Full disclosure, I count the author as a friend and mentor from my halcyon pre-pandemic undergraduate days at UNC-Chapel Hill. Regardless, this is an excellent contribution to the literature of 1990s American political history, and particularly, as the title suggests, how Iraq fit into American politics. Now don’t get that twisted; this is not a book about the First Gulf War or the invasion of 2003. Nor is there much on CENTCOM operations during the 1990s as the U.S. attempted to “contain” Iraq. No, this is about how nascent ideas about regime change grew from a minority after victory in 1991 to the consensus in the post 9/11 moment as the second Bush administration struggled to “do something” in the wake of such an egregious attack. The Regime Change Consensus is a foreign policy and political history through and through describing just how the country justified regime change in a country already reeling from sanctions. I find it odd how the first Bush administration fully understood the ramifications of total regime change in terms of American men, matériel, and money. Yet, by the immediate aftermath of 9/11, most of the Federal government (and even Britain) were convinced that Saddam had to go, as there was no other alternative. Stieb classifies those critics of containment into three schools: the conditionalist, the inevitable decline, and humanitarian. The conditionalists he describes as critics and defenders of containment on the condition of how effective the policy was being used. The “inevitable decline” school likewise felt that there would be no normalization of relations with Saddam, and unlike the conditionalists, felt the entire idea of containment was doomed. As the word denotes, the humanitarians are those who criticized containment on account of the inevitable humanitarian problems a sanctions regime brings. These views eventually merge and result in the 2003 invasion, with each significant player that supported Operation Iraqi Freedom doing so for their own reasons that generally fall into one of Stieb’s three “schools.” It often makes it seem the best way to avoid the post-2003 catastrophe might have been regime change in 1991, but that might be one of the big “what ifs” of the post-Cold War.
This book offers an essential contribution to the overall literature of U.S. diplomatic history, especially as a starting point for historians to continue to explore questions on America’s role in the world in the 1990s, how it viewed itself, and how it acted. As Stieb points out near the end of the monograph, was the United States always seeking to reinvent the world in its image? Or is this a relatively recent phenomenon, ignoring Kennan’s advice to “Let them be Russians”? Nevertheless, this book is well organized in five chronological, readable chapters. And as a bonus for student readability (especially graduate students), each chapter has a well-marked introduction, conclusion, and other sections, and….footnotes!
I look forward to engaging with this work more, and if I am ever fortunate enough to teach graduate students the history of U.S. foreign policy, this book will be one of my first choices.