Strategic alliances cultivated over the past four decades have given the neoconservatives influence out of proportion to their small numbers. The previous chapter highlighted the various institutional scaffoldings that afford them their proximity to power. However, their history is not one of uninterrupted success. They have often had to battle the US foreign policy establishment, and even within the pro-Israel community their position was until recently marginal and is again in decline. There was nothing inevitable about the Iraq war. There were strong institutional forces that held neoconservative ambitions in check. But the neoconservatives’ response to the end of the Cold War was robust: they tried to dominate the national security discourse and generated an interventionist momentum which, accelerated by the contingency of 9/11, succeeded in overwhelming institutional barriers.

This chapter looks at the various historical factors – some willed, some contingent – that contributed to the unique circumstances that led to the Iraq war. It starts with the post-Cold War search for a new national security paradigm; the technological advances that made the use of force cheap and palatable; the rise of human rights as an interventionist doctrine; the emergence of a shadow military establishment that turned crisis into a permanent state; and, most important, the attacks of 11 September 2001.

From the end of history to the clash of civilisations

The introspection occasioned by the Vietnam debacle had alarmed the neoconservatives. Uncertainty also followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the duration of the Cold War it had been possible for the Israel lobby to justify the transfer of extraordinary amounts of cash and hardware to Israel on the grounds that it served a US strategic interest keeping Soviet proxies at bay. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the argument was no longer tenable. A new paradigm had to be found to preserve Israel's privileged status. A state of conflict in the Middle East was the sine qua non for the ‘special relationship’ and, as the leading advocates of a Pax Americana, the neoconservatives were eager to find new demons to slay.