Online Feature

Bush's March to War

As we pass the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, the following selection of pieces published in The New York Review between 2002 and 2004 may be of interest.

—March 19, 2008

Its Own Worst Enemy
By Tony Judt
August 15, 2002
Notwithstanding the macho preening that sometimes passes for foreign policy analysis in contemporary Washington, the United States is utterly dependent on friends and allies in order to achieve its goals.

George Bush & the World
By Frances Fitzgerald
September 26, 2002
In the months before September 11 the Bush administration matched its surprisingly ideological domestic programs with what Democrats politely described as a "go-it-alone foreign policy." Bush officials called a halt to negotiations with North Korea and withdrew from attempts to negotiate peace in the Middle East. They refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and blocked a series of international arms control treaties. Then, while promising to make cuts in the US strategic nuclear weapons, they declined to make an agreement with Russia on mutual reductions.

Bush and Iraq
By Anthony Lewis
November 7, 2002
I find it increasingly hard to believe that Mr. Bush's objective is limited to seeing that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction. The history and the theology of the men whose advice now dominates Mr. Bush's thinking point to much larger purposes. I think this president wants to overthrow the rules that have governed international life for the last fifty years.

In Guantanamo
By Joseph Lelyveld
November 7, 2002
At the United States Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay there is not a single certified prisoner of war among the 598 Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees. The procedures laid down by the Geneva Convention have been overridden by fiat of the President, who determined at the start of the year that they didn't apply in this case, that none of the detainees needed to be treated as prisoners of war under the terms of the convention, and, therefore, that there was no need to determine their status individually before the tribunals it prescribes, which are also prescribed by US military regulations.

Iraq: The Economic Consequences of War
By William D. Nordhaus
December 5, 2002
In views of the salience of cost, it is surprising that there have been no systematic public analyses of the economics of a military conflict in Iraq. This essay attempts to fill the gap.

War Games in the Senate
By Elizabeth Drew
December 5, 2002
The administration doesn't recognize, or would prefer not to recognize, traditional boundaries between the different branches of government. Its attitude toward Congress is contemptuous; it tells legislators only what it is forced to, and takes Congress into consideration only when there is no other choice. Other administrations have played loose with the truth, especially when it came to obtaining the power to wage war, but the Bush administration does a striking amount of it. And it's an administration that plays rough.

The Wrong War
By Avishai Margalit
March 13, 2003
In my view radical Islam of the sort promoted by bin Laden is and should be regarded as the enemy. And fighting Saddam Hussein will greatly help this enemy rather than set him back. This will be true even if the war is successful, let alone if it turns out to be unsuccessful.

Anti-Americans Abroad
By Tony Judt
May 1, 2003
A military campaign is not retroactively justified by its success alone, and anyway much collateral harm is already done. The precedent of preemptive war against a hypothetical threat; the incautious, intermittent acknowledgment that this war has objectives far beyond disarming Baghdad; the alienation of foreign sentiment: these constitute war damage however successfully America handles the peace.

The Neocons in Power
By Elizabeth Drew
June 12, 2003
The problems in a postwar Iraq were always going to be difficult, but they have been made worse as a result of several factors: the administration's zeal—particularly on the part of the neocons and their allies—to remove Saddam Hussein from power while failing to plan for the peace; Bush's pretense that he hadn't decided to go to war long after he apparently had in fact decided to; the administration's relative lack of interest in peacekeeping and belief that such efforts are politically unpopular; and Rumsfeld's determination to hold down the number of troops in Iraq after the war—at whatever cost.

America Goes Backward
By Stanley Hoffman
June 12, 2003
It seems futile to recall from the history of empire that even when imperialism imposes direct rule is always threatened by rebellions and rising costs. Moreover, the shrinking of democracy at home does not go well with the spread of democracy abroad.

The White Man Unburdened
By Norman Mailer
July 17, 2003
Exeunt: lightning and thunder, shock and awe. Dust, ash, fog, fire, smoke, sand, blood, and a good deal of waste now move to the wings. The stage, however, remains occupied. The question posed at curtain-rise has not been answered. Why did we go to war?

Iraq: The New War
By Mark Danner
August 28, 2003
We see the world through the stories we tell, and until recently the story most Americans told themselves about the war in Iraq was a simple and dramatic narrative of imminent threat, daring triumph, and heroic liberation—a story neatly embodied in images of a dictator's toppling statue and a president in full flight gear swaggering across a carrier deck. Those pictures, once so bright and clear, have now faded, giving place to a second, darker story beneath: the story of an unfinished war, undertaken for murky reasons, that has left young Americans ruling indefinitely over people who do not welcome them and who are killing more and more of them each day.

The Failure
By Thomas Powers
April 29, 2004
Something went terribly wrong as America debated the need for a war a year ago, and each of the possible explanations raises grave questions of trust—either the CIA cannot be trusted to see the difference between real and imaginary dangers, or the agency made itself pliant and supine in the hands of the President, who exploited the CIA to make his case for war.