The authorization and the undeclared war
In the excerpts, the Iraq War is discussed chiefly as a constitutional problem: a war fought without a declaration. Bob Zadek puts the point to Christopher Preble directly, asking whether there was no declaration of war with respect to Iraq, and Preble answers that he is correct. Preble places Iraq in a sequence that begins with the first Gulf War in 1991, continues with the congressional authorization to use military force after 9/11, and includes another authorization leading into the Iraq War. These, he says, are not declarations of war; they are constructed as open-ended grants under which a president who decides war is in the United States’ interest receives what Preble calls a blank check On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019).
Preble adds that the 2002 authorization is still in effect, and that people are fighting under it on pretenses he calls completely phony with respect to the war in Iraq. He contrasts the rarity of congressional votes with the frequency of war, noting that since World War II there has been no formal declaration of war. He also invokes Madison, whom he describes as effectively the author of the Constitution or at least one of its principal authors, and who called the War Powers Clause the most important in the entire document. Preble’s analogy for congressional behavior is domestic: if Congress routinely let the president decide whether to raise taxes, or treated the president’s budget submission as law, most people would consider that a dereliction of duty On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019).
In a later episode, Zadek returns to the same ground, asking Preble to confirm that with Iraq there was no declaration of war, only what Zadek characterizes as some rough congressional action authorizing the use of military force for a short-term basis to kill terrorists, legislation that Zadek says sounds rather benign if you read it. Preble agrees. In the same exchange Preble notes that the Authorization to Use Military Force passed after 9/11 remains in effect and has been used to justify military operations in over a dozen countries, and that the AUMF with respect to the war in Iraq is also still in effect. Attempts by some members of Congress to repeal those authorizations, he says, have been foiled by those who worry that removing them would tie the president’s hands — a worry Preble answers by urging a return to the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and Madison’s statements, since tying the president’s hands is precisely the point except in extraordinary circumstances that call for force Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022).
The lesson other regimes drew
The excerpts give the Iraq War a second role: as an object lesson for proliferators. John Glaser, discussing North Korea, says that particularly after the Iraq War and after what was seen in Libya, the lesson Pyongyang takes is that rogue regimes without a nuclear deterrent get overthrown by the United States. In his account this pushed and incentivized North Korea to proliferate nuclear weapons. Zadek extends the point to Gaddafi, describing Libya as having been belligerent and moving toward nuclear power before Gaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear ambitions, after which he was dead and Libya taken over. Zadek draws the conclusion that for third-world countries that feel threatened by the United States — probably justifiably, in his phrasing — the lesson is that denuclearization is a path to ruination Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era (2018).
The same episode frames the Iraq War within a longer argument about intervention. Glaser states that there was no threat emanating from the Korean Peninsula in terms of American physical security or economic well-being, and that this tends to be, for a libertarian, the baseline that must be demonstrated to justify military force abroad. He describes containment of the Soviet Union and communist influence as the ideological engine behind American involvement in Korea, and says the world would be safer if the game of dominoes had not been invented. Zadek, for his part, argues that the North’s aim of undoing a split it did not participate in seems to him, on the core issue of unification, to have been on the right track, setting aside who the cheerleaders and supporters were Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era (2018).
Intervention, overspend, and the 9/11 aberration
John Mueller, in a 2022 episode, treats Iraq as one of two wars the United States would not have entered absent 9/11. He says any analyst would agree that the United States would not have gone into either the war in Afghanistan or the one in Iraq had 9/11 not taken place, and that it was a shock the country massively overreacted to. Quoting the defense analyst Bernard Brodie, who wrote disillusioned in the wake of the Vietnam War, Mueller says one way of keeping people out of trouble is keeping them from getting the tools with which they can get into it: had there been no military in 1965, the country could not have gone into Vietnam, and similarly, had there been no forces to invade Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands of people would not have been killed in those borders and subsequent occupations China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller also describes what he calls the policy adopted since the end of Vietnam in 1975 as vast proclamation and half-vast execution — wringing hands over Bosnia, for instance, but not sending troops until after the war is over — with 9/11 as the major aberration. He says the public is generally not inclined to want to get into wars, as he saw happening currently with respect to the Ukraine thing, and that under Trump and certainly under Biden the country was moving back to the vast proclamation and half-vast execution stage, staying out of wars while remaining an active and important international citizen China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
The press and the case for war
Ted Galen Carpenter, in a 2023 episode on foreign policy reporting, names the run-up to the Iraq War among the press’s failures. He says the stories leading up to the war — that Iraq was involved in 9/11, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — were both absolute lies, and yet the news media happily repeated them. He pairs this with the earlier Persian Gulf War, when the press repeated government propaganda portraying Saddam Hussein in the most vile terms; Carpenter grants that the man was pretty vile but notes the stories about Iraqi troops pulling infants out of incubators in Kuwait were a total lie that the U.S. government had endorsed, which was enough for most of the main publications Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Carpenter’s broader charge is structural. He cites the Senate investigative committee in the 1970s led by Senator Frank Church, which discovered that over 250 prominent journalists in the United States were on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency — not merely sympathetic or cooperative, but paid shills. He calls that a complete dereliction of duty. He also argues that most participants in the media are for-profit corporations answerable to shareholders, and that many outlets now receive subsidies, inputs, and threats from government; as one example he says the Justice Department and the CIA were paying $3.4 million a year to Twitter so they could meet with Twitter officials and push to exclude certain individuals and points of view, which he calls a corruption and a dangerous collusion Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Zadek’s contribution to that episode is a question rather than a claim: he asks how to motivate media outlets to perform a public service when it would not make money, invokes the old saw that if it bleeds it leads, and says he gets stuck on whether to feel like a scold toward the head of mainstream media or to understand the commercial logic and be torn Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Across episodes: the authorization that never ended
The Iraq War is touched on in all five episodes, but the excerpts show no development in the treatment so much as a recurrence of one theme with different speakers. In 2019 Preble supplies the mechanics — the 2002 authorization, the blank check, the still-in-effect AUMFs, the Madison reference — and in 2022 he repeats the core claim that the Iraq AUMF remains in effect and that repeal attempts have been foiled by worry over tying the president’s hands On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019) Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022). What changes between the two is emphasis rather than position: the earlier exchange dwells on Congress’s self-interested delegation of hard decisions, while the later one dwells on the persistence of the authorizations and the use of the 9/11 AUMF across more than a dozen countries. Glaser, Mueller, and Carpenter each approach Iraq from a different direction — deterrence signaling, military overspend, and press failure — without contradicting one another or revising an earlier view.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the invasion of Iraq, its conduct, its casualties, or its aftermath in any detail, and they name no statute by its formal title. They do not identify which authorization text governs which operation beyond the distinction between the post-9/11 AUMF and the Iraq AUMF, and they give no dates for either. Nothing in the excerpts states the outcome of any repeal effort, the identity of the members who attempted it, or the current legal status of the authorizations beyond the assertion that they remain in effect.