Who Was Behind the 2003 US Invasion in Iraq?

David Warsh of  Economic Principals writes:

I have been reading Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Harvard, 2014), by Michael MacDonald, professor of international relations at Williams College.  It is a brilliant reassessment of the opinion-making forces that led to the American invasion of Iraq, an aide-mémoire more powerful than Mme’s Defarge’s knitted scarf  for all its careful comparisons, distinctions and citations. A parallax view, reaching similar conclusions, from a position slightly to the Left, is here.

The conventional wisdom has become that George W. Bush all but willed the invasion of Iraq singlehandedly. There is, of course, no doubt that the president was essential, says MacDonald. For one reason or another, Bush positively hankered to go to war. But he had plenty of help. 

For one thing, there were the neoconservatives.  By 2000, they more or less controlled the Republican Party.  MacDonald put the emphasis less on policy makers such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld than on the extensive commentarial behind them:  Journalists Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan at the National Standard and the New American Century think tank, the long-dead political philosopher Leo Strauss (nothing neo- about him) his and latter-day acolyte Harvey Mansfield, Islamist Bernard Lewis, to name the most prominent.

For another, there were the Democratic hawks. The Democratic Party itself divided into three camps: opponents (Sen. Edward Kennedy, former Vice President Al Gore, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi); cautious supporters (Senators John Kerry Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton); and passionate supporters (Senators Joseph Lieberman, Diane Feinstein, and Evan Bayh).  Former Clinton adviser Kenneth Pollack made the argument for war in The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.

MacDonald discounts the theory that the oil companies argued for war, with a view to obtaining control of Iraqi reserves.  He credits the argument that Israel and the Israeli lobby in the United States strongly supported regime change.  There were the many pundit hawks, including Thomas Friedman of The New York Times to Michael Kelly of The Atlantic to Max Boot of The Wall Street Journal, as well as the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and the editorial page of The Washington Post.   Economic Principals went down that path as well.  MacDonald doesn’t dwell on it, but it was reporting in the news columns of the major dailies that was especially influential in building support for the invasion.