Did the Bush Administration Consult Academics Before Invading Iraq?

Following is an exchange that has taken place on H-Diplo.

Nedra Dyer McCloud, Graduate Student (10/15/04)

This week, PBS aired Frontline's "The Choice 2004," a dual biography of John Kerry and George W. Bush. Bush's decision to wage war against Iraq was treated in some detail; there was no mention of his asking advice from any Middle Eastern scholars. There was no mention of any Middle Eastern scholars' having volunteered their advice about whether or not it would be sensible to invade Iraq in a traditional, boots-on-the-ground, nineteenth-century mode or in any other conceivable mode, for that matter. Does anyone know whether Middle Eastern scholars had any input whatsoever into Bush's decision to invade Iraq?

Jonathan Winkler, University of Maryland, College Park (1015/04)

Nedra McCloud has asked an interesting question regarding the planning for war in 2003. I would urge, however, a rephrasing of the question to be more specific. Perhaps one might use 'non-government or academic scholars of the Middle East' instead---or scholars from the Middle East [a particularly revealing area of inquiry].

I know personally of at least two people who qualify as "Middle East scholars," having received PhDs on subjects specifically about Middle East history, who chose to work in the federal government rather than the academic world and were in a capacity to lend their knowledge to the administration's planning or diplomacy.

Speculatively I would hazard a guess that Bernard Lewis and those scholars of the Middle East who lean towards his side of the field might well have had an intellectual influence on the thinking of the pre-war political planners. One should also not overlook the role of experts on the Middle East who reside within the vast bureaucracy of the military training and planning systems--those former attachés and exchange officers who would have brought their contacts and familiarity with the area to bear on the war as well. While not entirely equals in the eyes of the academic community, the government/business community would regard them as every bit as much experts on things like the viability of military operations on the ground in a place like Iraq.

John C. Zimmerman, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (10/15/04)

Nedra Dyer McCloud asks: "Does anyone know whether Middle Eastern scholars had any input whatsoever into Bush's decision to invade Iraq."

I believe that Bernard Lewis may have advised along these lines. Also, Michael Scott Doran of Princeton University supported invasion in an article appearing in Foreign Affairs before the invasion. However, as to Ms. McCloud's broader point, there does not seem to have been any major effort to consult Middle East specialists before the invasion. The reason for this can probably be found in Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America published in 2001. Kramer convincingly argues that Middle East specialists have been wrong on so many issues facing the region that they have become marginalized and hence ignored by policymakers. If memory serves me correctly, he gives the 1991 Gulf War as an example.

Keith Webster, Graduate Student, University of Victoria (10/18/04)

While this is not my area of concentration, I recently took a graduate course on religion and the Middle East, and presented a paper about the attack facing scholars of the Middle East in the United States.

Tenured faculty at American universities who had written about your question (up until February of 2004 at least), were unanimous that they had not been asked for advice. Many asserted that the present administration had come to rely on think tanks such as The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and The Middle East Forum. These institutions typically did not support or present research which questioned the role American foreign policy, American support for Israel or Israeli foreign policy played in the events and trends of the Middle East. Some scholars have argued that their research, while not actively sought, was available to anyone researching the Middle East. Others countered that the scale (in period and subject), and density of academic works did not fit the requirements of the modern briefing note.

If you visit the H-Mideast Politics discussion logs for 3 November 2003 on, under the subject thread "Middle East Studies" you will find several scholars debating the question of their role outside of research and the classroom, and how best to fulfill it.

This discussion was prompted in some part by hearings leading to the introduction of HR 3007 which would place political oversight on the granting of 'Title VI' funds in the United States. In the period leading up to this discussion, Middle East scholarship had faced de-facto blacklists from Campus Watch (sponsored by Middle East Forum) and the Young Conservatives of Texas.

Middle East Forum contributor Martin Kramer also wrote an attack on Middle East scholars titled Ivory Towerson Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, where he argued that these academics had failed to understand or explain the Middle East, they had failed to conduct research that supported American Foreign Policy, and lastly that they had developed a pro-Arab bias that he attributed to the influence of Edward Said.

Needless to say, in the context of 9/11, the attacks on Middle East scholarship and the war in Iraq, many academic experts have maintained or stepped up the public dissemination of their research and their comment on current events. I have seen pieces from Juan Cole (his blog is at www.juancole.com), Joel Beinin, Rex Brynen and Roger Owen. Representing views more sympathetic to American foreign policy, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington are also writing for a general audience.

Christopher L. Ball, Dept. of Political Science, Iowa State University (10/19/04)

I recall that the State Dept. put together an advisory group on post-war Iraq before the invasion called "The Future of Iraq" Project, but I don't know how many Phd-holding, full-time academic members were involved. Kanan Makiya, the "Republic of Fear" author who was teaching at Brandeis was deeply involved with it, at least publicly.

Of course, in terms of consulting with historians studying an era relevant to US foreign policy, few if any presidents systematically consult with full-time academics working outside government. Even symbolic attention is rare. During the Clinton administration, academics were never invited to state dinners in their own right (e.g., no China scholar to the state dinner for Jiang Zemin). By contrast the Bush administration has invited some scholars to state dinners (Thomas Sowell to a state dinner for Mwai Kibaki; Richard Romo to a state dinner for Vicente Fox, and John J. Bukowczyk to the dinner for Aleksander Kwasniewski). Of course, Romo is president of UT-San Antonio in addition to being an urban historian, and Africa is not Sowell's primary area of study (but he did examine Indian migration to East Africa in one book).

Orrin Schwab (10/19/04)

Concerning the question of scholarly input on George Bush's invasion policy, the best reference we have at the moment is the investigative journalism of Bob Woodward. Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, depicts a very closed decision-making process dominated by a few key high level decision makers none of whom were scholars of the Middle East. I don't have any precise knowledge of who supported Bush's decision for war among leading academics of the Middle East and international affairs. It would seem very unlikely that any scholar steeped in Arab culture and history would have supported an invasion as effective foreign policy.

In retrospect, however, a letter condemning Bush's war policy was signed by more than 700 international affairs scholars. The text of the letter can be found at http://www.sensibleforeignpolicy.net/letter.html

Andrea Teti (10/19/04)

I think the dynamics at play here are rather more complicated than Middle East Scholars being 'wrong' about Middle East politics. As for Martin Kramer's book, while it may have had an impact on the policy community, as a piece of scholarship it is rather dubious - it accuses Edward Said of being useless on the basis that Orientalism didn't help predict the Iranian revolution. Kramer, as Daniel Pipes, are, for all their claims that the 'other side' is biased by a specific poltical agenda, not exactly the first people one would want to turn to for 'objective' (or at least dispassionate) advice. Needless to say, this has a considerable imact upon their intellectual output.

What is more interesting is the question: why have policy-makers and politicians (categories between which it would be wise to discriminate in any case) come to ignore Middle East scholars (also here it would be wise to distinguish between area scholars interested in politics or economics and the rest of the 'field' --e.g. Medieval historians-- from which it would be unreasonable to expect contributions on contemporary politics)?

Part of the answer has to do, perhaps, with the fact that these scholars often tell policy-makers what they don't want to hear, for either intellectual or political-iedological reasons.

But perhaps more than that - and this is just speculation - it has to do with the disciplinary divide between International Relations [IR] and Middle East Studies [MES], and with the fact that the current Bush administration actually has several members who are or were directly involved in academia and whose formation is from within Political Science/IR rather than MES (Rice and Wolfowitz, for example). With these kinds of 'heavy guns' perhaps the adminstration feels it has more than enough academic credentials to override the sort of cautionary tales coming from most MES. Perhaps the political/intellectual 'inconvenience' of the MES message was reinforced by a disciplinary formation which leads (mainstream) IR scholars (particularly of the realist variety...) to often underestimate the importance of local complexities (as opposed to an area scholarship which usually over-emphasises them).

It also seems to me that the intellectual and political orientation of those who made these decisions reflects a more general shift in patterns of political preferences over the last 20 years or so towards greater conservatism, or at least greater willingness to listen to simplified messages. But that's another kettle of fish...

Also, it seems to me that it would be important to ask not only whether MES scholars were consulted, but what the policy-making process was in its entirety --i.e. whether this advice translated into policy or not, and at what stages.

It would certainly be interesting to carry out a full study on these questions.

Christopher L. Ball, Dept. of Political Science, Iowa State University (10/20/04)

I'm not so sure that one should expect or even want policymakers to be consulting with professional academics to make policy. First, the government has area experts of its own, usually academically trained, as Winkler pointed out in his posting on this thread. Second, academics who want to influence policy have multiple public venues -- magazines, op-eds, broadcast interviews -- to make their case heard to activists, Congress, and executive officials. Third, the academic consensus, if there is one, may not be of much value to policymakers seeking to effect change. For example, when the Clinton administration sought to expand NATO in the 1990s, IR security specialists and Russian studies experts almost unanimously rejected the idea, and many lobbied hard against it. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration persevered and when expansion happened none of the academic's dire predictions transpired.

Policymakers want to know how to solve problem as they define them. What many of us academics do is define the problems as we see them. Academics can offer expert advice on how to solve problems in some cases, but if academics want to define the problems for government, then they want to be policymakers, not academics.

Joseph M. Henning, Associate Professor of History, College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology (10/20/04)

In his recent book, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (Scribner, 2004), John B. Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, describes the influence of Princeton historian Bernard Lewis and Johns Hopkins political scientist Fouad Ajami on the Bush Administration before the invasion of Iraq. Both scholars argued that occupying and democratizing Iraq would be relatively simple, short-term projects.

According to Judis, "Lewis had been a mentor to Wolfowitz and Perle. Talking to Lewis, Perle said, was 'like going to Delphi to see the oracle.' After September 11, Lewis conferred at length with Perle's Defense Policy Board, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice. Bush read Lewis's articles. Ajami met with administrative officials and would have a particularly strong influence on Cheney. . . .When Cheney first made the case for war in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign War [sic] in Nashville in August 2002, he even cited Ajami by name," predicting an eruption of joy when Iraqis welcomed American troops as liberators (pp.181-3).

Tom Nichols, Naval War College (10/25/04)

While I agree with Christopher Ball's comment that policymakers probably wouldn't find it useful to consult with academics, I offer a few additional comments:

First, it is important to point out that the uselessness of academic advice is of academics' own making; the emphasis on theory and abstraction (at least in political science) renders a great deal of academic work inapplicable to the the real world. When I took time off from an academic post to move to a policy-related job, I was shocked and disheartened at how much of my training and general background in political science turned out to be utterly irrelevant to actually dealing with foreign policy.

Second, while the government may have its "own" experts, particularly in the intelligence community, this is a mixed blessing (and not necessarily just because of putative "politicization"). The main problem is that government estimates are the often the result of the dreaded "group" approach, in which material gets passed around for vetting to a committee of researchers and ends up larded with so many caveats as to almost be useless. Independent scholars, as the sole authors of their work, have an advantage that scholars working in a bureaucratic environment -- in which it is too often the case that a report is only as good as the dumbest person who was involved in working on it -- do not enjoy.

Third, there is no question that academics would reach conclusions that are often appallingly out of touch with reality. (The overwhelming consensus among academics in favor of parliamentary democracy, and especially proportional representation systems, for new democracies is reason enough never to consult a political scientist about regime design.)

However, I take issue with Prof. Ball's example: NATO expansion beyond the original addition of Poland, Hungary and the CR (which I believe atones for and partly restores the injuries of 1944, 1956, and
1968) was the one case where the scholarly community got it right. I believe Americans are living with some of the negative consequences of that decision now, including a growing backlash against the United States that predates the Iraq War; while the academic community can often get it wrong, the Russia hands of the Clinton administration were so inept (and things have not improved much, in my personal opinion) that even the academics were able to see what the policymakers could not.