On March 31, the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush departed naval station Norfolk in Virginia, bound for the Middle East to join the other three carriers (USS Lincoln, Tripoli and New Orleans) as American and Israeli air strikes against Iran enter their second month.  The name alone forces us to reckon with two legacies bequeathed by the George W. Bush administration nearly a quarter century ago.

The 41st president, George H.W. Bush, fought a war in the same region in 1991. He drove Iraq out of Kuwait and then stopped. His national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, explained the logic: ‘It was the first conflict after the Cold War, and we wanted to establish rules’.  As such, the coalition was multinational, its objectives limited, and there was a clear exit plan. The elder Bush understood that invading Baghdad would shatter the regional order and entangle the US in a bottomless occupation. The difference between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. was strategic humility, the father knew when to stop.

His son’s administration rejected that restraint. The neoconservatives, who dominated the Pentagon and the White House after 9/11 believed the US could use force to remake the Middle East, and their project left us with two enduring concepts that still shape American military power and politics today: creative chaos and strategic deception. These are the intellectual doctrines of neoconservatism, an ideology that bears constant re-examination.

Legacy One: Creative chaos

The intellectual architect of creative chaos was Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In 2002, he wrote: “Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day…They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission”.

This worldview had already been incubating for years.  In 1998, the Project for the New American Century, (PNAC)-whose signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and John Bolton- sent a letter to president Clinton insisting that ‘removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power… now needs to be the aim of American foreign policy’.  The letter was written three years before 9/11 and before any claims about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.  After the attacks, these men moved into the highest ranks of the Bush administration, and the invasion of Iraq was sold to the American public and the rest of the world as a mission to eliminate WMDs and spread........

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