Departments

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neoconservatives

  • 3/21/2023

    The Iraq Invasion Turns 20

    Historians comment on the consequences of the invasion and efforts to control the narrative about how and why the US invaded. 

  • SOURCE: The Century Foundation
    3/7/2023

    America Broke Iraq, and Itself

    by Thanassis Cambanis

    "The U.S. occupation of Iraq normalized torture, impunity, manipulation of intelligence, and a new level of official mendacity."

  • SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
    3/10/2023

    Iraq War at 20: What the Neocons Got Wrong

    by Max Boot

    "I desperately wanted to believe that spreading freedom could solve the security dilemmas confronting the United States—that by doing good in the world, it could also serve its national security interests."

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    1/23/2023

    Why We Went to War on Iraq

    by Melvyn P. Leffler`

    One foreign policy historian argues that the decision to invade Iraq was made out of genuine concern for thwarting attacks on Americans and preserving the United States' ability to use military power in the Middle East. 

  • SOURCE: Substack
    9/27/2021

    Never-Trumpers Keep Insisting that Reaganism Was Not Demagoguery--It Was

    by Claire Potter

    Robert Kagan's assessment of the risks of a presidential coup in 2024 is strangely silent on the role of his own neoconservative faction in mobilizing grievance politics, and uses poor historical reasoning to try to rescue the Republican Party from association with Trumpism. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/20/2021

    What Liberal Comparisons between Bush-Cheney and Trump Get Wrong

    by Joseph Stieb

    Liberal critics of Liz Cheney have suggested she's a hypocrite, blasting Trump's "Big Lie" while having championed the deceptions that led to the Iraq War. This is an imperfect comparison, which ignores the real lessons of Iraq – that fixing the fact-finding process to fit a policy is a common and continuing danger. 

  • SOURCE: War on the Rocks
    9/1/2020

    Opening Up New Avenues to Understanding the Path to War in Iraq

    by Joseph Stieb

    National security historian Joseph Stieb reviews journalist Robert Draper's account of the drive to war against Iraq in 2003, concluding that Draper explains how the principals built a case for war out of selectively embroidered intelligence, but not why war appeared as a positive option or much of the American political establishment got on board. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    8/2/2020

    Missing in Action: Accountability Is Gone in America

    by Karen J. Greenberg

    A crucial part of the history of the neoconservative invasion of Iraq and the use of torture in the War on Terror is the utter lack of accountability or consequence for the people who made those decisions.