Public Opinion, Power and Ideology in Pushing the Iraq War

George W. Bush launched his attack on Iraq ten years ago Tuesday.  Since then, there has been an endless stream of commentary and critique surrounding the loss of American life, hundreds of billions in wasted tax dollars, failure of the U.S. to achieve some of its geopolitical goals, and occasionally even a discussion of the more than 100,000 dead Iraqi men, women and children.  I’d like to reflect for a second on what the war says about public rationality, the relationship between power and credibility, and the ability of powerful ideologies to obfuscate a straight-forward understanding of institutional incentives.

Americans supported the war because they were relentlessly lied to

Public opinion favored the war because American people were duped into our attack on Iraq.  Despite extensive documentation of the parade of lies trotted out by the Bush Administration and servilely repeated and amplified by major media institutions, pessimists continue to argue that the American public is bloodthirsty by nature.  If the president, vice president, secretaries of everything, senior members of both political parties, leading think-tank bullshiterati, national newspaper editorial boards, cable news programs and almost every other elite all say that Iraq is a WMD-wielding threat with ties to the guys who just blew up 3,000 Americans a year earlier, how can you possibly expect the American public to see through it or be properly informed?  Is Chad Whitesworth supposed to just stroll down to his Topeka-area Revolutionary Books and grab a copy of Chomsky’s (who he’s never even heard of) latest anti-imperialist tome?

You can see the manipulability of public opinion by considering Iran and conducting a thought experiment on Iraq.  Warmongers have been pushing lies about Iran’s nuclear program for years, but without (until?) a sustained war push by political elites and the press, the American public continues to oppose a unilateral or multilateral strike (unlike Iraq).  Presented with a slightly less skewed set of facts, Americans choose peace.  Now imagine if in 2002, President Bush said Iraq wasn’t a threat, major editorial boards called a war unnecessary and Brookings scholars said it would be a tremendous strategic blunder (all true).  Could you possibly argue that, presented with these facts, Americans would have supported an attack on Iraq?  Of course not.

Media organizations and opinion makers favored powerful interests over truth

The relationship between power and credibility has also been made starkly clear in the years after the American attack.  Simply put, the more powerful an institution or its defenders are, the more credibility they gain in popular discourse.  Neo-cons promoted American military power, the military-industrial complex and big oil interests by banging the war drum, and they lost almost zero credibility despite the fact that Iraq cost orders of magnitude more lives than 9-11 and more than a trillion dollars in wasted funds.  Bill Kristol was rewarded with a regular column in the New York Times, Ken “Threatening Storm” Pollack is still an “expert on Middle Eastern political-military affairs” at Brookings, and Richard Perle is looking even creepier at the American Enterprise Institute.  Imagine what their media reception would’ve been like if they’d advocated an $800 billion dollar airdrop of U.S. food and medical supplies into Iraq that ended up killing 100,000+ civilians and 5,000 U.S. aid workers, instead of opening up Iraqi oil fields for U.S. investment and providing a great global reminder of why you don’t fuck with the U.S. government.

Elites buy into ideological justifications over clear-headed rational analysis of institutional incentives

The run-up to our attack on Iraq also demonstrated how challenging it is for elites to apply incentive-based, marginal benefit/cost analysis to powerful institutions.  American control of oil was clearly central to the Bush Administration’s decision to overthrow the Iraqi regime (why not attack Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Congo etc…), but political and media elites attacked this idea as a lie or conspiracy theory.  A similar willful blindness prohibits frank discussion of the possibility that Wall Street firms regularly commit fraud or insider trading as a part of business (to earn above market returns), or that politicians make policy decisions based on campaign contributions or future job opportunities.  CEOs and politicians are instead taken at their word or dismissed as bad apples if any corruption is uncovered.

Using an incentive based framework, all of this unethical behavior make sense.  The world’s leading consumer of oil needs to secure future reserves, Wall Street executives gain multi-million dollar bonuses by boosting stock prices, and politicians without wealthy backers are dead in the water, facing a future in academia rather than a lucrative lobbying gig or million dollar pay day on Wall Street.

American elites helped pave the path to war by favoring ideology over incentive-based thinking, bowing to powerful interests over truth and actively participating in the manipulation of public opinion.  Anti-war advocates should endlessly point to Iraq’s boy-who-cried-wolf examples as military attention is turned to Iran.  Progressives should also refuse to engage with thinkers and policymakers who advocated for the Iraq War.  Finally, anyone who wants to challenge powerful institutions should stick to marginal benefit/marginal cost thinking and advocate for policies grounded in providing strong material and social incentives for military generals, politicians and corporate executives to act in the interests of the American people.