Event Details

End: March 13, 2023
Contact: rwheatley@historians.org

This event is part of the Washington History Seminar series. It is cosponsored by the AHA and the Woodrow Wilson Center and features author Melvyn Leffler and commentators Kori Schake, Robert Kagan, and Odd Arne Westad. This event will be held as a hybrid seminar, with an option to attend in person or watch virtually. 

Confronting Saddam Hussein is a major new interpretation of George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq. Often considered the most consequential foreign policy decision of the 21st century, Leffler rejects previous accounts that focus on hawkish advisers, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and places the president at the center of the decision-making process. Leffler vividly portrays the emotions and anxieties that shaped the thinking of the president after the shocking events of 9/11, and shows how fear, hubris, and power influenced Bush’s approach to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Employing a unique set of personal interviews with dozens of top officials as well as declassified British and American documents and captured Iraqi records, Leffler describes Bush’s motivations empathetically, yet critically assesses his performance and illuminates the reasons for the turbulent, unexpected, tragic aftermath of the invasion. This book reconfigures our understanding of the most important international event of the 21 st century – the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Melvyn P. Leffler is Emeritus Professor of American History at The University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on the Cold War and on U.S. relations with Europe, including For the Soul of Mankind (2007), which won the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, and A Preponderance of Power (1993), which won the Bancroft, Hoover, and Ferrell Prizes. In 2010, he and Odd Arne Westad co-edited the three volume Cambridge History of the Cold War. In 2017, he published Safeguarding Democratic Nationalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015 (Princeton Univ Press). He has served as president of the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University, and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at The University of Virginia.

Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Before joining AEI, Dr. Schake was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government, working at the US State Department, the US Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland. Dr. Schake is the author of five books, among them America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved? (Penguin Random House Australia, Lowy Institute, 2018); and Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Harvard University Press, 2017). Dr. Schake has a PhD and MA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, as well as an MPM from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Her BA in international relations is from Stanford University.

Robert Kagan is the Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. He served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy planning staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and holds a doctorate in American history from American University.