What an admission. “The threat of terrorism” from the Middle East, an influential US columnist wrote a fortnight ago, “was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it”. If the US had “not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s,” he added, “Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking” it. He went further still: “Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of ‘who we are’ but because of where we are.”
After a quarter of a century of disastrous US wars in the Middle East, that may sound like common sense. But this is Robert Kagan, one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, the creed that zealously championed military adventurism at the height of the era of US exceptionalism. In the 1990s, he repeatedly agitated for war with Iraq, a demand that became a rallying cry after 9/11, when he insisted that “the Iraqi threat is enormous”.
To be clear, Kagan is not rejecting US hegemony so much as mourning its decline. His startling admission is buried in an article lamenting the Iran war as a strategic disaster, straining western alliances and aiding Russia and China. The journey Kagan has been on seems to owe more to a reordering of priorities than to any full recantation of beliefs: Donald Trump’s arrival a decade ago pushed him to focus on the threat of fascism at home.
Kagan’s transition from arguing the invasion of Iraq “would have a seismic impact on the Arab world – for the better” to conceding that US intervention fuelled Islamist violence isn’t unique. He joins a pantheon of western politicians, policymakers and pundits who’ve had important realisations about the calamities of western intervention – only several decades too late.
“Knowing what we know now, I would never have voted for it,” — said Hillary Clinton about the Iraq war in 2007. Barack Obama described the chaotic aftermath of Libya as “his worst mistake”. The British-American commentator Andrew Sullivan began agitating for the invasion of Iraq in the hours after 9/11. He later compiled that writing in a book titled I Was Wrong.
Others appear pathologically averse to learning anything. Having presided over the calamity of Iraq, Tony Blair declared that his country “should have backed America from the very beginning” over the Iran war. The British commentator Douglas Murray – a serial cheerleader of disastrous wars – pens articles with headlines such as “We must crush Iran now so it can’t come back and spread terror.”
There is not even an apology. The pro-war ideologues of the 21st century have been wrong about everything, and the cost of their errors has been measured in death, destruction and chaos: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, now Iran. Instead, those who opposed these catastrophes were denounced as extremists, as useful idiots for tyranny, as apologists for terror.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Susan Sontag made much the same argument Kagan now so casually advances. The attacks, she wrote, were not driven by hatred of western values, but were “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions”. For this, she was vilified. What she was implying, thundered the neoconservative Charles Krauthammer, was “we had it coming”.
There have been no meaningful consequences for being consistently wrong about the gravest of questions – whether millions live or die. Krauthammer himself, a fervent advocate of the Iraq war, warned that if weapons of mass destruction were not found, “we will have a credibility problem”. The media evidently disagreed. He remained a ubiquitous television pundit, bestselling author and Washington Post columnist until his death in 2018.
Even in the absence of any elite reckoning, the American people have learned their lesson the hard way. The Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya wars all enjoyed majority support when they began. The Iran war is the first not to command public consent at the outset. The predictions of the warmongers have collided with reality too many times.
So why, then, does a reckoning matter? As you will have noticed, human history has taken a rather dark turn. War, genocide and mounting authoritarianism loom large. Unless we understand how we arrived here, we are unlikely to end up anywhere better. Kagan now casually repudiates beliefs that were once central to his worldview, but without offering any serious explanation. It would not merely be an act of intellectual honesty to explain why he supported such self-evident calamities. It might help us escape the nightmare they created.
