Question lingers about Iraq: Why?

There is a question about the U. S.- led invasion of Iraq that, 20 years later, remains a matter of deep uncertainty and debate among historians, political scientists and even officials who helped set the war in motion.

It’s not the war’s toll in American military deaths ( about 4,600) or Iraqi lives ( estimates generally fall around 300,000 or more killed directly by fighting). Nor the financial cost to the United States ($ 815 billion, not counting indirect costs such as lost productivity).

It’s not even the war’s consequences, which are broadly understood to include, at a minimum, plunging Iraq into civil war, giving rise to a new generation of jihadism and, for a time, chastening U. S. interventionism.

Rather, it’s a question that would seem to be far simpler: Why did the United States invade at all?

Was it really, as the George W. Bush administration claimed in the war’s run- up, to neutralize an active Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist?

Was it over, as the administration heavily implied, suspicions that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had been involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which also proved false?

Was it to liberate Iraqis from Saddam’s rule and bring democracy to the Middle East, as the administration would later claim? Oil? Faulty intelligence? Geopolitical gain? Simple overconfidence? Popular desire for a war, any war, to reclaim national pride? Or, as in conflicts such as World War I, mutual miscommunication that sent distrustful states bumbling into conflict?

“I will go to my grave not knowing that. I can’t answer it,” Richard Haass, a senior State Department official at the time of the invasion, said in 2004 when asked why it had happened.

It’s not that there’s some missing puzzle piece or state secret. Quite the opposite: As time has passed, journalistic investigations and insider testimonies have explored nearly every facet of the invasion. “If you want to prevent this from happening again,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a Georgetown University scholar, “you need to get the diagnosis right.”

Searching for motive

One question has drawn particular scrutiny: Did the administration sincerely believe its rationale for war, or engineer it as a pretense?

Insider accounts consistently portray the administration as playing down or rejecting mountains of intelligence contradicting its claims, instead cherrypicking circumstantial evidence for its case.

That began in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, with Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, pressing subordinates for proof of his suspicion that Saddam had been involved. Four days later, at a Camp David meeting, Wolfowitz and others argued that Saddam probably was responsible, urging Bush to consider military action.

“I believe Iraq was involved,” Bush told his national security team two days later, adding that he did not yet have the evidence to act, according to interviews conducted by journalist Bob Woodward.

Searching for a cause

Yet this does not explain why those officials all suddenly converged on toppling Saddam.

One school of thought focuses on the impersonal forces of international relations, which may have sent the two countries careening toward a war that served neither’s interests.

Saddam, in this view, overstated his willingness to fight and concealed the paltry state of his weapons programs to appear strong at home and deter the Americans, who had attacked in 1998. But Washington believed him. Meanwhile, Bush’s threats perhaps were misread in Baghdad as a bluff. Several rounds later, they were at war.

Still, miscommunication cannot explain the final run- up, when Baghdad allowed weapons inspectors total access and Washington established the sincerity of its invasion threats.

Others suggest that after Sept. 11, “the United States felt the need to regain status and establish itself as an aggressive global power,” scholar Ahsan Butt has written.

Search for a reason

There is growing focus on the second school of thought for why U. S. policymakers moved to war.

“Scholars of the Iraq War should shift their attention from the thoroughly examined 18 months between 9/ 11 and the March 2003 invasion to the pivotal decade of the 1990s, when Iraq became a major political and foreign policy issue in the United States,” Joseph Stieb, a U. S. Naval War College historian, wrote for the website War on the Rocks.

It is in the 1990s, Stieb argued, where historians would find “the intellectual, political and cultural scaffolding of the beliefs that motivated the 2003 Iraq War.”

After the Cold War’s end, a small circle of policymakers and academics calling themselves neoconservatives argued that the United States, rather than drawing down, should wield its now mostly unchallenged power to enforce an era of “global benevolent hegemony.”

After years as intellectual insurgents within the Republican Party, the neoconservatives were suddenly elevated to an influential policy board in 1998. Newt Gingrich, who was then speaker of the House, had turned to them after the party’s 1996 election losses, believing that new ideas would attract voters.

Members included Wolfowitz as well as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, who would become Bush’s vice president, defense secretary and secretary of state.

Neoconservatives also formed Project for the New American Century, a think tank, to act as the voice for the movement, which now spoke for the Republican Party. In a letter, it urged President Bill Clinton to “aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”

Few scholars argue that Bush’s team entered office plotting to invade Iraq and seized on Sept. 11 as an excuse. Rather, one growing view is that in the shock of the attack, many officials, grasping for an explanation, saw confirmation of the neoconservative view that seemed to provide one.

Still, the competing theories tend to share a common baseline: that a mix of ideological convictions, psychological biases, process breakdowns and misaligned diplomatic signals led to an invasion that did little to serve the goals that its architects believed they were advancing.

No matter how much we know about the facts of the 2003 invasion, Saunders said, “some of it will remain fundamentally unknowable.”