Prior to the Iraq War, John Mearsheimer, sort of a famous realist, got many realists together, he gave a sort of a call or an email and said he wanted to take out an ad in the New York Times.
A quarter page ad, which cost $37,000 at the time, for quarter page ad in the op-ed piece to say:
We shouldn't go to war with Iraq. It wouldn't be prudent, we don't really have a core national interest and in doing
it and the implications of doing it might be far worse.
We haven't really figured out the endgame. It could be far worse.
It turned out to be very prescient advice and nobody listened. They listened in Europe; they didn't care at all in the United States. And there were like 35 of us realists
that essentially contributed to this, put our names on it. So, liberals are much more concerned with how we get to international agreements. So it's not that we're necessarily opposed to war all the time. Sometimes war is justified.
But if we're going to go to war in Iraq, we need to have a rule based coalition.
So we have rules at the United Nations that say, under these conditions war is ok.
It's okay to attack another country. And we didn't really follow those rules.
We kind of started to, and then when we realized that countries like Russia and China weren't going to go along with it, we just kind of threw up our hands and said, well, we're gonna put together this ad hoc coalition and find any country that that will sign
on and call it a Coalition of the Willing and and we're going to invade Iraq. So from a liberal perspective, that was
concerning because it was really using this Coalition of the Willing to hide what was really a unilateral action. Most of us, I think, were opposed to the war not necessarily for political reasons but because we thought that the proper
procedures weren't followed. Well, one thing that I should be clear
about is that unlike realism and liberalism, constructivism doesn't necessarily give you a theory about policy. It doesn't necessary tell you what you ought to do. It's more a theory about what you could do. That said, most people that are
constructivist tend to be more on the left, more pacifist, in favor
of human rights of that sort of thing. But that's not necessarily the case. So that said, a lot of constructivists were not at all happy with the Iraq War, particularly because one thing that most of them do agree on is that they like international norms. They like international law, within broad limits, and they like there to be agreement on what should be done and in as much as a lot of constructivists saw the U.S. and British policy in Iraq in 2003 as a violation of the international law that they see as a sort of hard-fought, hardearned accomplishment, and as undermining that international law, they're not happy about it. Now, that said, you could just as easily have been a constructivist who thought that international law constraining war was a bad thing. And you might have been happy that the U.S. and UK were doing things that were changing the law. But I don't think there were as many people who thought that. So, liberals I think are much more on board with what happened after we invaded Iraq.
I think we disagreed with how we got there, but once we're there, I'm not sure we
disagreed that much with the way the situation actually played out. Because if we're going to invade another country and adjust or change their political system, liberals are pretty strong believers in the importance of democracy. And so once we had invaded Iraq, we get past the weapons of mass destruction and the security arguments, at least the attempt to restructure the Iraqi political system along democratic lines, with protection for the
rights of women, for religious minorities, for ethnic minorities, seems like a really, really good thing.
Now, it hasn't always worked out all that well, but the basic program that the US has followed and our allies have followed after the invasion looks
much more liberal and is much more agreeable to liberals than the actual invasion of Iraq. You know, if you're moralizing, crusading, saying we don't like your human rights policies and we don't like your regime the way -- it's not democratic enough, it's not liberal enough; well, then you're going to get involved everywhere. And the problem with promoting democracy is it doesn't work, first of all, and second of all, it almost always
leads to a quagmire. Again, there is no natural harmony of interests in the world. Realists understand that. So
you just have to live with diversity. And I think liberals don't understand that. Most of American wars have been, particularly since the end of the Cold War, have been all about promoting democracy and human rights. And liberals would actually say that the only
just war is one that promotes human rights, whereas a realist would say the only just war
is one that promotes the national interest. And if there are no threats in the environment,
well, then you retrench. There's this whole legacy of history and of understanding on the United States part of what it means to be the United States, and what it means to deal with places like Iraq. And so there, they would point to history of -- limited histories of American colonialism in Latin America; the United States's growing conception, especially after World War II, that it is sort of the global leader and that its job is to take care of situations like this, especially if they're seen to be endangering the national interest,
whether through possession of weapons of mass destruction or supply of natural resources, take your pick on the Iraq War; and also this sort of longstanding tension between Western and Islamic civilization that dates back all the way to the Crusades,
but it became especially protracted as a result of European colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East, and the way that the Europeans came to understand their relationship to Islamic peoples to sort of dehumanize them. All of those things get inherited in the way the United States deals with Iraq. And so it's a really complicated story. So that's how a constructivist, I think, would go deeper into the story than just talking about the actual policy
implications.
