Abstract
Frank P Harvey Explaining the Iraq war: Counterfactual theory, logic and evidence Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 349pp.,$30.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-1-107-01472-5 Reviewed by : David G Haglund, Queen's University
While visiting Paris back in the 1970s, China’s prime minister, Zhou en Lai, is said to have been asked by his French host, President Georges Pompidou, if he cared to comment on the effect the French revolution of 1789 had on the Chinese revolution of 1949. Zhou’s reply, or so the story goes, was that it was too soon to tell. Whether the Chinese leader actually did respond thusly, it is not hard wishing that he had; the story is too good to be allowed not to be true. Besides its humorous send-up of a certain pretentiousness on France’s part, the retort contains a great deal of epistemological virtue. After all, explanation in history and the other human sciences is always a complicated, usually an aleatory, undertaking; and this is so even when we happen to think that we have a fairly good idea as to what did occur.
A case in point, and the subject of Frank Harvey’s provocative monograph, is the Iraq War of a decade ago: it has become well-nigh an article of faith that US President George W. Bush deliberately instigated an illegal invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq because he was goaded into doing so by duplicitous “neoconservatives” who dominated him and his administration, on the spurious pretext that the Iraqi ruler was amassing arsenals of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) that nearly everyone today claims to have known to be nonexistent a decade ago. The reason why the “neocons” should have sought Hussein’s removal varies according to the critics: some are convinced it was a simple lust for oil, others see in it a desire to avenge an Iraqi attempt to assassinate Bush’s father, still others point to their belief that it was necessary for safeguarding Israeli security interests—these latter usually said to require democratization of the entire “Greater Middle East,” starting but not ending with Iraq. Whatever the motives, the critics nonetheless agree, it was not only an illegal and ill-advised war, it was fundamentally a neocons’ war.
Although he does not in this book argue the merits of the Iraq War (if any such there be), Harvey does insist upon the demerits of the interpretation he lampoons as “neoconism”—to wit, the claim that ideologues in the Bush administration forced Hussein’s removal for reasons that were contrary to logic and antithetical to America’s own national interest. Not only this, but Harvey goes on to make a robust, if necessarily “counterfactual,” critique of the contention, widely held, that had Al Gore won the presidential election in November 2000 (which many, myself included, are rather inclined to believe he did), there would have been no war in March 2003. This version of the past that did not transpire (viz., a Gore administration) Harvey dubs the “Gore-peace” counterfactual. Against this he posits a counterfactual of his own, called “Gore-war.” And the burden of the book is to make the case that no matter who won that 2000 presidential election, it was fundamentally irrelevant to the outcome, for Al Gore was a centrist hawk who, while serving as Bill Clinton’s vice president for eight years, had supplied more than enough reason for any informed observer to conclude that, given the chance to do so as president, he would have sought to unseat Saddam Hussein.
It is the fate of anyone relying upon counterfactuals to end up in the uncomfortable position of never being able to “prove” one’s point. But this does not imply, as is sometimes erroneously thought, that counterfactuals are fraudulent means to the pursuit of larger truths. They are valid, some say indispensable, methodological tools of inquiry. This does not translate into the rule that, in the realm of counterfactuals, anything goes. To the contrary, Harvey insists that those who do use a past we never had should be careful to employ one that we might easily have had, and the Gore-war counterfactual satisfies the “minimal-rewrite” rule by requiring only a slight alteration in reality (as in, Ralph Nader’s deciding not to pose his own candidacy for the White House) to have generated the alternative reality and necessary condition for the Gore-war counterfactual, namely Gore carrying Florida and its 25 electoral college votes.
There is much to like about Harvey’s argument, even if one must ultimately concede that his claims will always remain in the realm of speculation. He does as good a job as could be imagined in making the case for a credible alternative explanation of the Iraq war, which instead of relying upon “first-image” ideological explanations turns to structure and contingency to provide necessary and sufficient reasons for imagining the war to have been foreordained. These conditions are twofold—US power, which meant that Hussein could be toppled, and 9/11, which supplied the conviction that he should be toppled, even if it was obvious that there was no explicit link between al-Qaeda and the regime in Baghdad. To make this latter point, Harvey engages (166) in some nice word play, and shows that it was not so much the “failure of imagination” that led to the war as it was the “imagination of failure” (i.e. the obsessive privileging of worst-case scenarios, based on the assumption that pre-9/11 threat assessment had erred tragically on the side of best-case assumptions).
Despite the book’s many strengths, there are some claims—two in particular—that Harvey should not be allowed to get away with. First of these is his contention that he is battling “revisionism” in his bid to set the story to rights. In fact, and by his own admission—since he makes no secret of his joy in taking on the purveyors of what he more than once calls the “conventional wisdom”—it is actually Harvey’s account that appears to be revisionist. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as a corrective. The whole point, and merit, of this book is that neoconism does need revisiting, and even revising. The second criticism I make here appertains to Harvey’s assessment of Canada’s decision not to go to war in March 2003. Harvey may well be correct in asserting the likelihood that Canada, under Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien, would have joined a Gore-war in March 2003 (after all, Ottawa had no trouble supporting Operation Desert Fox five years earlier), but if he is correct, then he is so in a surprising manner, given all that he tells us throughout the book about the relative unimportance of individuals to outcomes, and this outcome in particular. It seems that even such a relatively consistent structuralist as Harvey has a soft spot or two for “first-image” analyses.