Welcome to A Better Peace, podcast of the U.S. Army War College official online journal War Room, graciously supported by the Army War College Foundation. Please join the conversation at warroom.armywarcollege.edu. We hope you enjoy the program. The views expressed in this presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of War. Make sure not to miss a single episode and subscribe to A Better Peace, the War Room Podcast at warroom.armywarcollege.edu forward slash subscribe. Welcome to A Better Peace, the War Room Podcast. I'm Ron Granary, chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College and podcast editor of The War Room. It's a pleasure to have you with us. For nearly three decades, spanning the turn of the century, Iraq occupied a central place in American security policy. Saddam Hussein's ambitions, viewed with more or less benign neglect from Washington in the 1980s, sparked a major crisis with his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. From that point on, Saddam represented the foremost threat to stability in the Gulf. As it happened, the only thing more destabilizing to the Gulf turned out to be the absence of Saddam, as his overthrow in 2003 led to a decade and a half of upheaval until the defeat of ISIS in 2018. Those decades included a variety of important decisions and mistakes, triumphs and disasters, whose echoes continue to shape politics, both in the United States and in the Gulf. The passage of time has also allowed gradual broadening and deepening of our historical understanding of what once were considered disparate events. Samuel Helfont's The Iraq Wars, the latest in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series, is a learned and concise assessment of the entire period, tracing connections and legacies that were not immediately apparent to actors at the time or to those writing the first treatments of the wars. A book aimed at an educated non-specialist audience, it offers enlightenment both to those approaching the subject for the first time and those who already think they know all there is to know. Today, on A Better Piece, we are pleased to have with us friend of the show, Sam Helfont, in our virtual studio to discuss his book and what the historical record can help us understand about the Iraq Wars. Dr. Sam Halfant is an Iraq War veteran and an associate professor of strategy and policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and is also the author of Iraq Against the World, Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order, and Compulsion in Religion, Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq. I can't think of a better person to talk about the Iraq wars than Sam Helfand. Welcome to Better Peace, Sam. Thanks, Ron. It's great to be back. So, Sam, do you consider this book to be the culmination of your work on Iraq? In some ways, it's a culmination in the sense that I'm bringing together a lot of what I've researched and what I've taught about over the past decade plus about this topic. I've spent a lot of time in the Iraqi archives, spent also a lot of time working on Iraq in the sort of policy realm. So in that sense, bringing it all together is a culmination. And it's also a culmination in that I think I've done enough just on the Iraq wars. So I will continue to write about the Iraq wars, but I'm going to move on to bigger projects about the greater Middle East after this. So this might be the last word I have to say on the subject for a while. That's fair. So I got to, I got to confess, right, a certain historian's love of word games. And you chose to call this book The Iraq Wars, which I, you know, at least you're sort of linking events together. What would you say to somebody who said, brother, it was all just one war? I would probably be sympathetic that this is one war. And that is one of the arguments in this book. It's a very short introduction, but they ask you, you know, make it your own. It's not just a Wikipedia article or something like that. There should be arguments in there. And one of mine is that these are all connected in one giant war. That being said, there are, you know, events which have been treated as wars. The Gulf War, the Iraq War. If I just called it the Iraq War, people would assume this is just 2003 we're talking about in the aftermath. And it also fits into the sort of historiography of other similar conflicts. So we have the Napoleonic Wars, right? It's not the Napoleonic Wars. We have the Wars of German Unification. More recently, you've had the Vietnam Wars. And so I look at it along those, in line with those other conflicts, kind of the Wars of German Unification. They had maybe different policies and strategies in different wars, but they fit together as a whole. And looking at one in isolation isn't as helpful as seeing them as a broader project, same with the Napoleonic Wars or in Vietnam. And so that's kind of the argument I'm making here, that there are separate events. Sure, you could pick out the Gulf War 2003 or the ISIS campaign, but when you look at them as a whole, you actually learn something more. Right. Well, and I got to say, there's a lot, you pack a lot in 120 pages of text here. And so I find it really interesting the way that you highlight how Iraq, the Iraq wars or the wars in and around Iraq are important, not only in themselves to the people who fought them, but one of the reasons why they became so central was because they became bound up with our entire feeling about the post-Cold War order. If George H.W. Bush decides that the invasion of Kuwait is not just a local issue that can be dealt with through negotiation, but he says, this is a test of the global order, and we're going to show that we can do better. And that really raises the stakes, does it not, for how we deal with Iraq? And it commits the United States to long-term stability in the region. Would things have been different even if George H.W. Bush had said, you got to get out of Kuwait? Did the rhetorical connection of the Iraq War to this broader idea of new world order, was that the fateful decision that shaped how this would all turn out for us and for the region? Yes, I think so on a couple of levels. One, I'm not sure there is an Iraq wars without a new world order because Saddam's plan for this was to launch this. And he thinks the Americans are going to be upset and oppose it. He doesn't think they're going to mobilize a half million people and a quarter million of their allies to come and reverse it. And in some ways, the assumption wasn't crazy. When the Americans first started thinking about this. There's a famous cabinet meeting that happens in the days after his invasion. And Dick Cheney is the Secretary of Defense, and Colin Powell's there, and a few other people. Bush himself isn't there, and neither is National Security Advisor Skullcroft. But the senior principals are there, and Baker's also away in Mongolia. But the senior principals there look at this and say, you know, we should voice our opposition to this. You know, if they were in the 21st century, they would have said, you know, we'll change our Facebook profiles to a Kuwait flag and, you know, we'll send thoughts and prayers and these wonderful things. You know, but they said that they think they should defend and can defend Saudi Arabia. But it just wasn't worth it to go into, you know, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world. It's on the other side of the planet. The US really has no presence over there. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. You know, in war college talk, the value of the objective just simply wasn't high enough for them to justify the cost But Bush looks at this and we have to remember what going on in the world right This is the summer of 1990 German reunification is happening They thinking big thoughts about what the world should look like. And when Bush comes back and he tells the National Security Council that he's going to go in a different direction, he says explicitly, This is not about Kuwait. This is not about, you know, balance of power in the Gulf or oil. This is about the way that the international system is going to be for the next hundred years. You know, he uses language, language like this. And this eventually becomes what he calls a new world order, right, a month later. And so I'm not sure that, you know, the U.S. would have been upset about this. Maybe there would have been some airstrikes. You know, there would have been sanctions. But I'm not sure that we have the Gulf War in 1990, 1991 without the New World Order. That's what made it worth it. Right. And so that pulls the U.S. in, but it also keeps it in because there are other times when things start to go sour in the 90s. We start losing allies over this. The French and the Russians are defecting. We can't defect. The Americans can't. They can't just – in Somalia, things go bad. Okay, fine. We'll just leave Somalis to their own fate. And it's not great for Somalia, but that's what we did. In this case, we can't do that. There's actually Chirac, the president of France, is debating Clinton about this later in the 1990s. And Chirac says, you know, I don't think we have many options here. You know, there's not much else we can do. And he's sort of trying to push Clinton to ease off on Saddam. Just make some sort of peace that we can live with here. And what Clinton answers is very telling. This is a private phone call. It's not in front of reporters or anything like that. And Clinton says, what do we do then if somebody breaks a resolution and we decide we're not going to follow through on enforcing that resolution? And this is what the whole thing was with Saddam. They'd put Iraq as the test case for this. Iraq could become the test case for this. And if the test case fails, then it's not just that Iraq is out of sanctions. It's that these resolutions don't mean anything. And that's the whole point of, you know, Security Council and what the new world order is going to be. And there's a lot, you know, the U.S. presidents have put a lot of stake in this kind of rules-based order. And they can't simply let Iraq slip away because it is, it's the test case for the broader system. See, and that's what I think is so interesting and so ironic about this, right, is that there's, you know, when the, you know, I remember when the, when the Gulf War, when Gulf War began in 1990 and there was a lot of talk and there is a lot of talk about, we were interested in it because of the oil. And obviously there are material interests involved for the United States, but the idea that American policymakers, that even subsequent administrations, right. Who could very easily have said, right. This isn't my war. Bill Clinton could have said, right. This isn't my war, this was George H.W. Bush's war, when it came time to enforcing sanctions or the like, that they felt bound by principle. And it sounds almost shocking, right? Because we always talk about realpolitik. But you know what? Some of these guys actually believed stuff and felt that their beliefs required them to behave a particular way. I think that's funny or funny in a head scratching kind of way, right? That the stated ideals that people are fighting about can have implications that can shape policy decisions. We need to be reminded that can still happen. Yeah. So we need to be, you know, it is interesting to look back and to see, you know, in our time, you know, in February, 2026, it seems quite quaint that people were worried about this type of thing. But, you know, we also shouldn't be, you know, naive. You know, oil did play a role. And when George H.W. Bush, especially George H.W. Bush, and to some extent Clinton, it wasn't just altruism, right? They saw this system that they're trying to build, a rules-based order, as good for the United States, because the United States would be running this system. The United States would have a special place in this system. And the United States was viewed by the other actors in this system as a first among equals power. And so it wasn't that they were just simply trying to, I'm sure part of what they were doing was they thought the rules-based order was good and it's for its own sake and had some humanitarian value and whatnot. Certainly George H.W. Bush understood what the alternatives were because he had fought in World War II. But it wasn't just doing good for good's sake. It was also in U.S. interest to have a system where the U.S. was the top dog and the U.S. could sort of dictate what was going on within rules that the U.S. made. And so, you know, there was that aspect of it as well. Right. And then we get to the next irony is that by 2003, when you have the George W. Bush administration is making the decision to go to war, they try, or at least they make the effort to go through the same Security Council procedures. But when the Security Council won't deliver the green light to war that the Bush administration wants, the Bush administration turns around and says, well, we're going to do it anyway, because it has to be done. Ironically, undermining the very system that all of these sanctions and everything were supposed to, holding up those sanctions was supposed to be what this was all about, maintaining that world order. I think one of the interesting things in the book that you point out here is you talk about the significance of 9-11, but in a very interesting way, because you argue that it wasn't that anybody believed that Saddam had anything to do with 9-11. And it wasn't even that 9-11 gave them a green light to invade or for regime change, but rather you argue that the ideas for regime change had already pretty much crystallized long before 9-11. And that it was more that a changing international system or changing international situation provided the opportunity to resolve the Iraq issue in a way that some people had wanted to do for a long time. Am I accurately describing your argument? But second of all, do you find that argument to be more common today within the scholarship, or are you pushing out away from what people have thought about 9-11 and the Iraq War? So I do think it's becoming more common. there's a uh a book out a few years ago by this one named joseph styeb called regime change consensus he's at north carolina uh and he makes you know the case of the crystallization of this regime change uh consensus is um you know occurred earlier in in the 1990s um there are several books coming out uh called the iraq wars this is uh the first one i won't i won't uh spoil it i've been sort of peer reviewer for two of them at least by senior scholars who are coming out with larger books that connect all of these wars. And you look back even at wars about 2003, like Mel Leffler's recent book, it starts earlier on in the 1990s. And I think you have to, and so to understand this, you really need to break down the difference between policy and strategy. What is a policy and what is a strategy, right? So the policy is what the U.S. wants to achieve, and the strategy is how they want to do it. The policy, one can argue that the policy all the way from back in the Gulf War was regime change. They wanted to get rid of Saddam. It was unstated, which was very problematic because the system needs stated goals, and parts of the system weren't functioning on that assumption, which led to a quagmire. But it becomes clearer and clearer throughout the 1990s that the policy is regime change. And this culminates in 1998, when there's actually a law that's passed, the Iraq Liberation Act, which states explicitly that the policy of the United States is regime change in Iraq So we have a policy stated written in law by the late 1990s won argue it was actually earlier than that but by the late 1990s it very clearly stated that our policy is regime change and we are attempting regime change. We're attempting it with the tools that we have available to us at the time, right? That we could muster up power to domestic political power for certain tools, certain strategies. And these were fairly low cost strategies like sanctions and no fly zones, maybe attempting a CIA coup or something like that. What changes after 9-11 isn't the policy. The policy remains the same. It's regime change. What happens after 9-11 is the domestic political atmosphere in the United States has changed. And now the American people are willing to pay a much higher price to achieve that policy end. So now new strategies like a conventional war and an invasion become possible. And so 9-11 changes the price that the American public is willing to pay to achieve a policy that had been already entrenched in American law and probably in American foreign policy as an objective for a long time. And it's interesting how that shift takes place. And then, of course, the way the war is fought also, right? It is fought in part because of developments in the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, who has a vision for how the war should be fought, which then has implications for whether there are enough troops to police the country after Saddam is overthrown. These are relatively familiar things, I think, sadly to a lot of folks. But the one thing that I want to come back to, because before we talk about what happens in Iraq after 2003, is in this book and as well as in Iraq Against the World, you do a really good job of showing how difficult it is to manage a sanctions regime. right? Sanctions feel like they can feel like a somewhat lower, as you were just describing, right? A somewhat lower cost way to push for a policy advantage, but to impose sanctions on a country and to maintain those sanctions requires a willingness to withstand a lot of public relations problems, right? What happens when it looks like you're starving innocent Iraqis, But also, in an increasingly globalized world economy, how do you maintain sanctions? How do you get everybody to stay on board with them? Was it a mistake from the beginning to assume that we could just put open-ended sanctions on Iraq and that we insisted on holding onto them? yes i i think it it was we have to remember a couple things though one that um when we talk about sanctions now we discuss sanctions it's we have a certain idea of what sanctions are they're they're you know they can be rough against the population they they can uh be hard to maintain over time this was all new stuff there was international sanctions you know between states interstate sanctions for a long time. But the idea of internationally imposed sanctions through UN Security Council resolutions as part of collective security, not one state's policy against another, but as part of collective security was brand new. It had never been tried. I mean, it was written into the UN sort of plans, but because of the Cold War, the UN had never really done this. A few small cases of Rhodesia or somewhere like that. But the level that they were attempted in Iraq was something brand new. Not only that, but sanctions were seen as a kind of peacenik strategy. They were developed by pacifists. Pacifists who were against the idea of war in the late 19th century, the more sort of realistic among them realized that there's going to have to be some alternative to war, right? And what can that alternative be? And they're the ones who developed the idea of international sanctions through collective security like the League of Nations or the UN. And so sanctions weren't looked at going into this the way that they were looked at coming out of it. Also, there weren't smart sanctions. Now we have sanctions that can be targeted at certain people. These were just blanket because they were trying it for the first time. So you can give them a little bit of credit on that. But you end up, I think, the problem with the sanctions, again, I mean, to get back to the strategy and the policy, is that the George H.W. Bush administration wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein. They called him Hitler. They said they're not willing to live. They said very explicitly, they're not willing to live with a world in which Saddam Hussein is in charge of Iraq. And Clinton picks this up and goes with that adopts the same exact view. Problem is, this isn't the official policy. Not the official policy until later in the 1990s. And so when they're giving the Department of Defense or the Treasury or the State Department the official policy objectives, it's not. It's enforcement. It's enforcement of UN resolutions. We're going to use sanctions to enforce these UN resolutions. Well, that leads to a problem because the strategies you would use to enforce resolutions like sanctions, no-fly zones, other things of that nature, were never going to lead to regime change. And so you have now an unwritten policy of regime change, but you've developed strategies to achieve a different goal altogether. And so they were never going to, these types of sanctions were never going to be enough, ever. This only could be a quagmire if you have a strategy that can't achieve the policy objective. You either have to quit or you're going to have to somehow reconcile your objectives with whatever you're trying to, you know, the means you're trying to use to achieve those objectives. And so that was – the sanctions were never used in the way that they were intended, which was to just get compliance. They had a shot. They had a shot at actually getting Iraqi compliance. But the US made it very clear that that was never going to be good enough. See, because that was the idea is if you let the Iraqis know that there's essentially nothing they can do short of removing Saddam Hussein that will satisfy the United States, then how do you get them to comply? That's right. And the Iraqis were very savvy. This is one of the things that comes out of their own archives, which we have now access to the Iraqi archives. They understood the game. And they understood, first of all, that, yeah, there was no way out of this mess for them. Saddam has, I'm going to paraphrase, but he says something along the lines. Listen, we can have sanctions with inspections or sanctions with no weapons inspections. We might as well just get rid of the inspectors and stop cooperating because it's going to be the same thing, the same result. And they knew how to amplify. They knew where the soft spots were in the West. They knew there's Iraqi suffering. It's very real. They knew how to amplify that, make it even worse for the Iraqis, and sometimes make up things that weren't happening and project that to the international community to show how horrible these sanctions are. And then also bring people along with, you know, they have a lot of oil and so they can buy off their, you know, French oil companies who have influence or Russian politicians. Even if they're not allowed to sell the oil, it's sort of latent power that's there. So they can say they can sell a future contract and say when the sanctions are lifted, you'll make a lot of money, you know. And so they use that to push people in the right direction. for them. Yeah. And so then one could argue that the 2003 Iraq war was an American effort to break out of a trap of our own devising, right? Sanctions weren't working. If we were serious about regime change, this was how it was going to have to happen. So the United States invades with a very small force relatively speaking succeeds and then this is a catastrophic success After the overthrow of Saddam where do you see and in the book where do you point out where are the moments where things could have turned out differently? So this is, it's a great question, right? Was this, was there ever a chance my inclination is that this wasn't going to go well and I just get that from having spent a lot of time with Iraqi directors and how long that they spent or how well they did at organizing control of their own society they were very good at it, they were very good at keeping the lid on certain ideologies that were bubbling under the surface, certain threats within the Iraqi society. So my inclination is that this wasn't going to go well, no matter what we did. That being said, I will answer the question still as hypothetical. We don't know. I will say that possibly there were some chances where maybe, if I'm wrong, this is where I would be wrong, that we went in with too few troops very clearly. I mean, it's funny to say that, you know, as I mentioned, the Gulf War in 1991 really wasn't about Iraq. It was about the international system. Well, the strategy in 2003 wasn't really about Iraq either. It was about Donald Rumsfeld trying to have a legacy. And his legacy was going to be reform of the Department of Defense so that, you know, the Powell Doctrine and all these things where you had to go all in on everything meant you couldn't use the military at all, hardly ever. Donald Russell wanted to turn the military into something you could use. It could be much more light and nimble, but that meant that you can't go all in and you can't send a whole, you know, a whole lot of troops to a place because then you'll, you'll, you'll be stuck there. He wanted to show a very cost-effective strategy, which worked in Afghanistan, you know, at least it seemed at that point. It seemed at that point now, 20 years later, it all depends on how you define work. Yeah. It doesn't, it didn't work as well. But, And so when American troops went in, there simply wasn't enough, there weren't enough troops to secure the country. You could overthrow the Iraqi army, you could overthrow the ruling regime, but you couldn't keep peace on the streets. Because there were Iraqis, there was whatever was left of the Iraqi middle class that hadn't been destroyed through sanctions and everything else. They realized things weren't good under Saddam. They were under these sanctions. Saddam was a brutal dictator. People disappeared in the middle of the night. There was torture cells and mass graves and all these kinds of things. And they had an idea, a post-Cold War idea of the United States as the US being this kind of fairly benign or benevolent, competent, at least even if we're not benevolent or benign, it's certainly competent power that can get things done. And they expected that. And they gave the US, if you remember them pulling down the Saddam statues this was a very famous scene and there were other people waiting for okay fine you know you want us to be you know maybe we prefer to be iraqis but if you want us to be middle-class americans fine you know build us our mall and we'll you know we'll eat mcdonald's and we'll go shopping like everybody else we'll go shopping like everybody else and that turned out not to be the case at all because instead of that they got they got riots and and um and looters um there was also a problem of controlling american troops right if you go in with too few people you just don't have enough rank around to make sure things go right. So you end up with things like Abu Ghraib prison where there's, you know, torture occurring and very little oversight from, you know, very junior reservists and National Guard soldiers doing things that, you know, were sort of out of control. All right. So we're approaching the end. So I've got some big questions. we probably can't get to all of them but I'm going to ask you the biggest one first just because I've got to ask this because you know this is coming so who won the Iraq wars, Sam? and did different actors win different wars? and is there a grand prize? who won? you said you were going to ask me this question I did, I warned you that this was on the list this is an interesting question I don't know I don't know who won well first of all, I think I'll give a historian an answer which is it's too soon to tell right all right it's too soon to tell um in some ways you know i thought oh the name of this show is the better piece right so who's got the piece that's better at the end of this right we're gonna go with liddell hart here um who's got the best piece at the end you know iran is in a better position than they were without um without their their adversary to you know to their to their west saddam hussein that's clearly better um are iraqis better in some ways they're better you know at certainly would rather be an Iraqi today than an Iraqi in 1998. On the other hand, would I have wanted to go through the gauntlet of the early 2000s when who knows how many Iraqis were killed, somewhere between 100,000 and a million? That's a lot to get to this. So are they better off now? Yeah, sure. They probably have, some things are better, but they've lost members of their family and lives are gone. People don't ever know. So it's tough for them. For the United States, I mean, in some ways, listen, Iraq doesn't have WMD. They never did to begin with, but they're not at a threat of getting WMD. Saddam isn't doing things. Iraq really isn't, from a purely realist standpoint, Iraq really isn't opposing US interests at this point in the way that it did previously. But again, was it worth that gauntlet that we went through for 20 years. So it's really hard to see who the winners are in this. Iran, I mean, is the clearest one that seems to have benefited. But even there, it's not, they don't have as, it's unclear what the benefits are, are gonna be long-term for Iran. There's a lot of opposition to Iran in Iraq. We're seeing it right now. This is, you know, February, 2026. There was an election in the fall in Iraq. And there are competing factions of like the sort of pro-Iran faction and the pro-American faction, it's not clear that the pro-Iran faction is going to come out on top. And so, you know, I'm not sure. There's no clear winners. And there's also no clear losers except for, you know, Saddam and the Baathist who are no longer running things. It's been bad for everybody. And there's been some good for different parties as well. Right. I mean, I asked you that question knowing that it was there's no way to answer it. Right. This is the historian's dilemma. Right. You know, people are always going to ask you. I didn't ask you whether the war was inevitable either. We'll save that for another time. But I mean, Sam, there's a lot of richness in this very short introduction, as they say. And I hope that people who are interested in reading more about it will. There's your insights about the Baathist regime to remember that Saddam was not a military dictator so much as a party dictator, which is, I think, something that I, for one, had never really had presented to me in exactly that way and learned a lot from it. I think I appreciate your efforts to try to make some sense out of a very complicated period. And the echoes are still with us. We're still trying to figure out what it means. You think about what it meant for American policy, American politics, how we still talk about our role in the world. Everything comes back to the Iraq wars. And so, Sam Helfont, thank you so much for joining us today on A Better Peace to talk about the Iraq wars. Thanks for having me. And thanks to all of you for listening in. Please send us your comments and suggestions about this and future episodes. Please subscribe to A Better Piece on your podcatcher of choice. And most importantly, tell a friend about the program so that we can continue to grow this community for conversations like this one. This conversation is over, but we look forward to welcoming you again. And so until next time, from the War Room, I'm Ron Granary. And that concludes our program. Thank you for listening. The views expressed on this podcast reflect those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Army or the Department of War. Let us know what you think. Provide us your feedback, comments, or suggestions through our webpage at warroom.armywarcollege.edu. And have a great day.
