The scale of the catastrophe in Iraq—hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead along with more than 4,200 Americans; unknown numbers of wounded and traumatized; several million Iraqis uprooted and exiled; untold numbers of maimed, malnourished, and unemployed; massive damage to the physical country; not to mention the damage done to American diplomacy overall—not only invites a long, hard stare at the wreckage but ignites the question of what to conclude. Almost everyone can agree that “mistakes were made,” but which, by whom, and why? Richard Nixon wrote a book called No More Vietnams, after all. Arguments against repeating the past are perilous, so much so that it might be said that all policy errors are the products of wrong lessons extracted by misplaced analogy—Munich a faulty deduction from 1914, Vietnam a false extrapolation from Munich, and so on. Among the questions that arise now: was the Bush invasion a case of standard-issue American foreign policy at work, or is Iraq what happens when neoconservatives run amok? Was Iraq the wrong war on behalf of what were, nevertheless, the right (Wilsonian) principles? Or was the Iraq war a liberal-minded war with a neoconservative face, and does it therefore discredit the whole liberal internationalist project? This slender volume of sharply argued essays sets out to resolve the debate, and while not ending it, does advance it.
