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).
30. James D. Fearon, "Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict," in David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds., The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 107-126.
31. Robert Powell, "War as a Commitment Problem," International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 169-203.
32. L), utility maximizing actors face an inevitable "risk-return" trade-off. Because of this trade-off, there is always some stochastic risk of war.
33. Powell, In the Shadow of Power.
34. Wagner, "Bargaining and War".
35. Darren Filson and Suzanne Werner, "A Bargaining Model of War and Peace: Anticipating the Onset, Duration, and Outcome of War," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No. 4 (October 2002), pp. 819-837.
36. Branislav L. Slantchev, "The Principle of Convergence inWartime Negotiations," American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (November 2003), pp. 621-632.
37. Robert Powell, "Bargaining and Learning while Fighting," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 2 (April 2004), pp. 344-361.'.
38. H -a.
39. Branislav Slantchev, "Military Coercion in Interstate Crises," American Political Science Review, Vol. 99, No. 4 (November 2005), pp. 533-547.
40. This is especially true of models that focus on asymmetric information. See Erik Gartzke, "War Is in the Error Term," International Organization, Vol. 53, No. 3 (July 1999), pp. 567-587.
41. Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982-1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), pp. 68-93.
42. Neither side could openly declare its ambitions, for obvious reasons, and thus direct evidence of the issue in dispute is hard to find. On the regional ambitions of the United States, see Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2008), pp. 51-56, 141-143.
43. Peter W. Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), pp. 9-10.
44. Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 5-6.
45. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York:W.W. Norton, 2008). This is, of course, the ex post cost of the war. Nonetheless, it is not substantially different than widely circulated estimates of the costs before the war.
46. William D. Nordhaus, "The Economic Consequences of a War with Iraq," in Carl Kaysen, Steven E. Miller, Martin B. Malin, Nordhaus, and John D. Steinbrunner, War with Iraq: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2002), chap. 3, which gives an outside estimate of $1.9 trillion but does not include costs of veterans' care, which loom large in Stiglitz and Bilmes's calculations.
47. Daniels's original figure is from Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 194.
48. The revised figure from Daniels and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is from Stiglitz and Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, p. 7. Larry Lindsey, head of President Bush's National Economic Council, originally estimated that the total costs of the war might reach $200 billion, but Rumsfeld dismissed this as "baloney." Lindsey was pushed out of the administration in December 2002.
49. Stiglitz and Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, p. 7.
50. Stiglitz and Bilmes hesitate to place a dollar value on Iraqi lives, but there is little doubt that overall losses in life and economic welfare have been greater than for the United States. I have not been able to identify any estimates of likely costs to fighting for Iraq released prior to the war.
51. The lowest estimates are from Iraq Body Count, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/. The highest estimates are from Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, "Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-section Cluster Sample Survey," Lancet, October 21, 2006, pp. 1421-1428.
52. Oil production remains about 14 percent below 2000 levels. See U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq: Oil," Current Analysis Briefs, June 2009, http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/iraq/oil.html.
53. On the philosophy of a more robust military, see Mann, Rise of the Vulcans.
54. Combining conditions one and two, if the direct costs of war to administration officials were low, the direct benefits of demonstrating the usability of force were low as well. Although the country might gain from demonstrating that the public supported the use of force, it is not clear how this would redound to the advantage of individual officials.
55. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, pp. 50-60.
56. Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, pp. 46-47.
57. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 351-353.
58. Indeed, one of Bush's persistent fears in 2002 and early 2003 was that Saddam would concede. Below I suggest that this fear had more to do with the problem of credible commitment that would exist as long as Saddam remained in power.
59. In principle, a broader array of options existed. I focus on the three actually discussed or pursued during the 1990s to discipline the counterfactual analysis.
60. On the Bush administration's review of its options, see Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 332-334.
61. For contemporary defenses of this alternative, see Steven E. Miller, "Gambling on War: Force, Order, and the Implications of Attacking Iraq," in Kaysen et al., War with Iraq, chap. 2.
62. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "An Unnecessary War," Foreign Policy, No. 134 (January-February 2003), pp. 50-59.
63. Nancy Soderberg, The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2005), pp. 205-206.
64. Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), pp. 194-199.
65. Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, p. 210.
66. The ineffectiveness of containment crystallized for neoconservatives all that was wrong with the 1990s, including the failure to exploit the unprecedented international power of the United States.
67. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 36.
68. Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, pp. 17-18.
69. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 176.
70. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 301, 347.
71. For an insider's critique, see Feith, War and Decision, pp. 205, 300-301.
72. Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, pp. 140-141.
73. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 7. This was one of the reasons the CIA distrusted Chalabi in 2003 even while he was supported by the Pentagon.
74. Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq:Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 71.
75. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 19.
76. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 88.
77. For a skeptical view of the consequences of a coup, see Feith, War and Decision, p. 202.
78. Quoted in Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 167.
79. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 39.
80. Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies since 9/11 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 26.
81. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 80.
82. Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, pp. 22-23.
83. For an account of the National Security Council meeting on September 13, 2001, See Feith, War and Decision, pp. 13-17
84. At the Camp David meeting on September 15-16, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice set out three options in response to the terrorist attacks, of which the third was not only to attack al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan but "to eliminate the Iraq threat.".
85. Hersh, Chain of Command, p. 182.
86. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, pp. 3, 6, 82.
87. The claim that the Bush administration was "fixing" the intelligence around the policy originates in a report from Sir Richard Dearlove, Britain's head of intelligence, to Prime Minister Tony Blair in July 2002.
88. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 61.
89. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 39.
90. A second credibility problem might have existed, namely, that the United States could not credibly commit not to invade Iraq if the latter fully disarmed. In this case, Iraq would become weaker, p would increase (p > p'), and a would shrink (a > a'), making it necessary for Iraq to offer a better deal to the United States than it would if it did not disarm (see figure 3a). For this credibility problem to lead to war, however, two conditions must be true: (1) the United States was deterred in 2003 by residual uncertainty about Iraq's WMD capacity; and (2) it would not have been deterred if that uncertainty was resolved by full disclosure of the latter's (nonexistent) WMD programs.
91. That the United States was not deterred in 2003 by this uncertainty suggests that the credibility of its promise not to invade a weaker Iraq at some future date was unimportant, or at least not sufficiently important to affect Iraq's calculations. Moreover, and somewhat at odds with the prior conditions, Saddam believed that the United States was a paper tiger, unlikely to mount a significant invasion under any circumstances. This further implies that this particular credibility problem was not important in causing the war.
92. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 83.
93. Feith, War and Decision, pp. 224-225.
94. Quoted in Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 342.
95. Quoted in Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, p. 14.
96. On Iraq's estimate of the probability of victory, see Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 2.
97. The greater was Iraq's WMD capability, the further p' would shift to the left, the larger a' would be, and likely the higher b would be as well. Even short of parity in capabilities, however, the post-WMD bargaining range might not overlap with the pre-WMD range.
98. Feith, War and Decision, p. 355.
99. pp. 203, 215, 308.
100. The commitment problem also explains why exile for Saddam was insufficient, as he could not be trusted to refrain from reclaiming power at some later date. Indeed, the larger the payment to Saddam to induce him to accept exile (imagine if the United States gave him $25 billion to leave- a bargain for both sides), the easier it would be for him to continue to influence Iraqi politics or return to power.
101. Prior beliefs about Saddam's type (an attribute possessed by the United States and its offificials) are the inverse of his reputation (an attribute possessed by Iraq and Saddam himself). On reputation and international relations, see Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
102. Andrew H. Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
103. On the gathering evidence, see Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, pp. 175-185.
104. On the responsibility of the administration for subsequent attacks and how this conditioned officials' thinking, see Feith, War and Decision, pp. 217, 515.
105. Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, especially p. 62.
106. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 32.
107. Quoted in Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, p. 164.
108. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 778.
109. Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, p. 210.
110. Quoted in Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 115.
111. There is no doubt that the Bush administration disregarded evidence suggesting that Iraq's WMD programs were either dismantled or significantly inhibited over the 1990s and used intelligence not to guide policy but to market it.
112. Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, p. 214.
113. President Bush and National Security Adviser Rice may not have even read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 296.
114. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 61. The president and his aides cherry-picked intelligence that supported their view that Saddam was untrustworthy, selectively fed this information to the press, and then used press accounts as an "echo chamber" that confirmed the information.
115. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 54. They also relied heavily on evidence extracted under torture or from sources known to be unreliable. The intelligence community was also inhibited from challenging prevailing beliefs in the administration
116. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 67. Although fixing the intelligence around the policy is deplorable, the practice is not inconsistent with the strong prior beliefs that Saddam was "evil" and could not be trusted.
117. Feith, War and Decision, p. 181.
118. Iraq was removed from the list in 1982 to make it eligible for military aid while it was fighting Iran, but it was readded in 1990 following its invasion of Kuwait.
119. Feith, War and Decision, p. 181.
120. Strict rationality expects that given identical information two individuals or sets of officials would arrive at the same prior beliefs. Information is rarely identical, however. Moreover, how it is interpreted is affected by different experiences and cognitive traits.
121. Saddam may have been attempting to send a costly signal when he permitted the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq in December 2002. At this point, however, the Bush administration was already hardened against any sign of acquiescence, and interpreted Saddam's move as one of continued obfuscation.
122. The Iraq Survey Group was sent in after the war to assess Saddam's WMD capabilities, find the expected stockpiles, and destroy them. For its findings on the absence of WMD programs, see among others Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, pp. 305-309.
123. On Bush's response, see Packer, The Assassins' Gate, pp. 375-377.
124. For a brief analysis, see Hersh, Chain of Command, chap. 5.
125. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 38.
126. For a history of the Iraqi nuclear program, see Etel Solingen, Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 7.
127. This is the overriding theme of Kevin M. Woods, with Michael R. Pease, Mark E. Stout, Williamson Murray, and James G. Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam's Senior Leadership (Norfolk, Va.: Joint Center for Operational Analysis, U.S. Joint Forces Command, 2006), based on interviews with former Iraqi officials (including Saddam) and cap tured documents.
128. For a condensed version, see Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, "Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 3 (May-June 2006), pp. 2-26.
129. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006), pp. 55, 122.
130. Solingen, Nuclear Logics, pp. 161-163.
131. On the attacks on the Kurds, see Jentleson, With Friends Like These, chap. 2.
132. Galbraith, The End of Iraq, pp. 27-35.
133. On the sarin attacks, see Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 55-56.
134. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 65.
135. Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group tasked with finding Iraq's WMD after the war, "personally concluded that Saddam had been engaged in an impossible double game: trying to persuade the West that he had no WMDs while maintaining enough ambiguity that his historical foe, Iran, couldn't be certain that was true.".
136. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 375.
137. Feith, War and Decision, pp. 330-331, explains Saddam's obfuscation over WMD in the same way, raising the question that if this is obvious ex post why were officials not more aware at the time of the dual game Saddam was playing.
138. That this was a "surprise," at least to the U.S. military, is apparent inWoods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project.
139. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, pp. 126, 146.
140. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 348.
141. Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, p. 15.
142. Quoted in Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 121.
143. Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, p. 28.
144. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 62.
145. Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, pp. 48, 55.
146. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 173-175.
147. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 190.
148. On the intent of many in Congress to signal their resolve to Iraq rather than support the United States going to war, see Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 149.
149. On audience costs as a form of costly signaling, see James D. Fearon, "Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes," American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (September 1994), pp. 577-592.
150. Michael Tomz, "Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach," International Organization, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Fall 2007), pp. 821-840.
151. Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, pp. ix, 8.
152. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 134.
153. Feith, War and Decision, pp. 346-347.
154. Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, p. 113, documents that Saddam was aware of U.S. actions, but claimed he did not understand them.
155. On the difficulty of inferring intentions in tyrannies, see Feith, War and Decision, p. 283. That a key administration official recognizes this ex post, of course, raises the question again of why intelligence assessments of Saddam's intentions did not take this difficulty into account ex ante.
156. Stiglitz and Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, p. 233.
157. Ricks, Fiasco, pp. 76, 99.
158. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 246.
159. Stiglitz and Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, p. 124.
160. Imperfect information is not inconsistent with rationality if it is costly relative to its value to obtain. That is, rationality does not imply full information by any actor, only that the actor equate the marginal costs of acquiring information against its marginal benefits. In both Iraq and the United States, the costs of acquiring information on the other were relatively low. Saddam only needed to read a Western newspaper to gauge U.S. intentions. For the United States, various estimates of the cost of the war were made by outside organizations; these were readily available to the administration, and in fact officials exerted considerable effort in trying to debunk these alternative studies. In turn, given the high costs of fighting to both sides, the marginal value of additional information was high. The failure to acquire additional information does not appear to follow from any rational cost-benefit calculation.
161. The Iraq War does illustrate clearly, however, how prewar mobilization costs matter in important ways in setting the prospects for a negotiated solution. Prewar mobilization, intended as a costly signal to compel the other side to concede without fighting, can also increase the risk of war by making the country more belligerent, or more difficult to satisfy. Once the costs of mobilization have been incurred, they are sunk and no longer matter to the bargaining.
162. Slantchev, "Military Coercion in Interstate Crises".
163. Branislav L. Slantchev, Military Threats: The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
164. Some set of bargains with Iraq that the United States might have settled for before mobilization were thus excluded, as these sunk costs dropped out of the equation. This helps account for the hardening of the Bush administration's position as the crisis escalated and its increasing resistance to anything less than a total victory.
165. This suggests that the decapitation strategy pursued by the United States may have facilitated the dissolution of the Iraqi military, whose integrity the Bush administration was counting on for the occupation, and paradoxically prolonged the actual fighting as isolated units continued to resist.
166. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 75.
167. I owe this argument to Laura Wimberley, "Pyrrhic Peace: Governance Costs and the Expected Utility of War," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2007. Theorists could, of course, simply include postwar governance costs in the "total" costs of war within the standard setup described above. Crucially, though, the challenger may not know what these governance costs will be, with the implication that it is uncertain over its own costs of fighting. The literature on postwar occupations and extraction is relevant.
168. Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
169. On total and limited war and bargaining, see Wagner, "Bargaining and War".
170. R. Harrison Wagner, War and the State: The Theory of International Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
171. Quoted in Wayne Washington, "Once against Nation-building, Bush Now Involved," Boston Globe, May 2, 2004.
172. Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, p. 125.
173. Quoted in Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 97.
174. Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 65.
175. Feith, War and Decision, p. 415.
176. Strock's recollections are quoted in Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 463.
177. Wolfowitz's similar views, quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 96.
178. Interview with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC show Newsnight, "Iraq 4 Years On," Wednesday, March 21, 2007.
179. For a transcript of the interview and link to the televised interview, see Bob Fertik, "John Bolton's Astonishing Neo-Neo-Con Rewrite of History," April 17, 2007, http://www.democrats.com/bolton-rewrites-history. Alternatively, even today the prospects for democracy in Iraq remain bleak.
180. Bruce E. Moon, "Long Time Coming: Prospects for Democracy in Iraq," International Security, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Spring 2009), pp. 115-148.
181. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 114.
182. Quoted in Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 180.
183. On Bush's limited knowledge of Iraq's religious groups, however, see Galbraith, The End of Iraq, p. 83.
184. Quoted in Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 194.
185. Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 96.
186. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 12.
187. Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 20.
188. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 12.
189. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 105.
190. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 89.
191. Although blame ultimately lies with the civilian leadership, the U.S. military bears some responsibility for this failure to plan for postwar disorder, sectarian violence, and a possible insurgency. Following Vietnam, the army intentionally forgot nearly everything it had learned about counterinsurgency warfare.
192. Ricks, Fiasco, pp. 226, 267.
193. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 201. The Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, in turn, reinforced the military's desire to fight tank battles rather than lightly armed insurgents in urban settings.
194. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 132.
195. Although the Bush administration may have had political or ideological reasons for wanting to ignore postwar nationbuilding, the military should have recognized the impending problems and at least developed contingency plans for dealing with them. Yet, as journalist Thomas Ricks concludes, "In the Spring of 2003 the U.S. military fought the battle it wanted to fight, mistakenly believing it would be the only battle it faced."
196. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, pp. 191-200.
197. On the other hand, the "Future of Iraq Study" carried out by the State Department was criticized by David Kay, a CIA weapons inspector later tasked to Garner's ORHA who resigned after one day on the job, as "unimplementable," more "a series of essays to describe what the future could be" rather than a plan that would have made a difference.
198. Quoted in Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 159.
199. Ricks, Fiasco, pp. 78, 80.
200. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 33.
201. Feith, War and Decision, defends his role in the lack of planning on two fronts.
202. First, the goal, in his view, was liberating Iraqis to rule themselves rather than occupying the country. Second, he developed a plan for an Iraqi interim authority that was approved by Bush but then ignored by both military and civilian administrators in Iraq. He places the blame for the failed planning squarely on the State Department and the CIA, which opposed allowing Iraqi exiles, primarily Chalabi, to play a leading role in any indigenous governing authority.
203. Foremost here was the evaporation of the Iraqi army. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 162, 467. Tellingly, Garner arrived with just $25,000 in cash to resurrect the devastated Iraqi government ministries.
204. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 143.
205. Bremer's decisions on disbanding the army and de-Baathification are the most controversial of all these planning failures. These two actions disrupted Iraq immediately, but the decision to abandon the promised provisional government had a larger long-run effect by undercutting indigenous forces supporting democratization.
206. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, p. 225.
207. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 105-110.
208. Galbraith, The End of Iraq, pp. 118-124.
209. Bremer regarded economic reform as his biggest accomplishment in Iraq (see Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, pp. 70, 134, 328), but it created a "fearsome" backlash from the Iraqi business community.
210. (see Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 198). All of these problems were exacerbated by the incompetence of many Coalition Provisional Authority officials, at least some of whom were picked not for their experience but for their party credentials and past work on Bush's election campaign.
211. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 203.
212. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, pp. 103-104.
213. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 184.
214. An anonymous general involved in postwar planning at the Pentagon, quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 179.
215. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 83.
216. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, pp. 114, 116-117;.
217. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, pp. 35, 59.
218. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 118.
219. Galbraith, The End of Iraq, p. 8.
220. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 457-460.
221. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 147.
222. Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), p. 20.
223. Quoted in Galbraith, The End of Iraq, p. 101.
224. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 189.
225. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 155.
226. Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, p. 229.
227. The early looting in Baghdad now appears to have been coordinated, at least in part, to destroy data on internal security and to disrupt the occupation (Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, pp. 115-117).
228. But it sent a message to the average Iraqi either that the United States did not care or that it was powerless to act effectively (Ricks, Fiasco, p. 136).
229. In the absence of security, sectarian groups grew up to provide protection and social services to their members (Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 168), creating parallel power structures that later bedeviled U.S. forces.
230. (Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 91).
231. On the surge and new counterinsurgency strategy, see Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends.
232. Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (New York: Penguin, 2009).
233. This is hardly a new insight. On first- and second-image theories of war, see Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
234. Special interests were blamed for World War I. Most famously, see Helmuth C. Engelbrecht and Frank C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934).
235. On social forces and war, see, among others, Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
236. As Waltz correctly pointed out, however, domestic theories of war tend to ignore the strategic interactions between states. Although applied to institutions and the democratic peace (see especially Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001]), the bargaining theory of war has not to date incorporated the role of social groups.
237. On the role of Israel, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
238. Samuel Seljan, "Economic Interests in the Domestic Politics of War: Evidence from U.S. Decisions to Go to War with Iraq in 1991 and 2003," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2010.
239. I am indebted to Kenneth Schultz for his original development of these ideas. For a full treatment, see Jeffry A. Frieden, David A. Lake, and Kenneth A. Schultz, World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), pp. 143-153.
240. The most careful analysis of the effects of the war on industry is Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz, "Using Markets to Inform Policy: The Case of the Iraq War," Economica, Vol. 76, No. 302 (April 2009), pp. 225-250.
241. Analyzing financial market data, they estimate that ex ante a 10 percent increase in the probability of war produced a $1 increase in the spot market price of oil, but this effect was expected to dissipate quickly (largely by the end of 2003). Counterbalancing this special interest effect, the same increase in the probability of war is estimated to produce ex ante a 1.5 percent decline in the value of the S&P 500.
242. On the obsolescence of war, see Richard N. Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
243. John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
244. Virginia Page Fortna, Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
245. Colin F. Camerer, "Behavioral Economics," in Richard Blundell, Whitney K. Newey, and Torsten Persson, eds., Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and Applications, Ninth World Congress, Vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 181-182. Behavioral economists do not question the "intentionalist stance," by which we assume humans are making meansends calculations.
246. Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
247. On the efficient market hypothesis, see Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
248. On mass behavior, see George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
249. Gartzke, "War Is in the Error Term.".
250. Daniel Kahneman, "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics," American Economic Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (December 2003), p. 1450.
251. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, chap. 5.
252. Kahneman, "Maps of Bounded Rationality," pp. 1454-1458.
253. On prospect theory in international relations, see Jack S. Levy, "Prospect Theory, Rational Choice, and International Relations," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1 (March 1997), pp. 87-112.
254. Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
255. Kahneman, "Maps of Bounded Rationality," pp. 1463-1467.
256. Camerer, "Behavioral Economics," p. 193.
257. Quoted in Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 45.
258. Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, p. 308.
259. Framing effects are often ambiguous, however. Some officials believed that the United States could fundamentally alter politics in the Middle East by building a liberal democracy in Iraq, thereby undercutting Islamic fundamentalism and diffusing Arab antagonism toward Israel. This significant improvement over the status quo should have engendered a degree of caution or risk aversion. Although it is not hard to understand how a narrative of future loss might win out and lead to a high-risk foreign policy decision, the advocates of transformation within the administration- Wolfowitz, Feith, and the other neoconservatives-were among the most willing to toss the die and take a chance on war.
260. More speculatively, the same may be true for Saddam's mistaken prior belief that the United States was likely to back down in the face of resistance.
261. On bias in updating beliefs, see Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper, "Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 37, No. 11 (1979), pp. 2098-2109.
262. On bias and intelligence failures, see Uri Bar-Joseph and Rose McDermott, "Change the Analyst and Not the System: A Different Approach to Intelligence Reform," Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 2008), pp. 127-145.
263. Rose McDermott, "The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science," Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 2, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 691-706.
264. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics.
265. For an alternative more sensitive to strategic interactions, see Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970).
266. On the administration's internal decisionmaking pathologies, see Mitchell and Massoud, "Anatomy of Failure.".
267. On how Rumsfeld's individual worldview and bureaucratic style affected decisionmaking, see Stephen Benedict Dyson, "'Stuff Happens': Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War," Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 5, No. 4 (October 2009), pp. 327-347.
268. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 67.
269. On threat inflation and the public, see Chaim D. Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the IraqWar," International Security, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Summer 2004), pp. 5-48.
270. Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau, eds., Contending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969).