Iraq hardly exports any oil and suffers shortages of its own, so the war has
hardly helped the world cope with its energy shortfall. American prestige
abroad has sunk to a new low, owing partly to the illegal and inhumane
methods we have used against “detainees” suspected of being terrorists. All
these problems, too, were predictable from the start. Indeed, the CIA warned
the Bush administration of the likely negative outcomes of our invasion, but
Bush and Cheney paid no heed. For that matter, back in April 1999, an
operation of the U.S. government under the Clinton administration, a series of
war games known as Desert Crossing, predicted most of them. Still earlier, a
paper by Ivan Eland, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute,
asked, “Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism? The Historical
Record,” and answered affirmatively.^39
Yet only one textbook—again it is Pageant—suggests the war was a
mistake. It does so by reprinting President George H. W. Bush’s rationale for
not toppling Hussein after the Persian Gulf War:
Trying to eliminate Saddam... would have incurred
incalculable human and political costs.... Going in and
occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’
mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international
response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone
this invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be
an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have
been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.As the authors note, the paragraph makes “sobering reading in the context of
his son’s subsequent invasion of Iraq.” To suggest that the other five textbooks
support administration policy would be too strong, however. Probably their
authors would claim they neither support nor decry administration policy. But
since they mostly adopt the administration’s terms, and since they start from the
“international good guy” point of view, authors do come across as supportive,
on the whole. In addition, given that the quagmire in Iraq—like any failed
enterprise—was not in America’s best interest, even a neutral assessment
seems inappropriate.
Even more than earlier chapters, the last pages of U.S. history textbooks
come across as “just one damn thing after another” (a line variously attributed
to Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, historian H.A.L. Fisher,
Voltaire, and anonymous). Notwithstanding the names of famous historians with