Yo, Max! How about taking a shot of truth serum? It would help! A lot!
Max Boot is at it again, provoking my blood pressure with another of his patented “mea culpa with an asterisk” stunts. I called the first one way back in 2018 in a snarly piece reviewing Max’s recently published memoir, The Corrosion of Conservatism that I labeled Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: A major mea culpa just a few culpas shy of a load. What causes me to vent this time around was a recent offering from Max in the Washington Post called We’ve left Iraq. But we haven’t learned its lessons.
First of all, it’s “amusing”—and typical—that Max doesn’t actually tell us what those “lessons” are, although he does imply, but only imply, that Trump’s current excellent Iranian excursion is not a good idea, that we are biting off more than we can chew, concluding his post by sighing “I hope our leaders have learned the same lessons [to be aware of the limits of American power], but as I read news that President Donald Trump is sending a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East, I fear that they have not.”
Well, fine, but back up a bit. Here’s what really ticked me off, and about which I complained back in 2018: Max is still retailing the same misinformation today that he did back then, to wit:
But even as I grew disillusioned by the war I had foolishly supported [he wrote in his Oct. 5, 2026 column], I worried about the cost of a premature withdrawal. I feared that would only accelerate the bloody Shiite versus Sunni civil war unleashed by our invasion. Thus, I supported the 2007 “surge” that sent 30,000 more troops to Iraq and changed their mission to focus on population security, not just chasing insurgents. Violence fell by 90 percent.
A few years later, I opposed President Barack Obama’s decision to pull out the U.S. troops in 2011. Tragically, that concern was vindicated when the resulting power vacuum was filled by the Islamic State [ISIS]. The group’s rampage through Syria and Iraq necessitated the return of about 3,000 U.S. troops in 2014 — this time not as occupiers but as enablers for local security forces.
Which sounds an awful lot like what Max is really saying is that the invasion of Iraq would have worked, but Obama screwed it up—the same line that he handed us in his memoir. But, as I wrote back in 2018 in response to his memoir,
Boot, he if wants to be taken for an honest man, should acknowledge that it was George Bush who took us out of Iraq, signing the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement that required the removal of U.S. troops by 2011. The U.S. was in fact forced to sign this agreement thanks to pressure from the Iraqi government. As the New York Times reported at the time of the signing of the draft of the agreement,
“Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government demanded a withdrawal timetable as the price of legalizing the American military presence in the country after the expiration of the United Nations mandate at the end of this year. Security gains in recent months also made the prospect of a winding down of military operations more palatable to the White House and top military officials, said people involved in the talks.”
Boot could have argued that Obama could have kept more troops in Iraq if he had really pushed the Iraqis (though that’s very unlikely). But he doesn’t do that. He could also acknowledge that it was Bush’s invasion of Iraq, far more than anything Obama did or didn’t do, that caused the “rise of ISIS” and the continuing crisis of Islamic extremism.
But he didn’t do that either.
There are so many things that Max misrepresents in his column. He begins by saying that “I supported the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, convinced that it would lead to greater democratization in the Middle East.” But in the lead up to the invasion, the Bush administration said almost nothing about democratizing Iraq or anyone else. Instead, the Bush administration’s propaganda machine was devoted to labeling Iraq as a “growing threat” to the security of the U.S., a growing “nuclear” threat, no less, when in fact Iraq was no threat at all, nuclear or otherwise. The administration was hellbent on war, not to democratize the Middle East or “protect” the U.S., but rather to seize control of the Middle East’s oil riches and to guarantee the security of Israel by establishing a massive, permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East for decades to come.
Our invasion wasn’t a “noble experiment” poorly thought through, or one sabotaged by metrosexual Democrats; it was a gratuitous, calamitous power grab that failed of its own arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence. Those are the lessons that we should have learned—lessons, unfortunately, that Max has yet even to consider.
I have written, almost endlessly about Iraq, and not a little about Max as well.
