Butt, Why Did The US Invade Iraq

Security Studies
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Why did the United States Invade Iraq in 2003?
Ahsan I. Butt
To cite this article: Ahsan I. Butt (2019): Why did the United States Invade Iraq in 2003?, Security
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SECURITY STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2019.1551567
Why did the United States Invade Iraq in 2003?

Ahsan I. Butt
ABSTRACT
Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003? Most scholars
cite the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD),
a neoconservative desire to spread democracy, or the placating
of domestic interest groups as the Bush administration’s objec-
tives, but I suggest these arguments are flawed. Instead, I proffer
the “performative war” thesis resting on the concepts of status,
reputation, and hierarchy to explain the Iraq war. Hegemons
desire generalized deterrence, such that others do not challenge
their territory, preferences, or rule. However, the challenging of a
hegemon’s authority—as occurred on 9/11—generates a need
to assert hegemony and demonstrate strength to a global audi-
ence. Only fighting a war can demonstrate such strength; no
peaceful bargain, even a lopsided one, can achieve the same
effect. Consistent with this framework, the United States fought
Iraq mainly for its demonstration effect—defeating the recalci-
trant Saddam would lead other states to fear the United States
and submit to its authority and global order.
Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003? Specifically, what concrete
goal was the invasion supposed to accomplish for the Bush administration?
International relations scholars have proffered various answers to this ques-
tion, including the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), the diffusion of liberal democracy in the Arab and Muslim heart-
land, and the placating of domestic interest groups, such as the oil or Israel
lobbies. I believe these arguments are flawed. WMD-based arguments for
preventive war, especially dominant in the literature on the causes of the
invasion, are dubious for two reasons. First, their evidentiary reliance on
the Bush administration’s public claims between 2001 and 2003 is problem-
atic, given that during this period the administration was engaged in a pub-
lic relations effort to convince skeptical domestic and international
audiences of the threat posed by Saddam. We do not know that WMD
actually mattered to the Bush administration, only that it formed the main-
stay of its public case for war—a fundamentally different proposition.
Second, the causal logic of the preventive war theory is inconsistent with
the run-up to the war, especially concerning the issue of uncertainty. Aside
Ahsan I. Butt is associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University and
a Non-resident Fellow, Stimson Center.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 A. I. BUTT
from WMD nonproliferation, other purported goals, such as spreading

democracy or satisfying interest groups, do not satisfactorily explain the
Bush administration’s decision-making either.
While a firm understanding of why the United States invaded Iraq will
probably have to await the release of archived documents and memoranda in
the decades to come, this article seeks to contribute to the debate. Drawing
on scholarship in IR, political theory, applied psychology, and sociology for
its theoretical architecture and on internal memoranda, diplomatic corres-
pondence, memoirs, interviews, and a plethora of secondary sources for
empirical evidence, I proffer the “performative war” thesis to explain the
American war in Iraq. In a nutshell, my claim is that until September 10,
2001, the United States enjoyed global prestige and status commensurate with
its material capabilities and social rank—America knew it was universally
acknowledged as a hegemonic power. However, the attacks of 9/11 threatened
its hegemony and the generalized deterrence it had established against chal-
lenge to its rule. Consequently, the United States felt the need to regain status
and establish itself as an aggressive global power. To do so, it had to fight and
win a war. Afghanistan in 2001 was insufficient to generate such a fearsome
reputation, but the defeat of a recalcitrant foe like Saddam would serve this
performative purpose. Invading Iraq would allow the United States to reassert
and demonstrate its strength in no uncertain terms to a global audience,
crown itself king of the hill, and reestablish generalized deterrence.
In this view, the United States fought Iraq not because of a dyadic dis-
pute but to demonstrate to observers that it was, and would remain, the
global hegemonic power in the post-9/11 era. Importantly, there was no
peaceful bargain short of war for the disputants to locate. The United
States was intent on attacking Iraq shortly after—and perhaps on—9/11,
and there was nothing material or symbolic Saddam Hussein could have
offered that would have avoided war. The Iraq war thus provides a more
general lesson for IR scholars: at times, states may be insistent on a fight
because certain reputation- and authority-establishing benefits only accrue
to violent actors.
The remainder of this paper proceeds in four sections. I first explain my
claim that the field’s explanations for why the war occurred, especially
those centering on WMD, are flawed. Next, I construct a theoretical frame-
work of performative war centering on the concepts of status, reputation,
and hierarchy. In the third section, I make the case that this framework
accounts for the Bush administration’s path to invading Iraq. Finally, I
discuss this study’s theoretical implications for the bargaining model of war
and its policy implications for the wider American intelligentsia, body
politic, and public.
SECURITY STUDIES 3
Explanations for the Iraq War

As a field, IR has been surprisingly silent about the causes of the Iraq
war. Five major journals in IR and security/conflict studies (International
Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution,
Security Studies, and World Politics) have published thirty-six articles
with the word “Iraq” in their title referring to the most recent US war
in Iraq (as opposed to, for example, the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s).
Generously considered, only six of these thirty-six articles were about
the war’s causes. The others focused on how the war was sold and the
associated failure of the marketplace of ideas;1 the sensitivity to casual-
ties in US public opinion;2 tactical and strategic issues faced by insur-
gents and counterinsurgents;3 and the stability and democratic future of
post-invasion Iraq.4
That said, the provenance of the Iraq war has certainly been the subject
of scholarly attention, with three explanations especially popular: ideas,
interest groups, and WMD. One argument is that the United States was
motivated by a neoconservative desire to spread democracy in the Middle
East.5 “Wilsonian ideas of spreading democracy,” however, are conspicuous
by their absence in available pre-war documents, which more commonly
refer to a “stable, law abiding Iraq” than a democratic one. Moreover, the
administration only began to emphasize regime type in Iraq specifically
and the Arab world generally in the spring of 2003, after the war was
See Chaim Kaufmannn, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq
1
War,” International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 5–48; Jon Western, “The War Over Iraq: Selling War to the
American Public,” Security Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 106–139; Jane Cramer, “Militarized Patriotism: Why the US
Marketplace of Ideas Failed Before the Iraq War,” Security Studies 16, no. 3 (2007): 489–524.
See William A. Boettcher and Michael D. Cobb, “Echoes of Vietnam? Casualty Framing and Public Perceptions of
2
Success and Failure in Iraq,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 6 (December 2006): 831–54; Erik Voeten and
Paul R. Brewer, “Public Opinion, the War in Iraq, and Presidential Accountability,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 50, no. 6 (December 2006): 809–830.
See Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey A. Friedman, and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in
3
Iraq in 2007?,” International Security 37, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 7–40; Colin H. Kahl, “In the Crossfire or the
Crosshairs? Norms, Civilian Casualties, and US Conduct in Iraq,” International Security 32, no. 1 (Summer 2007):
7–46; Austin Long, “Whack-a-Mole or Coup de Grace? Institutionalization and Leadership Targeting in Iraq and
Afghanistan,” Security Studies 23, no. 3 (2014): 471–512; Thomas Meyer, “Flipping the Switch: Combat, State
Building, and Junior Officers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Security Studies 22, no. 2 (2013): 222–58; Deborah Avant
and Lee Sigelman, “Private Security and Democracy: Lessons from the US in Iraq,” Security Studies 19, no. 2
(2010): 230–65.
See Daniel Byman, “Constructing a Democratic Iraq: Challenges and Opportunities,” International Security 28, no.
4
1 (Summer 2003): 47–78; Bruce E. Moon, “Long Time Coming: Prospects for Democracy in Iraq,” International
Security 33, no. 4 (Spring 2009): 115–48.
For example, see Andrew Flibbert, “The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq
5
War,” Security Studies 15, no. 2 (2006): 310–52; Brian C. Schmidt and Michael C. Williams, “The Bush Doctrine
and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists,” Security Studies 17, no. 2 (2008): 191–220; Michael
MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
4 A. I. BUTT
underway.6 Finally, neoconservatives’ unwavering support for authoritarian

regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt renders suspicious any claim that
imputes to them any concern for democracy in the Middle East.
Others argue the war was fought to placate the “Israel lobby.” Powerful as
the lobby is, it was superfluous; the evidence is clear that leaders such as Vice
President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were not reluctant warriors pushed into
invading by forces outside the administration.7 Still others allege that the war
was fought because of the oil lobby. However, as Colgan shows, Iraq was “not
a classic resource war, in the sense that the United States did not seize oil
reserves for profit and control.” Rather, the United States awarded production
contracts to even Chinese and Russian companies.8
The remaining dominant argument in the literature is that the invasion
of Iraq was an act of preventive war based on the threat Saddam’s WMD
capabilities would pose in the future.9 There are two significant problems
with this argument: the lack of positive evidence in its favor and the incon-
sistency of the war’s run-up with its stated logic.
Saddam’s WMD and Iraq as a Preventive War

IR scholars focusing on Saddam’s WMD as the direct cause of war have
subsumed their explanations within a bargaining framework. Specifically,
Iraq’s possible acquisition of nuclear capabilities would represent a rapid
power shift in the future, forcing the United States to gamble against a rival
relatively easier to defeat today than tomorrow. The result was a preventive
war in March 2003.
One clear example of this thinking is forwarded by Alexandre Debs and
Nuno P. Monteiro (DM).10 Notwithstanding their caveat—“Our purpose
here is not to claim that our theory offers a definitive, or complete explan-
ation for” the Iraq war11—they state simply: “The main US motivation for
6
Jane Cramer and Eric Duggan, “In Pursuit of Primacy,” in Why Did the United States Invade Iraq, ed. Jane
Cramer and Trevor Thrall (New York: Routledge, 2012), 210–20; Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of
International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 461.
7
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2007); Jerome Slater, “Explaining the Iraq War: The Israel Lobby Theory,” in Why Did the United States
Invade Iraq, ed. Jane Cramer and Trevor Thrall (New York: Routledge, 2012), 105–109.
8
Jeff D. Colgan, “Fueling the Fire: Pathways from Oil to War,” International Security 38, no. 2 (Fall 2013):
171, 176–77.
9
Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2010); David Lake, “Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of
the Iraq War,” International Security 35, no. 3 (Winter 2010/11): 7–52; Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro,
"Known Unknowns: Power Shifts, Uncertainty, and War," International Organization 68, no. 1 (January
2014): 1–31.
10
Debs and Monteiro, “Known Unknowns.”
11
Ibid., 15–16.
SECURITY STUDIES 5
the war was to prevent suspected Iraqi nuclearization, which Washington

thought would bring about a large and rapid shift in the balance of power
in favor of Iraq.”12 Similarly operating within a bargaining framework,
David Lake adopts a more nuanced position than DM on the role of
WMD in the Iraq war. He writes, “Although Iraq’s supposed WMD pro-
grams were the casus belli, they were the precipitant and not the underlying
issue, and are better thought of as one source of bargaining failure.”
Rather, “through the eve of the 2003 war, the underlying issue between the
United States and Iraq was most likely which country—and its policies—
would dominate the Persian Gulf region.”13 Notably, Lake concurs with
DM in claiming that Saddam’s inability to credibly commit to not develop-
ing WMD in the future, along with his hostile “type,” rendered any peace-
ful bargain impossible.14 Finally, Robert Jervis takes as a given that the war
was motivated by concerns about WMD, instead questioning how and why
the intelligence community came to “fail” in 2003.15
As others have noted about the difficulties in debunking the preventive
war argument, “it appears impossible to prove or disprove whether or not
leaders sincerely feared a possible future threat.”16 While the claim that
fears of WMD caused the war is logical, there are two reasons scholars
should be skeptical of this argument pending future research. First, there is
a lack of positive evidence in its favor. Second, the stated logic is inconsist-
ent with the run-up to the war, specifically concerning the issue of
uncertainty.
The Evidence
To the extent that proponents of the preventive war argument offer evi-
dence for it, it is restricted to public statements of Bush officials between
2002 and 2003. DM, for example, merely cite four quotations in support of
their thesis: (1) Bush at the State of the Union, (2) Colin Powell at the UN,
(3) Ari Fleischer after the invasion was already underway, and (4)
Condoleeza Rice’s memoirs.
The problem with the claim that Saddam’s future arsenal was a genuine
concern for the Bush administration is that the United States was in the
middle of a propagandistic effort to convince domestic and international
audiences of exactly that notion. Consider how DM slip between the
12
Ibid., 16.
13
Lake, “Two Cheers,” 14–15.
14
Others agree on this point, such as Benjamin Miller, “Explaining Changes in US Grand Strategy: 9/11, the Rise
of Offensive Liberalism, and the War in Iraq,” Security Studies 19, no. 1 (2010): 26–65.
15
Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, chap. 3.
16
Cramer and Duggan, “Pursuit of Primacy,” 202.
6 A. I. BUTT
contentious claim that WMD caused the war17 and the inarguable one that
“the case presented by the US administration had at its core concerns
about a large and rapid shift in the balance of power in favor of Iraq as a
result of Baghdad’s WMD investments.”18 However, these two positions are
hardly equivalent. One can concede that WMD were the central part of the
Bush administration’s case without granting that WMD represented their
sincere motivations. Jervis goes further than DM: not only does he accept
the idea that the Bush administration harbored genuine fears of Iraq’s
WMD, he also considers the intelligence failure on those WMD a function
of the intelligence community, not the administration.19
Inattention to the possibility of strategic misrepresentation—or lying—is
problematic because, as John Mearsheimer states, “Key figures in the Bush
administration—including the president himself—lied to the American peo-
ple in the run-up to the Iraq war.”20 The Bush administration lied because
“there was not much enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the broader public.
Moreover, the American military, the intelligence community, the State
Department, and the US Congress were not keen for war. To overcome
this reluctance to attack Iraq, the Bush administration engaged in a decep-
tion campaign to inflate the threat posed by Saddam.”21 Though the Bush
administration also lied about Saddam’s connections to Osama bin Laden’s
al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11,22 I focus here on its lies about
Saddam’s WMD—and especially nuclear—arsenal.23
Research has focused considerable attention on how the Iraq war was
sold by the Bush administration, marginalizing or precluding dissent from
17
Debs and Monteiro, “Known Unknowns,” 16.
18
Ibid., 16–17.
19
DM and Jervis are hardly alone in their credulity. Economists such as Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow,
“Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (Spring 2017):
211–36, consider the Bush administration purposely misleading the public regarding WMD evidence as a
“partisan conspiracy theory,” juxtaposed with beliefs that Barack Obama was born outside the United States,
that 9/11 was planned by the US government, that the Holocaust did not occur, and that Lyndon Johnson
was involved in John Kennedy’s assassination.
20
John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 6. See also Cramer and Duggan, “Pursuit of Primacy,” 202.
21
Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, 49–50.
22
Ibid., 50, 52–53.
23
The Saddam–terrorism nexus is less important than the WMD angle because there is near-unanimity, ranging
from critics to defenders of the administration, that the issue did not supply the rhetorical ammunition the
administration wanted. The administration itself could not reasonably claim it was under the impression that
the nexus was real. In a memo to Feith in January 2002, Peter Rodman wrote, “You asked if we’d made
progress on our analysis of links between al-Qaida and Iraq. So far we have discovered few direct links.” Peter
W. Rodman, “Links Between al-Qaida and Iraq,” memorandum to Douglas Feith, 24 January, 2002, Digital
National Security Archive (DNSA): Targeting Iraq, Part 1: Planning, Invasion, and Occupation, 1997–2004, http://
proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/iraq97. As one senior intelligence official told me on the terrorism issue, “We
pushed back strongly, that never became justification for the war.” In contrast, the intelligence community’s
pushback may not have been as forceful on the WMD issue, which ended up being a mainstay in the case of
war and the resulting scholarly analyses of it. Senior US intelligence official E, interview by Ahsan Butt,
February 2018.
SECURITY STUDIES 7
the general public, the media, the opposition party, and its own intelligence
agencies.24 Objectively, the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war saw UN inspec-
tors destroy “most, if not all, of [Iraq’s] physical capacity to construct
nuclear bombs.” Combined with economic sanctions that “severely limited”
the import of materials that could be used for WMD and the enforcement
of a no-fly zone buttressed by satellite surveillance, this ensured that
Saddam had little opportunity to develop nuclear capabilities.25
Indeed, in early 2002, US intelligence agencies did not even consider
Iraq among their five most pressing concerns, agreeing with their British
counterparts that Saddam had been successfully contained, even if they
were not certain that he was fully disarmed. As Paul R. Pillar wrote, “My
corner of the intelligence community produced nothing during the first
year of the Bush administration that could be construed as an impetus for
more aggressive action against Iraq.”26 Certainly, neither American nor
British intelligence believed that Saddam was growing his arsenal.27 Thirty
relatives of Iraqi scientists reported to the CIA in 2002 that Saddam had
no nuclear programs they were aware of—all had been stopped in the
1990s28—and a 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report voiced simi-
lar skepticism about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons.29 Moreover,
pace Jervis, intelligence from countries opposed to the war—such as
France, Germany, and Russia—was “very skeptical” that Iraq had rebuilt its
nuclear weapons programs and wished for more clarity from the UN
inspections Saddam allowed in September 2002.30 As Richard Ned Lebow
sums up, “In the absence of WMD and a useable air force, and with a
poorly equipped and trained army, Saddam was more a nuisance than a
threat to his immediate neighbors.”31
However, this impression was contradicted by the Bush administration’s
public rhetoric between 2001 and 2003. Scholars note that there is “broad
agreement among US foreign policy experts, as well as much of the
24
See Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation”; Western, “The War Over Iraq”; Cramer, “Militarized Patriotism”; and Joshua
Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
25
James Pfiffner, “Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments for War with Iraq?,” in Intelligence
and National Security Policymaking on Iraq: British and American Perspectives, ed. James P. Pfiffner and Mark
Phythian (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 69.
26
Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011), 31.
27
Cramer and Duggan, “Pursuit of Primacy,” 203; Ron Suskind, One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit
of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 169.
28
James P. Pfiffner, “Decision-making, Intelligence, and the Iraq War,” in Intelligence and National Security
Policymaking on Iraq: British and American Perspectives, ed., James P. Pfiffner and Mark Phythian (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 224.
29
Quoted in Pfiffner, “Did President Bush Mislead,” 72.
30
31
Lebow, Cultural Theory, 466.
8 A. I. BUTT
American public and the international community, that the threat assess-
ments that President George W. Bush and his administration used to justify
the war against Iraq were greatly exaggerated, and on some dimensions
wholly baseless.”32 These exaggerations and lies included claims that: (1) a
shipment of sixty thousand aluminum tubes procured on the open market
were meant for centrifuges, when both Department of Energy and
Department of State experts concluded they were meant for rocket launch-
ers; (2) Iraq had a mobile lab for biological weapons sourced to an Iraqi
defector codenamed “Curveball,” whose reliability his interlocutors within
German intelligence warned against, and (3) Saddam was trying to procure
yellowcake from Niger. This final claim, based on forged documents, was
known by US intelligence to be false at the time, necessitating the lawyerly
insertion of the qualifier “The British government has learned” as a prefix
in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.33
Some members of the Bush administration were candid about the strat-
egy to sell the Iraq war and the place of Saddam’s WMD program therein.
Wolfowitz commented after the fall of Baghdad, “The truth is that for rea-
sons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled
on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass
destruction.”34 Douglas Feith said, “My basic view is, the rationale for the
war didn’t hinge on the details of this intelligence even though the details
of the intelligence at times became elements of the public presentation.”35
As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New York Times,
“From a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products
in August.”36
These new PR products included speechwriters crafting rhetorical flour-
ishes such as Rice’s famous remark, “We do not want the smoking gun to
be a mushroom cloud,” to resonate in a post-9/11 world.37 Another popu-
lar tactic was to leak false information about Saddam to one arm of the
media, such as a newspaper, which would publish stories based on it that
could in turn constitute evidence to be cited by government officials to
other branches of the media, such as Sunday talk shows.38 The Bush
administration also aggressively lobbied reluctant members of Congress
timed to coincide with the first anniversary of 9/11 and the run-up to the
32
Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation,” 5.
33
Cramer and Duggan, “Pursuit of Primacy,” 204–206.
34
George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 60–61.
35
Pillar, Intelligence and US Foreign Policy, 30.
36
Quoted in Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq
War (New York: Random House, 2006), 33.
37
Ibid., 35.
38
Ibid., 36.
SECURITY STUDIES 9
US midterm elections in November 2002. This pressure was exerted in an

atmosphere of public fear generated in part by the administration through
tactics such as announcing that Cheney had spent the night of September
10 at a secure, undisclosed location, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s dec-
laration of an orange terror alert, and the choice of Ellis Island for Bush’s
speech on the first anniversary of 9/11 to allow for the Statue of Liberty as
a backdrop.39 Taken together, the preventive war argument’s reliance on
propagandistic speeches and memoirs as unvarnished data sources is a sig-
nificant shortcoming.
The Causal Role of Uncertainty

Even as the preventive war argument is hamstrung by its reliance on prob-
lematic sources such as speeches expressly designed to further the cause of
war and memoirs written by legacy-conscious leaders, its proponents might
respond that notwithstanding the administration’s exaggerations and mis-
truths, it is still conceivable that the Iraq war was motivated by a fear of
WMD. This argument holds that the uncertainty of Saddam’s future capa-
bilities compelled the war; thus even if the administration was wrong, it
was sincerely wrong.40
There are two issues with the notion that uncertainty about Saddam’s
future capabilities compelled the invasion. First, the evidence suggests that
the decision to invade led to uncertainty about Saddam’s WMD capabil-
ities, not the other way around. Second, the preventive war argument elides
the Bush administration’s resistance to peaceful options of uncertainty-
reduction, such as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections,
raising serious questions of whether the United States’ true priority was
disarmament or war. This latter issue can be termed the “taking yes for an
answer” problem.
First, did uncertainty about WMD capabilities cause war or did a deci-
sion to invade lead to the muddying of intelligence? Sympathetic accounts
portray the Bush administration as a victim of flawed intelligence and
uncertainty making a difficult decision in the face of incomplete informa-
tion.41 However, as Joshua Rovner usefully reminds us, the only basis for
such a position is the government itself.42 In fact, there is little evidence
that the administration’s beliefs or decision-making was complicated by
uncertain intelligence.43 In one scholar’s words, “Administration
39
Ibid., 42.
40
For example, Debs and Monteiro, “Known Unknowns,” 18–21.
41
Debs and Monteiro, “Known Unknowns”; Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, chap. 3.
42
Rovner, Fixing the Facts, 141–42.
43
Ibid., 177.
10 A. I. BUTT
exaggerations of the Iraqi threat during 2002–03 … did not result from
mistakes by US intelligence agencies. Rather, top officials knew what policy
they intended to pursue and selected intelligence assessments to promote
that policy based on their political usefulness, not their credibility.”44
Several journalistic accounts support this interpretation of intelligence
being a tool used not to weigh whether to launch the war (which had
already been decided upon), but to sell it.45 As the head of British intelli-
gence, Richard Dearlove, confidentially told Tony Blair and senior mem-
bers of his government in July 2002, “Military action was now seen as
inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justi-
fied by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy.”46 Tellingly, and damagingly for
theories claiming that WMD was a sincere fear, the Bush administration
never even requested a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s
WMD; one was hurriedly produced only in September 2002, having been
demanded by Members of Congress in the face of emphatic—and false—
claims by Cheney regarding Saddam’s nuclear capabilities.47
Indeed, to the extent that a “certain” picture was forwarded by the US
intelligence community, it contradicted the Bush administration’s dire
claims.48 As Pillar wrote, “The war was launched in spite of, not because
of, most of what the US intelligence community said about Iraq.”49 In
2002, the intelligence community was so much more circumspect about
Saddam’s capabilities than the administration that Cheney and Rumsfeld
considered the CIA their major impediment to war,50 resulting in frequent
visits and a “barrage of questions” by Cheney and his aides—including
Scooter Libby, who was considered “the most aggressive on intelligence
related to Saddam and al-Qaeda,” according to a CIA veteran.51
Overall, “information from intelligence analysts or other experts in or out
of government that contradicted or undermined the operating assumptions
of the get-Saddam crowd was ignored or belittled.”52 As one high-ranking
CIA official noted, “Never have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that
has played out since the second President Bush took office. I watched my staff
44
45
Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 16; Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 62; James Fallows, “The Right and Wrong Questions About
the Iraq War,” The Atlantic, May 2015.
46
Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 82.
47
48
Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, 51.
49
50
Suskind, One Percent Doctrine, 175.
51
Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 4–6; Suskind, One Percent Doctrine, 168–91.
52
SECURITY STUDIES 11
being shot down in flames as they tried to put forward their view that
Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.”53 These efforts at misrepresen-
tation, exaggeration, and marginalization of intelligence “changed the content
and tone of key estimates on Iraqi capabilities and intentions.”54 In other
words, it is likelier that the decision to invade, made in the fall of 2001, led to
muddy intelligence rather than the other way around.55
Second, it would be strange that a government genuinely fearful of the
threat of Saddam’s WMD would do so little to learn about and arrest the
WMD program through peaceful measures. Given that war is costly and
rational actors should prefer peace to war if similar outcomes, such as
reducing uncertainty, can be achieved through both, it is curious why the
Bush administration was so dismissive of IAEA inspections and contain-
ment strategies in the run-up to the war. As the head of the State
Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) warned Powell in
August 2002, “Assuming that the imminence of the WMD threat is the
central justification for defensive pre-emption, every reasonable effort to
employ UN inspectors to determine the state of Iraqi capabilities and elim-
inate them must first be exhausted.”56 If uncertainty was driving decisions,
wouldn’t the administration have welcomed the uncertainty-reducing
inspections regime? According to Kaufmann, these “four months of unre-
stricted, essentially unhindered IAEA inspections,” eliminated whatever
doubt that remained about Saddam’s programs, since they found “no evi-
dence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program
in Iraq.”57
To the contrary, American and British leaders evinced little interest in
the inspections or their outcome, perhaps revealing their governments’ true
concern with WMD. Beginning in January 2003, Saddam gave UN inspec-
tors “the access they wanted. There would be no efforts to keep presidential
compounds or other government sites off limits … even the Republican
Guard was ordered to make their records available to UN monitors.”58
However, in the more than seven hundred visits to more than five hundred
suspected sites from November 2002 to March 2003, UN inspectors
received no help from US or British intelligence—despite “begging” for it—
aside from Tenet providing the location of three dozen suspected sites that
53
Quoted in Rovner, Fixing the Facts, 138.
54
Ibid., 139.
55
Pillar, Intelligence and US Foreign Policy, 35, 13–17, 140–43. See also Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor,
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Random House, 2006), 154.
56
Carl W. Ford, “Problems of Justifying War with Iraq,” memorandum to Colin Powell, 29 August 2002, DNSA,
Targeting Iraq.
57
58
Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 136.
12 A. I. BUTT
yielded no weapons or signs of a program.59 The lack of cooperation with

the inspectors sufficiently perturbed Congressional leaders to write to Bush
urging him to provide information to the inspectors, make public how
much of that information was shared, and to “support the UN inspection
process as long as the inspectors are making progress before deciding
whether to take another course of action, including the use of mili-
tary force.”60
This is the “taking yes for an answer” problem: the Bush administration
did not appear interested in solutions that disarmed Saddam, aside from
those that promised war and regime change.61 Colin Powell himself feared
that his boss wanted war more than disarmament per se. In August 2002, in
the context of advising restraint and the UN route to Bush, he told him, “If
you take it to the UN, you’ve got to recognize that they might be able to solve
it. In which case there’s no war. That could mean a solution that is not as
clean as just going in and taking the guy out.”62 Powell’s words are extremely
revealing, for they show his concern that his government was drawn to a
“clean” solution of a new regime in Iraq more so than disarming Saddam.63
In a similar vein, Feith told a senior military commander that “in crafting a
strategy for Iraq, we cannot accept surrender.”64 The Bush administration
rebuffed several attempts by Saddam to cut a deal through third-party inter-
mediaries between December 2002 and March 2003, including offers to allow
several thousand troops or FBI agents to comb the country—“to look wher-
ever they wanted,” in the words of an Iraqi official—as well as concessions on
oil, the Middle East peace process, and banned weapons.65
Queried specifically on the issue of uncertainty and preventive war, a
senior IAEA official I interviewed responded, somewhat colorfully,
“Frankly, it’s bullshit. There was no indication that Iraq was even on the
cusp of a nuclear weapons program,” adding that there “was absolutely no
reason for that war to start. There was no indication of Iraq working on a
program. There was no justification for the invasion. Iraq was in fact very
cooperative with the US.”66 A senior inspections official for the IAEA
59
Cramer and Duggan, “Pursuit of Primacy,” 207–208. See similar criticism of Jervis in Rovner, Fixing the
Facts, 141–42.
60
Letter from Carl Levin to George W. Bush, 24 January 2003, DNSA, Targeting Iraq.
61
62
Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 151.
63
On this exchange, see also Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 81–82.
64
Ibid., 83.
65
James Risen, “Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal to Avert War,” New York Times, 6 November
2003; Julian Borger, Brian Whitaker, and Vikram Dodd, “Saddam’s Desperate Offers to Stave Off War,” The
Guardian, 7 November 2003.
66
Senior International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official O, interview by Ahsan Butt, January 2018 (italics
indicate strong emphasis by the speaker).
SECURITY STUDIES 13
similarly dismissed the preventive war argument based on how defanged—

and distant from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability—Iraq was at the
time. “We were pointedly ignored. I don’t think they [the US] had any
concerns of WMD.”67 He also described Iraqi officials during the inspec-
tions process as “very, very cooperative. Whenever I asked them [about a
site], they said ‘now or tomorrow?’” Echoing this skepticism of the future
threat argument, a former senior US intelligence official told me of the
uncertainty issue, “You don’t need to solve that problem with war. You can
send inspectors back in, something like Iran present day.”68 He stated
emphatically: “This war was not waged for WMD, that’s how it was sold
but not why it was fought.”
The more time inspectors spent in Iraq, the clearer its future trajectory
as a nonthreat became, which poses a significant problem for DM and
Jervis’s argument that uncertainty was driving the war. A rational actor sin-
cerely fearing a future threat would have updated over the winter of
2002–03 to revise their preference for war downward, but the opposite
took place. As one former senior US intelligence official told me, “The situ-
ation in March 2003 was much more reassuring than the previous fall.
Saddam was not going to have nuclear capability,” but “the administration
never gave inspectors a chance.”69 Nothing in the inspectors’ assessments
or US intelligence assessments necessitated the urgency with which the
Bush administration drove to war: “If Iraqi weapons developments were
the concern, there was ample time to try other policy responses short of
the drastic one of an offensive war.”70 In 2002, a Joint Intelligence Center
(JIC) top secret report guardedly noted that were Iraq to escape from sanc-
tions, a highly unlikely prospect, it would take it “at least five years to pro-
duce a nuclear device and a further two to produce a warhead.”71 In
September, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) summarized that Iraq
“is unlikely to produce indigenously enough weapons-grade material for a
deliverable nuclear weapon until the last half of this decade [2000s].”72 As
a senior proliferation specialist in the US intelligence community told me,
“In 2003, we had an effective inspections regime, we knew [WMD-
involved] individuals and what they were doing.”
67
Senior IAEA inspections official E, interview by Ahsan Butt, January 2018.
68
Senior US intelligence official A, interview by Ahsan Butt, January 2018.
69
Senior US intelligence official N, interview by Ahsan Butt, February 2018.
70
71
Joint Intelligence Center (JIC), “Iraq: Saddam Under the Spotlight,” JIC Assessment, 27 February 2002, DNSA,
Targeting Iraq.
72
National Intelligence Council, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs,” September 2002, DNSA,
Targeting Iraq.
14 A. I. BUTT
Overall, the preventive war argument suffers from (1) a lack of positive
evidence in its favor and (2) the inconsistency between its stated logic con-
cerning uncertainty and the administration’s actions in the run-up to the
war. These criticisms notwithstanding, the idea that that the Bush adminis-
tration invaded Iraq to prevent the future threat of Saddam armed with
WMD remains difficult to rule out, and future research may uncover more
evidence in favor of the proposition. For our present purposes, however, I
believe there exists enough doubt about WMD-based motives to entertain
the possibility that something else was driving the Bush administration.73
Demonstrating Hegemony: War as a Performative Act

The end of 1878 found Sir Henry Bartle Frere bristling.74 As High
Commissioner for Southern Africa, Frere’s job was to assert British imper-
ial authority in the region. He was offended by alternative reservoirs of sov-
ereignty, such as that enjoyed by Zululand, which embodied Kaffirdom and
a lack of submission to Her Majesty’s Government. His solution was sim-
ple: war. For Frere, only military defeat would bring to heel the Zulus led
by King Cetschwayo, swallowing them in a British “confederation” and
delivering an uncompromising message: British strength and authority in
the region was not to be questioned. Importantly, Frere believed this mes-
sage could only be transmitted through a fight; no peaceful bargain, how-
ever lopsided, could compare to the effects of a resounding military
victory. A quick and decisive win on the battlefield against the Zulus would
ensure that observers in the region would learn that resisting British
hegemony was fruitless.
Frere’s strategy entailed what I term a “performative war”: he was chiefly
concerned with the demonstration effect of British power. Drawing on
scholarship on status from both IR and applied psychology, IR research on
hierarchy, and work on reputation-building and authority-establishing vio-
lence in the fields of IR, political theory, and sociology, I outline the per-
formative war thesis below. To be clear, what follows is not a theory; I am
not proffering a predictive relationship between an independent and
dependent variable. Rather, the analytical framework I construct is aimed
73
Decision-makers may have had multiple motivations for invading Iraq, but that should not preclude scholars
questioning which was the central cause.
74
This section on the Anglo–Zulu war is drawn from Eric Walker, The Cambridge History of the British Empire:
Volume VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1963), 485–86; John Laband, Kingdom in Crisis: The Zulu
Response to the British Invasion of 1879 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 7–14; Ian St John,
Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics (New York: Anthem Press, 2010), 190–91; Bruce Vandervort, Wars of
Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 104–105; Martin
Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2014), chap. 36.
SECURITY STUDIES 15
at explaining one case, albeit one with significant scholarly and policy
implications: the Iraq war.
The Performative War Thesis

The cornerstone of the performative war framework is the concept of sta-
tus. Unlike material power, status is conferred and “exists entirely in the
eyes of others … [it] is a property of co-actors and observers.”75 Both sta-
tus and its associated cousin, reputation, are therefore relational concepts.76
To affect one’s reputation or status, one must change others’ perceptions of
oneself and where one falls in a rank ordering.77 A state’s social role or sta-
tus within such a ranking is at least partly determined by “second-order”
beliefs: “beliefs that a group of observers holds some belief.” For instance,
prestige, the idea that “everyone thinks that everyone thinks that an actor
has some good quality,” is a second order belief.78
All states care about status, but the idea is especially important for hierarchic
states.79 Hierarchy obtains when a powerful state is deemed to have authority
over subordinate states with respect to some issues. Such authority does not
rely only on divergences in material capabilities between powerful and minor
states, but also social recognition of the former.80 Hegemonic states especially
enjoy a degree of “voluntary deference,”81 and such recognition of their status
is crucial for the construction and maintenance of their order.
However, sometimes states experience “status anxiety”82 or “status dissat-
isfaction.”83 At the individual level, “people experience status loss when
75
Joe C. Magee and Adam D. Galinsky, “Social Hierarchy: The Self-Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status,” The
Academy of Management Annals 2, no. 1 (January 2008): 363–64.
76
According to Jonathan Renshon, “Status Deficits and War,” International Organization 70, no. 3 (Summer 2016):
513–50, reputation is a first order belief (what an actor believes about another), while status is a second order
belief (what an actor believes other actors believe about it). See also Marina G. Duque, “Recognizing
International Status: A Relational Approach,” International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 2018):
577–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqy001.
77
Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996): 27–28; Allan
Dafoe, Jonathan Renshon, and Paul Huth, “Reputation and Status as Motives for War,” Annual Review of
Political Science 17 (2014): 373.
78
Barry O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 193; Dafoe, Renshon,
and Huth, “Reputation and Status,” 374.
79
Paul Musgrave and Daniel H. Nexon, “Defending Hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic
Capital and Political Dominance in Early Modern China and the Cold War,” International Organization 72, no. 3
(Summer 2018): 591–626.
80
David Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Ian Clark, “Towards an
English School Theory of Hegemony,” European Journal of International Relations 15, no. 2 (June 2009):
203–228. This authority is similar to Robert Gilpin’s definition of prestige in War and Change in the
International System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 31.
81
Gilpin, War and Change, 30–31.
82
Tudor A. Onea, “Between Dominance and Decline: Status Anxiety and Great Power Rivalry,” Review of
International Studies 40, no. 1 (January 2014), 132–33.
83
Renshon, “Status Deficits and War,” 12–13.
16 A. I. BUTT
they lose respect in the eyes of their group members.”84 For states, similarly,
such status loss centers on others’ views.85 Though IR scholars generally con-
sider status dissatisfaction with respect to rising or “emerging” powers,86
there is no a priori theoretical reason to exclude dominant powers from status
analysis, especially given that dominant powers can be risk-acceptant when it
comes to maintaining status.87 Indeed, at the individual level, high-status
actors find status loss more self-threatening than low-status actors, mainly
because the former consider status a more important component of their
selves.88 For organizations, such status loss, if especially severe, can motivate
highly public efforts to reestablish identity and credibility.89 Transferring this
idea to the realm of IR, a hegemonic power can perceive a mismatch between
the status it enjoys versus the status it thinks it deserves, especially after a
humiliating event.90 Because “those with high power but low status might be
seen as undeserving of their power,”91 such a disjuncture can generate an
imperative for a powerful state to demonstrate its power and (re)assert
hegemony so that its “deserved” status is recognized.
One of the primary ways a state can improve its status is “a focal and
dramatic event such as a military victory.”92 While the emotional, cathar-
tic effects of such wars are significant, my focus here is on the instru-
mental effects. A motivation to (re)establish a particular reputation93— or
more ambitiously, the terms of a new order—can lead a powerful actor
to launch war.94 As Arendt noted, “That such a beginning must be
intimately connected with violence seems to be vouched for by the
legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical and classical
antiquity report it: Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus; violence
was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be made
without using violence, without violating … . The tale spoke clearly:
84
Jennifer C. Marr and Stefan Thau, “Falling from Great (and Not-so-Great) Heights: How Initial Status Position
Influences Performance After Status Loss,” Academy of Management Journal 57, no. 1 (February 2014), 223.
85
Dafoe, Renshon, and Huth, “Reputation and Status,” 375.
86
For example, Deborah W. Larson, T.V. Paul, and William C. Wohlforth, “Status and World Order,” in Status in
World Politics, ed. T.V. Paul, Deborah W. Larson, and William C. Wohlforth, 3–5.
87
Onea, “Between Dominance and Decline,” 135.
88
Marr and Thau, “Falling from Great Heights,” 226.
89
Tao Wang, Filippo Carlo Wezel, and Bernard Forgues, “Protecting Market Identity: When and How Do
Organizations Respond to Consumers’ Devaluations?” Academy of Management Journal 59, no. 1 (February
2016), 139.
90
Joslyn Barnhart, “Humiliation and Third-Party Aggression,” World Politics 69, no. 3 (July 2017): 532–68.
91
Magee and Galinski, “Social Hierarchy,” 364.
92
Dafoe, Renshon, and Huth, “Reputation and Status,” 377.
93
Allan Dafoe and Devin Caughey, “Honor and War: Southern US Presidents and the Effects of Concern for
Reputation,” World Politics 68 no. 2 (April 2016): 341, 343.
94
Barnhart, “Humiliation and Third-Party Aggression.”
SECURITY STUDIES 17
whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out

of fratricide, whatever political organization men have achieved has its
origin in crime.”95 Similarly, Machiavelli exhorts “he who wants to estab-
lish an absolute power” to “build new Cities, destroy old ones, transfer
the inhabitants from one place to another, and in sum, not to leave any-
thing unchanged in that Province, (and) so that there should be no rank,
nor order, nor status, nor riches, that he who obtains it does not recog-
nize it as coming from him; he should take as his model Philip of
Macedonia, father of Alexander, who, by these methods, from a petty
King became Prince of Greece.”96
Continuing in this tradition, IR scholars have noted the reputation-estab-
lishing effects of war.97 War reveals capabilities in a highly public, dra-
matic, and unambiguous fashion, which in turn influences the observers’
views of the disputants’ status.98 For Gilpin, international prestige is
attained “primarily through successful use of power, and especially through
victory in war. The most prestigious members of the international system
are those states that have most recently used military force … and have
thereby imposed their will on others.”99 As research has repeatedly shown,
wars fought for prestige or status, intended to impress or scare would-be
adversaries, have been long-running facts of life in international politics,100
from the Sino–Japanese war of 1894–95101 to the Scramble for Africa,102
from World War I103 to the Falklands war.104 Similarly, civil war scholars
argue that since fighting hard against an ethnic group confers a “tough”
reputation today, it may aid in deterring other ethnic groups from making
95
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 20.
96
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses (New York: Penguin, 1517/1970), 42.
97
Gilpin, War and Change.
98
Renshon, “Status Deficits and War,” 14.
99
Gilpin, War and Change, 32–33.
100
See William C. Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War,” World Politics 61, no. 1
(January 2009): 28–57; Joshua Kertzer, Resolve in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2016); Barnhart, “Humiliation and Third-Party Aggression.”
101
Andrew Q. Greve and Jack S. Levy, “Power Transitions, Status Dissatisfaction, and War: The Sino-Japanese War
of 1894–1895,” Security Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 148–78.
102
Joslyn Barnhart, “Status Competition and Territorial Aggression: Evidence from the Scramble for
Africa,” Security Studies 25, no. 3 (2016): 385–419.
103
Alexander Lanoszka and Michael A. Hunzeker, “Rage of Honor: Entente Indignation and the Lost Chance for
Peace in the First World War,” Security Studies 24, no. 4 (2015): 662–95; Reinhard Wolf, “Status Fixations, the
Need for ‘Firmness,’ and Decisions for War,” International Relations 28, no. 2 (June 2014): 256–62.
104
Thomas Dolan, “Demanding the Impossible: War, Bargaining, and Honor,” Security Studies 24, no. 3
(2015), 528–62.
18 A. I. BUTT
nationalist demands tomorrow.105 In either case, force is used primarily for

its status- or reputation-enhancing effects.106
As a consequence of such reputation-establishing wars, where violence is
used for “the edification of potential opponents,”107 states can deter would-
be challenges to their territory, policy preferences, or hegemonic rule more
generally.108 Fighting one actor can establish a fear-based “general
deterrence,” such that a state “look[s] too tough to be pushed around.”109
This deterrence is “general” in the sense that it is “diffuse,” not necessarily
aimed at any one adversary or challenge.110
Other contexts, such as prisons, also provide illustration of this principle.
Since prisons observe many of the structural conditions inherent in inter-
national politics—near anarchy, scarcity of important resources, and uncer-
tain information about the true character (for example peaceful versus
violent) of other units in the system111—the lessons drawn from such con-
texts can be relevant to IR scholars. In such environments, sociologists
demonstrate, actors will often use violence against another prisoner not
because they desire a good that is at dispute, but to make an example of
the victim.112 Fights erupt between prisoners keen on establishing their
place in the social hierarchy, and consequently, those prisoners whose repu-
tations are less established or more in question will face stronger incentives
to fight. For instance, in prisons with a high degree of inmate turnover or
where prisoners are often switched to new wings and/or cells, there will be
less certain information about reputations and consequently more reputa-
tion-establishing violence. Such fighting is a “communicative act, an act
aimed at shaping or modifying other prisoners’ beliefs.”113 As with states,
the goal is to establish a generalized deterrence, such that one’s will and
105
Monica D. Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Conflict: Identity, Interest, and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003); Barbara F. Walter, Reputation and Civil War: Why Separatist Conflicts Are so
Violent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
106
Such reputation-enhancing force is thus distinguished from Robert J. Art’s concept of “swaggering” in “To
What Ends Military Power?” International Security 4, no. 4 (Spring 1980), 10–11, which while assuredly serving
goals such as being “taken seriously by others” or enhancing “the nation’s image,” is not undertaken for
specific instrumental ends.
107
Patrick M. Morgan, “The State of Deterrence in International Politics Today,” Contemporary Security Policy 33,
no. 1 (April 2012), 86.
108
Whether a tough reputation succeeds in deterring future challenges is a matter of empirical debate. See
Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005); and Alex Weisiger and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Revisiting Reputation: How Past Actions Matter in
International Politics,” International Organization 69, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 473–95. What matters for our
purposes is that leaders think it does.
109
Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 80.
110
Ibid., 82–83.
111
Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009), 79.
112
Ibid., 80–91.
113
Ibid., 91.
SECURITY STUDIES 19
preferences are not questioned. In both prisons and politics, the thinking
goes, life is more peaceful if one is acknowledged as the meanest bully on
the block.114
To summarize this section, all states are concerned with their status.
Hegemonic or hierarchic states are especially sensitive to status because
their leadership relies upon their authority being accepted by minor powers
and other observers; they are not merely interested in deterring threats to
their territory but, more grandly, to their rule. When there is a mismatch
between a powerful state’s self-perceived status and how others consider it,
especially after a humiliation, that country may choose to start a war to
demonstrate its hegemony to others in the system. Certain reputational and
status benefits can only be earned by violence; a peaceful bargain, no mat-
ter how lopsided, cannot produce the same effect. As such, a state will itch
for a fight, and there is nothing material or symbolic the victim can offer
to sufficiently assuage the aggressor; there is no bargaining range to speak
of. I label this idea the performative war thesis.
The Bush Administration’s Performative War in Iraq

Using recently released documents, author interviews, memoirs, and a
plethora of secondary sources, I argue below that the performative war the-
sis can help us understand US decision-making between 2001 and 2003.
Consistent with the logic of the argument, (1) there was a humiliating
event that necessitated a new order, (2) the war’s architects repeatedly cited
reputational and signaling concerns in private, and (3) there was no plaus-
ible concession by the target that could have substituted for the reputa-
tional spoils of war. Together, these three pillars lend strong support to the
performative war thesis.
9/11, Status Loss, and the Need for a New Beginning

Channeling Arendt and Machiavelli, perhaps unwittingly, George Bush jus-
tified the then-potential invasion of Iraq by invoking a grand vision: “I will
seize the opportunity to achieve big goals. There is nothing bigger than to
achieve world peace.”115 His close confidant, Tony Blair, wrote to him a
week into the Iraq war, pronouncing, “This is the moment when you can
define international politics for the next generation: the true post-cold war
world order. Our ambition is big: to construct a global agenda around
114
This is not a pleasant-sounding logic, especially to citizens of so-called liberal democracies, which may
explain why leaders of such countries, even when motivated by such thinking, cite alternative arguments that
may resonate more with the public.
115
Quoted in Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 339.
20 A. I. BUTT
which we can unite the world; rather than dividing it into rival centers of
power.”116 Where did this need to define a new world order come from?
Before 9/11, American prestige was not in question and was commensur-
ate with its hegemonic role. For more than a decade, it had been the
world’s unrivalled unipolar power.117 For close to six decades, it had been
the world’s most powerful state. For more than a century, it had established
a hegemonic, or hierarchic, role in its sphere of influence, primarily Latin
America.118 “The United States of America today predominates on the eco-
nomic level, the monetary level, on the technological level, and in the cul-
tural area in the broadest sense of the word,” France’s foreign minister said
in 1999. “It is not comparable, in terms of power and influence, to any-
thing known in modern history.”119 Even its main potential state challen-
ger, China, was circumspect and sought accommodation.120 US hegemony
may not have been popular, but neither was it challenged; a generalized
deterrence held.
A sense of impregnability was necessary to sustain the idea that the
United States was the region’s, and arguably the world’s, unipolar power.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 punctured this sense of American invulnerabil-
ity and dominance in the collective thinking of the US body politic if not
other observers. As Krebs asks rhetorically, “How much of a superpower
could America be if 3,000 of its citizens, residents, and visitors had died in
a single day?”121 On September 11, 2001, the United States was still materi-
ally hegemonic, but its status and prestige were considerably damaged by
the fact that fewer than two dozen men, a “rag-tag cabal of Middle Eastern
terrorists”122 armed with box cutters, destroyed the symbols of American
capitalism and military power. After the attacks, there was a widespread
view within the country that “the American mainland is indefensible.”123
Commenting on a CIA source’s warning that the chance of a reprisal ter-
rorist attack was “100 percent,” the Wall Street Journal somberly noted,
“This is the harsh reality of life after September 11, when Americans
116
Tony Blair, “The Fundamental Goal,” letter to George W. Bush, 26 March 2003, The Iraq Inquiry Archives, http://www.
iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/244166/2003-03-26-note-blair-to-bush-26-march-2003-note-the-fundamental-goal.pdf.
117
Nuno Monteiro, “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity is Not Peaceful,” International Security 36, no. 3 (Winter
2011/12), 9.
118
Ahsan I. Butt, “Anarchy and Hierarchy in International Relations: Explaining South America’s War-Prone
Decade,” International Organization 67, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 584–85.
119
Quoted in G. John Ikenberry, America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2002), 2.
120
Alastair Iain Johnston, “Is China a Status Quo Power?” International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 5–56.
121
Ronald R. Krebs, Narrative and the Making of US National Security (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 149.
122
Lebow, Cultural Theory, 473.
123
SECURITY STUDIES 21
learned that their own homeland is now vulnerable to attack.”124 A fort-

night after 9/11, a US senator stated, “We are not prepared for the next
attack. That’s all I can say, and I’ll keep on saying it,” while a former chair
of the House Intelligence Committee pronounced Americans “extremely
vulnerable to hostile attacks on our own soil.”125
The public agreed with political elites. In an October survey, 53% of
respondents predicted a terrorist attack within months as “very likely,” and
fewer than one-fifth said they had a “great deal” of confidence that the gov-
ernment could protect them from terrorism. As one respondent said, “I feel
like America was a little too sure of itself, thinking that no one could touch
us … . Now there are outbreaks all over the place, and you wonder, ‘What’s
next?’”126 This “realization of vulnerability led to an American response char-
acterized by bafflement at having been thus attacked; anger at having been
humiliated; a concern with protecting the credibility of American power; and
a desire to prove the effectiveness of American power.”127
Spurred by humiliation and keen to (re)establish its hegemonic order, US
leaders felt the need for a credibility- and reputation-establishing war. Once
the effectiveness of American power was proved in a war, the foundations of
a new, post-9/11 era could be erected. The American war in Afghanistan,
which preceded the invasion of Iraq by eighteen months, was not sufficient
for these order-establishing purposes. Afghanistan was a “fair” war, in which
the United States was retaliating directly for an attack conducted on its soil.
As with prison bullies or drug cartels, a strike suffered could not be met with
a proportionate response; a level of escalation and indiscrimination in the
retaliation was necessary to send the larger message.128
Afghanistan was merely tit-for-tat, not adequate to convey a message of
unbridled hegemony that the United States wished to send. The target was
simply too weak for the victor to win the reputation for toughness it cov-
eted.129 As Rumsfeld privately said on the evening of 9/11, “We need to
124
“This War’s Purpose,” editorial, Wall Street Journal 8 October 2001.
125
Brad Knickerbocker, “‘Homeland Defense’ Won’t Be Easy,” Christian Science Monitor, 24 September 2001.
126
Richard L. Berke and Janet Elder, “Survey Shows Doubts Stirring on Terror War,” New York Times, 30
October 2001.
127
Evelyn Goh, “Hegemonic Constraints: The Implications of 11 September for American Power," Australian
Journal of International Affairs 57, no. 1 (April 2003), 78.
128
For an example of such a retaliation from the Mexican drug war, see Ginger Thompson, “How the U.S.
Triggered a Massacre in Mexico,” National Geographic, July 2017. Such lashing out is subtly different from
that identified by Peter Liberman and Linda J. Skitka, “Revenge in US Public Support for War against
Iraq,” Public Opinion Quarterly 81, no. 3 (September 2017): 651, since the latter is an emotional/psychological
effect. By contrast, the mechanism here is instrumental: a bid to establish generalized deterrence.
129
If one concedes that Afghanistan was not enough to establish a tough reputation, then Lake’s dismissal of
the reputation argument (“Two Cheers,” 18) becomes much less persuasive. Lake’s argument against the
demonstration thesis rests on an unsubstantiated assertion: that the Bush administration “was unlikely to
value the act of fighting itself more than the $50 billion it anticipated” the cost of war to be. It is not clear
why Lake finds it “difficult to imagine” that the Bush administration could not value demonstration benefits
22 A. I. BUTT
bomb something else [other than Afghanistan] to prove that we’re, you
know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of
attacks.”130 For Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith, restricting the 9/11
response to Afghanstan was dangerously “limited,” “meager,” or “narrow.”
On September 12, Rumsfeld’s thinking was that “the Bush administration
needed to demonstrate that the United States had the will to fight beyond
Afghanistan.”131 According to Feith, “Rumsfeld wanted some way to organ-
ize the military action so that it signaled that the global conflict would not
be over if we struck one good blow in Afghanistan.”132 Similarly, Feith
wrote a memo to Rumsfeld in which he “expressed disappointment at the
limited options immediately available in Afghanistan” and “suggested
instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive,
perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq.”133
Rumsfeld noted on September 13 that Iraq “also had substantial infra-
structure and military capability [unlike Afghanistan]. In Iraq, he
[Rumsfeld] noted, we could inflict the kind of costly damage that could
cause terrorist-supporting regimes around the world to rethink their
policies.”134 The same day, “Wolfowitz warned against focusing narrowly
on al Qaeda and Afghanistan … . If we should take hasty action that pro-
duced only meager effects, he warned, it could embolden rather than dis-
courage regimes that were assisting our terrorist enemies.”135 Feith was on
the same page, writing in a memo on September 18 to Rumsfeld: “Single
pronged attacks against the smallest state sponsor of the terrorist network
may not be sufficient … . Such a limited attack may be perceived as a sign
of weakness rather than strength.”136
Preparing for a meeting with Bush on September 20, Rumsfeld wrote in
a memo, “The President has stressed that we are not defining our fight nar-
rowly and are not focused only on those directly responsible for the
September 11 attacks … . It would drive this point home if the initial mili-
tary strikes hit [targets] in addition to al Qaeda. That is one of the reasons
129
sufficiently highly to cause war, but his language suggesting diminishing returns after the first Gulf War and
Afghanistan in 2001 is suggestive.
130
Quoted in Stephen Glain, State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire (New York: Random House,
2012), 379.
131
132
Ibid.
133
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, 22 July
2004, 559.
134
Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper
Collins, 2008), 15.
135
Ibid., 49.
136
Douglas Feith, “Strategic Planning Guidance for the Joint Staff,” memorandum to Donald Rumsfeld, 18
September 2001, DNSA, Targeting Iraq.
SECURITY STUDIES 23
why I still favor an early focus on Iraq as well.”137 In a memo ten days
later addressed to the President, Rumsfeld intoned, “A key war aim would
be to persuade or compel States to stop supporting terrorism … . If the
war does not significantly change the World’s political map, the US will
not achieve its aim. There is value in being clear on the order of magnitude
of the necessary change.” To that end, “The USG should envision a goal
along these lines: New regimes in Afghanistan and another key State (or
two) that supports terrorism (to strengthen political and military efforts to
change policies elsewhere),”138 an unequivocally clear statement supporting
the performative war thesis.
To truly mark a new era of American dominance and demonstrate to the
world the extent of its power and will to use it, the Bush administration
needed a quick and decisive victory against a more formidable foe than
Afghanistan. Iraq fit the bill not just because of the more impressive physical
targets (as Rumsfeld, Feith, and Wolfowitz identified), but also because it rep-
resented a festering symbolic wound to American pride. This was a regime
that remained defiant despite a prior military defeat by American forces, with
reminders that said, “I’m still here”139—an untenable position in a post-9/11
world where the United States had to clearly enunciate its hegemony. Indeed,
that Iraq was unfinished or unsettled business for neoconservative such as
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld even before 9/11 is well known;140 Feith noted with
dismay that Saddam “emerged from the Gulf War with a strong, if perverse,
sense of accomplishment.”141 The incidence of al Qaeda’s attacks intensified
the urgency such figures felt to settle old scores.
Reputation and Signaling as Causes of the War

Pillar, a senior official in the National Intelligence Council, wrote that one
major purpose of the war “was the exertion of American power as a dem-
onstration of the US ability and willingness to use that power, thereby
increasing deference to US interests worldwide and deterring adversaries
and would-be troublemakers from opposing those interests.”142 For the
Bush administration, invading Iraq would “be a demonstration of
American power for Syria and other wayward regimes.”143 An anonymous
137
Feith, War and Decision, 66.
138
Donald Rumsfeld, “Strategic Thoughts,” memorandum to George W. Bush, 30 September 2001, DNSA,
Targeting Iraq.
139
Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 10.
140
Intelligence official E, interview February 2018.
141
Feith, War and Decision, 185–86.
142
143
Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 84–85, 45, 73.
24 A. I. BUTT
senior administration official, described by the New York Times as having

“played a crucial role in putting together the strategy” to overthrow
Saddam, revealed at the beginning of the war that “Iraq is not just about
Iraq,” but rather that “it was of a type,” including Iran, Syria, and North
Korea.144 Wolfowitz, arguably the genesis of the demonstration effect argu-
ment, plainly saw “the military conquest of Iraq as a lesson to regimes that
threaten US interests.”145 Bush told Bob Woodward, “Action—confident
action will yield positive results provides kind of a slipstream into which
reluctant nations and leaders can get behind and show themselves that
there has been— you know, something positive has happened towards
peace.”146 According to a journalistic account, Cheney and Bush believed
that “a sudden blow for no reason is better than one for a good reason … .
They had to do something dramatic, maybe irrational, even willful, to
change the behavior of America’s enemies, make them second-guess them-
selves, knock ’em off their game.”147 A senior intelligence official told me
that Cheney and Rumsfeld subscribed to the Ledeen Doctrine—“every ten
years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little
country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean
business”—and thought about the Iraq invasion in such terms.148 Another
former senior intelligence official told me the run-up to the war reminded
him of French involvement in the 1956 Suez crisis, which to him was
intended as a demonstration effect for audiences in Algiers.149
Such a concern for reputation, credibility, and demonstrating power was
not new for Bush administration officials. In March 1992, the New York
Times published leaked sections of a draft of the Defense Planning
Guidance, a forty-six page document written by Zalmay Khalilzad and
Abram Shulsky, future members of the George W. Bush administration,
commissioned by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and overseen by
Undersecretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. According to the document, the
United States needed to embrace a hegemonic role more fully in the post-
Cold War world, for its benefit as well as others’.150 In order to “prevent
the re-emergence of a new rival … [or] any hostile power from domi-
nating” Western Europe, East Asia, the territories of the former Soviet
Union, and Southeast Asia (essentially the entire globe), “the U.S. must
144
David Sanger, “Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World,” New York Times, 6 April 2003.
145
Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 277–78.
146
Woodward, Bush at War, 341.
147
148
Senior US intelligence official A, interview by Ahsan Butt, February 2018.
149
Intelligence official E, interview February 2018.
150
SECURITY STUDIES 25
show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that
holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not
aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their
legitimate interests … . We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring
potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger or regional or glo-
bal role.”151
President George H.W. Bush and Pentagon leaders disavowed the docu-
ment, but it was an important marker in intellectual history because of its
emphasis on the demonstration effect of American power, whereby minor
powers submit to an American-led global order because of fear generated
by tough, forthright behavior. Writing in the spring of 2000, Wolfowitz
reminded readers that the Cold War entailed “demonstrating your friends
will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished,
and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done
so.”152 Similarly, journalist George Packer notes, “Writing in January 2002,
[Robert] Kagan and [William] Kristol urged military intervention in Iraq as
part of America’s reassertion of global leadership. ‘The failure of the
United States to take risks, and to take responsibility, in the 1990s, paved
the way to September 11.’”153 Such views were rooted in the neoconserva-
tive camp of America intelligentsia during the Cold War, including Henry
“Scoop” Jackson, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan.154
Even before 9/11, Bush administration leaders influenced by such theo-
ries saw Saddam’s regime through a prism of its performative potential. In
July 2001, Rumsfeld argued, “If Saddam’s regime were ousted, we would
have a much-improved position in the region and elsewhere … . A major
success with Iraq would enhance U.S. credibility and influence throughout
the region.”155 A mere month into the Bush administration, he asked other
cabinet members to “imagine what the region would look like without
Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would
change everything in the region and beyond it. It would demonstrate what
U.S. policy is all about.”156
151
Wolfowitz, Paul, Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad, “Defense Planning Guidance,” in The Iraq Papers, ed. John
Ehrenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.
152
Quoted in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 17.
153
154
Ibid., 15, 17–18. Wolfowitz and Khalilzad had their PhD theses supervised by Albert Wohlstetter, who also
taught Perle, all at the University of Chicago.
155
Donald Rumsfeld, “Iraq,” memorandum to Condoleezza Rice, Richard Cheney, and Colin Powell, 27 July 2001,
in Joyce Battle, The Iraq War – Part I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001, National Security Archive Electronic
Briefing Book No. 326, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/doc06.pdf.
156
Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 85.
26 A. I. BUTT
This rhetoric intensified on and after 9/11. In a message to combatant

commanders on September 19, Rumsfeld outlined three strategic objectives,
one of which was “opportunities to demonstrate a capability or a boldness
that will give pause to terrorists and/or those who harbor terrorists and
force them to exercise much greater care, at greater cost or with greater
fear than they otherwise might have.”157 As one senior intelligence official
told me, “Showing the consequences of defying the U.S. was uppermost in
his [Rumsfeld’s] mind” when it came to invading Iraq.158 Or as Feith put it
in an October memo to Rumsfeld, “Actions against Iraq could make it eas-
ier to ‘confront—politically, militarily, or otherwise—other state supporters
of terrorism’ such as the regimes of Muammar Qadafi in Libya and Bashar
al-Assad in Syria, which had a record of backing down under international
pressure.”159
On this theme, one account of Cheney, perhaps the most important deci-
sion-maker in the Bush administration, is worth quoting at length:
The United States could not destroy every potential foe, unseat every hostile
government, but tackling one would send a powerful message to the rest. Bernard
Lewis, a British-born historian who was among Cheney’s frequent advisers on Islam
and the Middle East, said Cheney believed that “the image which we should avoid is
that we are a harmless enemy and an unreliable friend.” Yates, Cheney’s Asia
adviser, heard him say the same thing. “The vice president seems to be quite
concerned about the perception of American strength,” Yates said. “That is easily
spent, and very slowly rebuilt.” [Aaron] Friedberg said part of Cheney’s calculation
was to show “we are able and willing to strike at someone. That sends a very
powerful message.”
“Demonstration effect”—that was Friedberg’s term for it. “The demonstration effect
is not just to be a tough guy but to reestablish deterrence,” he said. We had been hit
very hard, and we needed to make clear the costs to those who might have been
supporting or harboring those who were contemplating those acts.” … Cheney, in
the end, did not press for war with Iraq because Saddam really topped the list of
“grave and gathering threats,” as he led the Bush administration in asserting … . The
war would not preempt immediate danger, a more traditional ground for war, but
prevent a danger that might emerge later—from Baghdad or anywhere else in the
viewing audience. Part of the point, as Voltaire explained about a public execution in
Candide, was to “encourage the others.”160
Several important onlookers technically outside the administration voiced a

similar logic. In a September 19 meeting of the Defense Policy Board, an
advisory panel to Rumsfeld, Bernard Lewis put it simply: “Iraq needs to be
157
Feith, War and Decision, 55.
158
Senior US intelligence official N, interview by Ahsan Butt, February 2018.
159
Ibid., 52.
160
Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008), 231–32.
SECURITY STUDIES 27
liberated, and Middle East nations would respect the use of force.”161 In
the National Review, Jonah Goldberg’s enunciation of the performative war
thesis was refreshingly clear, citing what he called the aforementioned
Ledeen Doctrine. He went on, explicitly drawing on the prison yard ana-
logy sketched above.
The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with
someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense. Whether or not Ledeen—a
historian and student of Machiavelli—was being tongue-in-cheek when he made the
suggestion, there’s an obvious insight to it … . International relations is much more
like a prison yard than like a college seminar at Brown.
[…]
It is impossible to read about the Middle East for any length of time and not
conclude that that (sic) the Arab world respects power and the willingness to use it
more than anything else … . There is nothing we want to see happen in the Middle
East that can be accomplished through talking around long tables festooned with
bottled water and fresh fruit at Swiss hotels, that cannot be accomplished faster and
more permanently through war. But there is plenty that cannot be achieved by such
gabfests that can only be achieved through war.
[…]
The Arab world respects winners and so does everybody else … . Fighting and
winning today means not having to fight at all tomorrow—and maybe, just maybe,
changing the rules of the prison yard so that it’s not a prison yard at all anymore.162
Henry Kissinger’s explanation for why he supported the Iraq war was simi-
lar, evoking the logic of disproportionate responses espoused by drug car-
tels, among others:
“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with
radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.”
The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a
larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban.
Something else was needed. The Iraq War was essential to send a larger message, “in
order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world they want for us.”
He said he had defended the war ever since. In Manhattan, this position got him in
trouble, particularly at cocktail parties, he noted with a smile.163
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, a popular foreign policy com-
mentator, echoed this language in a televised interview with Charlie Rose:
“We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right
in the heart of that world … . What they [Muslims] needed to see was
161
162
Jonah Goldberg, “Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two,” National Review, 23 April 2002. Emphasis in original.
163
Quoted in Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 408.
28 A. I. BUTT
American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and
basically saying ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You
don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy,
we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!’ That, Charlie, is what
this war was about.”164
Alongside testimony from important players within and outside govern-
ment, the interpretation of the Iraq war as mainly a performative act is fur-
ther supported by a retrospective survey of foreign policy experts taken a
decade after the invasion. Among thirteen possible causes ranging from oil
to Israel to rights violations, the choice of “Assert dominance in a New
American Century” was voted the most popular reason for each of the four
actors referenced: Bush (53%), Cheney (70%), Rumsfeld (64%), and
Neoconservatives (77%).165 One respondent summarized this worldview:
“Leading figures within the Bush administration … decided that the United
States needed to act as a far more energetic and effective world hegemon
than had been the case under George H.W. Bush or the Bill Clinton
administration. Iraq was, in my opinion, chosen as a supposedly easy target
for what has been called the ‘demonstration effect’ of American leadership,
military strength, and moral superiority (through free enterprise and dem-
ocratization). The alleged presence of WMD was merely a pretense for the
assertion of a new supposedly benign American imperial role.”166 The
organizers of the survey note that many responses emphasized that
“administration officials believed that when the United States flexes its mili-
tary muscle—wields a ‘big stick’—it can make other states, especially ‘rogue
states,’ behave better.”167 As one Republican critic pejoratively characterized
this demonstration effect thesis, it was aimed at “teaching the Middle East
it can’t mess with America.”168
War Was Not a Last Resort

The performative war thesis entails a war that cannot be avoided. Contrary
to the expectations of bargaining frameworks, there is nothing the target
can offer that would sate the aggressor—the fighting itself is the point.
Consistent with these ideas, war was not the last resort in 2001–2003;169 it
164
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFaSpca_3Q [last accessed December 18, 2018].
165
Jane Cramer and A. Trevor Thrall, “Introduction: Why Did the United States Invade Iraq,” in Why Did the
United States Invade Iraq, ed. Jane Cramer and Trevor Thrall (New York: Routledge, 2012), 7.
166
Ibid.
167
Ibid., 9.
168
Julian Borger, “Hidden Battle Rages for President’s Ear,” Guardian Weekly, https://www.theguardian.com/
guardianweekly/story/0,12674,1168070,00.html.
169
Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, 54.
SECURITY STUDIES 29
was decided upon very soon after—probably even on—9/11. In the summer
of 2002, Tony Blair wrote to Bush that his worry was that Saddam “drags
us into negotiation.”170 In September 2002, Bush announced at a
Republican fundraiser that there would be “no discussion, no debate, no
negotiation” with Saddam.171 The Chilcot Report’s “crushing” verdict on
Tony Blair’s government, which was “fully committed to regime change in
Iraq by the end of 2001,”172 could be just as appropriately be applied to the
United States: “The UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peace-
ful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that
time was not a last resort.”173
Some, like Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and CIA Director
George Tenet, claimed that war was never even the subject of debate or
deliberation; rather, it was simply assumed into action.174 However, to the
extent that there was one decision for war, it seems to have been taken in
the fall of 2001. Minutes after escaping the destroyed Pentagon on 9/11,
Wolfowitz “told aides that he suspected Iraqi involvement in the
attacks.”175 At an afternoon meeting that day, a Rumsfeld aide jotted in his
notes as the Secretary of Defense spoke at the National Military Command
Center: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time.
Not only UBL. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”176
Feith, when told by a senior military officer that “we were working hard on
Afghanistan,” responded: “Why are you working on Afghanistan? You
ought to be working on Iraq.”177
On September 12, George W. Bush was pushing Richard Clarke, his
counterterrorism director, to investigate whether Saddam could be tied to
the attacks: “I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything,
everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”178 To
Clarke’s protestation, “Mr. President, al Qaeda did this,” Bush, who was
“very forceful” in this exchange according to a counterterrorism official
present, pressed, “I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just
170
Tony Blair, “Note on Iraq,” letter to George W. Bush, 28 July 2002, The Iraq Inquiry Archive, http://www.
iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/243761/2002-07-28-note-blair-to-bush-note-on-iraq.pdf.
171
172
John Bew, “Policy Roundtable 1-1 on the Chilcot Inquiry,” H-Diplo ISSF Policy Roundtable 1, no. 1
(September 2016).
173
Luke Harding, “Tony Blair Unrepentant as Chilcot Gives Crushing Iraq War Verdict,” The Guardian, 6 July 2016.
174
John Prados and Christopher Ames, The Iraq War—Part II: Was There Even a Decision?, National Security
Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 328, October 2010, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB328/.
175
176
Ibid.
177
178
Lloyd C. Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of US Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present
(New York: The New Press, 2010), 128.
30 A. I. BUTT
look. I want to know any shred.”179 The same day, Rumsfeld “asked if the
terrorist attacks did not present an ‘opportunity’ to launch against Iraq.”180
At a national security meeting four days after the attacks, Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz included in their briefing three targets in the war on terror-
ism—al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq.181 As Rumsfeld told General Richard
Meyers, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), “My instinct is
to hit Saddam at the same time, not just bin Laden.”182 In a September 18
memo by Feith to Rumsfeld, Iraq was listed as the second target after
Afghanistan, including relatively detailed avenues for attacking the coun-
try.183 The commander in chief agreed with the overarching principle of
war against Saddam, if not the precise details: “We will get this guy but at
a time and place of our choosing,” Bush told the JCS chairman privately.184
The Chilcot report reveals that on October 11, 2001, Tony Blair wrote to
Bush, reporting a conversation with the leaders of an anonymous Arab
country—we know he was in Egypt at the time—saying, “There is a real
willingness in the Middle East to get Saddam out but a total opposition to
mixing this up with the current operation [Afghanistan] … . I have no
doubt we need to deal with Saddam. But if we hit Iraq now, we would lose
the Arab world, Russia, probably half the EU and my fear is the impact of
all that on Pakistan. However, I am sure we can devise a strategy for
Saddam deliverable at a later date.”185 The content and tone of the memo
suggests that Bush had tasked him with pressing friendly Arab regimes on
the need to attack Saddam. Other letters from Blair also suggest that even
while the war in Afghanistan was getting underway, the US and UK leader-
ships were on board with the idea of war against Saddam, with the only
major question being how to convince skeptical allies in Europe and the
Arab world of their chosen strategy.186
Two months after 9/11, just as Kabul fell, Bush asked Rumsfeld to “draw
up a fresh war plan for Iraq and keep it a secret.”187 A classified
179
Quoted in Ibid., 128–29, Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, 80.
180
Woodward, Plan of Attack, 25.
181
Ricks, Fiasco, 30.
182
The 9/11 Commission Report, 334–35.
183
Feith, “Strategic Planning Guidance.”
184
185
Letter from Tony Blair to George W. Bush, 11 October 2001, Iraq Inquiry Archive, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.
uk/media/243721/2001-10-11-letter-blair-to-bush-untitled.pdf.
186
For example, see the following correspondence from the Iraq Inquiry Archive: Tony Blair, “The War Against
Terrorism: The Second Phase,” letter to George W. Bush, 4 December 2001, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/
media/243731/2001-12-04-note-blair-to-bush-the-war-against-terrorism-the-second-phase.pdf; Tony Blair,
“Iraq,” letter to Jonathan Powell and David Manning, 7 March 2002, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/
75831/2002-03-17-Minute-Blair-to-Powell-Iraq.pdf; Tony Blair, “Note on Iraq,” letter to George W. Bush, 28 July
2002, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/243761/2002-07-28-note-blair-to-bush-note-on-iraq.pdf.
187
SECURITY STUDIES 31
CENTCOM Strategy Paper dated November 27, 2001 laid out plans for
regime change. The paper’s third bullet point, titled “How start?,” posed
three options: “Saddam moves against Kurds in north?,” “US discovers
Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or to anthrax attacks?,” and “Dispute
over WMD inspections?” This third option had its own separate sub-bullet
point: “Start now thinking about inspection demands.” This language
strongly suggests the cart was leading the horse in terms of WMD and the
decision to invade Iraq. At the time, Rumsfeld was pressing CENTCOM
Commanding General Tommy Franks for war plans, happy to “contribute
staff if Franks was shorthanded because of Afghanistan … . Clearly
Rumsfeld was not about to let the war in Afghanistan get in the way of a
new war with Iraq.”188
By December, Franks was reviewing plans for an invasion, and Major
General Victor Renuart, who joined Franks at his Washington DC meet-
ings, noted that “there was a sense of urgency to get a conceptual plan in
front of the president.”189 In a December 3 memo to Wolfowitz titled
“Next Case,” Rumsfeld wrote, “I have a feeling we are going to have to
make our case on anything we do after Afghanistan.”190 In January 2002,
Bush made his famous “axis of evil” speech, an “astonishingly bold address”
for Charles Krauthammer, who correctly inferred, “If there was a serious
internal debate within the administration over what to do about Iraq, that
debate is over. The speech was just short of a declaration of war.”191 Like
Krauthammer, Iraqi exile groups took the speech to mean that war for
regime change was on the way.192
In February, Bush ordered Franks to begin shifting forces from
Afghanistan to the Gulf. “In March, he interrupted a meeting between his
national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and three senators: ‘Fuck
Saddam’ the president said. ‘We’re taking him out.’”193 In the same month,
Cheney told a group of Republican senators, “The question was no longer
if the U.S. would attack Iraq, the only question was when.”194 In April
2002, just before Tony Blair’s visit to Crawford, Texas, Bush told a televi-
sion interviewer, “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go.”195 After
188
189
Ricks, Fiasco, 32.
190
Donald Rumsfeld, “Next Case,” memorandum to Paul Wolfowitz, 3 December 2001, Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes
Come in from the Cold, National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 615, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//dc.
html?doc¼4357755-11-L-0559-First-Release-Bates-1-912.
191
Quoted in Woodward, Plan of Attack, 95.
192
Defense Intelligence Agency Intelligence Summary for February 5, 2002.
193
194
Battle, The Iraq War—Part I.
195
Prados and Ames, The Iraq War—Part II.
32 A. I. BUTT
Blair’s discussions with Bush, an anonymous British official claimed that

the “removal of the Iraqi dictator … had by now been ‘hardwired’ into the
administration’s thinking,” and that the “‘whiff of inevitability’ mingled
with the smell of barbeque at the Bush ranch.”196 This was also the point
at which “detailed operations plans” by the US Third Army and V Corps,
those that would conduct the war, were being prepared,197 while
Rumsfeld’s aides were proposing “the idea of provoking Iraq to take action,
which would provide Washington with an indisputable casus belli and
avoid lengthy rounds of diplomacy, including at the United Nations.”198
In May 2002, in a conversation with his press secretary about a journal-
ist’s questions, Bush “unleashed a string of expletives. ‘Did you tell her I
don’t like motherfuckers who gas their own people? Did you tell her I
don’t like assholes who lie to the world? Did you tell her I’m going to kick
his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Mideast?”199 These were hardly the
words of a leader still contemplating the decision to go to war. Indeed,
Richard Haass was warned against dissenting by Rice in July 2002:
“Decision’s been made, don’t waste your breath.”200 Pillar noted, “It was
quite apparent from—certainly from, I would say, early 2002—if not that,
mid-2002—that we were going to war, that the decision had
been made.”201
Haass and Pillar probably overstated the timeline. By November, if not
the evening of September 11, 2001, war was inevitable.202 Indeed, the time
between the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2003 was spent debating how,
not whether, the war would be fought. At first, Feith and Wolfowitz told
Rumsfeld of their “disappointment with the narrowness of the options”
after meeting with Joint Staff generals on September 17, reporting that “we
had a useful talk about more creative approaches to Iraq.”203 These early
thoughts involved arming Shias and Kurds while expanding an American
presence in the oil-rich south or supporting a coup,204 which evolved to
196
Ibid.
197
Ibid.
198
199
200
Quoted in Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, 54.
201
Prados and Ames, The Iraq War—Part II.
202
Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 61; Suskind, One Percent Doctrine, 166; Prados and Ames, The Iraq War—Part II.
203
Paul Wolfowitz, “War or [sic] Terror—Coordination with Joint Staff,” memorandum to Donald Rumsfeld, 17
September 2001, DNSA, Targeting Iraq.
204
Peter Rodman, “Planning to Support any Possible Coup or Insurrection in Iraq,” memorandum to Paul
Wolfowitz, 20 September 2001; and Douglas Feith, “Using DoD-Controlled Humanitarian Assets to Support
Campaign Objectives in Iraq,” memorandum to Directors of Joint Staff and Defense Intelligence Agency, 21
November 2001, DNSA, Targeting Iraq. Such covert strategies for regime change have precedent. According to
Lindsey O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), the
United States intervened in such a manner sixty-six times during the Cold War.
SECURITY STUDIES 33
invasion plans that were developed through the winter of 2001–2002,

guided by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz’s relentless demands,205 continuing to
the summer of 2002, by which point only the fine-tuning remained.206
The performative war thesis entails a war that must be fought; no peace-
ful bargain, however lopsided, can promise the same benefits. It is hard to
avoid the conclusion that such thinking is exactly how the Bush adminis-
tration conceptualized the Iraq problem in 2001–2003.
Summary and Implications

The Iraq war was one of the most significant developments in post-World
War II geopolitics due to the sheer magnitude of its implications, including
in part the Arab Spring, the internationalized civil war in Syria, and the
creation of ISIS. I have argued that the United States’s concern with status,
reputation, and hegemony—more so than WMD, oil, Israel, or spreading
democracy in the Middle East—drove the decision to fight. Having experi-
enced status-loss as a result of 9/11, the United States was compelled to
burnish its reputation for toughness and establish a generalized deterrence
against challenges to its hegemony. Consequently, it had to fight—a lesson
British colonial authorities, states fighting separatists, prison bullies, and
Mexican cartels all know well. Iraq was suitable for such an exercise
because it represented a festering wound to American pride and such
unfinished business was not tolerable for a hegemon keen on settling debts
and marking a new global order.
Theoretical implications
The most important theoretical implication of this study is its questioning
of the bargaining model as suitable to explain the Iraq war specifically and
a catch-all model of war more generally. At its core, the bargaining model
of war considers war a mistake in that states can do better without fighting
than by fighting. This is an important insight that has structured the field
of security studies for over two decades. But as powerful as bargaining
explanations are, they cannot account for all wars. There are circumstances
under which states value fighting more than not fighting because certain
benefits, such as a tough reputation or recognized authority, only accrue to
actors that fight. Under such conditions, as with the Anglo–Zulu war of
1879 or the US invasion of Iraq, states will not fall mistakenly into war,
but positively welcome it.
205
Paul Wolfowitz, “Special Military Planning,” memorandum to Donald Rumsfeld, 24 January 2002, DNSA,
Targeting Iraq.
206
34 A. I. BUTT
A rejoinder from bargaining proponents might note that wars fought to

establish tough reputations have been subsumed under a bargaining frame-
work via information rather than commitment problems.207 However, con-
cerns remain. First, and more generally, information problems as causes of
war have been called into question for logical and empirical difficulties.208
Second, and with respect to the specific bargaining models that encompass
reputation- or “honor”-based war, the problem is that their theories of war
do not comport with experiences such as Iraq.209 A disputant in these theo-
ries could conceivably stop the war from occurring or continuing by not
making a challenge in the first place or acquiescing on the matter under
question, such as territory, policy, or a symbolic issue such as an apology.
By contrast, in my framework there exist conditions under which war is
unavoidable, not because of a commitment or information problem, but
because of preferences: one side insists on a fight and no amount of plaus-
ible concessions from a disputant, even if they allay honor-based concerns,
will suffice. The Zulus did not challenge the British, nor did Saddam pro-
voke the United States. Similar to victims of prison bullies, the target state
happens to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, unable to
avoid the wrath of the powerful actor sending a message to other observers.
Because bargaining models cannot contend with situations where there is
no viable bargaining range due to one actor’s preference to demonstrate its
might, it may be advisable to eschew reliance on them when building a
framework of performative war.
Policy Implications
The policy implications of this study should be deeply troubling to the
American intelligentsia. If the Iraq war was fought for oil or the Israel
lobby, the solution would be simple, if challenging to implement: curtail
the power of interest groups in domestic politics. If the war was fought due
to mistaken intelligence, the obvious response would be to tighten stand-
ards of data collection and ensure better coordination across bureaucratic
divides—not to mention forgive Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld of errors that
any leaders under pressure could make. If the war was fought for the
implementation of neoconservative ideas about the importance of democ-
racy, then it becomes incumbent to better understand the mismatch
between theory, centered on ideas such as the “End of History” and the
democratic peace, and the practice of external democracy promotion.
207
Walter, Reputation and Civil War.
208
Robert Powell, “War as a Commitment Problem,” International Organization 60, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 169–203.
209
Walter, Reputation and Civil War; Dafoe and Caughey, “Honor and War.”
SECURITY STUDIES 35
If, however, the war was fought to assert American hegemony, as I argue,
then there is no obvious boogeyman to blame for the war. Consider that in
the 2000 election, Al Gore’s campaign was more aggressive than Bush’s on
foreign policy, especially in asserting American responsibility to lead. Since
Gore was one of the leading hawks on Iraq within the Clinton administra-
tion and his positions on Saddam and WMD were remarkably close to
those of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Bush post-9/11,210 it is
more than conceivable that, under pressure from a Republican Congress,
he would have charted a similar course to Bush. Irrespective of one’s judg-
ment of this counterfactual of a Gore presidency,211 it bears remembering
that there were no significant partisan splits on the advisability of the Iraq
war.212 Democrats in Congress, including party stalwarts such as John
Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Edwards all voted for the deci-
sion to give Bush authorization to start a war, while supposedly liberal
newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post editorialized
in favor of it.213 Primacy, or the idea of forthright American leadership in
a dangerous world, was not an ideology restricted to the Republican party
or neoconservatives in 2001–2003.
As such, it is fairer to characterize the decision-making in the run-up to
the Iraq war as a collective failure emanating from a nationalism that
breeds, and relies on, the idea of American exceptionalism214 and a desire
to maintain the United States’s global standing and hierarchic order. Such
an interpretation would also beget questions for those that believe in the
image of the United States as a liberal hegemon, not prone to the dark and
ugly behavior of other great powers. The uncomfortable truth may be,
however, that the United States behaved as a vicious, aggressive state bent
on establishing exactly such a reputation.
210
Frank P. Harvey, Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
211
I disagree strongly with Harvey’s narrative in parts, though not on the crucial argument of whether Gore
would have stayed out of Iraq.
212
Krebs, Narrative, 168.
213
A month before the war, the New York Times complained about France’s “wishful thinking” and the possibility
of Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei playing “games of hide-and-seek,” cheered Britain and the United States
being “prepared to take the next step,” and warned that “the time has come for the others to quit
pretending that inspections alone are the solution.” See “Disarming Iraq,” New York Times, 15 February 2003.
Its only complaint once the war started was that it was not fought with a wide enough coalition. See “The
War Begins,” New York Times, 20 March 2003. The Washington Post was more hawkish, arguing a week before
the war, “In our view, military action has been made necessary by Saddam Hussein’s repeated defiance of
U.N. disarmament orders; we believe Mr. Bush is right to go forward despite opposition from France and
other nations.” See “Final Days,” Washington Post, 17 March 2003. When it began, the newspaper reminded
readers that “even if the operation does not go smoothly or fast, it must go forward. . . . The war that has
now begun stands to end the single greatest threat to peace in the Middle East.” See “First Strike,”
Washington Post, 20 March 2003.
214
Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), chap. 1.
36 A. I. BUTT
Acknowledgements
This article was improved thanks to helpful suggestions from Omar Bashir, Austin Carson,
Mike Hunzeker, Insiya Hussain, Burak Kadercan, Morgan Kaplan, Rose Kelanic, John
Mearsheimer, two anonymous reviewers and the editors at Security Studies, and partici-
pants at the Workshop for Research in Political Science at George Mason University, the
International Security Center seminar at Notre Dame University, and the 2017 annual
meeting of the International Studies Association. All errors are my own.

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Why did the United States Invade Iraq in 2003?

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Why did the United States Invade Iraq in 2003?

from WMD nonproliferation, other purported goals, such as spreading

Explanations for the Iraq War

underway.6 Finally, neoconservatives’ unwavering support for authoritarian

Saddam’s WMD and Iraq as a Preventive War

the war was to prevent suspected Iraqi nuclearization, which Washington

US midterm elections in November 2002. This pressure was exerted in an

The Causal Role of Uncertainty

yielded no weapons or signs of a program.59 The lack of cooperation with

similarly dismissed the preventive war argument based on how defanged—

Demonstrating Hegemony: War as a Performative Act

The Performative War Thesis

whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out

nationalist demands tomorrow.105 In either case, force is used primarily for

The Bush Administration’s Performative War in Iraq

9/11, Status Loss, and the Need for a New Beginning

learned that their own homeland is now vulnerable to attack.”124 A fort-

Reputation and Signaling as Causes of the War

senior administration official, described by the New York Times as having

This rhetoric intensified on and after 9/11. In a message to combatant

Several important onlookers technically outside the administration voiced a

War Was Not a Last Resort

Blair’s discussions with Bush, an anonymous British official claimed that

invasion plans that were developed through the winter of 2001–2002,

Summary and Implications

A rejoinder from bargaining proponents might note that wars fought to

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